Why Founders Should Choose Good Quests

What's up, everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, your personal concierge for your entrepreneurial journey. Before we hop into the episode, I wanted to say thank you for the thousands of messages that I have gotten from listeners since the relaunch of the show just a few months ago. I spent five of my twenty hours flying home from my honeymoon. catching up on emails from you all, and it was incredibly validating to know how much value you get from the podcast. Before we hop into today's show, I wanted to share a few of the most common pieces of feedback that I received from the emails. First, you absolutely love Startup CrossFit, where I take a business idea or an existing startup and take it through the wringer, assessing whether I think it's a good or a bad business. So I plan to do more of those things. Second, you enjoy when I get vulnerable, whether it's me talking about imposter syndrome, anxiety, my insecurities as a founder, or the topic I'm gonna talk about today. You feel seen when I talk through my emotional journey of building businesses, and you feel like you don't get that from other podcasts. So I plan to do more of that as well. And third, you really enjoy celeb shots where I have amazing entrepreneurs, whether it's Sam Parr, whether it's Cody Sanchez, amazing people in my network who have built companies very different from mine. You love when you hear them and their recorded guest journals so that you can hear impactful stories and lessons from people who have very different experiences from my own. I really, really do take the time to go through all of your emails, and it actually impacts how this show evolves over time. So please send me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. Introduce yourself. I love getting to know my listeners. I love getting to know who you are, what sort of businesses you're building. I've built relationships with listeners over the years. And also let me know what you like and you don't like about the show, or if you have any topics that you would love for me to cover moving forward. So that's alex@morningbrew.com. Shoot me an email whenever. Okay, I am done with the long preamble. Now for today's episode, I want to talk about what it means to be on a good quest, why I am reflecting on if I am currently on a good quest myself. And I share a number of companies for you to look into that are without a doubt on Good quests. Let's hop into the show. During my plane ride back from Africa, I came across an article that really rocked me, and it had me thinking about if I am playing things in life too easy. The article is called Choose Good Quests, and it's by the founder of Anduril, an AI-powered defense company, and the founder of Delphi Labs, a frontier tech research company. I'm going to get into a lot of depth around the article, but the punchline is simple. Not enough people who have the skills and resources to do it are building generation-defining companies. They are playing it safe, and it's a huge mistake. The authors explain that we are all on quests, which are basically primary objectives that we center our lives around. A quest can be a specific end state, like being mayor of your town, or getting to 12% body fat, or reaching $5 million in net worth, or curing cancer. Or it can be a journey that encourages a certain way of being, something like having as much fun as you can before you die, or bringing joy to the world. But not all quests are created equal. There are 4 types of quests, and the crux of this article is that not enough people are embarking on the right type. There are good quests, bad quests, hard quests, and easy quests. A good quest is one that makes the future better than our world today. As you can guess, a bad quest is one that doesn't improve the world much at all or even makes it worse. An easy one is a typically more straightforward quest with a well-understood playbook. So that could be how to get good grades in your high school or losing or gaining a certain amount of weight, which there's proven models around doing. A hard quest A hard quest is a high-risk and operationally complex quest with a low chance of success. Something like reversing aging or going to Mars, curing cancer, uh, creating artificial general intelligence, or creating a new country. Everything I just named is a hard quest. And even if you're well-suited to embark on that quest, the odds are that you will fail. Now, to know if you're on a good, a bad, an easy, or a hard quest, it's not just about looking at the quest you're on. It's also about understanding the unique resources and skills that you have to know what good quests you're well positioned for. So, for example, investment banking isn't inherently a bad quest, but the authors of this article would argue it is a bad quest for someone that works in investment banking, but they got their PhD in nuclear engineering, and they have a greater probability than most of society to succeed in a quest to build novel solutions in nuclear fusion, which are obviously very important for humanity. And so one of the takeaways of this piece piece, and the part that struck me most is the authors really put on blast successful entrepreneurs who had life-changing outcomes, and they are now choosing to play it safe. What the authors say is, today we are in a crisis. Silicon Valley's best, our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors are almost all on bad quests. Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest. It's the end of the quote. And they go as far to say that it is a moral imperative for the folks with resources and skills to take on quests that are impossible for most, but just extremely difficult for the select few. We're gonna take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back. I have read the article now 5 times, beginning to end, and I've been left with the same reaction each time. First, I ask myself, am I, by the author's definition, on a bad quest? And second, let's say I am on a bad quest, what would be a good quest for me to embark on, given the skills and resources that I have? So here's my reflection. I do think, if I'm being very honest with myself, I am on a bad quest right now. I am not currently working on something that could be generation-defining, and I'm probably not leveraging all of my unique skills to their fullest potential. I don't have unique technical skills like someone that is a world-class scientist or engineer, but I do have unique soft skills like storytelling and selling combined with a successful exit under my belt that could probably enable me to raise a lot of money for a crazy idea and persuade world-class talent with the right technical skills to come together to build towards that idea. So now the question is, why am I not doing that? Why am I not embarking on a good quest if I have the resources and skills to do it? I think there are 4 reasons. First, I want to enjoy my life. As the author said, most good quests are also hard quests, and hard quests deserve and require a decades-long commitment minimum. I worry once I embark on a quest like this, There is no turning back, and my entire life will be consumed by the quest. And while the quest is a big thing, it is not the only thing in my life. Second, I want to maximize my time with my family and my close friends. Same issue as the one I just mentioned, just a different concern. Family is the most important thing in my life. I lost my dad in college, so I've experienced the fragility of life and the impermanence of spending time with those closest to you. I feel incredibly fortunate and privileged that the sale of Morning Brew gave me the financial freedom to spend my time as I'd like, and I would like to spend it with family. I worry a quest like this will jeopardize my time with them. Third, I am probably insecure about my abilities and if I even have what it takes to embark on a good quest. Let's just say I find a great quest. Deep down, I have self-defeating thoughts that say to myself, why do you think you're qualified to succeed in this quest? Or what are you actually good at, or there are definitely people who have a higher probability to succeed in this quest. And fourth, I don't have a great idea for a good quest. I think there are 2 pieces to this part. The first is, what are a list of all of the good quests that one could embark on? And the second, what is the intersection of this list of good quests and my skillset as a non-technical newsletter entrepreneur? Now, I'm not at all settled in a conclusion around if I should embark on a good quest or what that good quest would even be. But I thought it would be valuable for you to hear the perspective of the authors of this piece, them basically saying that I am squandering an important opportunity, and actually I have a moral imperative to do something that is better or a better quest. And until I make this decision, I do think it is important that I share some of my favorite companies and entrepreneurs that are without a doubt on good quests so we can reprogram society to reward folks like this. Versus the more materialistic things that we've been taught to put on the highest pedestal. I will probably end up doing full episodes in the future on some of these companies, but here are a few for you to know about and look into to get you started on knowing what's out there in the world in terms of people and companies on truly great quests. The first is Figure. Figure is an AI robotics company that is building general-purpose humanoid robots to work alongside humans on all of the manual labor tasks that we do first in factories. That's their primary focus. And then in homes and old age homes globally. If you have seen I, Robot with Will Smith, that is what Figure's robot mockups look like and what they plan for their finished product to look like. Second is Varda Space. Varda is a space manufacturing company that develops products in microgravity in orbit and then returns them to Earth. Their first focus is developing pharmaceuticals that we wouldn't be able to develop here. And there's reasons that it is advantageous to develop them in space, to develop those pharmaceuticals and then return them to Earth. And the third is Pipe Dream Labs. Pipe Dream is building an underground autonomous logistics system that, if successful, will enable reliable delivery in less than 10 minutes for less than $1 per shipment. So to bring it all together, there are different quests that we can choose to embark on during our lifetimes, and it is wildly important for enough people to embark on good quests that push society forward. I am personally still trying to figure out if, when, and what good quest I want to embark on. But until then, I want you to know about some of the incredible people that are building the future in front of your eyes. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and please share this episode with friends, family, or coworkers that either would find this specific episode valuable or the show in general valuable. Otherwise, I can't wait to catch you next episode. Take it easy, everyone.