Founders and games
There are type 1 and type 2 founders. And there are finite and infinite games. The two seem correlated.
I came across this blogpost by Anu Atluru (no clue who she is) about “two kinds of founders”.
The way I see it, there are two types of true entrepreneurs. There are those in it for the love of the mission that they’re obsessed with championing. And there are those in it for the love of the game of entrepreneurship itself, almost irrespective of the mission of the business. Sometimes the mission is the business and sometimes the business is the mission. Type I, and Type II.
To the best of my knowledge, I’m a Type 1. I’m starting Babbage Insight because it’s a problem I’ve wanted to solve for nearly a decade, and a very strong pain point that I’ve felt both in my consulting life and in my last job. During a couple of recently conversations with people, I’ve been told “don’t do this. Do something else”. And that is one piece of advice I’ll never take. If I don’t build what I’m building now, it’s far more likely that I’ll take a job, than trying to build something unrelated.
Anyway Atluru goes on to write about the Type 2s:
They’re obsessed with the game itself. The game is entrepreneurship — with some mix of building a business, creating something from nothing, “winning” against a field of competitors, capturing the world’s attention, making a lot of money, rising to the top of the entrepreneurial respect ladder. To a large extent, they could get excited about any idea, so long as the game around it is compelling. Importantly, they are deeply driven by playing the game, not just by winning it. (emphasis added)
This reminded me of one of the studdest books I’ve ever read, which is James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. It’s not a long book, but insanely intense, and I read it way back in 2015. Carse’s theory is simple - in finite games, the objective of playing is to win the game. Examples include football and chess and Kabaddi and so on.
In infinite games, on the other hand, there is no “win”. There is no finish line (hence “infinite”). Instead, the objective of the game is to just keep on playing. You can think of “life” itself to be one such infinite game. And because the objective is to just “keep playing”, your strategy will be very very different than it will be in the case of a finite game. When you get the time, read the whole book.
In any case, Atluru’s analogy makes me feel like Type 1 founders look at entrepreneurship as a sort of finite game - you are looking to accomplish a mission (in my case, to provide instantaneous and personalised Exceptional Insights to business leaders), and you are working towards that. You either succeed (your company does well and that mission gets accomplished), or you fail (the company doesn’t do well). In the latter case, you move on and maybe take a job.
Type 2 entrepreneurs, on the other hand, look at entrepreneurship as a sort of infinite game. They look at what is hot, build on it, if it works, great; if not, they find something else to build.
In any case, I came across Atluru’s post via this post by Benn Stancil. This is one of a group of posts I’ve come across in recent times which is self-flagellatory in nature, and talks about why the “modern data stack” didn’t do well. Another post in the same category (which triggered Stancil’s post I think) is this one by Tristan Handy, founder of dbt.
Stancil says something interesting:
The data world, I’d argue, has very few true mission-driven, Type I founders. At best, most data founders are motivated by bringing some elegance to an ugly technical problem; at worst, we were opportunists who convinced ourselves we could turn some internal tool into a business, and saw founding a company as a way to avoid the career cul-de-sac of becoming a mid-level data director. There aren’t many people who start data companies simply to manifest something in the world.
Maybe because (I think) I’m a Type 1 founder, I find this rather surprising. Then again, I have a problem with empathy.
In any case I wonder what difference I can make by being a Type 1 founder in data. And while I’m building something in the analytics space (maybe Tristan Handy will consider this part of the “analytics stack”?), AI is a big part of the solution, and I’m hoping to ride that wave, which is only beginning to take off.
Let’s see how things go.
We read the same things :). Is it possible to be clearly in Type 1 and Type 2 in a very neat way? I am not sure about that.
Very interesting! I've got elements of Type 1 and Type 2 I believe. I'm strongly driven by a mission to solve a problem - not because it's hot, but because I've experienced it and seen a lot of other people experience it. But if it doesn't work out, I'll focus on another mission / problem, because I connect with more than 1 problem / mission. So in a sense, I'm driven by the mission, but certain that entrepreneurship is my game, not employment.