Tolerable Arrogance

A personality type that works in tech.

Many outside tech don’t understand a common personality type you’ll find here.

We’re all accustomed to blustering arrogance. It’s the used car salesman overpromising the wares. It’s the sports fan whose team can do no wrong. It’s the professor who has spent decades in certainty.

Because startups are so hard, founders must have a firm self belief. So what kind of arrogance might that manifest?

The key difference is that you need to close. You need to have a product that works. Your predictions about the future need to be technically accurate and eventually realized true. This is a different kind of arrogance because unlike a lemon of a car, a Draymond Green flagrant foul, or the impractical academic idea, you need to be right.

I see this personality all the time in tech. And actually I love it, or at least tolerate it.

The challenge is that mimicry means you have a lot of wrong cargo-cult assholes. They think yelling and wearing a turtleneck is all you need to be Steve Jobs. They confidently take the credit of their engineering teams. They promise a feature on a sales call they don’t know if the team can ship.

At Tango, I need to judge the difference by closely listening to what the founders say. Conversation with founders is the primary way to judge an early stage company. Does your technology make sense? Will the market demand it? Can you find the right talent? Can you convince future investors? All require critical thinking about what founders plan.

Those confused by this might react negatively to the right kind of arrogance. These are the types of folks that dismiss Elon Musk as a know-nothing, despite the smartest folks in each of the fields where he operates disagreeing, and his dominance through Tesla EV sales and SpaceX mass to orbit. It’s arrogant, but it works. Everyone is fallible, but the quality shines through.

You can learn to adopt the right kind of arrogance by doing the work. It’s incredibly difficult to mime the confidence that comes from talking to hundreds of customers. If you’ve been heads down building, and you know the tech inside and out, then your competence will shine.

One failure case to avoid is hedging and caveats, which I most often see in academics. Research is so concerned with the narrowest specialization that academics will caveat and justify too much. Your company and potential investors aren’t a thesis defense, and you should just get to the point.