Underdogs and Entrepreneurs: Does Adversity Create Great Leaders?

Lately I’ve been thinking about growing up in South Africa and what this meant for my generation, many of whom emigrated.

It started when I learned that Elon Musk, cofounder of Tesla Motors (TSLA) and PayPal (sold to EBAY), is South African. (So is Roelof Botha, who led PayPal through its IPO in 2002 as a 28-year-old CFO and is now a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.)

Then I came across an article in the Silicon Valley Business Journal from December that made an astonishing statement about four of the first five winners of its Executive of the Year awards: “Here’s something interesting about our Executive of the Year awards, something that hadn’t occurred to us at the time that these four executives were selected. [Paul] Maritz, Musk and the Rives [brothers Peter and Lyndon who co-founded solar panel installer SolarCity] all share the same native heritage — they are all originally from South Africa.”

It made me wonder: Was there something about growing up in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s that fostered risk taking (and thus successful entrepreneurs)? The country was a political pariah, but it was also a place where many children had a remarkable amount of freedom in terms of venturing outdoors with minimal supervision. And with no nationwide television until 1976, kids had to figure out how to occupy themselves. (Little-known fact: South Africa’s first television broadcast took place in the major cities in 1975, but the first nationwide broadcast was only on 6 January 1976. And then television was available only for a few hours in the evening, alternating between English and Afrikaans programming.)

Perhaps it has something to with a culture of risk and freedom. People in my generation saw what seemed-to-be-unshakeable institutions crumble. And many came to realize that the world could be changed — and in fact should be changed — and that it would take persistence, risk taking, and a sense of ubuntu — working together. Or put another way, a person is a person through other people. (In this short clip, Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, talks about one aspect of ubuntu.)

I raise all this because I came across a video on the New Yorker website in which author and staff writer Malcolm Gladwell discusses “underdogs,” the subject of a forthcoming book. It would be a stretch to suggest that successful South African entrepreneurs were underdogs, but it did make me wonder, more broadly, about how being an underdog shapes a person’s mindset. Also, how adversity feeds creativity, innovation, and survival. (Here is the 2009 article that inspired the book: “How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules.”)

Reflecting on the Vietnam War, Gladwell notes: “There is something about the status of being an underdog which renders you invulnerable to certain kinds of assaults — the notion of being battle hardened, and not just in the field of actual combat, but individuals can get battle hardened.”

He also discusses the Impressionists who “completely turned the world of art upside down”. These artists were “very much outside the mainstream,” in fact they were  outcasts in their time, he says. “Is their innovation and their creativity a function of the fact that they are outcasts?” Gladwell asks. “Their decision not to participate in the Salon, in the prestigious infrastructure of the art world of their day, frees them up to imagine things that were unimaginable.”

I don’t know what has freed so many South Africans to imagine the unimaginable — in Musk’s case, founding SpaceX  in 2002 to revolutionize space transportation, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets — and whether there is any connection whatsoever to having come of age in the era of Apartheid, or having been an underdog, or both. But, at the very least, it makes for an interesting discussion.

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