Balaji Srinivasan: “Startup founders need to be ideologically motivated”

One should be a startup founder if you are fundamentally ideologically motivated. And that's not something I'm so sure that it can be easy to just incentivize or train people to do. The reason I say ideologically motivated is that a startup is so hard and it's so economically irrational to persist with it at certain times you need to have like a cause greater than yourself that you believe in that you're working on. And I'm not sure that it's easy to incentivize or mass produce that. What I would say though is that it is useful to ask yourself if you are ideologically motivated and you'll know that on your own. And many people are not and they're financially motivated and that's completely fine. But if you're ideologically motivated, then what is the single most effective thing you can do to achieve that goal? Larry Page has a different way of putting this. He says 10x is easier than 10% sometimes, right? Like it might actually be easier to do something paradomatically different and better than it is to improve an existing system by 10%. So I guess I'd just say ask that question to yourself if conditional on your own self assessment of being ideologically.