What really is grit?
I’ve been in the startup/innovation ecosystem for a bit now, and I’ve been fortunate to study, observe, and embody what I believe is the most important trait to do great things: grit.
Grit manifests from singular focus, passion, and the ability to reach towards the edge of the possible. We often mistake it for adjacent qualities like ambition, confidence, success, or privilege. Those can help, and they often reinforce each other, but grit sits in a separate category. It shows up most clearly when none of the external signals are reassuring and you keep going anyway.
In my experience, grit is built from three elements:
- Uncompromising conviction in the mission you choose to pursue
- High agency to carve out your own path, because no one will do it for you
- Personal accountability to own outcomes and define hard success and failure
Uncompromising conviction
This is something I saw early on at Gordian and in the longevity space. There are many people on the bandwagon now, or those who speak more nonsense than truth, but Martin (CSO, Gordian) was one of the few that embodied the field’s ambitions and always sprinted towards them. The eventual goal for geroscientists, after curing all disease, is to extend lifespan. But to do that, you need a clinical trial for aging. To do that, the FDA has to designate aging as a disease. This calls for systems-level change that will define this century, and I think it’s uniquely possible because of people like him. It requires a coalition built over many years.
Martin, as well as being the CSO of an incredibly ambitious longevity startup making drugs for four very different diseases, also ran a longevity fast grants program—over $30M to date—as well as a longevity apprenticeship group convening and cultivating young scientists in aging. He had very little free time and was fiercely focused on curing aging. Since meeting Martin, I’ve been fortunate to meet many people like him—solely focused on their mission, giving up free time, risking their career, even financial stability. It doesn’t matter how long things take. To them it’s not a question of how, but when.
This sort of uncompromising conviction is something you embody, and probably one of those things that’s less impactful to write out. Alas, I’ll try:
Conviction comes with competence and confidence that you are uniquely able to bend entropy in your favour, no matter the time scale or resources required. Time, networks, money—these are tools for leverage. “Tokens” you “cash in” when needed, and you often do, because if it was easy someone else would’ve done it by now. Conviction becomes uncompromising when you’re inevitably given an out.
The James Dyson story is a popular example: he created over 5,000 prototypes over five years to arrive at his bagless vacuum. I’m sure he had a product of lower ambition he could’ve sold along the way, but he pursued his vision without compromise. I don’t necessarily endorse this relative insanity—to be fair Dyson had his wife’s teaching income to support their family—but it’s a common feature in truly cracked founders, often described in podcasts like Founders (e.g., Chung Ju-yung, CEO of Hyundai). It goes without saying that Chung and Dyson had some grit in them.
High agency
This phrase gets thrown around too much now. But just a few years ago, the people who embody it truly changed how I perceive what’s possible in this life.
We’re all human. No matter how much money we raise or how many lawyers we’re armed with, we’re all just hyper-evolved lizard brains trying to predict and build the future we semi-selfishly want. The “you can just do things” slogan is cringe mostly because ego inevitably gets in the way when we’re suddenly given money, power, influence (on Twitter) with a startup. “You can just” blow an $8 billion hole in your balance sheet and spend other people’s crypto money on parties in the Bahamas. “You can just” burn your investor’s money on fire, leasing out co-working spaces while haemorrhaging cash until the SEC exposes you. But just as you can do that, you can also recover from heroin addiction and lead one of the most well-endowed philanthropic funds in California.
Cate Hall is one of the superwomen in the valley that I and many of my friends respect and admire. When I first met her in early 2024, she had just been brought in to lead Astera, a new philanthropy stood up by Jed McCaleb’s personal wealth. Jed is a crypto legend not known much outside of crypto and progress/philanthropy circles, but he’s a fascinating person. I was giving a talk on my very first ideas for Artemis FRO at an unconference, after which she came up and told me about the fellowship and other initiatives she was spinning up. That fellowship didn’t work out, but every time we’ve spoken since, and every time she’s come up in conversation, she was always respected—for her past, her work, and now her writing, too.
Fittingly, she’s since left Astera and is writing a book about agency, out in 2026.
Cate’s story is fascinating. Plentifully available on the internet now, but for those who don’t know (in short): Yale Law School JD, top-ranked female poker player in 2016, heroin addict, pandemic medicine biotech COO, CEO of Astera Institute. Agency is the word she attributes to her success, and that’s fair, but this is also someone with a lot of grit. Being smart with degrees doesn’t magically make you the top-ranked female poker player, and certainly doesn’t dig you out of heroin addiction. I’m not sure how she operated as a COO, but I saw how dedicated she was at Astera.
[Tangent] Between her and the likes of Erika Alden DeBenedictis, it seems like Seemay Chou, the co-founder & president of Astera, has an eye for exceptionally agentic people. I think Cate embodied the valley outlier archetype throughout her life, and when SF caught up and noticed, it immediately embraced her. Since leaving Astera, she’s probably one of the most sought-after people in science philanthropy. Maybe soon Tom Kalil can bring her on as a Senior Advisor to Renaissance Philanthropy.
I’m not sure what makes people truly agentic—maybe Cate will define it for us in her book. For now, I think about it as the “anything is possible” mindset. It’s on us to raise each other’s level of ambition. Over time, this snowballs into an abundant, flourishing future for us all. Just as I can, in theory, get a meeting with Bill Gates, I can also talk on “Chicken Shop Date” with Amelia Dimoldenberg, if I really wanted to. If San Francisco taught me anything, it’s that we’re never more than two people away from anyone. That’s probably useful advice.
Personal accountability
This is the most undervalued trait, precisely because it can’t be measured externally. You can screw people over (investors, friends, family, etc.) and retroactively justify that you were “doing it for the mission” or “keeping yourself/the company accountable.” At the end of the day, no one knows the truth but you.
In the startup/innovation context, the most obvious examples are when founders step down, executives transition out, or companies/projects are spun down. We’re not often taught or encouraged to quit correctly. Companies drag on for ages—either by the founder thugging it out even though we all know it won’t work, or by sending a doomed clinical asset forward despite the entire company being laid off, with the product sponsor operating like a shell company.
Biotech often doesn’t have a clear playbook, and there’s real value in that. But it also makes it hard to see the path forward. This is especially true in the metascience space, where initiatives are built upon a seemingly bottomless stack of experiments.
Henry is one of those people currently navigating the metascience biotech space. He’s been leading the first FRO, Cultivarium, for four years. Cultivarium is a microbial infrastructure project that builds tools for the 99% of microbes we can’t work with in the lab. In theory, finding bacteria that duplicate every 2 minutes instead of 20 will have massive impact on the pace of science. New microbes can help us terraform Mars, build concrete from dirt, chew away plastic destroying our oceans, in situ. But it’s not the first time humanity had these ideas, and past failures are now precedent.
Non-model microbe research is very, very difficult to commercialize. Up until now, commercialization paths have been things like biofuels, scientific tools, and bio-fabrication. These are all impossibly difficult to scale. FRCs are therefore the most realistic path for organisations like Cultivarium—but difficult nonetheless.
Recently, Henry announced that the org was transitioning into an FRC. This is the first time an FRO has taken this route. Henry says he has the “fiduciary duty” to see it through, but I interpret it as personal accountability. FRCs are ambitious contract organizations that operate with a long-term vision, piecing together contracts from similarly ambitious clients—government innovation agencies, potentially startups, and more. Modelled off DARPA contractors of the past called BBNs, FRCs are the 21st century experiment to see if we can revitalise these organisations to continue driving progress.
Henry’s conviction is uncompromising, infectious, rational, and personal. When I asked why he started Cultivarium, he said it was because one day when the aliens come and ask for the microbiology expert on earth, he wanted to be the one nominated. I couldn’t tell how serious he was, but I thought that was a pretty cool goal. Henry is a lot of things, but he’s certainly a guy with grit.
Martin, Cate, and Henry are just a few of the people I’ve been fortunate to learn immensely from. Seek them out. Better yet, become one of them. I’ll do it. Will you?