Nothing is impossible to tackle. But the sense that something might be nearly impossible is the biggest motivator one can find—if you’re crazy enough to pursue it. That’s according to George Arison, a Soviet Union-born serial entrepreneur and the CEO of Grindr, the publicly traded LGBTQ+ dating app worth $2 billion.
“One of my motives in life is doing impossible things; that’s how I’ve shaped my life,” Arison said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Utah this week. “My whole life is impossible; I’m now here doing this, and look at where I was born. Nothing’s actually impossible.”
A veteran tech founder and Google employee, Arison joined Grindr shortly after its 2022 IPO. He’s one of a small handful of openly LGBTQ+ CEOs among publicly traded companies and the Grindr board is majority LGBTQ+. Beyond tackling the inconceivable, becoming a founder in America today requires being “arrogant and crazy,” Arison added, effectively owning up to being both those things.
The mayhem underpinning founder culture has been ubiquitous for decades. In 2012, Steve Blank, the so-called father of entrepreneurship, told Fortune that all entrepreneurs are, at their core, nuts.
“As it turns out most of the time, founders are actually hallucinating, and every once in a while they’re actually visionaries,” Blank explained in a Fortune interview. “They are insanely driven to bring that thing they see to fruition. And they need to be, because of the amount of travails they go through in making something out of nothing.”
A step further, Blank said, founders more resemble artists than engineers or run-of-the-mill businesspeople. “They make things happen,” he said. “And they need this perseverance and tenacity and resilience to drive them through those obstacles, because rationally, it would make a lot more sense to just exchange your labor for money.”
(Blank isn’t shy on that point. As Fortune wrote at the time, Blank once asked an audience at a Silicon Valley seminar who wanted to start their own company. He then told them that “the good news is that one of you will be worth $100 million in 10 years. The bad news: the rest of you would have been better off working at Walmart.”)
Founderitis and impossibility go hand in hand with AI
That impossibility-chasing mindset has been incredibly effective for Grindr’s Arison as a founder, he said. Effective leadership has never been more of an uphill climb—but it’s on the cusp of drastic change.
“The number of people you will need to build a company is actually going to be much less than you needed in the past, because of what AI is going to do to how we work,” Arison said, as Fortune’s Jason Del Rey reported earlier this week. “Starting now, or especially a year from now, I can easily envision a company getting to $50 or $100 million in revenue with like 25 employees, because they’ll have a bunch of synthetic employees as well, doing a lot of the work.”
But that doesn’t mean the human employees will become redundant; rather, given the smaller headcount, each individual employee’s contributions become more vital. “The people you bring on board as your core team need to be exceptionally good, because the synthetic [workers] are going to be providing leverage for them.”
Greater efficiency while still allowing for human ingenuity? Not so crazy after all.
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Jane Thier
