Asymmetric professions

Do you want to be a striker or a goalkeeper?

Venture capitalists (VC) have a weird job, you can be wrong 90 percent of the time, yet one big hit out of nine misses could still be considered as hugely successful. On the other end of the spectrum, being a surgeon is an extremely unforgiving job, one stupid, careless mistake could potentially end your entire career.

I like to think about these opposite professions using an analogy from football - Strikers vs. Goalkeepers. As a striker, you can miss many chances in a game, yet one magic moment could make you a hero. Conversely, as a goalkeeper, you might have many stunning saves, yet one wrong move in a decisive moment could ruin your entire career, just ask Karius from Liverpool for more details =)).

Now, let's loosely define Striker professions as jobs in which you are rewarded hugely for a single successful event, one big win is kind of compensating for all previously failed attempts. By contrast, Goalkeeper professions are jobs that you are punished severely for failing to perform your job even once in a long time. I call these job as asymmetric professions. Striker and Goalkeeper jobs are both asymmetric; however, they're on the opposite ends of the reward/penalty spectrum.  

In Striker jobs, you are rewarded hugely for a single successful event; one big win compensates for all previously failed attempts.

In Goalkeeper jobs, you are punished severely for failing to perform your job even just once in a while.

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Striker Professions

Let's take a quick look at some "striker" professions: VC, Startup Founders, Musicians, Writers, Artists, Sales.

Most startup fails, but when they win, they win big. Therefore, it's natural that the founders and investors in these rare winning startups are disproportionally rewarded. 

From an investor's perspective, the vast majority of startups in any VC's portfolio will fail; this is statistically true for all funds, even the most renowned ones. It's almost always the case that 2,3 big winners bring back most of the return to the entire fund. Because of this power-law distribution, best investors have all experienced some kinds of FOMO ( fear of missing out); they are worried more about missing out on the right unicorns than backing the wrong ones. (in nerds' parlance, False negatives is much more harmful than False positives in this case). 

The most recent classic example of this is the $9 million Series A investment of Benchmark in Uber back in 2011. When Uber launched its IPO in May 2019, the shares were worth about $ 6.9 billion. This is equivalent to the overwhelming return on investment of about 753 times. Furthermore, $9 million is only 2% of Benchmark's $400 million fund, making a simple calculation of 2% * 753X return, you will get an average return of 15X on the entire scale of the fund. Basically, Benchmark could have invested in 50 companies (each investment was worth 2% of the size of the fund), and only Uber succeeded brilliantly, the other 49 all failed, they would still earn a 15X return on the initial size of the fund.

Similarly, as a startup founder, the same mentality is applied. Drew Houston - Dropbox's founder encapsulated the idea in his quote: 

"Don't worry about failure you only have to be right once"

Many founders had experienced multiple failures before hitting the jackpot. Travis Kalanick was miserable at his first two startups, getting sued by competitors, being betrayed by his cofounder amid 9/11 stock market crash, witnessing "all but one of the company's engineers" leaving (who eventually also departed), having to move to India and Thailand as a cost-saving measure, et cetera. But ultimately, all of these failures and struggles don't matter because of his successes at the third company that he founded - Uber. 

Apoorva Mehta quit his job at Amazon then spent nearly two years to iterate on 20 different ideas before settling on Instacart, a popular app in the U.S. that gets your groceries delivered straight to your door, in case you haven't heard of it. Instacart is now valued at nearly $14B, not a bad outcome for Apoorva and two years of his life wandering in the dark. 

Move on to the next typical Striker jobs. Musicians, Writers, Artists, in general, share the same dynamics; you just need one big hit out of countless misses. JK Rowling has written 14 novels, most of them are unknown to us, but the Harry Potter series alone is more than enough to make a name for herself. Picasso is probably the most extreme example; this prolific artist produced about 50,000 artworks during his lifetime, including paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and ceramics. Only a very few masterpieces in his collection were sufficient to bring him to fame.

Sales is another classic Striker job where you will naturally get a lot of rejections, but you need just a few YES from significant clients to exceed your KPI for months, this is especially true for real estate agents and B2B salesmen. 

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Goalkeeper Professions

Now, let take a look at some "Goalkeepers jobs": Surgeons, Truck Drivers, and most maintenance jobs. 

It doesn't require many explanations to see that Surgeons and Truck Drivers are classic illustrations of a Goalkeeper job. Both work under high pressure; one negligent moment could put people's lives at risk. They're expected to fulfill their duty without making mistakes. 

Similarly, most maintenance workers won't be praised for having done a perfect job because their work to keep the system working normally is taken for granted. However, if the system is down, especially critical systems, they will be the first for people to place the blame on. 

For example: if you were a maintenance operator in a nuclear plant, despite having a good safety track record for years, just one single unwise decision could burn down everything. This is exactly what happened in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, a maintenance mistake combined with a flawed design ended these unfortunate engineers' careers and lives forever. There's no room for error. 

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So, after all, what is the lesson here?

Striker and Goalkeeper jobs require a different mindset and personality, which I might elaborate on in another essay. I'm also not judging which ones are more important because each has its irreplaceable role in society.

There are only two things that I hope you can take away after reading this essay.

The first one is the concept of asymmetric jobs and how it can be seen from multiple angles.

Secondly, I want to give you some questions, those that I have been continually asking myself.

Do you want to play your life offensively or defensively?

Do you want to be a striker of a goalkeeper or maybe a midfielder?

And if you want to play the game offensively,

Are you positioning yourself accordingly by working on something that has the potential to change your life entirely?

Are you investing your time to learn new things that will compound over time to be useful in the long run?

Are you building a long-term mindset to take risks wisely and a resilient attitude to deal with repeated failures?

Or simply, are you willing to be seen as an idiot in short-term to gain advantages over the long-term?

It might take years to figure out the answers for these questions, I'm also no expert here, just a newbie learning the game. But for me, only by asking these questions helps me a lot to course-correct myself when things go wrong, when I feel so lost in the game. I hope it helps you too.

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Only the success counts!

Finally, let me end this with two stories.

Last year, I read a fun book named How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars by Billy Gallagher. It talks about how Snapchat was started and its bloody war with Facebook.

"Zuckerberg has always been hyper-aware of lethal threats from small startups; he builds separate teams at Facebook to create new apps and snatches up the best new companies by making aggressive and successful offers for hot startups like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus Rift. But that approach didn't work with Snapchat. When Facebook tried to buy it in 2013, Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel turned down the reportedly more than $3 billion offer. For Zuckerberg, Snapchat became the one that got away."

Throughout the book, Facebook tried to copy different features of Snapchat; most of them failed miserably. Mark was ridiculed as a villain, a copycat loser which was true until they added Stories to Instagram.

"Instagram Stories became a massive success. Just two months after its launch, it had 100 million daily active users, a number that doubled to 200 million by April 2017 and 250 million by June 2017, figures that dwarfed Snapchat’s 166 million daily active users."

The triumph of Instagram blurred all humiliating failures before that. As a line that the author noted at the end of the book which I really like.

"Facebook tried to copy Snapchat a million times. But the failures didn't matter—only the success would."

Yeah, Only the success counts.!

That’s all for now. Cheers!

Minh Phan 👋

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P/S 1: Lmao, some might think that I’m a fan of Mark. No, I’m not.

Actually, I was rooting for Evan and Snapchat the whole time reading the book, who wouldn’t root for the underdog, right? It’s just that the lesson that Mark showed was on point to illustrate a Striker’s mindset.

P/S 2: I know all analogies become rather vague to a certain extent. Some strikers are still being remembered for missing once in a lifetime chances like Robben in 2010 WC finale or Higuain in 2014 finale, so some are gonna say I'm cherry-picking the data to fit my arguments, that's alright. 

But that's not the point, the point of this essay is to distinguish between the two kinds of extreme asymmetric professions and Striker vs. Goalkeeper is the best analogy that I could think of right now, feel free to lemme know if you have a better one.