Silicon Valley is full of people like roon, people who look at purgatory and call it heaven, who look at the glass and declare it half full. “All successful founders are optimistic. You have to be,” said Graham. The perfectly risk-neutral, well-calibrated founders tend to fail. “Strictly speaking, optimism is [an] error. But it cancels out other errors,” he said. You can’t sell other people on your ideas unless you’re optimistic about them, and without other people who believe in you, your startup will never achieve escape velocity.
