By far, this is one of my favorite and most recurring questions over the years. And not just in the scope of founders, I’ve asked the same question for a multitude of titles:
- Investors
- On a similar note, I’ve asked investors: What’s the difference between a great investor and a great board member?
- And it yielded some insightful answers.
- Leaders
- Managers
- Executive hire
- Marketers
- Chefs (both since I was co-hosting a cooking competition in 2019 and 2020, but also for culinary tips to improve my own cooking)
- Artists
- Software engineers (when you’re hiring folks who are in a field you don’t have a strong competence in)
- Auto mechanics (yes, when you drive a 2009 mommy van, it visits the shop more often than you’d like, but also funnily enough, one of the most reliable cars)
- Friend versus best friend
- Life partner
… just to name a few.
I love this question since its counterpart is often asked: What is the difference between a bad and a good founder? Unfortunately, the “bad vs good” dichotomy usually ends up being a vanity question. You don’t need a trained eye and years of experience for the average person to differentiate between a bad and a good. If you’re reasonably logical, you can tell the difference between a bad and a good in any industry. There are a few exceptions, like art, especially modern or abstract art. But the case holds for most other cases.
On the flip side, to be able to differentiate:
- The good – top quartile (25%)
- The great – top decile (10%)
- And the epic – top percentile (1%)
… becomes increasingly more and more difficult the higher up you’re going. As the power law and the Pareto principle goes, the top 20% accounts for 80% of the results. In other words, the small top-performing minority account for the vast majority of the returns. For instance, the top 20% of VCs account for 80% of the industry’s returns. And the higher you go up in differentiation – from good to great to epic – the smaller the delta in inputs between the tiers. There is a far smaller difference in inputs between the top 1% and the top 2%, compared to the same percentile difference between the 50th and the 49th percentile.
Having said that, to a layperson, the most insightful answer you can get that will save you years of mistakes and failures and industry know-how is the differential between the top performers. As such, usually, I get answers that would have otherwise required a keener eye, much smarter brain, a more resilient body, and a more differentiated path than I have.
For example, here are some answers I’ve learned over the years that differentiate the good from the great:
- VP Sales hire. Their ability to hire two rock-star directors from their network within 1-2 months of being hired.
- Chef. Their morning routine, starting from how they set their palate in the morning to how they build a robust supply network.
- Founder. Their ability to raise their team members’ potential and how close of a pulse they keep to their operating expenses/burn rate.
- Manager. How radically candid they can be.
Of course, it’s one thing to know what are the differentiators and another thing to understand the differentiators. The latter requires you to internalize and cut your teeth so that you can understand the true value behind the answers to the above question.
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
The DGQ series is a series dedicated to my process of question discovery and execution. When curiosity is the why, DGQ is the how. It’s an inside scoop of what goes on in my noggin’. My hope is that it offers some illumination to you, my readers, so you can tackle the world and build relationships with my best tools at your disposal. It also happens to stand for damn good questions, or dumb and garbled questions. I’ll let you decide which it falls under.
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