Bouldering

The author bouldering in the Flatirons. Photo by Crusher Bartlett.

All climbers like to boulder and most lifers would rather get a workout touching actual rock than climbing in a gym. Bouldering in my generation was an extension of being a rock climber; having a repertoire of hard local problems in your quiver was a requirement if you wanted to burn off the visitors.

When I was young, my friends and I idolized John Gill, the father of modern bouldering. Gill was the first guy to focus all his energy on bouldering instead of treating it like practice for rock climbing. He was so much better at it than everyone else in the world that his bouldering problems weren’t repeated for decades after his first ascents.

Gill was a gymnast and a climber. He bouldered in a dynamic, fluid style born of his gymnastics training unlike the climbers that came before him. I spent a lot of time in the 80’s trying to repeat Gill’s boulder problems in Colorado, an effort that required days of strenuous, often pointless effort. When I finally got one of them, I worked it relentlessly so that I could do the Gill problem every time, with timing and grace.

My Gill quiver brought visiting hardmen to tears.

Mastering a business model is the entrepreneurial equivalent to bouldering. We make money in our companies by doing the same thing well, over and over again. It takes an enormous effort to master a new business model, but this expertise then forms a moat around your businesses that keeps the copycats away.

Apart from the joy in relentlessly flogging the competition with our competent execution, there is reward in delivering our products and services at scale with a consistency and style that delights customers. In addition to the satisfaction of creating a successful enterprise, that reward is usually a big multiple of invested capital.

The best example of bouldering in our life sciences portfolio is ArcherDX, which sells kits to researchers that enable them to repeatedly and accurately identify cancer genes in tumors. Jason Myers, ArcherDX’s founder and CEO, has been focused on this problem for years. Through multiple iterations of their product, Jason and his colleagues have developed the best NGS tests out there for cancer researchers and drug companies, because ArcherDX works every time, consistently and at scale.

The strongest and most stylish boulderer today is my friend Paul Robinson. He is the modern heir to Gill and his dynamic style. Paul devotes himself to new problems that often involve years of effort, but his bouldering has achieved a level of difficulty unimaginable to Gill in his day, or to me in mine. Paul is a talented filmmaker as well and has his own YouTube Channel. It’s worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/user/akahnprob/videos