Choosing our heroes: Celebrating the founders who go on to do it all again

By Serge Van Dam

I have been working with some founders longer than others!

TLDR: We should celebrate founders, especially the ones who go on to do it all again!

When speaking on the future of our country or species, I often make reference to ‘choosing our heroes’. We do this as leaders, as voters, as consumers and as a society. The obvious point to make is that more so than influencers or sportspeople or cultural icons; our real heroes are people who change the world. Most of those do so through companies, which as we all know, were at some point, a startup.

To make this vivid... Moderna is a pharmaceutical company founded in 2010 whose vaccine saved 20-100 million people globally (depending on how you count these). Cristiano Ronaldo is a great footballer with world-class abs. Bad Bunny is a singer who sells lots of albums. Winston Peters is our longest standing Member of Parliament. One of these is not like the others… I think you get the point.

And the best kind of these kinds of heroes are those who make a fabulous impact in the world, and then go again.