A Tale of Two Founders

How current events (and one very unusual investor) are shaping the way we think about age, money and experience

A few minor details are obscured to guard against competitive investment, but here’s an tale of two founders — with a surprising twist — unfolding today.

A Tale of Two Founders

These two founders are separated by two big numbers: age and money. One has $50m, and the other $100m. One is 20 years old and the other 55. One is fresh out of school and one has decades of professional successes and failures.

But what they share is more interesting than their differences: unbridled confidence. One has the confidence of youth and one has the confidence of experience. Does the source of this confidence matter here?

Both founders are in the new race of defense tech–a real thing after Palantir and Anduril–and both share the same investor.

One is building autonomous subsea vessels, the other balloons. One is in SoCal, the other NorCal. They went to Stanford and MIT. Neither have ever built a hardware product. Undeterred, they both function under the belief that our world today says we can assemble things off the shelf at pennies and seconds on the dollar and hour.

To understand this, consider this fact: for every boat we put in the sea, China is launching 250. The name of the game is numbers. These founders probably understand this, and each is looking to hit almost disposable-level price-points.

There’s historic precedent here. The Allies beat the Axis Powers not by brains, nor even brawn. Our confidence came from numbers. We dammed up the Columbia River Gorge and used cheap hydro power to smelt aluminum. We stamped out a lot of bad aircraft. But we won by numbers.

These two founders of very different motivations are placing each other in exactly the same model their mutual investor is backing. They are what we call “founder bets.” Despite their differences, their confidence and vision to take a shot at the game of numbers could make either one a generational founder.

Confidence is what makes this interesting, but there’s a fun “gotcha” in this tale. The common investor is actually one of the founders. Twice his age, working with a budget half the size, he’s placing two very different bets on the same factor. He probably sees much of what our younger founder yet cannot, including the appreciation of youth. Confidence at any stage is a precious commodity.

Damming rivers and launching planes, vessels and balloons for the first time takes a lot of guts. If world events call for it, it’s less of a bet and more of a mission. Experience can be the hunter of naïveté, but without both we’d never do anything.