It is a better world if our most prominent people are moral exemplars with happy family lives. However, after a decade of meeting billionaires, reading biographies of highly successful people, and building products myself, I’ve come to accept that the opposite is probably true. The highest level of success requires wholly unreasonable people. Musk ... See more

Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need pes... See more

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more