Kareem Amin: True risk requires genuine uncertainty and potential for shame
Kareem Amin · Clay’s Unusual Path to Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company · Invest Like The Best · Jun 16, 2026 · at 13:08
Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin explains his personal mental model for what distinguishes genuine risk from hedged experimentation.
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“For me, at least, my definition of risk, or how I've experienced it, is you need to not know what's going to happen genuinely, so you're gonna discover something new, and you also need to have, I think it needs to be coupled with a high potential for shame. It needs to be, you can fail in a way that feels scary or maybe associated with shame, and when you're doing that, you're genuinely about to discover something new and learn from it, and that's when you can take real risk.”
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