Startup Success: The Skills vs Talent Debate

31 Jan 2023 · 1 min

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Dharmesh Shah argues that startup success depends on learnable skills, not innate talent. Talent just determines how fast you pick something up. If you lack it in an area, you can still learn it, just maybe not reach the absolute top. Identify what you need, grind on the hard parts.

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One of the big lessons kind of in my, in my life, in my professional career, is that most things are actually skills, not talent. So skill is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition. Talent is the rate at which you can acquire a particular skill. So if you have a talent for music, that means you will acquire musical skills faster than someone that doesn't have a talent for music. It doesn't mean that someone that doesn't have a talent for music can't learn it. So they may have a ceiling as far as how far they can go. Fine, I get that. But it doesn't mean they can't do it. My point here is startups, whatever skill in startups are a skill. Figure out what set of skills you need to acquire. Some you'll be good at acquiring because you have the talent. The other one, you're just gonna have to grind it out more than others may, but it's doable. It's a doable thing.