To be a good startup founder, Paul Graham says, you need to be relentlessly resourceful — or, you might say, hapful:
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.Till then the best I’d managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not hapless. Hapless implies passivity. To be hapless is to be battered by circumstances — to let the world have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world.
Unfortunately there’s no antonym of hapless, which makes it difficult to tell founders what to aim for. “Don’t be hapless” is not much of rallying cry.
It’s not hard to express the quality we’re looking for in metaphors. The best is probably a running back. A good running back is not merely determined, but flexible as well. They want to get downfield, but they adapt their plans on the fly.
Unfortunately this is just a metaphor, and not a useful one to most people outside the US. “Be like a running back” is no better than “Don’t be hapless.”
But finally I’ve figured out how to express this quality directly. I was writing a talk for investors, and I had to explain what to look for in founders. What would someone who was the opposite of hapless be like? They’d be relentlessly resourceful. Not merely relentless. That’s not enough to make things go your way except in a few mostly uninteresting domains. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can’t simply plow through them, because you don’t know initially how hard they are; you don’t know whether you’re about to plow through a block of foam or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to have keep trying new things.
Be relentlessly resourceful.