Clay CEO Kareem Amin Discusses Capitalism, Courage, and Death Doulas in New Interview

Kareem believes capitalism rewards risk more than hard work or skill.

He has a really unique way of defining risk and explains why most people never actually take any:

"Capitalism rewards risk more than anything else.

A lot of people think it's a meritocracy, but there are a lot of people working really hard and not making a lot of money.

It doesn't just reward skill either.

You can be eating a sword and not making as much as someone doing a YouTube video.

A lot of people think they're taking risks, but aren't taking real risks.

I talked to one founder who went to a good school, then YC, and he was telling me about his company.

He said, 'We serve sales, and we serve recruiting.'

I said, 'You have to pick one.'

That's where you're actually providing value –– in committing yourself to serving some group of people in some specific way.

My definition of risk is you need to genuinely not know what's going to happen, so you're going to discover something new. And it needs to be coupled with a high potential for shame.

That's when you can take real risk.

When you couple risk and courage, the next part is commitment. You actually need to follow through to see what ends up happening.

You can't just quit in the beginning."

There's been much debate about the role of introspection in great founders.

Kareem has a thoughtful way of approaching it:

"The balance between doing and meta-analysis can sometimes flip. You should be doing 90% of the time and meta-analyzing 10%.

I wake up every day like Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) said, and I think, "How do I make more Clay?" It's consuming all of the CPU time in my brain.

But I don't just care about scaling. I care about how is this creating value in the world?

I think that the more you make and the more successful you become, it is part of your responsibility, back to all of us, to think about what you're doing.

For me, the introspection was a journey to understand why ambition. I was suspicious of my own ambition.

I was looking at people who are further ahead in my field and I was like, "Do I want that?

And I wanted to make sure that I really grappled with that correctly, and didn't just be like, "Hey, I did something big. I accumulated some resources, and I lived."

Kareem believes most founders and creatives create from a place of lack, a need to prove something or to be loved.

He creates from a place of wholeness instead. We coined a term for it: "post-lack."

"VCs have this common trope, that they invest in someone who has a chip on their shoulder, or some kind of lack they're trying to fulfill.

It's common across creative work.

The trope is you're depressed or anxious, and you're trying to fill that, and you're actually afraid to lose the depression or anxiety because you feel like you'll be less productive or creative.

I've had friends say, "I don't care if you succeed or fail, I love you."

And I was like, "Wow, that's actually helpful." I didn't think it would be, but it's feeding some part of my desire must be fueled by that, but I can get that right now.

And now I can start to take real risks where I'm thinking about the business and not trying to fill this like particular need.

I had this moment where I'm not going to create from a place of lack anymore. I went around telling people, I have everything I need.

And from there you can still create.

People are tremendously misunderstanding this. You can create from a place of wholeness.

And the more whole you can be, the more risks you can take, and the more courage you'll have, because you have nothing to lose."

not a typical invest like the episode because kareem is not your typical founder.

an excerpt i liked:

"I feel like people don't talk enough about the things that actually matter in building a business...And I think we're not talking about these things because the risk is too high.

If I talk about what I'm doing in a company and how I’m treating people, maybe someone will sue you, or customers will lose faith in you.

I really feel like companies are built through rules of thumb (eg how do you scale from 100 to 300?)

And then I talk to five people who’ve done it and they tell me. And by the way, I've done things that are completely the opposite of that and it’s worked.

So many people told me there would be all these weird problems scaling 50 to 300 people.

None of them happened.

We have some other things that happened, but I didn’t have the typical problems because I didn't do it the typical way."