One Essential Question to Ask When Beginning an Accelerator Program — GAN

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” — Lewis Carroll

Last week, Exponential Impact’s latest cohort visited the GAN office. XI is a GAN Accelerator located in Colorado Springs and this cohort of founders is an amazing group, just starting the program. When thinking about what I should say to them, I remembered something that Steve Blank shared with a bunch of the Techstars founders we brought together in Las Vegas back in 2012.

Steve got in front of the room and asked everyone, “Who here comes from a broken or chaotic family? Just a quick show of hands.”

About 80% of the room raised their hands. He said that’s pretty normal for a room full of founders. One of the main reasons founders do what they do-start and run incredible companies-is because they’re used to chaos and they know how to live (and thrive) in it.

Unfortunately, he also shared that the flip side of this can be dangerous. When founders actually experience calm, they don’t know what to do. Founders can be addicted to craziness. When things are calm, things feel terrifying. They don’t seem to be “right” or “okay.” So, when they experience calm, they want to mess things up because all they really know is chaos.