Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

by Timothy Ferriss

The third mental model I find myself recommending lately is found not in a book, but on a slightly obscure website: workwithsource.com. This work is based on a European management consultant who studied hundreds of startups and realized that even when there are multiple “co-founders,” there is always a single “source”: the person who took the first risk on a new initiative. That source maintains a unique relationship with the gestalt of the original idea and has an intuitive knowledge of what the right next step for the initiative is, whereas others who join later to help with the execution often lack that intuitive connection to the founder’s original insight. Many organizational tensions and power struggles often revolve around lack of explicit acknowledgment of who the source of the initiative is. A prominent angel investor observed to me recently that many founders seem to hire friends as co-founders more to quell their own anxiety during the early, highly ambiguous days of a new company than to fulfill a specific role. This can work fine as long as everyone is clear on who the source is. The responsibility to fully own the role of source rests in large part with the source themselves.