Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Why do you think you’re better suited to being an entrepreneur, as opposed to being an employee?

Basil: A lot of the reasons are the ones that we talked about earlier with the characteristics I would look for in an entrepreneur. For example, I have to be the person who is driving the bus. If it’s my company, I can’t be the number two person; I can only be the number one person. If you made me number two, I would be very stressed, and very quickly I would become dysfunctional and counterproductive.

Other people, and in fact the vast majority of people, if you took them and said, OK, you’re the boss now. You make the big decisions. The whole organization’s going to succeed or fail on your decisions – that stress would kill them. That stress would make them paralyzed with fear because they know inside themselves that they don’t have that capability.

So, what people do is they find opportunities in the structure of our economy that fit their fundamental nature, and they rise or fall in the structure to a place that works for them. But if you displace them, then their stress level goes way up, their productivity goes down. Even their lifespan decreases.

Irina: You’re talking about those fortunate people who understand this concept but a lot of people don’t. They’re suffering but they can’t understand why, and a lot of people still can’t find any jobs. We’re just talking about the fortunate people who can think like you think.

Basil: Even those among us who are good at it, often we take half of our lives to figure them out. It’s not easy, I agree.

Irina: Once you figure it out you can be relatively happy, right?

Basil: I think so, yes. I think it’s one of the few advantages of getting older is you get to understand yourself better. It’s easier to make life decisions that will make you happy.

Irina: Do you have the same situation in Canada now that we have here in the United States where a lot of people can’t find any jobs?

Basil: It’s an interesting difference. The Canadian system is a little bit less capitalistic. We’re a little bit more socialistic. We’re about a third of the way toward Europe, compared to America. And America has a larger population of undocumented workers, if I can say that.

Part of the reason that that works is because there’s a larger structural unemployment in America. And part of the reason for that is because of the illegal workers. Canada is different. Even though the countries are getting closer rather than farther apart and the systems are getting more similar, today in Canada we have a smaller, kind of permanent unemployment and we have far fewer undocumented workers.

This segment is part 9 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II
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