Nick Beim

And yeah, founders come in a lot of shapes and sizes, but the good ones tend to cluster around five or six different artists.

Well, the best founders change their business model, change their business focus, but companies that are committed to a specific business model or business focus don't suddenly increase the caliber of the people at the team.

For us, we do a lot of what are called incubations, where we really help start a company in our offices.

And it's interesting, a lot of those exercises begin with, this is an incredible person that we would love to build a company with.

Let's go find, you know, there are three or four areas that we've talked to this person about and they'd like to work in.

We'd like to really go deep with them and come up with a really great idea.

Some of our biggest wins, in fact, many of our biggest wins have that structure and it all starts with a person.

There's a wealth tech company, two wealth tech companies that I have that'll be coming out of stealth mode in the next several months that both have that background where we started with the person and then it was a great idea, but the idea changed a lot.

But the person is what makes it magic.

Several things.

One is just incredible intellectual horsepower and incredible drive.

And the drive is interesting because you and I know a lot of incredibly driven people who have always stayed on the straight and narrow and don't take a lot of risks.

The drive that we're looking for has a huge quotient of raw willpower to it.

Someone who can create something out of nothing and just make it happen.

A lot of grit and a lot of just sort of... You see a lot of trauma there.

That's a really interesting question.

I can imagine in some cases it is.

And in some cases, there are psychological attributes that aren't trauma per se.

They may be related to trauma, but like having a big chip on one shoulder, that can be a huge motivator.

So we tend to love that.