Can an office drone be molded into an entrepreneur? Ressi thinks so. His Founder Institute teaches the art of startups. Ressi talks with Ashlee Vance about taking risks and high jinks with his college roommate, Elon Musk.
What kind of candidate do you look for to join your entrepreneur training program at the Founder Institute? The most successful entrepreneurs in the world have a combination of the right type of personality and fortunate life circumstance. A lot of them have been doing it most of their life. For whatever reason—they dropped out of school, or they wanted to join a classic profession that didn’t work out—the next thing they know they’re an entrepreneur. But the world conditions you very well to be an employee, to work for someone else. Just look at banks: They don’t know how to finance entrepreneurs. When I want to buy a house and get it financed, a banker looks at my situation and is like, “I don’t understand. The salary history is all over the map.” They don’t know what to do with me. But if I had been earning $125,000 a year for the last three years, they’d be like, “Oh, easy. You’re preapproved for this.” The world deals with people who have stable employment histories very well, and so what we try to do is, we try to find people who have the raw material and have been put into situations where they are employees and recondition them.
