Meet Todd Klein

The best qualities in founders are great storytelling, strong leadership, decisiveness, humble confidence, intense willpower, insatiable curiosity, and willingness to iterate toward success.

During my career, I’ve been fortunate to experience some extraordinarily successful companies at close range, which gives me the motivation to help as many entrepreneurial organizations as possible grow faster, larger, more plentiful, and more sustainable.

I like to hear the origin stories of a company. When I hear a pitch, it is important for the founder to explain to me why they started the business. The motivation behind the companies is really meaningful to me.

As a founder, you should know your market and understand the competition. When a company declares they have no competition it usually means they don’t know their market well. Every company that operates in an interesting sector has competition. If it doesn’t, chances are the market isn’t very exciting.

A thoughtful and cogent presentation of the business’ unit economics is essential. The startup team needs to thoroughly analyze their business. You’d be amazed at how frequently this is missing from a pitch.

The three Fs: Fitness, Film, and Family. But definitely not in that order.

In DC, I am happiest during a trail run on the Billy Goat Trail. Otherwise, my favorite spot is sitting left seat in the cockpit of a seaplane on final approach to a glassy lake someplace.

I am a hunt-and-gather reader in that I read several books at once. Beyond reading numerous entrepreneur-oriented blogs and websites (Recode, Techmeme, etc.), at any given point I will be reading:

• Something brainy, but hopefully not too pretentious: Lately it has been political essays by the late Christopher Hitchens, Waking Up by Sam Harris, or rereading Kundera’s Book of Laughter & Forgetting‍
• A potboiler: Lots of Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler
• A business (or occasionally political) biography: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow is a book every entrepreneur should read. I’m about to start The Last Mogul by Dennis McDugal about Lew Wasserman building and then dismantling MCA.
• A book addressing social issues: I recommend Between the World and Me by Te-Nehisi Coates.
• A script: Either for a pilot TV show or prospective feature film

Both of the books I’ve written deal with what I call Transformative Companies, those that aren’t just successful, but also transform their markets, their industry, and the world. I was inspired to write them by a question put to me by a stranger at a business dinner in Cape Town, South Africa who asked me to explain Google to him. Not what they did, but the economic phenomenon the company represented. I described the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the US, the culture, laws, universities, venture capital, research, etc. I did my best that night and decided the question was too interesting to leave at a random dinner table.

Earlier in the year, I started researching the impact of Big Data beyond the marketing function in organizations. A thesis began to emerge that every corporate function within an organization will be transformed by big data — marketing is just the first. Finance, logistics, HR, all will change because of big data, and the skills necessary to succeed at those jobs will almost certainly adapt as well. There is a chance that a third book will come from this thesis.

The most memorable founder advice that I ever heard came from Alan Klapmeier, who I profiled in Built for Change. Alan founded Cirrus Aviation and is responsible for building the most successful private airplane company in the modern era. He came from an entrepreneurial family and shared one line his father offered at the dinner table when he was a teenager that later sustained him through tough times in Cirrus’ early days: “To be a successful entrepreneur, you’ve got to be dumb enough to start and smart enough to finish.” I think that pretty much says it all.