40%

"If it doesn't suck, we don't do it."

- David Goggins

When your mind is telling you you're done, you're really only 40% done.  That's why marathoners hit a wall at mile 16 and still finish.  It's why this aptly named ship and fateful voyage ended in survival, not disaster.  Every story of human triumph over reality involves the same saga.

Grit.  Courage.  Endurance.  Heart.  Sisu.

Entrepreneurs (i.e., founders, executives and early employees at immature companies) require these characteristics for survival.  It's why investors and employers look for experience on athletic teams as indicators of future success.  Individual endurance sports are also relevant.  The best proxy would likely be relay endurance events, athletic (e.g., any relay -athalon) or engineering (e.g., formula student,  battle bots, lemon cars, hackathons, solar cars, etc.) in nature.  Folks that maintain participation while gravitating towards organizing these events later in midlife stages are worth their weight in gold.  It's all mindset - having fun while working hard, on a timeline.  Winning would be great too, but doing one's best and finishing the race is primary objective.

40% is not a perfect anchor - it falsely indicates linearity.  When it feels like we're done, it doesn't mean we can do 1.5x more time and 1.5x more work.  One or the other is possible, but probably not both.  Doing both requires reinforcements, going deep and getting outside of oneself.

Check out Le Mans sometime.  The first couple hours after the flag waves at 3 pm is pure joy.  By 1-2 am it's starting to feel like a grind, confirmed by the time 3-5 am rolls around.  Luckily two to three drivers swap in and out.  While formerly under less stringent rules, no single driver can drive more than 14 hours in the race, nor more than 4 hours within a 6 hour period today.  It has to be a team sport.  Most teams balance three drivers across the event, rather than allow a single human issue to knock them out of the event by relying on just one or over provisioning with 4 or more.

The perfect founding team is also likely 2-4 people. Three feels ideal because of being able to visualize three orthogonal axes of expertise.  One common configuration includes:
(1) a visionary and decisive leader to keep ahead of the problem
(2) a product and/or technology leader to conjure up defensive advantage, and
(3) an operator who iterates upon the company itself while avoiding own goals (e.g., conductor, firefighter, bus mechanic, waste management, etc)

These skillsets can be divided amongst 2-4 people infinite ways.  (1) alone would likely benefit from a complimentary partner.  Sometimes the bulk of (1) and (3) are better handled by a single co-founder, while the technology / product leadership requires a yin to her yang.  Over time, with any scale, (3) does need to be professionalized beyond what (1) will have time to do, but not necessarily in the beginning.

Therefore, the best way to test oneself, decide what to do next, and with whom to do it is to play and compete in a variety of ways.  Something seemingly adjacent will come from no where.  Folks you didn't know you couldn't live with out will suddenly be in your life.

Practicing.  Winning.  Losing.  Achieving.  Learning.

All of the above is better with friends.  Because it doesn't matter how hard we aim for Type 1.5 fun.  Out of necessity, we build companies with folks who enjoy Type II fun.  The most important caveat for the first ~10 hires is that everyone has to accept that we may drift into Type III fun.  That's when we really learn who's on our team.

Finish the race - the rest is noise.