Why this serial entrepreneur believes every great founder should break their arm

Kamran Elahian is an Iranian-American serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Cirrus Logic, which achieved a market cap of over $3.5 billion and Centillium Communications, which topped $4 billion. He’s not as well known, hailing from another generation, pre-Zuck. In total, he’s founded over 10 companies. After over 29 years of experience in the industry, Kamran moved over to the venture capitalist side.

Kamran Elahian at a Tech Circle event.

At a recent Tech Circle event with Dave McClure, Kamran spoke at length about his entrepreneurial journey.

He said that if he could wish for one thing, it would be for every entrepreneur to tear their rotator cuff. Although he laughed as he said it, Kamran was dead serious.

But why does this amazingly successful serial founder believe every entrepreneur should break their right arm?

While on a holiday ski trip, Kamran had an accident and tore his right rotator cuff, leaving his right shoulder in a cast for several months. That put his whole right arm out of commission. The natural reaction to this would be frustration, or even despair. But Kamran thought differently.

Kamran in a photo from his website.

“I could not use my right hand. For more than three months, I was in the hospital receiving physical therapy. That could have been a major blow to me. It was a lot of pain, a lot of therapy. Two ways you can look at it: This is a major disaster, or if you’re an entrepreneur, you can look at it and say that I was selected by the universe to receive a very special gift. Well, it was probably one of the best gifts I have ever received in my life.”

My brain evolved, and I developed some unusual abilities.

Kamran loves tennis. But he felt like he could never get better at it. His main swing was terrible, since he didn’t learn the proper techniques. All his bad habits were ingrained in his muscle memory.

After this injury, Kamran saw the opportunity to start afresh by developing a proper swing with his non-master left hand. Practicing with a cast in one hand and a racquet in the other, his persistence paid off, and his off-hand swing became better than that with his main hand.

All the friends he couldn’t beat before? He beat them.

“Because I went through this process of learning to become ambidextrous, my brain evolved, and I developed some unusual abilities. I am now able to write and use chopsticks with both hands.”

“Most incredibly, I now can read or write from left to right or from right to left. If you write in English from left to right, everybody can read it. But it you write it from right to left, it looks like gibberish, and it becomes your secret code. This was what Da Vinci used to do.”

He thinks founders need to treat entrepreneurship as a sport.

However, failures due to the lack of preparation or willful ignorance are not tolerable.