Naval Ravikant: “A long-term mentality is the most important indicator of an entrepreneur’s success”

It's still a very difficult business. I'd say like 1 out of 10 of my investments succeeded. It's not a great hit rate now. The ones that have succeeded are extremely successful, so they make up for a lot of the others. But there's a few general rules of thumb as an investor I would follow. One is, you know, these days, anything consumer facing, you want to see some traction before you invest because otherwise it's just too hard to predict what people are going to use. You want to keep some valuation discipline. Valuations do matter. One common trait I found amongst many of the great companies is that the founders are in it for the long haul. And the way you see that evidence is that very early on they are extremely deliberate about all kinds of small decisions. Stuff you might think like that doesn't matter. Why are you obsessing over it? And what you realize is their nature to obsess over these things because they are building, they feel like they're laying the bricks and the foundations of a skyscraper. So they have to get every little detail right. And sometimes that obsessiveness can drive you crazy, where they're always questioning, questioning, questioning, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. But then when you look back over the ages, you realize that's the mark of someone who's thinking really far forward and that's what makes them think at such a detailed level now. Whereas the people who are sort of flippant about things and are willing to kind of just take it as it comes, they're often signaling to you and maybe even to themselves that they'll sell the company the first chance they get, or the moment that it looks like they're going to run out of cash, they'll shut down. So I think that long term mentality is probably the single most important indicator of an entrepreneur's success, but that it's by no means the only thing. This is a very competitive environment. Most startups fail, and so you just got to stick with it.