The people around a founder, chosen on purpose
Founders absorb the standards of the people they spend time with. That can raise the bar or quietly lower it.
Surround yourself with value creators so you can be open with your heart and mind in an environment based on grace, merit and generosity.
Shervin Pishevar, the founder of Social Gaming Network and an active angel investor, offers this less as a management rule than as a description of a circle worth building: people who make things, who judge each other by what they make, and who help without keeping score.
The practical case for it is strong. A founder’s sense of what is normal comes from the people nearby. Spend evenings with people shipping products and raising the bar on each other, and shipping becomes the default. Spend them with people who mostly talk about deals, and talking about deals feels like work. The dinners that Y Combinator holds each week for its founders run on this idea: a room of people at the same stage, each making visible progress, creates pressure that no investor could apply.
The line’s other half, openness, depends on trust. Founders rarely admit in public that the company is in trouble. In a circle where people help freely and do not gossip, they can, and the advice they get is better for it.
The choice is practical in a narrower sense too. Early investors, first employees and advisers tend to arrive through the people a founder already knows. A founder whose circle is made up of people who build things hears about good engineers before they are on the market, and about investors who stood by other companies through bad months. Circles compound, for better or worse, and they are easier to shape early than to change later.
The risk is that a chosen circle becomes an echo. People who share values often share assumptions too, and a group that prizes generosity can find it awkward to say that someone’s idea is bad. The most useful people around a founder include at least a few who will disagree plainly and have nothing to gain from being liked.