The Four Steps to the Epiphany

CHAPTER 6Company Building

The essential thing is action. Action has three stages: the decision born of thought, the order or preparation for execution, and the execution itself. All three stages are governed by the will. The will is rooted in character, and for the man of action character is of more critical importance than intellect. Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous.

— Sun Tzu, as quoted in the Marine Corps Warfighting Doctrine

MARK AND DAVE WERE THE CO-FOUNDERS of BetaSheet, a pharmaceutical drug discovery company. Before starting BetaSheet, Mark had been the VP of Computational Chemistry of a startup acquired by Genentech. At Genentech Mark realized it was possible to revolutionize drug discovery by using computational methods rather than traditional wet labs. He passionately believed scalable drug discovery was going to be the new direction for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, and he tried to convince the company to fund a new lab inside the company. After Genentech said his idea was not big enough to be of interest to the company, he decided to start a company himself. He took Dave, his Director of Computer Methods Engineering, with him.

After some initial fund-raising, Mark became a first-time CEO, with Dave as his VP of Development. I'd been introduced to Mark by one of his VCs and sat on his board from the beginning. ...