Founder trauma as an investment signal is a little overdone. In fact, I'm not so sure it was ever that useful. Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all had pretty good upbringings.
I want to tread lightly here. We all have different experiences, and I'm not dismissing anyone's.
But you arguably can’t compare one person’s trauma to another's. Take any person on the planet and ask what's the worst thing that ever happened to them. There are some people whose “worst thing” is unimaginably bad. There are others whose “worst thing,” comparatively speaking, is like a walk in the park. But it was still the worst thing that happened to them, and it was traumatic by their standards. It’s all relative, which means it’s very challenging to differentiate.
What I do think you need to look for are absolute signs of outliers, and they can come in different ways. If you're a basketball scout and you see someone who's 7’5”, there’s no question. That’s about as legible as it gets. But in the context of early-stage investing, I'm more interested in less legible signals. Like extreme determination & unique technical breadth.
One of our portfolio companies, @raven_computer, is a smart glasses company. The founder, @tomthecarrot, is a great example of what we look for. When he was 10, he programmed the viral whack-a-mole app “Bustin Jieber.” At 12, he delivered a TED talk on programming that has accumulated over 11m views on YouTube. But his life was completely changed when Google Glass came out a few years later.
He became totally obsessed with smart glasses, AR, and the idea of spatial computing. He went on to Georgia Tech, where he became a Thiel fellow before dropping out to start an (you guessed it) AR company. He raised a bit of money but didn't have much success. Fortunately, it’s been a very different story with Raven.
His personality is very different from that of some other founders. But to me, the signal is his utter determination to birth a revolutionary smart glasses product and a new computing paradigm. He's also a polymath and largely self-taught. He can write software backwards and forwards and talk about waveguides and optics or thermal management and quantum leakage. Constructing a truly breakthrough wearable device & surrounding ecosystem requires extreme depth across a lot of areas, and he has just that.
Granted, I don't have depth in any of those areas. But I think I'm pretty good at picking up on someone who is really legit across them. And often I'll get reinforcement talking to other world-class experts.
Ultimately, I don’t find trauma narratives particularly instructive. I'd rather find out what a founder was obsessed with before anyone told them it could be the seed of a business.
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