Mark MacLeodFounder, Limitless.ceo · The Startup CEO Coach | Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

Not all founders can be great VCs, Sean Kelly Founder & Investor - The Startup CEO show

29 Oct 2024 · 1 min

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0:31

Sean Kelly explains why founders and investors need opposite mindsets. Founders must be relentlessly optimistic to solve problems, while investors need to be critical and ask why deals fail. But investors still need calibrated optimism because without risk, there's no reward.

Chapters

Founders actually oftentimes do not make great investors, because as a founder, in order to be successful, you have to constantly be optimistic. And not only do you have to be optimistic, you have to be optimistic in cases when nobody else would be. So you can see, like, oh, my gosh, there's a problem, I want to solve it. Well, as an investor, your job isn't to look at problems and want to solve them, because you don't have time to do that. For every one of your portfolio companies, you actually have to think about what are the reasons that this wouldn't work. Right. So, yes, you need some layer of optimism. You need to be able to take chances and risks to drive, you know, proper return. If there's no risk, there's no reward.