No, they're not false at all. I'm looking at your definition of Relentlessly Resourceful (RR), as understood from the essay, and his definition of tough. Thos

No, they're not false at all. I'm looking at your definition of Relentlessly Resourceful (RR), as understood from the essay, and his definition of tough. Those two seem to be vastly different. As I went on to say, where they're not disjoint, they're probably correlated, not causal, and i cite some examples where people i know exhibited Relentless Resourcefulness WITHOUT demonstrating the OP's definition of toughness. (Although, perhaps they meet your definition of tough, which is why you're quickly judging my claim as false, and we're having a miscommunication on terminology). I can't use your definition of tough, so i responded to his. Look at his third sentence: "These guys (and gals) were not the young, sheepish, technical founders you’d expect. These guys are operators – savvy, confident, operators." Furthermore, if someone sets out to find RR but looks instead for tough, you'll miss the set of people who are relentlessly resourceful -- but who are still "young, sheepish technical founders." Not all rectangles are squares, etc. Is that definitive? Is it always true? No, of course not -- we're talking about human properties that vary as much as humans. But I wouldn't want to look for relentless resourcefulness by looking for toughness. He's looking at confidence & poise as indicators of toughness. He saw the demo day, and he's dividing people into operators and sheepish 'technical founders'. You may say tough as a shorthand for relentless resourcefulness. He's saying tough to mean the opposite of geek. So the question, i suppose, is how do you, pg, evaluate people for toughness? The OP seems to be using a mix of posture & anthropology combined with business benchmarks. "Wimps don’t really get anything done – they don’t release a product, they don’t make sales, they don’t raise money, hey balk at big problems, they quit before they should." His definition of "wimp" seems totally irrelevant to actual performance under pressure, and would be a terrible litmus test. Can you ship without ever pushing through low points? Yes, you can ship crap. Can you make sales & raise money without being RR? Yes, you can be lucky. Is it evident, or can you see -- from a demonstration day! -- when people have balked at big problems or quit before they should? Probably not! Finally, his definition of wimp/tough might be "true" -- whatever the hell that means -- but i find it useless, and maybe worse than useless if it leads you disqualify many people who are RR. True/False is easy, but useful/useless is much harder to evaluate. A useful statement about the mental traits of founders would be nice to have. A useful test would be even better. That's what i'm trying to get at.