Intentionality
Judgement, the idea maze, and molten metal
As an early stage investor, your job is to evaluate founders — specifically their core attributes, quality of ideas, leadership potential, and slope.
A lot of this can be boiled down to judgement.
Judgement doesn’t cover everything, but it covers a large chunk of it. There are many intangible traits required to be successful. Those come first in the Order of Operations for evaluating founders + startup opportunities.
Once you feel confident about the intangibles, judgement increasingly becomes the next most important thing.
Over the course of their journey, a founder needs to take in millions of data points, process them, and make sounds decisions.
The expected value of their decisions must be consistently positive; additionally, they must discern which decisions take priority and triage accordingly. Everything here falls under the umbrella of judgement. You need judgement to decide what data you ingest; you need judgement to process and analyze it; you need judgement to make decisions off of the analysis; and you need to exercise judgement in the planning and actual execution of the decisions too. You need judgement in figuring out who you’re going to hire and who you’re going to partner with.1
Given its importance, it’s fairly difficult to evaluate someone’s judgement when you first meet them.
The best proxy is intentionality: Are they thoughtful — quite literally full of (quality) thoughts — about what they're doing and how they're going to do it?
Intentionality unearths maniacal focus. If a founder is encyclopedic about something, there’s a good chance they’ll be really thoughtful about why the thing they’re building should exist. Some of the best founders I’ve worked with all share this trait — they can walk me through the why for every single decision they made.
Some of the decisions are small. But when you’re building a company, all the little details add up, and if there’s harmony to the decision making process, it acts as a form of leverage.
Decision leverage is essential at the earliest stages of a company, because every aspect of the business is constantly shifting — it's like molten steel magma, swirling and boiling, refusing to sit still. If you're crafting something as volatile as molten steel, intentionality adds a cohesiveness to your decision making that gives you greater odds of success.
You may think sculpting clay is a better analogy because sculptors must intentionally mold their creation to its final form; clay isn't volatile enough though. Magma is far more energetic and unpredictable: it bubbles and boils, and requires more care, precaution, and forethought. You don't pour steel onto a table and then try to make a sword — you have to plan everything out. Before you even begin you have to gather an array of tools from a hammer and anvil to gloves, a cauldron, and goggles. Only then can you heat the metal and manipulate it.
You must think (many steps) ahead.
It’s rather difficult to create something, especially a company — the odds of success are just not that high (especially because building new businesses is harder when the low hanging fruit is gone) – intentionality is one way founders can fight against the odds to create something new, exciting, and consequential.
“Good startup ideas are well developed, multi-year plans that contemplate many possible paths according to how the world changes.” – Chris Dixon, The Idea Maze
Not only is intentionality the best way to navigate the Idea Maze, it’s also the best way to create a plan to execute against it too.
Eventually the molten steel will cool and coagulate; if you've been intentional the resulting final form should look like what you intended.
Maybe it takes a number of attempts, and maybe you need to rectify some past mistakes. But if you’re intentional then you’ll give yourself the best chance at success.
That’s all you can ask for.
“Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.”
Peter Thiel, Zero to One
See Evaluating Intentionality for more on this topic
I’d argue almost all time allocation and task prioritization decisions fall under judgement.