being a people person in an ideas world
Q1.25 LP update excerpt
I have this core framing I use to categorize people: people persons and idea people. What I’m asking is whether a person is primarily motivated by an interest in people or ideas. Do they do what they do out of a fundamental desire to serve and love humans, or are they more driven by an appetite for new and novel ideas? Effective founders come in both forms, especially if they manage to attract lots of talented people of a similar motivation style. Where a person falls on this spectrum can also shift over time — many founders start out driven by a desire to actualize an idea, then become increasingly people-driven as their company grows (and with it, their sense of responsibility to the people on their team). Regardless, I’ve found that the people vs. idea dichotomy is best posed verbatim — ask a person to simply pick which one they are and explain why.
I’ll provide myself as an example. I’ve always been someone who prefers to observe a given situation before jumping in. I’ve never cared much about becoming the smartest person in the room, but I’d pride myself on picking up on subtleties in the people around me, accurately judging character, and asking good questions. In some ways this quiet, observational approach made me a bit of a blank slate, allowing others to project what they wanted onto me. Because I wanted to belong, I sometimes played along. The best example of this was my Twitter in 2021. I was fascinated by the Silicon Valley social scene I found there and wove myself into it quickly, following the breadcrumbs of validation left for me by people I admired. I got a lot out of that app as I grew up and into myself — I met my husband and several of my best friends there, grew a following for my writing, and began building the network upon which I raised my first fund.
But I increasingly felt a certain amount of dissonance with most of the startup people around me for one simple reason: I’m not technical, nor am I motivated by a driving interest in being at the forefront of ideas. If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a people person. I liked startups because of the unique people working on them and stuck around because I wanted to better understand their motivations, desires, and big visions for the world. Twitter engrossed me for a while because it let me map out who influenced who, who was thinking for themselves, and what the social dynamics and norms of this culture were. I stopped posting a few years ago in order to reconnect with what I actually value — reading people and relationship-building.
How is this relevant to VC, you might ask. While venture capital is often framed as bets on potential futures, all potential futures are revealed to us by outlier people. Those who spot the signs of a person’s future success first (and crucially, act on it by investing in them) stand the most to gain. Very few capital I investors (i.e. ones with LPs) are actually willing to invest in just a person though. It’s a perception problem — talking about the qualities of a founder that make them exceptional (with examples, of course) just doesn’t win you smart points in a typical Silicon Valley conversation, much less in a memo read by those above you. If you want to get a promotion or to raise a lot of LP money, you’re probably wise to stick to talking about ideas.
But say you decide you don’t care about either of those things. Say you’re driven by wanting to be just as rigorous about refining their perspective on people as the best idea-driven investors are about their ideas. From what I’ve seen so far, becoming a better people picker requires spending a lot of time around excellent and unique founders — developing instincts in data-rich environments. But instincts alone aren’t enough. Discernment also requires authenticity; honesty with yourself and others. What are you great at? Where do you trip up? How much can you reasonably give? What are you here to do? These are the kinds of questions I try to answer as I get to know a person. Or my favorite: are you a people or an ideas person? Why?
Could there be a spectrum between “people people” and “ideas people”? I can think of “people people” who mostly talk about reality TV, gossip, and social media — human connection for its own sake. And I can think of “ideas people” who are so consumed by abstraction that they dissociate from their own values, motivations, even their bodies, in service of pure cognition.
I’m drawn to those who live in the middle. The “people people” — like you — who are drawn to ideas people, but want to understand how ideas connect to core values, motivations, and psyches. And the “ideas people” who stay curious about how upbringing, culture, and social environments shape our intellectual passions and biases.
In the workplace (back when I worked in one), I found the people/ideas divide to be awkwardly gendered. Many of my female colleagues would preemptively say they weren’t interested in “competing to have the best ideas,” as if discussing ideas were inherently adversarial or competitive. I sensed an insecurity with the idea space itself. Meanwhile, many of my male colleagues dismissed anything involving self-awareness — personality types, team dynamics — as a waste of time, revealing their insecurity with the people space.
I tried, carefully, to encourage women to engage more with ideas and men to stay open to emotional intelligence — but it was fragile territory to discuss.
Hi Molly, I am an ideas person. Like you I observe. When talking with others, however, I more so listen for what their thinking. Let's look at the times on the app you mentioned through the design thinking lens. Some steps in design thinking are for a people person others are for an idea person. The example that comes to mind is empathizing with a customer or in your case finding something you admire. Then in the next step of design the task is to generate ideas. This involves writing code, or for you, writing about what you found on an app.
Design thinking is a non-linear process. Ideas are only useful once acted on with other people. How about conveying ideas to people? I think a people person is a people person until someone has an idea about a problem that relates to a pain point or data environment. Then they get an idea that is backed by evidence. That is what the VC world is all about.