What are you uniquely adept to build?

10 Aug 2022

Incipient founders often ask me for advice on deciding what to build, and how I decided to commit to building a dog aging company. This a quick note on two frameworks that were key to my decision making, that may be helpful for other founders.

Obsessive dedication to a future world

Talented people can work on many problems. To have the resilience and growth rate necessary, it’s key to build a company not because you can, but because you can’t possibly not.

Very few wake up in the morning getting energy from the day to day chaos of building a company. You need to be able to tolerate years of discomfort and pain (“building a company is like being punched in the face repeatedly” “building a startup is like chewing glass”) in service of pushing forward your vision of the future. A disciplined person can do this for nearly any idea via pure determination, but startups take years to build and the escalating challenges will out-durate your willpower.

Obsessive dedication is also key to maintaining the supremely high growth rate necessary for a Founder/CEO. Personal growth is a bit like video game levels - each is progressively harder. This is in part because the problems become more niche, fewer people have achieved that level of growth (so fewer mentors) - and because you become closer to “good enough”. Pushing to be 99th percentile requires actively rejecting comfort. It’s easy to continue pushing when you know that’s the only way to realize your vision. If any world where your vision unrealized is tolerable to you, you will struggle to maintain the energy to fuel this growth rate over time.

What are you uniquely adept to build?

When picking a hard, important problem to build a company around, you should focus on areas where you are uniquely adept - both to improve probability of success, and to do the problem justice.

There are many interesting companies to build. I have the basic skill sets necessary to build, for example, an AI small molecule discovery company - but I am not uniquely adept at building that company. So while I could, it’s unlikely I will because I do not think that I am optimally or strategically leveraging my time by starting a company in that area, nor do I think I would do the problem justice.

For the young founder, this unique competency likely isn’t in a specific technical area. Instead, the unique competency may be at the intersection of various fields or opportunities, or in a field that is new or non-obvious to the old guard.

The key word is unique. If the combination or skillsets are common place, being adept at them does not make you uniquely adept. At that stage, becoming uniquely adept is dependent on your expertise level. Unfortunately, in most deep tech fields, expertise is directly related to years of experience. Therefore, the arbitrage for young founders is in unique intersections and incipient markets.

Loyal’s three core facets are pets, aging biology, and consumer go-to-market. My unique adeptness is not because I am best in class in any of these three. I have an eye for marketing and branding with my art background, but I would not be the best to build or lead a branding-centric company. I have core competency in aging biology, but I wouldn’t start an aging laboratory. I absolutely love animals, but I wouldn’t build any dog company. But having all three of these competencies in one person - and specifically the combination of aging biology insight with the other two - makes me one of the better people to start Loyal.

Unique insights take years, follow curiosity, and are non-linear

The path I took to build the context I needed to eventually build Loyal required more than six years of study, work, and research. Most steps did not have a straight line of relevance to building a dog aging company, but all were in retrospect key.

The best ideas are non-obvious, and are born from deep insight in an area - or the intersection of areas - that few others have context for. Taking this time can be painful, especially if you are itching to go out on your own and build something. The characteristics or skillsets that may end up key to your founder journey may not be found on the seemingly direct line from where you are now and being a Founder/CEO.

Building unique context allows you to discover low hanging fruit that are nonobvious to others. The opportunities that require minimal context building or commonly held context are already picked clean, with people fighting over the last few fruit. The opportunities that are a bit more non-obvious provide just as sweet fruit (or sweeter), with the bonus of being less likely to be discovered by others - providing crucial time for you and your startup to get off the ground.