Daniel Schmidt

Lessons from also a ~decade of angel investing: this is totally off-base. Unless they catch lightning in a bottle the first try (rare), the ones who just want to be rich will give up after the going gets hard. Because if you just want to make a bunch of money, your least risky path to do that is to join FAANG or a derisked late stage startup. It’s by far the highest EV path and if you cared about retirement money, you’d just defect to that path. While there’s obviously no universal consensus, most founders & investors would agree that as long as signs point in the right direction — if you can still see the light at the top of the mountain — the most important thing is to stay in the game. So then — the predictor of startup success is the answer to the question: what is most likely to keep you in the game longer? That’s what you should optimize for. A few things I’ve seen, in order: 1. Being mission-oriented / desire to make a difference 2. Relentless desire to solve a specific problem for personal reasons (more personal the reason the better) 3. Desire to put a dent in the universe 4. Self-aware stubbornness (ie tenacity) “Being right / fame / glory” is not a negative. Desire to be right is often correlated with tenacity — that isn’t a detractor. Desire to put a dent in the universe is actually strongly correlated with a desire for glory. But by far the best predictor is mission-orientation and desire for impact. NOT the desire to be rich.