Reflections on choosing an idea that I love — evaluating passion
After spending over two years searching for a partner who would mesmerize me into a visionary idea to start working on together, I discovered (and refused to believe for a long time) that I disqualify 90% of the opportunities that fall into my hands.
I tried analysing it and found three possible causes for these relationships to end: (1) There is no good fit in personality or values. (2) Our discussions don’t converge into a viable idea. (3) I’m not passionate about the idea or believe it.
As I was mostly meeting with people I had no prior experience with, interactions began with a discussion on an idea or business opportunity, and gradually moved towards a personality and values assessment. I chose to operate this way because both the idea and partner are critical for me, and I found it easier to validate the idea & my passion for it more quickly.
A good “hack” is to start working with someone who you have rich prior experience with and de-risk the personality and values assessment (you already value and trust each other, and the manner in which resolve conflicts together). Most of my opportunities came outside my 1st circle, but I made sure to exhaust them before moving on.
Recently, I struggled with self conflicting thoughts around reason number (3) — “idea passion”.
I met with solid founders that are tackling real problems in the market, and as we progressed, I often wondered whether this is a field I wish to spend a significant amount of my career on, and whether I’d be happy when I wake up in the morning two years from now, having worked on this domain.
In my thinking process, I assume that starting a venture takes a long time, and was looking for a decision that will last at least four to five years in order to start reaching success or shut down in the middle (hopefully faster than that).
This assumption made sense when I triangulated it with serial entrepreneurs, but often holds me back as I observe the opportunities that come my way.
Due to my tactics of meeting market experts with an idea, opportunities usually came in different areas, and I’ve spent a considerable amount of my time researching new fields I wasn’t involved with and trying to assess both the opportunity and my passion for it.
After running for a while, I pause to reflect and refine how I measure passion. Should I listen only to my heart, or utilize a set judgement criteria?
I have concluded from my reflection that the short answer is to use both heart and mind, and I’ll use the rest of this post to explore the mental processes I revised.
Like any matter of the heart in my case (e.g. looking for a spouse), I start with a list of the most important aspects about my goal.
I find this exercise helps me to remain objective in assessing an opportunity, which is often influenced by emotions in the heat of the moment (fear and excitement).
I keep the list short, and memorize it. It’s important not to overpack it, since this can keep me from great opportunities.
Here is the list I started a while ago and mentioned at my last post:
As you can see, these are all general metrics for picking a good idea. But this is also where I felt I was stuck.
The list is general by design, as I wanted to keep myself open to different domains and technologies. This comes at a tradeoff of focus, which is what I lack the most.
The issues I struggled with when evaluating opportunities through the list, is that metrics can be interpreted in very different ways, leading to different decisions. In addition, not all metrics here were equally important to me. Notably, some are mandatory, while others are very important. This is a big difference I should be aware of.
I’ll focus on one aspect that repeatedly came by when I assessed an idea, in order to clarify its meaning to me — Technical depth.
This is a general metric that I am often influenced by as I check it against the opportunity. I reflected on what does technical depth mean to me — is it accomplishing a hard software engineering challenge, using diverse languages, and working on a scale? Perhaps more data science or deep learning related work? Maybe an intersection between computer science and another field such as biology?
My best answer here sounds a bit dumb, but can be summarized this way — there is an aspect in the vision of the company that is hard to achieve technically that I find cool to work on, even if I wasn’t the founder — call it “the geek hook”.
As a technologically oriented entrepreneur, I find myself biased for this metric — even though it may be loosely related to the success of my venture.
One exercise a friend told me regarding passion is to select a few companies that I highly admire, and state out why. For me, those companies include the following:
- ImmuneAI — due to the technology involvement of several fields (biology and CS), and the research aspect of the startup.
- Gong.io — for the revolution they bring to an industry (sales), and their vision being rooted in deep technological research (NLP)
- VIS.ai — for to their disruption of a challenging market, and their vision including an aspect of deep technological research (CV)
One thing that is common among all of those startups is that “the geek hook” exists in them for me, which implies this aspect of a startup may be critical for me.
To counter that, a founder will face multiple other challenges that I might not weigh due to not having experienced them yet.
I’ll finish with words a smart entrepreneur I know once said to me. Something I won’t forget regarding startups — “your client doesn’t care if you do AI, or sacrifice a virgin to the god of Thor in order to have their problem solved. Customers only care about their problem, and if / how well you can solve them”. This is especially important to remember being a technological entrepreneur and more biased towards favorings technological complexity.
I still reflect on this metric nowdays, but have decided to relax it— the vision of the company will have to include “the geek hook”, but it doesn’t have to be the main part about the product, and doesn’t need to be included in the first two years product roadmap.
And what about listening to my heart? In my opinion (and after a long time in the dating scene looking for a spouse), I have found that the heart provides another useful metric that should not be ignored, or rather acted upon immediately. I let my heart provide another signal that I treat, and lean into this signal — if it’s positive, I invest more time assessing whether other metrics I defined align with my expectations. If it’s negative, I try to analyse why that is so, and organize experiences that will either amplify or reduce this feeling significantly. I feel uneasy with the interactions I have with the other partner? I create a situation where we’ll interact more intensively, and let my heart judge for itself.
I’ll continue my reflections at an additional series of posts, and hope it would be beneficial for other technological entrepreneurs struggling with similar dilemmas. Please reach out to me if you’d like to discuss and share your thoughts on this topic!
