Most entrepreneurs aren't risk-takers but risk-killers who neutralize danger by imagining it first. The speaker and his Lux co-founder Peter Ebert balance this: Peter sees possibilities and growth, the speaker asks what could go wrong. Deliberately envisioning worst-case scenarios lets you manage psychological risk instead of being blindsided by it.
Chapters
Another philosophy: we like to say that failure comes from a failure to imagine failure. Now when I say we, it's mostly me because I'm very negative. It's an adaptive mechanism growing up. If I could expect all the bad stuff that can happen psychologically, I could cope with it better. But I think that this is a great way to manage risk. There's this mythology around entrepreneurs that entrepreneurs are these great risk-takers, but I actually think that most entrepreneurs are risk-killers. They identify a risk and then they try to kill it. My co-founder of Lux, Peter Ebert, Peter Hebert and I have met 25 years ago. We founded Lux nearly 20 years ago. Pete is an optimist. He is wearing bright colors as he always is, typically pastels. He's thinking about how can things go right? How might this work? What if it's successful? How much money could we make? Who could we populate the board with? What's the right syndicate construction? How do we help these entrepreneurs? And I am thinking, okay, how is this all going to fail? How is this all going to go terribly wrong? And what can we do to prevent it going wrong? So people like to joke that Pete invented the airplane. And I, the parachute. And this is a beautiful yin and yang in a partnership, but it's also something as entrepreneurs that you need. You need somebody that can believe and say, we're going to go do it, especially when you have downtimes. But you also need somebody who's a little bit of a realist that can put the brakes on. So this yin and yang, I think, in founder dynamics is actually really important.
