Jessica Livingston recounts investing in Stripe when she met the Collison brothers as teenagers (John was 16 when introduced). She emphasizes the brothers' determination and ability to persuade banks and partners despite lacking connections. The chunk broadens into general advice on founder traits: determination is the paramount quality, followed by user understanding and product UX, flexibility/open-mindedness, focus, and leadership/communication skills.
Chapters
I think Patrick was working on some other idea first or something and we had, you know, high regard for him. He certainly was good at building things and he had like a Wikipedia app, so we knew he was like a talented programmer. He introduced us to his 16 year old brother. 16, there we go. He was 16 when we met him. John was. And I'm trying to remember when they said, oh, we're going to take on the financial industry, I think we were kind of like, do you realize how hard this is? And like you don't have connections. But they were intrepid. They were like, well, we don't have connections, we'll find connections. And they just. That is actually a really good question that you bring up because it shows how determined they were and how focused they were. And I mean, you think like the head of a bank is going to take a 19 year old startup founder seriously. It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them. Are there other traits in the founders that go on to really change the future besides determination that separate the very best founders from the mediocre founders? Yes, if I had to say the most important traits of the most successful founders, I've already mentioned determination, that is by far the most important quality. More than intelligence, more than intelligence, more than previous success. You know, in school, I mean, remember when we started Y Combinator, our hypothesis was, oh, we'll just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard and they'll turn out to be great startup founders. That is not true. That is absolutely not true. A lot of them are good and in fact Patrick was from mit, but it's not true. For the most part, determination is the most important thing. Again, sort of understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience is second most important. Not being distracted, being flexible minded, I've always felt is very important because you have this idea and you test it out and it doesn't always work the first time. And so you have to be able to say, okay, I thought I was going to do this, but let's try this. Even though I have a lot of energy vested in this, let's try this direction. You really have to be open minded and then ultimately you have to be a good leader. You have to be convincing and a good leader because you are going to be convincing employees to join you. You're going to be convincing investors to invest in you. When you do get to the where you're doing deals with bigger companies, you have to convince them like your whole world is convincing people. And so you have to be able to communicate your idea and convince people why they should care about you more than any of the other hundreds of startups out there.
