What are you passionate about

This is a question that often comes up during brainstorming or when you are introspecting. What is my passion ? Am I really living life to the fullest ? Am I just wasting my life .. so on and so forth. I have been in similar situations and quite frankly I still haven't been able to answer this question convincingly. I'll be crossing over to the dark side of 'mid 30s' soon and I sometimes think 'damn, will I ever figure out this passion thing'.

While I continue to look for that passion, I have been able to knock of at least a dozen activities/career paths that I'm not passionate about. That's valuable. If I look at my life as a startup, then this is the process of invalidating several hypotheses until I find that one hypothesis that sticks, the one that truly is my passion. During the course of this invalidation process, I have tried out several career options, doing a startup was one of them. I even tried photography. So far, I have invalidated all of them. This was my invalidation process.

Let's say I take up a job/project. There is always an initial high and productivity is at its highest. This typically lasts for 3 - 4 months. After that, at some point in time, procrastination hits. There's some bug that you just don't want to fix. There's a customer who you just don't feel like talking to. This phase, no matter how long it lasts, is perhaps the real test of passion. Do you feel terrible about not fixing the bug. Does it pain you to not take that customer's call. Do you feel bad about not waking up at 6 AM for that golden hour of photography.  Do you take immediate remedial action ? What I've come to understand is this - if you pull off this phase in stride, without actually feeling stressed then you are perhaps passionate about what you are doing.

On the other hand, if you really struggle to wake up knowing that you 'have' to fix the bug, or that your boss might be watching over you, or because of any other external 'fear factors' then perhaps you are not passionate about what you do.

This information is by no means a 'magic bullet' to find the passion in you. I'm just sharing what seemed to work for me.

Startups - technical co-founders

I often get a lot of flak for my bias towards technical founders, while evaluating startups. Most of the times I cannot come up with a convincing answer to this question 'why are you biased towards technical founders'.

Here's my view point - Technical founders (engineers), who are either self taught or college educated, typically have a logical bent of mind. This strong logical and mathematical foundation gives them the ability to tackle almost all aspects of running a startup. What they lack in their fundamentals, they can easily learn and keep learning. This is what makes them very attractive to graduate business schools as well. The very fact that engineers can be very successful MBAs is a testament of this viewpoint.

On the contrary, you don't often find someone with a non-engineering background being able to tackle engineering problems around a startup. Agreed that the rise of web frameworks and the mobile OS ecosystem has blurred the need for such deep rooted logical thinking. That doesn't mean the non-engineers can be very successful in 'building products'.

If I were given a choice to put my odds on two marketing guys starting up a company or two computer science guys starting up the same company, I'd bet my odds on the CS guys - simply because the CS guys can learn the marketing and sales chops much faster than the sales guys can learn the CS chops. While this is debatable, there have to be some really strong points to support that the marketing guys can learn programming and build a product :). I just haven't seen many of them do that. My knowledge is also limited and am still learning.

I've seen my friends who were once engineers build completely unrelated companies - Darter.in and Tapprs.com come to my mind. I haven't seen any photographers who have built software companies :).
So next time, if I come across as strongly opinionated towards tech co-founders, please don't get me wrong.