The Lion Tracker Mentality

One of my favorite books is The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life. Boyd Varty grew up in the South African bush and apprenticed under Shangaan master trackers before carrying those lessons into his work as a coach. Anyone on an entrepreneurial journey stands to learn from the ancient art of lion tracking, and I encourage both founders and investors to read it.

But the lesson I keep returning to is not a life philosophy. It is a single distinction: paths versus tracks.

Paths vs. Tracks

A path is someone else’s route. It is cleared, marked, and safe, which is why it rarely leads to the most interesting opportunities. A track is different. It is faint, fresh, easy to miss, and visible only to someone who knows what they are looking at. Trackers commit to a direction from incomplete evidence, then read their way forward, track to track.

Most diligence is path-following. Pedigree, logos, marks, warm consensus, the deck that looks like the last deck that worked. All of it is legible precisely because someone else already walked it. By the time a founder or manager is fully path-legible, the interesting part is over.

Tracking is reading the person directly. On my investing page I list the four attributes I look for: independent conviction, learning velocity, locus of control, and magnetism. That page is the scorecard. This is the field guide: what the tracks actually look like in the wild, and how they get faked.

Independent Conviction

The tracker sees a bent blade of grass and a half print in dust, and forms a view of where the lion went. No map confirms it. No one else sees it yet.

The track of independent conviction is an earned, non-obvious view that predates permission. A founder who built for a customer behavior the market didn’t have language for. A GP who backed a founder type before it was institutionally legible, and can show you the receipts, with dates. The tell is specificity: real conviction comes with a story about what they noticed, when, and what it cost them to act on it.

Diligence question: What did they notice before consensus, and what did they do about it?

Learning Velocity

A tracker’s model of the terrain updates with every track. The bush punishes anyone who keeps reading yesterday’s conditions into today’s ground.

The track of learning velocity is visible across meetings, not within one. The second conversation should sound different from the first: sharper theses, killed darlings, new evidence metabolized into judgment. People with real learning velocity volunteer what they got wrong and what the mistake taught them, because the update is the asset. People without it give you the same polished narrative every time.

Diligence question: What have they changed their mind about, and what evidence forced the update?

Locus of Control

Trails break. The best trackers don’t panic and they don’t wait. They slow down, re-read the terrain, and find the next track.

The track of locus of control is a history of created outcomes. When the round fell apart, when the anchor LP ghosted, when the market turned, did they manufacture a next step, or narrate their circumstances? Listen for the grammar. People with an internal locus describe what they did. People without one describe what happened to them.

Diligence question: When the obvious path broke, what did they create?

Magnetism

Nobody tracks lions alone. The measure of a great tracker is that serious people follow them into dangerous terrain, before the outcome is knowable.

The track of magnetism is who followed, and what it cost them. The engineer who left a sure thing. The founder who took the check from a first-time fund over a brand name. The LP who wired before the track record existed. Magnetism is not audience size and it is not likability. It is other people’s revealed preference under real stakes.

Diligence question: Who has taken real risk to follow them?

False Tracks

Trackers spend as much time ruling out sign as reading it. Old tracks. The wrong animal. Marks that look right and aren’t. Diligence should work the same way.

Contrarianism is the false track of conviction: a costume of disagreement with nothing earned underneath. Ask what the view cost them; costumes are free. Articulateness is the false track of learning velocity: pattern-matching delivered fluently is not the same as a model that updates. Motion is the false track of locus of control: busyness, pivot theater, activity metrics with no created outcomes behind them. Charisma is the false track of magnetism. A large audience is not a following. Plenty of people can draw a crowd; very few can get serious people to bet their careers.

Learn to Track

The posture transfers. LPs are tracking managers before the record is legible. Founders are tracking customers before the market has words for the need. Managers are tracking founders on faint sign: a repo, a community, an unreasonable rate of shipping. In every case the work is the same: read the ground directly instead of waiting for the path. This matters especially in emerging manager investing: if you wait for the path, you often lose access to the track. By the time the record is fully legible, access is gone.

Because in venture, the obvious path is usually too late. The best people are already moving along a trail most others cannot yet see.