Doing Harder Things For Longer
The renaissance of ambition in startupland
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Now that we are entering 2024, a question came to my mind. What's a common thread between history's greatest builders? There are a few themes, but one of them stood out: They attempt to do really hard things. Things that tend to be way harder than average. And they do it for a long time. Way longer than what an average person would do. Doing harder things for longer is what some of history's greatest builders have done.
Jensen Huang. Nikola Tesla. Marie Curie. James Dyson. Grace Hopper. Sam Zemurray (here's the Founders Podcast episode on him). Rose Blumkin (here's the Founders Podcast episode on her). Henry Ford. Ursula K Le Guin. Elon Musk. Estee Lauder.
The list goes on. But in order to build something truly iconic, you need to do things that leave a mark on humanity. Very few people attempt to hard things. And even fewer attempt to do those things for long enough to make a meaningful difference. You need ambition to start the pursuit.
What exactly is ambition? It's a strong desire to achieve something impactful. The consistent pursuit of hard tasks is intrinsically linked to this concept. It equips founders with the lens through which they can see past the immediate challenges and pursue a lofty goal. Leo Polovets recently published a great post on why deep tech is a good area to build and invest in. The journey through hard challenges is more than a test of endurance. It's a transformative experience that shapes individuals into visionaries.
Engaging in difficult pursuits serves as a crucible for greatness. In the context of startups, this journey of tackling complex problems leads to the development of deep expertise. Especially in areas where there aren't that many experts to begin with. You need a combination of ambition, agency, and resilience. Persisting through challenges over the long term enriches a founder's journey in profound ways.
There's a funny article on why you shouldn't start a SaaS company. And that you should build a deep tech company. It's obviously written in jest. Also it's ironic because the writer uses multiple SaaS tools to talk about why you shouldn't build a SaaS company.
I'm not going get into the silly dichotomy of deep tech vs SaaS. Mostly because it's not a real dichotomy in the first place. SaaS is just a mechanism to deliver your product to your customers. You can build deep tech. And if SaaS happens to be the most efficient way to deliver it to your customers, you should take that route. Here are two myths I’d like to debunk:
Deep tech only means hardware products. You can build an AI platform for drug discovery, which happens to be a software product in what is considered a deep tech sector.
SaaS doesn’t overlap with deep tech. You can build satellites, but your customers might just want to buy the image data insights from you. And you may have to deliver it as a SaaS offering. Building satellites is hard, but you’re using SaaS to deliver the outcome to your customers.
But if you look past these fallacies in the article, there's an interesting observation. The world needs ambitious pursuits. Venture capital was created to fund such pursuits because traditional sources of capital tend to reject them outright. No loans. No funding. It was too risky for banks, lenders, or funders to underwrite these pursuits. So venture capital came into existence to fill this gap. This in turn empowered ambitious founders to pursue hard things.
What constitutes hard tech? The definition of hard tech keeps changing with time. But in general it means technology that's hard to build given what's available to you at this moment. You need to overcome significant scientific and engineering challenges to build this product. So in 2024, hard tech could include software and hardware platforms that can help with:
AI: Building compute infrastructure, building foundation models for science
Biology: drug discovery, protein sequencing, genomics
Robotics: Building faster/better/cheaper industrial robots
Energy: Battery storage, generating renewable energy
Materials Science: Developing new materials that suit a particular set of needs in a given sector
Chemistry: Developing new chemicals that suit a particular set of needs in a given sector
If you're a founder or an investor in these sectors, I'd love to hear from you. I’m at prateek@moxxie.vc and our fund Moxxie Ventures leads seed rounds.
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