Innovator Archetypes
Innovators fall into two categories at a huge scale. Balaji Srinivasan calls these two people The Paladin and The Dark Knight.
The Paladin takes something popular and makes it profitable. They’re loved. The risk to them is making money before losing it all. Elon Musk has taken things like solar power and electric cars and made them feasible for millions of people to use.
The other kind of innovator, The Dark Knight, annoys a group of people. Their idea is unpopular. The markets they operate in have potential and there’s a customer demand. But they run the risk of being regulated or banned. They struggle not with profitability but popularity. In the early days of Uber, they battled the taxi industry and local governments trying to step in to prevent them from having customers. It wasn’t the demand they had a problem with.
These are just two of the Early Founder Archetypes that can be found in highly successful startups.