Charlie Songhurst

They've got a million failed initiatives.

So they have all these learnings of what not to do.

They've got all the things that have worked and they've seen what scale, they've seen the commonality.

And so how much of that is sort of looking at an athlete at the peak of their performance and not seeing the 10,000 hours of practice?

that got them there.

I could almost argue you could invert it and say, what are actually the causes of mortality, and how do we just avoid suffering that mortality this year?

If you survive long enough, maybe greatness eventually becomes you.

One of the things I think that's perhaps underestimated is, if you want to live forever, maybe don't start thinking about study centenarians.

Instead, work out how to not die of a DUI.

Or drink driving, or smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

And to some extent, the same in entrepreneurship is, it would be amazing.

And of course, the problem with the observation of the world is people spend a lot of time studying greatness.

They don't study failure.

They study Muhammad Ali.

They don't study all the heavyweight boxers that flaked out after losing their first match.

But maybe if you study all of those, you can find a commonality in their mistake.

Maybe they all, I don't know, offered their chin to the opponent or something.

And in startups, I think there are common mistakes.

There's an original sin about capital raising.

I see so many startups three to five years in still haunted by a bad capital raise at the beginning, some investor they don't want, some valuation that was hopelessly dilutive and puts VCs off now.