Anytime that you make a generalization about any group of people you are destined to be off base. But at the same time generalizations do help identify trends and garner understanding about people’s thoughts at a high-level.

One of the generalizations that we often discuss at WV is that entrepreneurs love sports with many of them being ex-athletes. This discussion caused us to ask the question, “why are athletes drawn to the entrepreneurial mindset?”

Our answers:

1. Sports have clear winners and losers. Entrepreneurs like to know a score and the feel of victory. These are almost always self-evident in start-ups/emerging companies
2. Athletics are a form of creativity. Entrepreneurial thinking people love to create things. They like having tangible things that they feel like they formed.
3. Great athletes like to push themselves. By definition, an entrepreneur is someone who believes they can do things better than they are currently being done.
4. Athletes have an appetite for taking risks. Although we don’t believe that most successful entrepreneurs are just crazy risk-takers, we do believe they have a certain appetite for risk.

Once again, generalizations are never full proof. But there are things you can see if you identify in yourself or other entrepreneurs you work with.

In startups, just as in basketball, one of the most important qualities to look for in a teammate is “feel for the game.”

I have the (mis)fortune of being a Los Angeles Lakers fan. But one of the joys of being a Lakers fan is getting the chance to watch Luke Walton play basketball. Luke has an incredible feel for the game. Basically, what this means is that he understands the rhythms of the action, and knows how to do the right things at the right time to help his team win, whether it’s rewarding big men who run the break by getting them the ball, or knowing how to space the floor to give Kobe Bryant room to operate.

Because of his feel for the game, Walton is a key player for the Lakers, despite the handicaps of being slow, (relatively) short, and unathletic.

Similarly, some people have a feel for the startup game. They know when to raise money, and when to bootstrap. They can sense the right time to launch a product–not so early as to make a bad impression, not so late as to be a me-too competitor.

Working with someone who has a feel for the game is a joy. Progress can seem effortless, and wins just keep piling up.

On the other hand, working with someone who lacks a feel for the game is frustrating and unproductive. You can’t trust them to do the right thing on their own, and micromanaging them simply produces a time-consuming and unreliable robot.

Feel for the game may not be obvious from a resume–it’s not about going to the right schools or working at the right companies, just as basketball isn’t simply about obvious factors like height and athleticism. But once you’ve worked with someone, you’ll never be in doubt.

Entrepreneurs are often very independent. You generally don’t choose the risks and pains of starting a company unless you’re pretty dead set against having a boss tell you what to do. But don’t let this independence blind you to other perspectives.

I recently worked with a great team of young entrepreneurs. They had done a phenomenal job of building a product that their customers loved, but were having problems figuring out how to sell it to big companies.

Off the top of my head, I ticked off the usual things you need to make an enterprise sale: analyst coverage, trade press, white papers, case studies, etc. They were amazed, because trying to figure out this world had been so difficult for them.

The key to remember is that your hard is another’s easy. Maybe you’re great at programming, but you think “the revenue thing” is a dark and somewhat sinister mystery. To a business guy, it’s a simple matter of selling a product to the same customers that he’s sold to for decades.

That doesn’t mean that the business guy is any smarter or more capable, just that he has different skills and experiences. Remember, to a business guy, extreme programming is what you call it when coders drink Mountain Dew and code while skydiving.

The ideal path is neither the arrogance of believing that what you do is more important, or the cringing self-flagellation of always looking to others for approval. Focus on doing the things that others find hard, but you find easy, and find partners who can do the things that you find hard.