Running Through Walls

Have goals so ambitious they looks silly to anyone looking at it from the outside

When I first started companies, I was not this way, but becoming a founder has taught me this skill. To build something really enduring - you have to run through walls. No one actually taught me this, it’s mostly from osmosis from being around other founders.

You have to set REALLY big goals, and not let anything get in the way. I know a bunch of founders who do this well, but one that stands out in their conviction recently is Ayush Jain at Syntra. He starts every single update he sends to investors with:

It’s been close to a year since I invested, and I’ve only really been watching from the outside. At the beginning, I knew it was a good investment, but I’m starting to think, by God Ayush might actually build the largest healthcare company in the world. He’s a lot of things, including an incredible engineer and good human, but most of all he runs through walls and doesn’t let anything stop him.

This isn’t about saying it when it’s going right, it’s about believing that you can achieve the stupidly ambitious goals, even when things aren’t going to plan. There are a bunch of reasons why this works, but the biggest ones are is it stops you from giving up and forces you to find good and creative solutions quickly to hard problems. The founders who do this the best don’t care what other people thing, they just do things. From the outside it might look kind of sexy, but from the inside it means a lot of resilience to really pull it off — you only really know it if you’ve done it and seen it.

(Edit: I couldn’t find a good header image for this one that wasn’t a hulk image - so I’m just going to leave it blank)