When I ran into Mitt Romney on the street in Paris, I knew what I had to ask him.
After we established he was in fact Mitt Romney, I asked him: "When you were at Bain, how did you think about leaving to form Bain Capital? Was it a big leap, or did it seem low risk because you could always return to Bain?"
Bain Capital was an early innovator in VC when it launched in 1984. They took the playbooks they learned as consultants at Bain advising innovating companies and formed a new entity to invest in those companies.
As we walked to our destinations, Mitt and I talked about the risk and upside he saw in moving from advisor to investor in tech companies. The parting insight he offered was: "Starting a successful business involves luck. But running a successful business is not about luck."
It was a fun moment because it hit on so much of what I do professionally: asking questions that reveal values, identifying tradeoffs, and exploring how leaders make career decisions.
And it gave me platonically ideal LinkedIn content: "I met [prominent figure] while [non-work activity] and it taught me [business insight]."
Romney's distinction between starting and running a business is worth sitting with. The first requires some fortune. The second is about execution, discipline, and judgment. That's true whether you're managing a billion-dollar fund or building a recruiting agency from scratch.
The best career decisions come from asking the right questions, understanding tradeoffs, and knowing when luck ends and skill begins.