Some of the biggest business successes don’t start with the best idea.
Sometimes, they start with the right person.
Paul Hirschbiel has spent decades investing in companies and evaluating the people behind them. As the founding chairman of Innovate 757 and a longtime investor, he has had a close-up view of what separates businesses that scale from those that never reach their potential.
On The Fervent Four Show, Hirschbiel made the case that investors—and entrepreneurs—often put too much emphasis on the idea itself.
“I have seen so many great ideas go down the tubes because their leader…wasn’t a good leader,” Hirschbiel said.
The opposite can also be true.
He pointed to Dell as an example of an idea that, at the time, didn’t necessarily look revolutionary.
In the fall of 1987, Hirschbiel’s firm was putting together an investment in Dell. The firm planned to invest roughly $3 million as part of a larger $15 million deal and had positioned itself to lead the round.
Then the stock market crashed.
As uncertainty spread, other investors began backing out of the deal. Hirschbiel convinced his partners to stay in.
The deal closed in late October, and Hirschbiel joined Dell’s board. He remained there for 13 years, from 1987 to 2000. He recalled Dell doing roughly $20 million in revenue when he joined the board and billions by the time he left.
But the lesson Hirschbiel took from Dell wasn’t simply about picking a company that became enormous.
It was about picking the leader.
Hirschbiel described Michael Dell as someone with “absolutely no ego” who was willing to surround himself with talented people—even people who might be better than him at particular jobs.
“He was constantly bringing in people who were smarter than him,” Hirschbiel said.
He saw similar qualities in other business leaders he backed, including Staples founder Tom Stemberg and Starbucks leader Howard Schultz.
That experience shaped how Hirschbiel evaluated opportunities throughout his investing career.
The question wasn’t simply whether an entrepreneur had a great product or business model. It was whether the person leading the company cared more about building the company than protecting their own position.
One way Hirschbiel evaluated that was by looking at the people a leader hired and promoted. Strong leaders, in his experience, weren’t threatened by talented people around them. They elevated them.
As Tim Ryan put it during the conversation: “We bet on the jockey.”
Hirschbiel agreed.
“You could have a stupid idea, but if they’re a great leader, they could make it happen,” he said.
A mediocre leader can squander an extraordinary opportunity. A great leader can take an idea that initially looks questionable and turn it into something nobody expected.
Hirschbiel’s career also gave him a very different perspective on fundraising when he decided to run for Congress.
His days became an exhausting cycle of researching potential donors and “dialing for dollars.” His finance staff would prepare lists of people to call, research their backgrounds and identify possible connections that could help him start a conversation.
He described spending his days making calls, taking a short break for lunch, returning to fundraising in the afternoon and then attending public events at night. As the election approached, the pace intensified to include weekends and “double calling,” with multiple staff members dialing simultaneously and handing him the phone whenever someone answered.
Eventually, his finance team tried to reassure him.
“When you get elected, you’re only gonna have to spend half of your time raising money,” Hirschbiel recalled them saying.
His response was immediate disbelief.
“Are you kidding me?”
They told him that was standard.
The experience was a different world from venture investing, but it reinforced just how much of leadership can revolve around securing the resources needed to keep an organization, company or campaign moving.
Across Hirschbiel’s decades of investing, the conversation kept returning to the same principle.
Ideas matter. Markets matter. Capital matters.
But ultimately, people have to execute.
That means evaluating more than the pitch. Look at the leader’s ego. Look at the people they surround themselves with. Look at who they promote. Look at whether they care more about their own future or the future of what they’re building.
Because the next enormous company might not begin with an idea everyone immediately recognizes as brilliant.
It might begin with the right person capable of making it work.
