Are rich people REALLY smarter than you?

Hi everyone

Today I want to talk to you about a preconception I had when I started building Elite Robotics. During the last 2 years, I have made a consistent effort to surround myself with people that were more successful and wealthy than I was. People who had been there and done it before and are now in a position that I wanted to be in. I would talk to all of them thinking that, yeah, these guys know way more about business than I did (because they actually did) and I just assumed that they knew everything there was to know.

So whenever I was given advice that contradicted my own beliefs and intuition I would always assume they were smarter than me and must know what they are doing. So I allowed myself to be influenced very easily by their opinions. This became especially prevalent when I started raising money for my business. I would often have meetings with investors whom would question parts of my business model and the validity of the technology we are developing, deeming it as nothing new and out of the ordinary. When I would receive this feedback I never questioned them further about the criticism they would give. Who am I to tell someone that manages a USD100 Million + sized fund about how to make business decisions. Surely, they must know more than me about EVERYTHING to do with business right?

well, not quite...

Recently, I was extremely privileged to have received a scholarship to go on a program run by one of the most prestigious business schools in China. The alumni from this school account for 1 / 6 of China's GDP. They included people like Jack Ma, a co-founder of Tenscent (the company that makes we chat and owns shares in so many major gaming companies you would have heard of like Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, Pubg Mobile etc. ). During this time, I had the opportunity to pitch at events that were livestreamed to over 430,000 people. I pitched at the Headquarters of Fosun Investments (one of the largest investment conglomerates in China), and met more investors in the space of 2 weeks than I had spoken to in the 6 months previously. Some of these investors I had follow up meetings with managed USD20-30 Billion funds. One investor told me stories about how he had put USD1 Million of his own money into a single startup and that the fund he created with his friends had made more than 50 investments over the last 4 years.

Here is a picture of me Pitching at Fosun Investments Headquarters in Shanghai

I tell you this not to brag, but to give you an idea of the calibre of people I was spending time with on my trip.

By interacting with so many people, I learned some highly valuable lessons about how to hold myself within investor meetings. I quickly realised that most of these people fall into 1 of 2 categories; they were either lucky and stumbled their way into lots of money or they made all their money by following a relatively narrow path. There is absolutely nothing wrong with following either of these paths. But what this means is that these people either didn't know a lot about building a business from scratch or they knew a lot about how to do it specifically in the context that they had followed. Neither of which necessarily translated into giving us the right criticism and feedback for our business.

Having dinner with one of the first futures traders in China at one of his restaurants in Beijing. This guy is a multi-billionaire.

This 100% applies in the broader context of all people involved in business at any level. Everyone follows specific paths in their life and because of their experiences, they built up a set of assumptions, values and decision-making processes. Some of these attributes can be extraordinarily effective in one type of industry but be completely useless in another. If there is one thing that I had learnt during our fundraising journey is that investors may have a lot of money but it does not make them the arbiter of every business that could ever exist. There is a million different ways to do things and achieve success in the way that you want to. As you navigate the ups and downs of building a business you need to figure out which one works for you. Which method is going to keep you hungry and push you to do things most other people won't do. I believe that will lead you down the path path of success because you will have the opportunity to define success in the right way for you.

I recall one of the meetings I had with an investor while I was in China. This was the second meeting I had with her and someone from her team. As I was talking to her, I explained some information which was in the image below:

This was towards the end of my trip, so by this point I was pretty comfortable talking to investors. After going through this slide, she stopped me and questioned me on the uniqueness of our technology. She proceeded to tell me that they run programs where children use robotics kits to make vehicles move around a course and that nothing we were doing was unique. Normally, I would have stepped down and not continued the conversation further. But this time I said... well no, please explain to me the nature of the tasks you get these children to do.

After digging a bit deeper I realised that she had this completely wrong. She was talking about the children making robots to follow pre-planned paths in highly controlled environments (indoor with fixed objects). I then proceeded to explain to her that what we were doing was completely different. We had developed unique technology that allowed us to put a robot in an outdoor environment it had never seen before and it would be able to detect objects within that environment while it as moving around, track them and predict their path, all using low cost hardware. The technology we had developed had never been done before and was leveraging work one of my team members had done in his PhD. After this she was impressed but still tried to talk done what we had done.

Pitching in Shanghai at an event co-hosted by a member of the Chinese equivalent of Dragon's Den

This meeting as well as several other experiences I had throughout my trip and startup journey so far has made me realise, yes there are rich people that have done incredible things. A lot of them are maestros in their respective industries. BUT, that is not the only dictator of success. Sometimes you just have the be at the right place at the right time, sometimes you just have to outwork everyone else. Sometimes it just comes down to pure luck. Whatever the case maybe, if there is anything you take out of this. Realise this, if you have something you believe that can add value to the world. Then put everything you have in it and know that your success is dependant a lot on the effort you put towards this journey. You will get a lot of advice that is wrong for you and you need to learn to be able to pick out the good advice from the bad. Take on board what people tell you but be ok with questioning them. The only way you can ever figure out if they are right is if you question them to the point that you realise what they are saying makes sense. Don’t just take their advice and follow it verbatim. Learn to question them and only then will the advice you get really have a positive impact on your business. Furthermore, remember you don’t have to be a genius to build a successful business.

So tell me what do you think? Have you ever had a preconception that led you to follow advice from others that maybe wrong? Let me know if there is anything I spoke about here that you found interesting and I will happily expand on these topics in later blog posts.