Excerpted from The New Zealand Herald | Click here for full article.

In every clever start-up, there is always someone who sees the glass as half full. And if that person is lucky, says American venture capitalist Bill Reichert, there will be another person who is convinced it’s half empty.

It might sound like a recipe for a fractious partnership, but in fact another ingredient is also vital, he believes – an engineering type who will inevitably point out that the glass was too big to begin with.

The point of this parable, says Reichert, is that entrepreneurs by their very nature tend to be optimists. But in the current economic environment, a bit of pessimism and a little realism can be helpful, too . . .