Founder Superpowers
The traits that make us different
As a founder at Harvard Business School, I am part of a fantastic community. This community is fostered through programs like Startup Bootcamp, the Rock Summer Fellowship and Reza Satchu’s classes. The community serves a dual purpose as a kind of group therapy session and a gladiatorial arena.
We push each other. We help each other. We celebrate together. We commiserate together.
One of my fellow founders and I were discussing our relative ‘founder superpowers’.
This is the idea that each of us has gifts, traits, or habits that give us the edge versus the normal population.
Founding is really hard and there is no way that any of us can do it all. This is a helpful framing to allow us to focus on our strengths and build teams to support our weaknesses.
It is also vital on the days when everything goes wrong, and it’s dark outside, and life just feels pretty grim - to remember that we are superheroes of sorts…
I’ve gone back to my notebook to review the list I wrote for my friend, here are few examples from it:
You see the world outside-in, which enables you to develop and hold a divergent perspective
You’re calm under pressure, which is vital for the difficult decisions
You think deeply and in a considered way, which provides you with an edge for understanding customers
I remember that on their list for me was the ability to go from 0 to 1, get defeated, and then start again - a humble kind of grit.
However, we both agreed on a shared superpower that is underrated in a world where so many people are writing emails, LinkedIn posts, and their blog posts using Chat GPT, Claude, or Gemini.
We can both write well, clearly, and in the abstract. We have both written creatively as well as academically.
For us, one of the greatest pleasures is writing our thoughts out - often with pen and paper in our notebooks. We both journal every day. We both publish our work publicly.
In this world of ‘AI-generated work slop’, an ability to convey an argument, feeling, or idea through words is a superpower for founders. It is a differentiator that is growing in value as the skill is being lost for many people.
At least that is how I justify the value in spending writing in my journal, on this Substack, and business memos. I think I have built an edge, a superpower, that will enable me and my business to win.