Want to live forever? Laura Deming is solving immortality.
Want to live forever? Laura Deming is solving immortality.
Quest Minutes: Laura Deming
Solving Immortality:
If you had all the time in the world, what would you do with it? Imagine what you could discover about yourself and the universe.
Laura Deming is not your typical VC. She is the founder and partner of The Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm focused on the study of aging and life extension in humans.
In this episode, Laura discusses her journey to becoming an effective leader, taking risks, dealing with failure, and being motivated to change the world for a better place, and living next to Steve Jobs. Beyond her impressive resume, she is a reminder that great founders can come from anywhere, so long as you have the passion to pursue something relentlessly and are not afraid to step outside your comfort zone.
You can find Laura on Twitter and check out her blog here.
Shout-out to our Quest Fellow for this episode, Stefany Nieto!
Here are some of the key takeaways from the episode:
Great founders can come from anywhere
“I think there's this incorrect perception that the CEO needs to have these great technical insights…and what I've seen with our best founders has been that they absolutely don't do that.”
Laura noticed that the best founders and CEOs are the ones focused on recruiting an incredible team, giving them resources, and building an amazing culture. You don’t need to have the greatest technical insights into every aspect of your company. Founders should support and enable their team to make decisions, ask the right questions, and remain humble. Retain that burning curiosity and passion and you’ll go far. Academic credentials, while helpful, are not prerequisites to becoming a great founder.
Character > strategy
“When we started originally, I thought that it'd be a lot of strategic advice that we'd be telling the entrepreneurs - a lot of specific things.
I think really it was always down to whether somebody felt good, whether they were cracking, motivated, had the right ambitions for themselves, and their self perception.”
Specific strategic advice is only as helpful as the mental state, clarity, and character of the founder. Having a clear plan is obviously important, but things rarely go exactly as we intend. The most important thing is how a founder responds when things don’t go according to their plan. Great founders will eventually figure out a working strategy by persisting at it, while those who have a great plan, but no motivation will give up or burn out quickly.
Don’t box yourself into one field, explore the ones you find meaningful.
“A lot of the best founders that I've worked with have not come from biology. They've actually come from places like tech or they've been heads of engineering at different companies beforehand.”
There are a lot of opportunities out there that are looking for the next generation of founders, engineers, builders, and creators. Laura spoke a lot about the biotech field needing people from all different types of backgrounds to move the space forward. Great ideas are always formed with varied perspectives, so don’t limit yourself to one area of pursuit. If you find a mission or field outside of what you’re currently doing that is meaningful to you, do whatever it takes to pursue it. If you are motivated enough, the world will always need people like you!
Catch the rest of the conversation with Laura here:
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