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All Founders are arrogant. How’s that for a polarizing statement? If you’re a founder and disagree, it means you haven’t been rejected, denied, denigrated, ghosted, or disrespected enough to build the thick skin that is arrogance.
If all founders are arrogant, then not all express it the same way. Nor is it a natural extension that they are assh*les. Arrogance is good, all the ways it shows itself are not. To understand entrepreneurial arrogance, distinguish between the attitude and its expression.
The Attitude
Arrogance is an exaggeration, the act of selling yourself and your capabilities for more than what they may be. It is the abundance of confidence, and if confidence had a Ludicrous mode, it would be arrogance.
Confidence is a function of knowledge, a fundamental belief that you know what needs to get done because you have the right tools and training. Arrogance, on the other hand, is confidence despite lack of training. It is the belief that you can meet the problem head-on and solve it, notwithstanding your sparse intellectual or financial arsenal. It is the conviction that you are in no way less than the person who claims to have the solution to your problem but won’t show you.
At its best, arrogance ignites the David in the Founder to fight every Goliath blocking their way. It is the fire that warms the renegade and fuels the rebel. Arrogance tells you you’re better than everyone because being “just as good” is failure.
As a tactical tool, arrogance compensates for size. When at IBM, you had to be humble because you were compensating for being an 800 lb gorilla with a vast arsenal of resources, so even the slightest stench of arrogance and you’d put off your customers. However, as a startup, you don’t have the same brand recognition, and hence the person on the other side of the table can easily mistake your humility for lack of confidence. This is both contagious and deadly.
Arrogance pushes you to be bold in your actions, to prize above all speed and risk-taking. It forces you to question the status quo tirelessly. It reminds you that nothing is final in human judgment, least of all their opinion of you.
The Expression
Arrogance is the license to be creative in your response to the “no.” It helps you find ways to get your foot in the door. It is not the permission slip to be rude, lack empathy, show disrespect, or for bullying. Those behaviors are expressions of personal insecurity and not of aspirational arrogance.
The willingness to learn from our mistakes and the need to listen to our customers never goes away. Arrogance does not dilute nor interfere with humility. However, when you’re in a startup, you deal with so much C.R.A.P (Criticism, Rejection, Assh*les, Pressure) that just being confident doesn’t cut it. You have to be arrogant enough to shrug it all off and continue to dance to your music, no matter how off-beat it may sound, and do it as many times as it takes to succeed.
The problem is that you can’t be selective with arrogance, and perhaps this is why entrepreneurs get reputations for being jerks. You cannot turn it on and off at will and, more often than not, end up overdoing it before you find the balance.
The only way to not overdo it, to not overplay your hand, is to be kind–always. Kurt Vonnegut said it best:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Finally
Arrogance hides ignorance but does not make up for it. You can show yourself as outsized to the world as long as you don’t fool yourself. A Founder’s arrogance buys them time to learn what they don’t know and back up the talk with substance.
Author’s Note: This is the second in the series picking up the conversation from A Founder’s Passion published earlier.