Five questions with William Bao Bean, General Partner at SOSV

Five questions with William

Q1: What’s one habit that keep you focused and productive?

Understand what are the things that only you can do and focus on them. As much as possible delegate everything else, hopefully to someone who has a passion for it and is better than you at it.

Q2: What’s one piece of advice for entrepreneurs in your industry?

Figure out what your superpower is, your unfair advantage, and focus on it. When taking a startup cross border, the obstacles are massive – its that much harder than just doing a startup in one’s home country. But the process is the same as you need to focus on a problem that people have and solve it better than anyone else can. Without an unfair advantage – be it tech, partnerships or even business model – you should question whether this is something you should be doing in the first place.

Q3: What’s one of the most important lessons you learned from your career?

When you wake up each morning, think about all the things that you have to do in the day. How many do you look forward to? What do you dread? Strive to have over half your day be filled with activities that you have a passion for, that when you are in the middle you lose track of time. And think about the things you dread.

Very few lucky people get to do what they want to do every minute of every day but understanding what you dread is useful. Maybe you are not the right person to be doing those things. People who don’t like doing something tend to execute poorly when they finally drag themselves to do it.

Q4: Something you’ve changed your mind about in your career

An important thing is to be able to change one’s mind. It takes hard work to keep an open mind, especially as one gets older. Wisdom from experience is great but it must be tempered as deep tech early-stage investment is focused on change. Every day we attempt things that would have previously failed but because of change – usually brought on by technology-based innovation – are now possible. Be open to change.

Q5: One trait that you would like to see in people you work with

Determination. The entrepreneurs we work with have it tough. A few years back, the term cockroach became a popular way to describe lean startups that are indestructible. Step on them and they might lose a leg or two but get up and keep on going. The successful startups are led by people who failed and didn’t quit. I’m not advising doing the same thing over and over if it’s not working. But determination in the face of repeated failure wins the day. I want to work with cockroaches.