While I was in London last week, I was lucky enough to have fish and chips with Dr Marcel Muenster of TheGritti Fund. Marcel has had a unique career path of becoming a fund manager, he studied medicine in Germany, did a Masters from John Hopkins and was an entrepreneur before taking the plunge into becoming a fund manager. Since we were together on a couple of panels for a Family Office conference on alternative investment strategies, we got talking and realized that we have a lot in common despite our career paths having started in wildly different ways. However, when Marcel spoke about utilising his medical knowledge to get the best out of entrepreneurs, I was hooked.
Marcel is setting up a unique accelerator experience for entrepreneurs in the Middle East through The Gritti Fund. One of the important USPs for this accelerator will be that it will require entrepreneurs to work with a psychologist who will mentally condition their minds for peak performance. Marcel believes that entrepreneurs go through similar experiences as high-performance athletes i.e. the performance pressure, a roller coaster of highs and lows and the failures outnumbering successes by a long margin. Therefore, instead of treating the entrepreneurs like a herd of cattle he wants to carefully manage their psyche and bring out the best in each one of them.
I resonate with his thoughts because I have been on the entrepreneurship roller coaster several times as both an entrepreneur and seed investor. I have been through the months and years of sustained pressure and have seen my entrepreneurs facing the same. Many times, I can only watch as the entrepreneur makes a series of blunders due to the pressure that his entire ecosystem has put on him/her; it irks me to be a silent bystander in such situations.
It is serendipity that I am in the middle of reading the autobiographies of two widely successful athletes i.e. Michael Jordan and VVS Laxman. It is clear how the former’s mother and latter’s uncle played instrumental roles in protecting these athletes from parental, societal, friend-related and performance pressures. They built a kind of cocoon around them during their formative years and performing years and continuously steered them to maintain focus on their craft. A similar comparison could be drawn in Warren Buffet’s autobiography where his wife and friends built a cocoon around Warren so that he could remain lost in his world. Marcel had thought through about marrying both these concepts, it was one of the big ‘aha’ moments of my life.
31/2019
