How to Be More Agentic

To succeed as a startup founder is, in many ways, to be a high agency person—someone who finds a way to get what they want done, who bends reality to their will, no matter the circumstances. Cate Hall is a former professional poker player, lawyer, and medical startup cofounder (among other accomplishments) who was able to do all of these things because of her own high agency. The good news: She believes that anyone can learn how to exert more control over their lives. Read her tips to learn how to be the master of your own fate. —Kate Lee

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I often hear agency described as an inherent trait: Either someone has it or they don’t—and if it’s the latter, too bad. They’re doomed to a life in the minor leagues. But this hasn’t been my experience. Over the years, as I’ve aged and made smarter friends, I’ve gradually grown dumber relative to my peers. I’ve compensated by dialing up my agency, which I think of as “manifest determination to make things happen.”

As a result, I’ve done a bunch of cool stuff in different domains: I was a Supreme Court advocate and the number-one female poker player in the world; I’ve started art and perfume companies; and most recently, I led operations at Alvea, a pandemic medicine company I co-founded that set the record for the fastest startup to take a drug to clinical trials. I did all of these things in my thirties.

In my way of thinking, radical agency involves finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion. 

The idea of finding real edges, rather than eking out wins by grinding harder than everyone else, clicked for me when I started playing poker. I missed the mid-2000s poker boom by a decade, so by the time I started playing professionally, poker had gone from being a gold rush to a game with extraordinary competition. Pros spent nearly as much time studying as they did playing, using solvers—models that calculate the best possible strategies—to seek out tiny mathematical advantages. I noticed a massive edge that was almost entirely ignored: physical reads, or tells. (I know an example would make this more compelling, but I’m sorry, it’s like explaining a magic trick.)