Michael Moritz describes entrepreneurial obsession through two examples: Apoorva Mehta, Instacart's founder, whose idea consumed his every thought, and Bill Gates, who removed his car radio to eliminate distractions during his drive to the office.
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There's a gentleman called Apoorva Mehta who's the founder and CEO of Instacart, the online grocery company. And we've been with Apoorva on his journey for considerable period of time now and before we invested I asked him how he had happened on grocery delivery as a business that he wanted to be in. And he said he'd played around with and toyed with a variety of other businesses that he wanted to start and he'd got down the road on, I forget two, three, four of those, but he said the only one or he.
Realized Instacart was the one for him when it was the last.
The idea of the business was the last thing that he thought about when he went to sleep and the first thing that he thought about when he woke up in the morning. And to me that was as good a definition of obsession as, as any I've heard. But it's that sort of full on experience that you can never stop thinking about and you don't switch off. I'll give you another example from yesteryear which was again, this is back to the early 1980s and I had been up in Seattle working on a story.
About Microsoft for time and again.
This was when Microsoft was still private and it was still quite small. And Bill Gates gave me a ride to the airport in his car. And not many people can say that they were chauffeured by Bill Gates. In fact, I may put that on my LinkedIn profile.
Above all other forms of education. And the radio was missing in the.
Car, big gaping hole in the dashboard.
And I said, Bill, so what happened here?
Did you get ripped off?
And he said, no, I had it taken out. Why do you have it taken out? Well, I drive from my home to.
The office, which is 7 minutes and 32 seconds.
And then I'll drive from the office.
To the airport, which is however long.
And he said, if I've got the radio, I'm afraid that I'll switch it on and I won't be thinking about Microsoft. That's obsession.
