As a VC investor, I often (nearly constantly) obsess about the qualities that make founders successful.
At the pre-seed stage, where my fund Beta Boom invests, much of our investment decision comes down to the founding team.
We know that pedigree, prestige, access, and a lot of Silicon Valley pattern matching are poor predictors of founder and startup success, but what qualities do correlate with outcomes?
One word that keeps coming up in conversations with other investors is “hustle.” Other investors will tell me, “Oh, she’s got incredible hustle! You won’t believe how many lines of code she’s written.” Or “He’s really recruited a huge team!”
Hustle is certainly important, but these platitudes have landed flat too many times to count when I dug deeper. She’s written a ton of code, but engagement or growth hasn’t improved. He does have a big team of fancy-sounding talent, but the only thing I see increasing is burn.
What I’ve observed is that some founders are good at hustling without actually getting many meaningful things done. They blaze forward and run around but don’t produce game-changing outputs.
On the other hand, other founders might not seem to be doing as much, but every time I talk to them, they have produced an incredible amount of consequential outcomes.
It’s the age-old tension between quality and quantity. Ideally, you’d like both. Same with founders.
This brings me to “industry” and its adjective “industrious,” which I think more adroitly capture the quality of getting a lot of substantial work done. Merriam-Webster defines industry as “systematic labor especially for some useful purpose or the creation of something of value.. diligence in an employment or pursuit.”
At the end of the day, what matters to me as an investor is not that you are good at being busy, but rather that you are effective and productive in the work that you do. This is measured more objectively by things like growth rate, engagement, and revenue.