There’s a common question in Silicon Valley about what makes an extraordinary entrepreneur. Experienced investors point to various traits. Perseverance. Grit. Overcoming adversity. Hustle. Innate genius. A good childhood. A bad childhood. Luck.
But the trait that is most meaningful is the hardest to describe. It is the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness. It is the belief that God or the universe has bestowed upon you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you. It is a holy war waged against the laws of physics. It is the burden of having to upend sometimes hundreds of years of entrenched interests to accomplish a noble goal.
When you see that kind of seriousness in a founder, the common response is to laugh or mock it. Who is he to believe he can colonize Mars? Who are they to think people will hop in cars with strangers? Butinvestors like myself run toward such serious people because this rare quality—a potent combination of capability and will—inspires others to reach beyond what seems conceivable.
Gen. H.R. McMaster, the former National Security Advisor, recently described the equation “capability times will” as something else: deterrence. That when nation-states see a dominant country’s technological prowess coupled with the will to defend its way of life, they will not act in a way that hurts the country’s interests.
For 80 years, beginning with the end of World War II, this was mostly the case. American deterrence and seriousness were in some ways synonymous—an undeniable force for growth and prosperity in business, in technology and in culture, making this country’s achievements the envy of the world. But as the century began, the loss of American seriousness accelerated just as our adversaries, Russia and China, became more serious about their own alternative projects.
We can debate the causes of this decline. Some say economic stagnation. Decadence. An unmooring from our founding principles or the natural rise and fall of nation states. But whatever the reason, we all know what unseriousness looks like.