Startup founders need that one quality, and most people don’t have it, says venture capitalist Paul Graham

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On Saturday, Graham mused on why some entrepreneurs succeed and others don’t.

“Someone asked me what is most dependent on luck in startups. I answered: whether you are suitable for it. Only a tiny fraction of people are,” he said tweeted.

When asked to describe the key trait in a single word, he responded, “determined,” noting that it’s “very common” for someone fit to start startups “to come up on their third or fourth try be successful”.

But, he added, it’s not obvious who has that quality. “If it were,” he noted, “YC would have a much higher success rate.”

One Twitter The user asked, “Are you saying you can’t change this? Something you can’t get better at?”

Graham answered“If you’re fit for it, you can get better at it.” But you can’t improve aptitude for it much.”

In the case of Airbnb, Graham was more impressed by the determination of its founders than their business idea. Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk founded the company in 2008 but were turned down by venture capitalists. Graham, too, was skeptical of the idea of ​​people inviting strangers to stay in their home.

But then Graham got a glimpse of the founders’ determination. Facing rejection from potential backers, today’s CEO Chesky and his partners had instead raised funds from their own clients by selling them $40 cereal boxes. The team custom-designed and taped the boxes featuring then-presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain and offered them as a breakfast option for Airbnb customers, some of whom were among the early attendees of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. The boxes were very popular and sold unexpectedly well.

As Chesky recalled At a recent Stanford Graduate School of Business event, Graham asked the founders about the boxes that had gone bad at the end of their interview. They replied, “That’s how we funded the company because no other investor gave us money.”

Graham was suddenly impressed. “If you can figure out how to get people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal, maybe, just maybe, you can convince strangers to live together,” he told them.

Y Combinator then invested in Airbnb, which today has a market cap of nearly $70 billion.