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Nothing is impossible to tackle. But the sense that something might be nearly impossible is the biggest motivator one can find\u2014if you\u2019re crazy enough to pursue it. That\u2019s according to George Arison, a Soviet Union-born serial entrepreneur and the CEO of Grindr, the publicly traded LGBTQ+ dating app worth $2 billion.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of my motives in life is doing impossible things; that\u2019s how I\u2019ve shaped my life,\u201d Arison said at Fortune\u2019s Brainstorm Tech conference in Utah this week. \u201cMy whole life is impossible; I\u2019m now here doing this, and look at where I was born. Nothing\u2019s actually impossible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
A veteran tech founder and Google<\/a> employee, Arison joined Grindr shortly after its 2022 IPO. He\u2019s one of a small handful of openly LGBTQ+ CEOs among publicly traded companies and the Grindr board is majority LGBTQ+. Beyond<\/a> tackling the inconceivable, becoming a founder in America today requires being \u201carrogant and crazy,\u201d Arison added, effectively owning up to being both those things.\u00a0<\/p>\n The mayhem underpinning founder culture has been ubiquitous for decades. In 2012, Steve Blank, the so-called father of entrepreneurship, told Fortune <\/em>that all entrepreneurs are, at their core, nuts.<\/p>\n \u201cAs it turns out most of the time, founders are actually hallucinating, and every once in a while they\u2019re actually visionaries,\u201d Blank explained in a Fortune <\/em>interview<\/a>. \u201cThey 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A step further, Blank said, founders more resemble artists than engineers or run-of-the-mill businesspeople. \u201cThey make things happen,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n (Blank isn\u2019t shy on that point. As Fortune <\/em>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 \u201cthe 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<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n That impossibility-chasing mindset has been incredibly effective for Grindr\u2019s Arison as a founder, he said. Effective leadership has never been more of an uphill climb\u2014but it\u2019s on the cusp of drastic change.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d Arison said, as Fortune\u2019s <\/em>Jason Del Rey reported earlier this week<\/a>. \u201cStarting 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\u2019ll have a bunch of synthetic employees as well, doing a lot of the work.\u201d<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean the human employees will become redundant; rather, given the smaller headcount, each individual employee\u2019s contributions become more vital. \u201cThe 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Greater efficiency<\/a> while still allowing for human ingenuity? Not so crazy after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\nFounderitis and impossibility go hand in hand with AI<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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