Michael Moritz: The Upside of Obsession

So you saw the market opportunity. What did you see in Lisa and Brian? What character traits did you see in them that gave you the confidence to invest?

What we see in a lot of other or other successful founders, which is a real sense about the product or service, in this case, that they wanted to build and a real connection with, in this case, an audience. But other times you'd say customers or, well, consumers. And so that they had a real sense and purpose and they're able to explain, as Lisa just did, the sort of product that they wanted to build, why people would, and why they were confident that there'd be lots of people that would care about it.

I'm going to ask a slightly more pointed question. You write about finding the people who are obsessed. How do you determine if somebody has an obsession?

It's a good point, and it's one that I wrote about with Sir Alex in this book. And I think it's a characteristic of the most successful entrepreneurs, which is that they certainly, at the beginning of their company and often for a very good long time, are able to shut out the rest of the world and just devote themselves to what they're really interested in doing and shut off all the other distractions. Because there's really only one thing that they care about, and that care is deep and it's genuine. And it's the sort of thing that they go to bed, you know, go to sleep thinking about, and they wake up in the morning thinking about.

Do you agree?

I do. Our first tagline for Popsugar was insanely addictive. And after some marketing team folks came in, they said, no one wants to be insane or addicted, but we just felt it really worked. And I think it was, you know, what fueled just to be able to write about all the other verticals, you know, to keep going and figure out what people wanted to hear from us about and what we weren't covering and, you know, what we had in our site and vision from the beginning and add new things that we added in along the way as well.