In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to get good at taking critical feedback. Sometimes we need other people’s feedback or opinion on something that we are working on, this is perfectly normal and can help you improve what you’re working on. However, some people are not good at taking other people’s feedback and this can lead to negative reactions from that person or worse. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why you shouldn’t take anything personally when it comes to feedback, how to get better at taking feedback, how to give feedback to someone so that they don’t take it personally and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 01:04 Something Steli is very sensitive about. 02:01 An example of someone who doesn’t take feedback well. 03:23 Why you shouldn’t take anything personally when it comes to feedback. 04:05 What makes people good at taking feedback. 05:06 How to get better at taking feedback. 05:21 How to give feedback to someone so that they don’t take it personally. 06:04 What to think about when you give feedback. 08:07 Why it might be better to ask for someone’s opinion instead of feedback. 3 Key Points: I’m very sensitive to people that ask for feedback but can’t take it.When it comes to feedback, don’t take anything personally.Start learning how to ask for feedback. [0:00:00] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten: And this is Hiten [Shah 00:00:04]. [0:00:05] Steli: And today on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to learn to take critical feedback well. And to learn from critical or even sometimes negative feedback. Here’s why I wanted to talk about this Hiten, where do I start? I think one of the things that I have very little patience for, I’ve gotten better at this in life, but I’m not great at it, is people that have a difficult time. That are asking for feedback but can’t take it. It’s something I’m very sensitive to. I instantly, very quickly I shut down on this. So one second… The thing that I have a difficult time with is people asking for critical feedback. But then when I’m telling them very direct feedback, they don’t want to hear it. They get defensive or they explain or excuse or push back or try to convince me and I’ve gotten a little better. But in general, I’m running out of patience very quickly with that and I instantly disengage. I am very judgmental of this, because in my mind I think you asked me for feedback. I didn’t ask you to convince me that your idea is brilliant. And when I told you what I think of your idea, instead of being curious and asking for more of my thinking, and then you can decide what the fuck you want to do with it. Instead of doing that, you’re now spending all this time trying to convince me of something I don’t want to be convinced and I didn’t even ask for. So I get really annoyed and irritated. And I just recently had a case where a good friend of mine, over long periods of time, multiple times had told me, “Dude, I know you don’t want to give… I know that most people can’t take critical feedback, but I really want you to always be brutally honest. You have to be really direct with me.” And then couple of times after he told me that he wants me to be more honest, more direct with him. Anytime I was direct with him, he spent all this time defending his position and I was really annoyed, until I recently brought it up. So that made me think that, the truth is most people I know are not good at taking critical feedback. I know you’re really excellent at this. I think I’m pretty okay at this. I mean nobody’s perfect, but I think I’m pretty good at this. And when people give me critical feedback, you’ll never hear me argue or excuse or explain. I usually shut the fuck up and I just ask for more. And then I’ll go and I’ll ponder it and I’ll figure out what to do with that feedback. But I wonder why are some people good at this and some people don’t. What do you have to learn to be good at taking feedback? And maybe you have a completely different point of view, which often you do. And you give a lot of people critical feedback as well. Or people ask you for your honest feedback on things. How do you think about this? Asking for critical feedback and honest feedback and then how you deal with it. How do you respond to it in the best possible way? What’s your thinking about that? [0:03:15] Hiten: So, I think when it comes to feedback, if you’re the giver, I think the framework I use, it’s basically the idea that is outside of just feedback. But I think a very good idea in general is, don’t take anything personally. And id you take that, this is something I’m learning more about every day. If you just take that approach, and you assume that whatever someone else is saying is not personal or whatever else someone else is doing, or whatever else is happening. It usually has something to do with your interpersonal relationships and the idea that, if you have a reaction, you’re taking it personally. And it doesn’t really matter if the other person aimed it at you to be personal or not. There’s no reason for you to take anything personally. So I think the people I know that are best at feedback, both sides of it, don’t take anything personally. And so when it comes to taking the feedback from somebody or asking for it, if you’re the one that wants it, I think the only way to get better at it is, start learning how to ask for it. Most people don’t ask for feedback. That’s why they don’t know how to take it. It would be like my thesis, because if you’re not able to ask for it, then well how can you take it? Because if you’re asking for it, you’re inviting it. So then when you get it and you’re not inviting it, you’re kind of used to it, because you want it. And the thing is feedback is almost everything in terms of your ability to improve requires feedback. Now, you can give yourself feedback and that’s fine, that approach. I probably do that more than I ask other people for feedback. I personally could get better at that. When it comes to giving feedback, it’s a very similar framework to me, which is, how can I say this, so there’s the least amount of chance that that other person doesn’t take it personally? There’s a least amount of chance that they take it personally. So that means they don’t take it personally, regardless of whether they believe in not taking things personally or not. And a lot of that has to do with either not saying it or waiting for the right moment in the conversation to say the feedback. Or, and this is annoying and I don’t like it, but it does work. You just tell somebody, “Hey, can I give you some feedback?” And you open up the conversation to that. Nobody really says no. The problem I don’t like it is because, when you ask someone that, you’re almost forcing them to say yes, and then you give your feedback. But that still doesn’t mean it lands right. So I think a lot about the landing of my feedback, whether it’s a rough landing or a smooth landing. And I try to find the opportunity to make it as smooth as I possibly can, for one simple reason, which is if I give feedback and it’s smooth, they’re going to listen to it. Not even very likely. They’re just going to listen to it. If it’s rough, they’re likely not going to listen to it. Think about just freaking out during a rough landing on a plane, you just got to do it. It’s just not what you want. You don’t want to do that again. You don’t want that to happen again. I’m not trying to do that to people, I’d rather them want to hear my feedback whenever they think they need it, instead of know what I’m going to say. Or think they know what I’m going to say because of my approach to it. I mean there are people that I’ve talked to about this to give me feedback about a year ago I would say. When [inaudible] stop, I had gone really far on feedback. Which other people, specifically a few people. Can I ask my friend, what’s up dude? Like you keep coming back to me for feedback and you kind of knew me from, I don’t know, maybe like eight, 10 years ago. But I think kind of, was not very good at giving it, in terms of the landing. And he’s like look, and this really got me and it just totally blew my mind. He’s like, “Look I wouldn’t not want your feedback, so I don’t care how it lands.” I’m like, crap! I’m doing a crappy job here. Because the landings are rough, but yeah, he values the feedback. Well, what if the landings were smooth then he valued the feedback. Wouldn’t that just be a better experience for everybody? So I think on that side of it, I put the onus on myself. I’m the one giving the feedback, to make a smooth landing on it. On something that usually can be very rough because nobody really wants to hear feedback, I truly believe that. Because, I don’t even like the word feedback. I think I might have ranted on this about talking to customers. Don’t ask them for feedback, ask them for their opinion. Everyone’s willing to share their opinion. So I think one other thing that comes to mind is, if you can frame it as, here’s my opinion, that could be helpful. If you can ask for people’s opinions, that can be helpful instead of asking for their feedback. Because I think on both sides, feedback is just a loaded word. Feedback essentially means, I need to take it. Feedback essentially means that the person giving it in that scenario, thinks that they’re right. That just imply all the loaded things. Well, opinion, hey, it’s just my opinion. It’s just my opinion, it’s okay. It’s just my opinion. Here you go. So that’s a way to almost mask feedback in a soft landing, that kind of works every time. But, the better approach is just finding the right opportunity to give that person your opinion, to share your feedback and just think about if it’s going to be a smooth landing or not. And that’s what people don’t do typically when they’re giving feedback or sharing their opinion. [0:09:25] Steli: I agree with that. I actually think that in most cases, not always of course, but in most cases, I’m very concerned with thinking through, what is the channel I need to, what is a way to communicate the ideas I have around this, in a way that the person can receive? Because if not, what’s the point? I do want to be smooth in the way that it’s received so that our exchange is valuable for both. So I’m not really super harsh to everybody. I’m very rarely harsh. But I think, when I ask somebody for their opinion, I can have one of two motives. One can be that I want confirmation, want to be right, and I want to hear it from others to be confident, that I’m right. The other is, I’m actually curious to learn. I want to learn what am I not considering? What else could be good about this? What could be bad? What do other people respond to this? Either I’m curious and I want to learn or I’m, insecure and I want confirmation. And I think that for people asking for others for feedback or for their opinion or for their input on your ideas, your strategies, your challenges, whatever, you need to approach it, with a, I’m here to learn, not I’m here to be right. Because that’s, I think the thing that really rubs me the wrong way. Because if you come and want to have a conversation with me and I want to give you my time to be helpful, but then I realize, oh no, I’m not even present in this conversation. It doesn’t really matter what I say. This person just wants to be right. And so, they’re not curious about my thoughts. They’re not curious about my experience, they’re not really curious about what I have to say or value what I have to say. They just wanted to hear that what they presented to me is great. And since I didn’t give them that outright, now they’re arguing with me. Now they’re working really hard to convince me- [0:11:45] Hiten: So, I don’t even entertain that approach. So basically if I smell that so to speak, I just stop giving feedback to the person. [0:11:55] Steli: Yeah. It’s exactly. [0:11:56] Hiten: I don’t want to validate that. I don’t want to validate somebody who just wants to hear that and like oftentimes, I’ll even just call them on it. Because I’ll notice, and I’m like, okay, you’re just looking for confirmation or validation that whatever you’re doing is right. I’m not the person that you should come to. You can go to your mom or somebody else will just be like, yeah, you’re doing a good job. Because, I assume if you come to me, you actually want to know what I think. Not just validating what you think, we’re not in that. I don’t even do that for my friend. You know what I mean? [0:12:35] Steli: Yeah. I have some family members that I try to avoid, but once in a while, I step into the trap and I do this. But this is the type of thing that I think, it seems like we’re both on the same page where it’s like I have zero patience for that. Like if you’re just here to convince me, but you’re masking it in a, I’m here to ask for your advice or get your input on things. Then it feels like, A, a waste of my life and time and B, a not an honest exchange. We’re here exchanging ideas, trying to learn from each other. But you’re here with an agenda to convince me, but you’re not saying that, you’re pretending you’re here to hear my thoughts and I have- [0:13:17] Hiten: There’s a way to do that. There’s a way that a feedback seeker can do that. They can say, “Hey look, I’m pretty convinced about this. Here’s what I’m thinking. But I really do want to hear what you to say about it.” You can lay it out like, hey, I’m really into this. If you want feedback and you’re kind of… I mean, if you’re talking to someone and you know that you kind of don’t want their feedback, you can approach it in a way where it’s like, you’re coming and going out. Or coming out there and saying, look, I’m pretty convinced about this. Here’s what I’m thinking, but I really do want to hear what you think. I might not do it. I might not listen to it because I’m so convinced. There is a way that you can just be honest about it. I’ve seen that a few times, not enough, but I’ve seen that a few times. I think a lot of times to give people a little bit of credit. They just don’t know that they’re that bias. [0:14:14] Steli: Yeah. They don’t know. But it still annoys me. I don’t care to some degree. [0:14:21] Hiten: Of course, yes. Sure. [0:14:22] Steli: But yeah, I think most people don’t know. I think that the majority of people when they… And this is the thing that I want to highlight as a mistake to avoid or how to get better at this. And how also to make people that might be able to offer a lot to you, and are under no obligation to do so. How do you make them want to do this and continue to want to spend time with you, and hear your ideas and collaborate and brainstorm around solutions and challenges. Is by being a really good listener and by being able to take even… The best feedback is going to be in most cases at least uncomfortable in one way or another. Because it points you in a direction that you don’t want to organically go anyway. So being good at getting feedback or input or listening to people’s opinions, can be a great tool to build great relationships and get a lot of value and learnings. The way to do this wrong, which is a lot of people are making this mistake, is not to be aware that when you’re seeking out “feedback”, you are secretly wanting to be right. You’re not willing to have this person truly criticize you or criticize the idea. Or highlight weaknesses or bring up other options that you might not want to entertain. And I think it’s that awareness, that can then help people to push themselves to go, no, I’m going to put my ego to the side. This is not personal, just like you said. And my main focus is going to be, I want to learn as much as possible. Curiosity should be my main emotion here, and I should speak less. Just ask the question, let the other person speak versus being the person that asks one question. The person gives me a little bit of feedback and then I spent 30 minutes trying to defend my original idea or whatever my original point was. So if you learn to do this better, I think that, you’re just going to be able to learn a lot more. And not just when you ask advisors or investors or whoever, even within your team, your coworkers, people that work for you. Being able to listen to unpleasant, uncomfortable, critical feedback with curiosity is your main response, versus defensiveness can be a massive game changer. [0:16:50] Hiten: Couldn’t agree more. [0:16:51] Steli: There you go. There you have it. That’s it from us for this episode. Stay safe and sane and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:16:57]The post 510: How to Get Good at Taking Critical Feedback appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about questions to ask yourself during this crisis. In times of crisis, especially one like the COVID 19 crisis, where anxiety is so universal, it’s important to ask yourself certain questions so that you recognise when you might be exhausted and there’s no good answer or solution to a challenge you’re facing. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what the concept of a wartime CEO means, why there’s no such thing as a peacetime CEO, the right way to think about this concept and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:36 Why this topic is important. 02:56 Why this particular crisis is unique. 03:53 Questions to ask when you think you’re tired. 04:50 How we sometimes ask ourselves questions that don’t have an answer. 05:57 Good questions to ask that can be helpful. 07:54 A question Steli asks his mum now. 10:00 Why Hiten switched to focusing on luck rather than gratitude. 12:03 The difference between gratitude and luck. 13:28 How focusing on what you feel lucky about can give you a new perspective on life. 3 Key Points: I can’t tell you why I’m exhausted.When you go through a time like this when anxiety is so universal, it’s literally in every interaction.We’ve never had a crisis at this scale before. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about good questions to ask yourself during these uncertain times. I think this is a important topic. I will tell you why and get personal, but we always get personal on this anyway. I had a friend text me the other day, text me something of the nature of like, “I don’t know, man. I’m just tired today.” He was like, “I feel like I’m tired every night.” And it’s a friend of mine that wouldn’t tell anybody else that. I texted him and I’m someone who really wouldn’t tell anybody else that either. [0:00:51] Steli Efti: Yes. [crosstalk 00:00:52]. [0:00:53] Hiten Shah: I told him, “You know what? Me too.” Then I texted him and this was the night before last, literally very fresh. I texted him last night and I’m like, You know what? I feel the same today as well.” He’s like, “Yeah, me too. He’s someone like you Steli, where I’ll tell him anything privately and we’ll chit chat publicly sometimes and stuff like that. I understand where he’s coming from when he says it to me because there’s a lot of… He’s just resilient. He’s seen lots of different things in the past. Someone like you, right? We just have this common either experiences or way of dealing with the world. I’ve just been wondering, how do you still… Of course it’s okay to feel that, but how do you ask yourself questions to just recognize when you might just be exhausted and there’s no good answer. Because I can’t tell you why I’m exhausted at night. He can’t explain why he is either. There’s just a lot going on in the world. [0:02:18] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s not just a lot going on in the world in the abstract. I think that when you go through a time like this where anxiety is so universal and uncertainty is so universal, it’s literally in every interaction. It’s in the hello goodbye. It’s even in small interactions that seem harmless and positive. The underlying energy exchange between all humans right now in varying degrees is always, no matter what we’re saying, we’re also probably communicating, “I’m anxious. I’m stressed. I’m worried. I feel uncertain. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next.” That, we’ve just never had that at this scale where almost everybody we interact with feels that, right? And therefore also communicates that verbally or non-verbally with each other all day long and all that is raining onto us and is amplifying those feelings. One thing I just remembered a long time ago, I think I had told you once, because you are in the small circle of people that I will tell things to that I won’t tell to most people. I think I told you that day like, “Dude, I’m tired.” You’re like, “Dude, you’re not tired. You’re just bored.” I’m like, “Huh?” Just think about it differently. When I say I’m tired, I just tell myself maybe I’m bored. “Are you bored?” I was like, “Huh?” It was such a mind twister. I’ve never forgotten that. That made such an impression on my fucking mind that any time, any time I think I’m tired, I go, “Am I bored?” Sometimes I’m like, “Damn you Hiton. I’m just tired. I’m definitely not bored today.” But I always check myself, “Are you sure you’re not bored?” I love it because it’s one of those ways where you just reframe a feeling or a situation in a way that can just create a different spotlight and create different possibilities. Right? Not always [crosstalk] [0:04:31] Hiten Shah: I like that. Good reminder. I forgot about that. [0:04:35] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that. I literally have not been able to forget that anytime. I do believe that there’s probably also, another thing that’s probably going on, is that we are most likely asking ourselves certain questions consciously or subconsciously that we don’t have good answers to and that might cause more tension in our bodies than we’re used to. That tension translates then into exhaustion. It translates into people breathing more shallow, people holding their breaths more, people tensing up their muscles more. That exhausts you even if nothing happened. That all comes from this consuming information that is scary or gloom and doom or thinking and asking yourself questions that cause you to either not know what the answer is and therefore cause you to feel uncertain and unsure or cause you to give yourself answers that probably make you worry. They’ll make you afraid and anxious. What have been some good questions that people have asked you or you have asked others or yourself that have helped in one way or another? I’ll go first actually. Because I have something that’s not… I have some questions that are very positive but I want to come up with something that’s actually not positive but still very helpful during these times. There’s two questions that I’ve started asking that have been helpful. One is, what is going on in your family life and in your personal life right now? One thing that we do in our team meetings now, whenever we do a director sync or whenever I talk to any of the people that I work with, any meeting I’m in right now over Zoom, we always start with a personal minute where it’s just like, “How am I feeling? How is my family? What is going on in my city?” A quick update in my world. What’s going on in my world and that has been incredibly helpful to release anxiety and tension and to make these meetings much more human, much more connected. A. It’s a release. People are able to say, “Well, we ran out of whatever water and my in-laws live with us now. It’s very stressful and I’m having a hard time to be productive right now.” Just being able to say it out loud in a group of peers can be very helpful. But it also gives the peers, all of us, it gives us information that help us work better with you. Right? Maybe we’ll support you a bit more. I had one person that three weeks ago they told us, “Hey, my father-in-law was just hospitalized and is now on a ventilator and is in a coma.” Now this thing has gotten really real for us and we’re all like, “Whoa, holy shit.” But knowing that helped me work with him and push him to take some days off and I just had context of what was going on in his personal life versus just going, “Is everybody fine? Yeah. Cool. So let’s talk about work.” Right? [0:07:51] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Yeah. [0:07:53] Steli Efti: That has been very helpful. Then another thing that I want to say that’s counter-intuitive, but it’s been very powerful for me personally. That’s why I want to share it is, I try to call my mom every single day now. My mom is older and she lives alone and so I’m overly worried about her and two times a week or so I’ll drive to her place and I’ll, she’ll be at her balcony with a lot of distance, just hang out and chat with her just so I can see her and she can see me. The last couple of times, anytime I talked to her, I would ask her, “How are you?” She would be like, “I’m fine. Believe me, I’m doing well. I just went on a walk and I’m reading a book and everything is fine.” Then I was like, “This sucks. This question never gives me what I really want to get to.” So this week when I went to her, I didn’t ask how are you doing. I said, “What are you worried about these days?” [0:08:48] Hiten Shah: Oh, that’s good. [0:08:49] Steli Efti: When I asked her that, she looked at me, she paused and she was like, “I mean, I’m not worried about much, but I’m worried about your sister-in-law. She was not feeling well the last couple of days. I was talking to her and I’m a little worried if it’s this or that and I’m also worried about this other cousin of ours.” Now all of a sudden for 30 minutes she was telling me about all these people she’s worried about. Right? Then we were able to have a conversation about it and I knew none of that stuff. I didn’t know about all these people having all these problems. Right? That I knew and I didn’t know that she was worrying about it all day long because when I asked her, “How are you?” my mom is such a grateful, grounded person. She would be like, “I have food. I have sunlight. I’m healthy. I’m fine.” But when I asked her, “What are you worried about?” She was like, “Well, I’m worried about this person and that person, that person, that person.” That allowed us to have a conversation where we could connect better, but also she could say some of these worries to me so we can talk about it and she doesn’t have to just have all those worries live inside of her. Those are weird examples but that’s why I wanted to start with them. [0:10:01] Hiten Shah: Yeah. No, that’s really a good one. I think the one on the positive side I go for, which is related to what you said is, I recently flipped from focusing on gratitude to focusing more on luck. Still into the gratitude. Gratitude’s great and there’s a certain feeling when you feel how grateful you are for things. Recently, even when people ask me, “How are you doing?” I’m like, “I feel lucky.” I feel lucky because my family is healthy. I have a house to be in right now and lots of space, enough space with four of us at the house. Again, everyone’s healthy and for the most part our family is very used to being in the house so nobody really gets too crazy together. I think my six year old daughter sometimes goes nuts at night because she hasn’t been out in a while but she’s been doing that since she was a little kid where she has a second burst of energy in the evening and sometimes really intense but that’s once every few weeks. That’s minor for kids and stuff right now, at least from what I hear. So I feel lucky. I feel lucky for lots of things and just ask yourself, literally look at your situation and think to yourself, “How lucky am I? Why do I feel lucky?” Even assuming that you do feel lucky and figuring out why you feel lucky, I think, is useful. Especially at this time, I feel like there’s a big difference between gratitude and luck. Gratitude is a approach that helps you feel gratitude, feel grateful for the things in your life and all that. Like I said, I think it’s very powerful. Luck is a little bit different where it helps you remove yourself from attachment in a different way. I think gratitude is still some form of an attachment. I think there’s no bad there. Luck though is almost like, “Well, I didn’t have anything to do with it.” [0:12:17] Steli Efti: Yeah, that’s the interesting one about that. I love that because I think that’s a big difference. Gratitude, you’re putting yourself often into the equation. Where luck, you’re not part of the equation. Right? Luck is like, this has come to me with no doing of myself versus gratitude. Many things I’m grateful for I had a hand in. I created for myself. Right? That’s super interesting. I do ask myself a lot around… I start my days with making a list of things I’m grateful for and every night when I put my boys to sleep, we have a ritual where first I tell them a story based on two random words they give me. Then we tell each other what we’re grateful for. Then when my son asked me the first time, “What is gratitude, dad?” I told him the best thing I could think of that moment, which is it’s like saying thank you with your heart for everything that’s good in your life that you acknowledge. But feeling luck you’re saying, “What is luck in my life?” I love that. It does have a different viewpoint. It’s a different angle. I love that. It’s really good. [0:13:45] Hiten Shah: Yeah. That’s the one that’s been, I think, helpful and possibly hopefully inspires people to think differently about something. Yeah. [0:13:57] Steli Efti: I love that. All right. We’ll take that. With that, we’ll wrap up this episode. We’ll wish all of you a lot of luck and stay safe and sane. We’ll hear you very, very soon. [0:14:10] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:14:10]The post 509: Questions to Ask Yourself During This Crisis appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to ruin your reputation during a crisis. In times of crisis, like the current COVID 19 situation, a lot of people will panic and act in a way that would ruin the reputation of themselves or that of their brand. So you want to be very careful how you treat people in times like these so as not to cause bigger problems for yourself when the crisis is over.  In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about Steli’s recent experience with a desperate salesman, Hiten’s thoughts on this particular experience, how treating people desperately and sleazy can ruin your reputation and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:42 Why this topic was chosen. 03:15 Steli’s recent experience with a desperate salesman. 07:12 Hiten’s thoughts on this particular experience. 08:22 How this is an unusual experience. 09:10 Why the devil is in the detail. 09:44 What was wrong about this person’s approach. 10:32 The second thing that was wrong with this person’s approach. 12:16 The importance of communicating your value. 12:34 How treating people desperately and sleazy can ruin your reputation. 3 Key Points: During a crisis, people will sometimes show their true colours.Some people have been consistent over the years that anything they do is not surprising.The devil is in the detail. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today with The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to ruin your reputation during a crisis, or what not to do, so that you build a strong and positive reputation in the marketplace during a crisis. So let me set the scene real quick. The reason why I wanted to talk about this is twofold. One, a common acquaintance of both Hiten and mine, did something a couple of days ago that has ruined his reputation with me, and we were just chatting about that. But that also sparked this thought, that during a crisis I think people will sometimes show their true colors and true face, but maybe sometime impulsively just act weird. And underestimate the damage that you can do to yourself and your brand, during this difficult time, when you act selfishly, or out of order, or do shitty stuff, right? Because you’re in a panic, or because you feel pressure, or because you’re stressed. So I felt like it might be a good idea to talk about that a little bit. I’ll summarize my story, and then maybe we dissect it, and try to highlight some learnings for our listeners, that they can take away from this. So the thing that happened with this common acquaintance between Hiten and I, is that this is somebody that has been friendly with me, and I’ve been friendly with him online for many, many years. Once in a while he needed help with something, I try to help when I could. Once in a while I asked for help, he tried to help when he could. Just very casual, very like twice a year email exchange, everything’s cool. And then recently this guy has a podcast, and I have been meaning to be booked on a bunch more podcasts, to promote a new book that we’re going to have coming up. And so we had somebody on the marketing team reach out to a couple of these podcasts that I’ve been on, and a few that I hadn’t been on yet, but that I’m kind of friendly with the hosts. And so my team reaches out to him to book me on his podcast, if he’d be interested in that. And in response, he sends me a message and basically goes, “LOL. Do these cold emails work to be a podcast guest?” Now to give some context on this, Hiten and then I know a lot about this. We have a podcast, there’s not a week where we don’t get cold emails from people that want to be guests on it. And for us it’s special LOL, because we are one of the rare podcasts that doesn’t do guests, right? [0:02:46] Hiten Shah: It was very silly, yes. [0:02:48] Steli Efti: We always laugh at this. So I do get it, right. I do get that he was like “LOL. Do these emails work?” And then I responded and said, “Hey, we only do this with people I’ve been on before with people I know.” And so far they’ve worked pretty well. And then we exchanged some pleasantries, and I asked him if he’s fine. He was like, “Everything’s fine.” And then he asked me, and I was like, “Everything is good.” And that’s that. And in my mind that was that. He made a little bit of fun of me, that’s cool. I have no problem with that, I get it. And then since he didn’t offer, and didn’t say, “Yes, I’m interested, let’s do it.” I just assumed he’s not. I’m like, “All right, I’ll keep it moving.” Two days later somebody from my marketing team forwards me a message from him, that basically reads, “Hey, in order to survive we’re charging 10K now for an interview. Does that work for you guys?” And so, to that my response was “LOL.” But I was like, “All right, this is aggressive. This is interesting.” It was a bit weird because I was like, “Why didn’t he pitch this to me directly?” We were already talking via email about this. And then I was like, “Also this is not that compelling.” Right? It’s like, “Just so we can survive.” What’s the value? Why should this be something we’re interested in to pay 10,000? Like how will we return that money? No pitch or effort made to make this compelling for us, which is very selfish. “10K we need to survive, do you want to pay?” And I know nothing about, to be honest, about how big the podcast is, if it would be worth it or not. I’ve never been on it. So I definitely would not pay. I’ve never paid anybody to be on anybody’s podcast. [0:04:21] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:04:23] Steli Efti: And so I said, “You know what, just say politely no.” Right? Just say politely no. Okay, so the team writes back to him and says, “Thanks for the offer, but it’s not going to work for us. But best of luck and stay safe and all that, and cheers.” To which he then responds, and this again gets forwarded to me. He responds, “Okay, special deal, 9K. Only for this week, cool?” And to that I think the 10K I was a little like, I was laughing at it, although I was not loving it. But I was like, “Ah, what about it, I’ll ignore this.” But the 9K special offer Hiten, that was the moment where my heart was broken a little bit. Plus I got a bit pissed, because I’m like, “This is so dumb and so desperate. This is actually, A, it breaks my heart because now I think so much less of you. And B, it pisses me off, because it shows me how little you think of me. Who am I? What is this? Are you joking? You’re giving me a 1K discount this week only, and what are you expecting? That I get excited about this? What is this?” So I told my team to just ignore him. We moved forward, and then he texted me a day later, with his link to “How to you make sure your audio is good for our interview” and some comment about, “Hey, your marketing podcasting person was really great.” And I’m like, I was even confused about that. I’m like, “Why is he text messaging me as if we’ve agreed to doing an interview?” Now he’s giving me his checklist, and he’s giving me a compliment about my team. This is so weird. This is so desperate. This is the type of behavior, this is why people hate sales people. And this is why people hate people that tell others you have to hustle, because this is what people think hustle means. Being a selfish, sleazy, desperate asshole, right? It’s somebody that’s just in it for themselves, and will act in kind of weird ways and just when you ignore them, they just think, “Well, I’m pretending they’re saying yes, and maybe that’s going to convince them.” Just weird. And it’s so sad because this is somebody I hadn’t done any close business with this person, so I didn’t have any strong opinions, to be honest. But this is somebody that was like, “I like this guy. This guy is cool, I guess.” I’ve heard some bad things about him before, but it was like I’d never had a bad experience, and whatever. It was a casual online acquaintance. It’s totally fine. But this made me think of him like this very desperate, sleazy person, that I will want to ignore in the future. So I thought I’d share that experience with our listeners, and I’m dying to hear your reaction to how you interpret this chain of events, and what your thoughts are about this. [0:07:23] Hiten Shah: We’re not going to mention the person, but I wish I could say, “Hey, this is a surprise to me.” But it’s not a surprise to me, because some people have been very consistent over the years, of anything they do is not surprising. This happens to be one of those just people. And I think it’s like, the word that comes back to me around this in my head, it pops in my head, is tone deaf. So it’s just the idea that this person is just tone deaf. They’re just unable to read the tea leaves, and understand what’s going on. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to stop somebody from making money, and charging for their podcasts, but it just seems like, it just seems really weird. Even the way of saying like, “It’s this much, and because of these times we have to charge for our podcast to survive, or whatever.” It’s just so weird. It’s just so weird. The whole thing’s weird. And I think it is something where you’re going to remember it, and you’re going to tell people too, just because it’s that weird. That’s your prerogative, right? Just like it’s that person’s prerogative to go ask for what they did. So I see, fortunately on my end, I don’t see too much of this kind of thing, but I do see a lot of smaller things, where I’m just like, “Really?” And I think this is just a time when there’s a lot of uncertainty. It’s business as unusual, and I guess this was unusual. But people are dealing with a lot right now, and it just seems really weird to do something like this, at this time. And make it about money, and use the excuse of what’s going on, to make it about money, for example, especially in that way. So I think what you do. And I think it’s just weird, and you’re going to remember it. [0:09:39] Steli Efti: It’s even like, I think the devil is in the details, right? As you said, I think we’re both on [cam] charge money, and make money, even during difficult times. Nobody is mad at people wanting to make money. Now you want to charge for interviewing people in your podcasts, I don’t love that business model. I don’t think that’s smart. But sure, I mean, whatever. I don’t care. I don’t want to stop you from that. The problem is not on the charging money part, and I have to pause here real quick Hiten. Here’s the problem with this, in my opinion, it’s number one, you’re asking for money and all of the reason you’re giving me is that you need to survive. That’s not a good enough reason for me to give you a ton of money, right? Like how about pitching me the value of being a podcast guest, or your podcast, or your audience? Or how I’m going to make money with this? There was no attempt to make this about both of us, right? “Hey, I have a new idea. We would charge you this, but here’s what you would get in return.” At least I can respect somebody who’s giving me an honest effort at a pitch that’s value based. But there was no such pitch. It was just “10K motherfucker, because I need to survive.” “Well, I need to survive too, so fuck off.” Right? I mean, it’s not compelling at all. That’s number one. Number two, when somebody says no thanks politely, the response, “Okay, I’m giving you a 9K deal, but only this week.” Listen, you have to be, if I come to you and I’m like, “Oh my God, can I pay you any money in the world? Please let me be on your show. You’re so huge. Your audience, your reach is so amazing.” Then you can say, “Listen, there’s too many requests, so we’re charging people.” When demand is way higher than supply, maybe you can play that arrogant game of like, “Oh, you give 10K.” But when there’s no fucking demand, it’s not like there’s a ton of people with brands on this podcast being interviewed. I know, because they’re not. If there’s not a ton of demand, you can’t charge a ton, not explain why it’s useful, and when somebody says “No thanks,” offer them a deal, as if that’s going to do anything. “Oh 9K, oh if it’s a 9K deal this week, of course we’re going to pay it.” It is so unimaginative. There’s nothing about it that says, “Hey, I’m going to try to make this valuable for both sides.” There’s nothing. You know what? If the email was, “I’m desperate. I’m about to fire half my staff. I need to make any kind of money. Can you help me, and give me some money?” The chances of me saying “Here 10K, I’m borrowing it to you,” are a thousand times higher in an email like that, than what he did, right? Because “No I’m not going to pay to be your podcast guest, because you need to survive.” What does that even mean? So I think that’s important to keep in mind. Of course, you can charge for things. Of course, you can ask for any money you want. His prerogative is to ask whatever he wants. My prerogative is to say “Fuck no,” right? That he didn’t do anything illegal. [0:12:47] Hiten Shah: Yeah that’s fine. [0:12:49] Steli Efti: It’s totally fine, but the way you do things, the way you do business does matter. And if you treat people with the lack of respect, which this is the way I interpreted this whole exchange. There was no respect. There was no trying to value each other. It was just desperate and sleazy. If you treat people desperately and sleazy, you shouldn’t be surprised if that becomes your reputation, and less and less people want to give you things, or work with you on things, or collaborate with you on things, or channel opportunities your way. And I think that, of course I get it, it’s desperate times. People are freaked out, and they’re going to make mistakes. But it’s also a question of who, right? And when. I’m much more willing to be forgiving of a junior sales rep that’s in their twenties, and is just desperately trying to close a deal. I’m still going to tell them, give them harsh feedback, but I’m more willing to forgive somebody that’s in their twenties, than somebody that’s in their forties, and has a lot of experience as an entrepreneur, and is not new around the block, right? So this is not a lesson that this person has to learn because they’re too young, and too naive. So yeah, ask for money, charge for things, hustle, pitch, try to do whatever you can to prosper during these times. But do it with respect. And make sure that you offer value in exchange for what you’re asking, and it’s not a pure selfish pitch. Because otherwise it’s going to ruin your reputation. And it doesn’t take much. This is the thing. It does not take much. It took him, we’ve known each other for, I don’t know, five to 10 years. It took him three emails to ruin his reputation with me. In the span of three days for nothing, for something that never had a chance to happen anyways. I think people need to keep that in mind, you cannot be selfish during these times, more so than ever before, when there’s a massive crisis. I think we’re all hypersensitive to selfishness, to just outright pure selfishness. So be sure not to be that guy. [0:15:09] Hiten Shah: Don’t be that guy. [0:15:11] Steli Efti: Don’t be that guy or gal. All right, that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. Stay safe. Stay sane. Bye bye. [0:15:21] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:15:22] The post 508: How to Ruin Your Reputation During a Crisis appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to stop your customers from churning during COVID-19. During a crisis like the COVID pandemic, it is to be expected that a lot of your customers will cancel their service with you. However, there are some things you can do to reduce the rate at which your customers cancel. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why you should always be working hard to improve your retention, what you shouldn’t be doing during this crisis, what to do to stop churn in this crisis and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:27 Why this topic was chosen. 01:10 Why churn is to be expected. 01:24 Why you should always be working hard to improve your retention. 01:34 What you shouldn’t be doing during this crisis. 03:00 Why you shouldn’t be lazy about trying to stop churn. 03:21 What to do to stop churn in this crisis. 04:10 The importance of talking to your customers. 05:43 Some practical ideas to help you stop churn. 07:58 How people’s feeling has been changing over time. 3 Key Points: We have to expect that some amount of churn is unstoppable.You should always be working hard to improve your retention.You shouldn’t be lazy about trying to stop churn. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about this idea of having a sense of urgency in your business and instilling it across your business. The definition of this is basically people in the organization, you as an organization, thinking of urgency of execution, urgency as like a sort of either a framework, a mantra, a way of being, that I think is necessary in business and it’s something that I strive towards in my own companies. And there’s usually no better time than like when there’s a pandemic or a crisis to really think through how you can have a greater sense of urgency because you’re kind of forced to at this time. But how can you do that more regularly in your company, in your business, and why is it important? It’s kind of like, I think what we can unpack. [0:00:58] Steli Efti: I love it. I just had to think, what a weird statement that’s totally normal to be like, “There’s no better time to think about urgency than during a pandemic.” And it’s like, “Yeah, of course this is [inaudible 00:01:12].” [0:01:12] Hiten Shah: Sounds about right, right? [0:01:13] Steli Efti: There’s an old business saying that, thy shall move fast during a pandemic. I get it. [0:01:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I mean, come on. Okay, go on. [0:01:28] Steli Efti: So I’ll challenge this, because this episode is actually inspired by our last episode around being a wartime CEO, and I think I know how to act with urgency during crisis. I had been told that I’m particularly effective when things are tough and- [0:01:49] Hiten Shah: You know why, right? [0:01:50] Steli Efti: Tell me. [0:01:51] Hiten Shah: You’re steady, that’s why. [0:01:53] Steli Efti: That is true. [0:01:54] Hiten Shah: You’re steady. That’s it. You’re just steady, and when you’re steady and everyone else might not be steady or needs that steadiness, you’re there. That’s just who you are. And I think that that’s different. Different in the sense of like, that would be you being able to be calm under pressure. That would be my read on it. [0:02:19] Steli Efti: Yeah. So, so there’s some truth to that. I think there’s also something to be said that during a crisis, I know how to make decisions under fire and had creed clarity and execute, not freeze when there’s uncertainty, not freeze when the stakes are really high. I know how to kind of keep moving when the stakes are high, making decisions, making adjustments at focusing people and I’m calm. I’m not somebody that panics in a way, that would ever panic in a way that screams at people or loses mind or acts funny. I have high intensity but I’m pretty calm. But the thing I am struggling with is when there isn’t a crisis or a global pandemic or things aren’t, there isn’t a threat of some kind that I can detect. I don’t keep the same level of intensity and I think that we are at close, we’re very good at moving fast, but I’ve seen so many, I know many companies that are much better at cultivating and instilling a sense of urgency. That’s just part of their DNA. Part of their culture is just to move really fast with real intense urgency at all times and we don’t have that. And I wonder and ponder what makes a company able to do that? What makes a leader or founder or CEO good at maintaining intensity during all times? Right. So let’s unpack that a little bit. Let’s try to figure out how do you do that? How do some people and some companies, how do they get good at this stuff? When I would say most companies aren’t. [0:04:12] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It’s something I struggle with. It’s something I’m looking to figure out for myself I think. You don’t want to create an organization, ideally, where everybody feels like they’re on their toes all the time and they have to just move fast just for the sake of moving fast or they have to just be constantly in motion. Some cultures are like that, but that’s not, to me the best way to think about whether a company has sense of urgency or not. For me it’s more like, are they able to react under changing circumstances, which is in a way the definition of a market. Markets are always changing. A business is in a market or a set of markets and the sense of urgency would mean that you’re able to react appropriately as things change and this is why the thing like a pandemic is a massive change and your ability to react can determine what happens to your business during this time. Your ability to react fast, your ability to react calmly. When it comes to sense of urgency outside of that, it’s, to me, this idea that markets are moving. We are one business in a market and are trying to take and get as many customers as we can, as much of that market share as we can and having a sense of urgency to do that and figuring out what that means for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re self funded, doesn’t matter if you believe in what DHH and Jason Fried at Basecamp say, or would you believe someone like Travis from Uber, now CloudKitchens would say. It’s not that. It’s this idea that if you’re in business, you’re in business to make a profit one way or another. You’re in business also to get as many of the right customers for your business as possible, as fast as possible. And even the folks at Basecamp would probably debate it, but they’d have to agree with the fact that if they can’t make money, they can’t build things that people need, they don’t get to exist. And, and so to me it’s about getting as many people as possible to adopt your product, buy your product, do business with you. And it’s, to me it’s a sense of urgency towards that and what is whatever it’s going to take to get that. I almost feel like sales as an area in a company probably has the greatest sense of urgency out of any other part of the company. On average, that would be my opinion based on just the way sales works inside of most companies. [0:07:14] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think that a lot of that has to do with the incentive in place. It has to do with the competitive nature of salespeople, what drives them and what kind of incentives the company puts in place. You know, in sales it’s always kind of a chase to hit the quarter number, to hit the monthly numbers, to hit certain numbers to get certain commissions to hit certain targets. There’s always competition within the team. And so that competitiveness and that clear scoreboard, alright, this is your number and you know what you need to accomplish. That causes a different level of urgency than in other teams where it’s like, this is our goal, but our goals might be much less directly and personally tied both to your finances and to the impact of your performance. Right. We as an entire team might be working on something and we hope it’s going to help with whatever retention or this or that or the other, or improve our branding or, but, but it’s not like if I don’t improve retention by X percent, then in something, my revenue goes down, my income goes down, everybody else sees that number. I could see how much somebody else accomplished. It’s not that directly tied. The impact is not as directly tied to me personally. So it makes a big difference. You know, I wonder if part of the challenge of this for me is how to maintain a level of urgency while maintaining a level of relaxation around it. Because I cannot just to keep them, to use a metaphor, a physical metaphor. To me, urgency comes with intensity, which means tenseness to some degree. Even if I’m calm, I might be more tense and tenseness is a place I can be at and I can stay at for long periods of time, but not indefinitely. No. Inevitably after a sprint of tenseness, I need to relax, or I feel at least the need. And then I see some people where I feel like for 20 years they’ve been running, they’ve been sprinting and just, they never stop and they just had this never ever ending fire that burns with the same level of intensity in them every single day. I just don’t feel that organically and naturally. So I wonder how to create or how to generate the benefits of that without the burnout that it would cause for me, which is why I think I don’t naturally just stay in that mode forever. I don’t know. Have you ever, who is somebody that you know most intimately? So it’s not like Steve jobs, right? We read some books and saw some interviews and heard some rumors and some stories about him. But is there somebody that you know personally that you’re like, “I have one founder or CEO that is a role model in this or that I think is amazing at this.” And if you had to analyze what makes that person good at this, how do they do it? [0:10:29] Hiten Shah: David Cancel from Drift. [0:10:31] Steli Efti: You mentioned that before to me. Why do you think he’s good at that? [0:10:38] Hiten Shah: I think that he is able to appropriately detach from almost anything when it comes to his business and determine what the best possible path in the least amount of time is. And that takes, I think for him, the way he does it is he has a lot of detachment and can detach from almost anything really instantly and take a different view on it. I don’t mean change his mind, I mean take a different view than most people would, but it’s a detachment. He doesn’t feel like he’s tied to the outcome. And I think just like other folks, he probably has a very healthy level of paranoia that helps him do that. So it’s almost like being able to see things almost like with fresh eyes is the skill set. And with fresh eyes with the filter of urgency basically, which I think is something that I don’t know anyone else that can do that but him that I personally know. And I don’t know everyone, so I’m sure there’s people that are very good at that. But from a firsthand standpoint, if I were to have to pick somebody, he’s the only one I can think of right now where I can be like, oh yeah, sense of urgency is there. The closest second would be my brother-in-law Neil. I think he has a very similar way of doing the same thing, and it’s almost like when he’s on something, nothing will get in his way. He will figure it out. He might even do things that you think are crazy in the process of figuring it out. I think they’re crazy. [0:12:23] Steli Efti: Yeah, I agree. I know some things, [0:12:26] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It’s just like, “What’d you do?” But if you understood why he was doing it and what urgency he felt around that thing, you’re like, oh, that makes sense. You know? You would do that if you have a sense of urgency and don’t give a crap about anything else but that sense of urgency and what you want to do. So I think he does it through brute force, like find the thing that I need to do now and then he just goes and does it. I think he’s more on and off on it. Well, he’ll do it when he really feels like he sees something and needs to move. It feels like this happens actually once a month, once every two or three months for him. And you know, I think it used to happen more often earlier in his career, so to speak. With David Cancel, I feel like it’s very steady. It’s like all the time. It almost feels like he has a sense of urgency and the people around him know it too. [0:13:21] Steli Efti: How do you improve on this? Like you said that this is something that’s been on your mind, that you’ve been pondering how to get better at? I have also thought about this a lot, but I don’t have a plan on how to improve it to be completely honest. This is not one of those items that I’m like, this is what I’m going to adjust or try. And maybe you’re not there yet either of like having decided already or having maybe recently changed something. But if you do, I’d die to hear it. [0:13:49] Hiten Shah: I’m still working on this, but I think it has a lot to do with what do you consume your thoughts with and trying to figure that out and figuring out how to make your thoughts more consumed by whatever makes sense for you having a greater sense of urgency. So like in Neil’s case, I think he’s just trying to figure out how to succeed and find the right problem to solve right now that just needs to be solved. But once he picks it, the urgency is uncanny on solving it. It’s just like literally, he’ll go in about 50 different directions at the same time towards that one goal until he finds the right path for him. That’s how he does it. I think David Cancel is a lot more on the paranoid spectrum of that where his lens feels like looking at the world or looking at these things and saying, well, this is a healthy exercise, but it also could be unhealthy for a lot of people. I don’t think it is for him, but I almost feel like he’s constantly asking himself what would kill us? What would kill this business? And then going after that with a sense of urgency, which I think is how he does it. And I’m making it up. I don’t know. I don’t know what goes through these people’s heads. I know both these people pretty well. I know obviously my co-founder Neil, who is my brother-in-law, in a lot of things. He’s my co-founder, but I know him really well. I’ve known him since he was 11 and I was 15. I’m pretty sure I know his method there. David Cancel, I’ve had to compete with him in the past, even had a company called Compete, and these days I’m more of an ally to him. And so yeah, I think that’s, that’s a contrast of approach. But they both are the pinnacle of sense of urgency to me, but they do it in different ways. And I think it’s about what you consume yourself with. Cause both of them get consumed by whatever they’re going after, but they have different ways to get to it. [0:15:59] Steli Efti: It’s so interesting. Have you ever… I’ve never read Only the Paranoid Survive. I have to admit, I’ve not read both books from the legend. High Output Management and Only the Paranoid Survive. What’s his name again? [0:16:16] Hiten Shah: Andy Grove. [0:16:17] Steli Efti: There you go. But I have been thinking about reading Only the Paranoid Survive just because I was curious, it popped up in my head. But anyways, we’ll wrap this episode up here. Obviously we’re both students of this, still trying to figure it out, still trying to get better at this. If anybody’s listening to us and you have an interesting book, an interesting article, an interesting story about somebody you know or something you have done to get better at creating a culture of urgency and really excelling with that, we’d die to hear from you and learn from you. So send us an email. Hnshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com. And until next time, stay safe, and we’ll see you very soon. [0:16:56] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:16:56] The post 507: How to Stop Your Customers From Churning During COVID-19? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to instill a sense of urgency in your business. In the startup world, the most successful CEOs tend to be the ones that maintain a sense of urgency in order in their business. They react quickly to market changes, develop new products all the time or add new features to existing ones. And having this sense of urgency is key to the success of their startup. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the meaning of a sense of urgency, how to react in times of crisis, what makes a CEO good at maintaining intensity at all times and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:45 Why this topic was chosen. 01:52 Why Steli knows how to act during a crisis. 02:35 What Steli does during a crisis. 03:22 What Steli struggles with. 04:05 What makes a CEO good at maintaining intensity at all times. 05:06 The meaning of a sense of urgency. 06:25 How to react in times of crisis. 06:55 Why the sales department is an area of most businesses with the most sense of urgency. 08:36 What a sense of urgency means to Steli.  3 Key Points: There’s a very different mindset and leadership style as a CEO during wartime versus during peacetime.A lot of companies are under some level of threat at the moment.I don’t think there’s such a thing as a peacetime CEO. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about this idea of having a sense of urgency in your business and instilling it across your business. The definition of this is basically people in the organization, you as an organization, thinking of urgency of execution, urgency as like a sort of either a framework, a mantra, a way of being, that I think is necessary in business and it’s something that I strive towards in my own companies. And there’s usually no better time than like when there’s a pandemic or a crisis to really think through how you can have a greater sense of urgency because you’re kind of forced to at this time. But how can you do that more regularly in your company, in your business, and why is it important? It’s kind of like, I think what we can unpack. [0:00:58] Steli Efti: I love it. I just had to think, what a weird statement that’s totally normal to be like, “There’s no better time to think about urgency than during a pandemic.” And it’s like, “Yeah, of course this is [inaudible 00:01:12].” [0:01:12] Hiten Shah: Sounds about right, right? [0:01:13] Steli Efti: There’s an old business saying that, thy shall move fast during a pandemic. I get it. [0:01:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I mean, come on. Okay, go on. [0:01:28] Steli Efti: So I’ll challenge this, because this episode is actually inspired by our last episode around being a wartime CEO, and I think I know how to act with urgency during crisis. I had been told that I’m particularly effective when things are tough and- [0:01:49] Hiten Shah: You know why, right? [0:01:50] Steli Efti: Tell me. [0:01:51] Hiten Shah: You’re steady, that’s why. [0:01:53] Steli Efti: That is true. [0:01:54] Hiten Shah: You’re steady. That’s it. You’re just steady, and when you’re steady and everyone else might not be steady or needs that steadiness, you’re there. That’s just who you are. And I think that that’s different. Different in the sense of like, that would be you being able to be calm under pressure. That would be my read on it. [0:02:19] Steli Efti: Yeah. So, so there’s some truth to that. I think there’s also something to be said that during a crisis, I know how to make decisions under fire and had creed clarity and execute, not freeze when there’s uncertainty, not freeze when the stakes are really high. I know how to kind of keep moving when the stakes are high, making decisions, making adjustments at focusing people and I’m calm. I’m not somebody that panics in a way, that would ever panic in a way that screams at people or loses mind or acts funny. I have high intensity but I’m pretty calm. But the thing I am struggling with is when there isn’t a crisis or a global pandemic or things aren’t, there isn’t a threat of some kind that I can detect. I don’t keep the same level of intensity and I think that we are at close, we’re very good at moving fast, but I’ve seen so many, I know many companies that are much better at cultivating and instilling a sense of urgency. That’s just part of their DNA. Part of their culture is just to move really fast with real intense urgency at all times and we don’t have that. And I wonder and ponder what makes a company able to do that? What makes a leader or founder or CEO good at maintaining intensity during all times? Right. So let’s unpack that a little bit. Let’s try to figure out how do you do that? How do some people and some companies, how do they get good at this stuff? When I would say most companies aren’t. [0:04:12] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It’s something I struggle with. It’s something I’m looking to figure out for myself I think. You don’t want to create an organization, ideally, where everybody feels like they’re on their toes all the time and they have to just move fast just for the sake of moving fast or they have to just be constantly in motion. Some cultures are like that, but that’s not, to me the best way to think about whether a company has sense of urgency or not. For me it’s more like, are they able to react under changing circumstances, which is in a way the definition of a market. Markets are always changing. A business is in a market or a set of markets and the sense of urgency would mean that you’re able to react appropriately as things change and this is why the thing like a pandemic is a massive change and your ability to react can determine what happens to your business during this time. Your ability to react fast, your ability to react calmly. When it comes to sense of urgency outside of that, it’s, to me, this idea that markets are moving. We are one business in a market and are trying to take and get as many customers as we can, as much of that market share as we can and having a sense of urgency to do that and figuring out what that means for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re self funded, doesn’t matter if you believe in what DHH and Jason Fried at Basecamp say, or would you believe someone like Travis from Uber, now CloudKitchens would say. It’s not that. It’s this idea that if you’re in business, you’re in business to make a profit one way or another. You’re in business also to get as many of the right customers for your business as possible, as fast as possible. And even the folks at Basecamp would probably debate it, but they’d have to agree with the fact that if they can’t make money, they can’t build things that people need, they don’t get to exist. And, and so to me it’s about getting as many people as possible to adopt your product, buy your product, do business with you. And it’s, to me it’s a sense of urgency towards that and what is whatever it’s going to take to get that. I almost feel like sales as an area in a company probably has the greatest sense of urgency out of any other part of the company. On average, that would be my opinion based on just the way sales works inside of most companies. [0:07:14] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think that a lot of that has to do with the incentive in place. It has to do with the competitive nature of salespeople, what drives them and what kind of incentives the company puts in place. You know, in sales it’s always kind of a chase to hit the quarter number, to hit the monthly numbers, to hit certain numbers to get certain commissions to hit certain targets. There’s always competition within the team. And so that competitiveness and that clear scoreboard, alright, this is your number and you know what you need to accomplish. That causes a different level of urgency than in other teams where it’s like, this is our goal, but our goals might be much less directly and personally tied both to your finances and to the impact of your performance. Right. We as an entire team might be working on something and we hope it’s going to help with whatever retention or this or that or the other, or improve our branding or, but, but it’s not like if I don’t improve retention by X percent, then in something, my revenue goes down, my income goes down, everybody else sees that number. I could see how much somebody else accomplished. It’s not that directly tied. The impact is not as directly tied to me personally. So it makes a big difference. You know, I wonder if part of the challenge of this for me is how to maintain a level of urgency while maintaining a level of relaxation around it. Because I cannot just to keep them, to use a metaphor, a physical metaphor. To me, urgency comes with intensity, which means tenseness to some degree. Even if I’m calm, I might be more tense and tenseness is a place I can be at and I can stay at for long periods of time, but not indefinitely. No. Inevitably after a sprint of tenseness, I need to relax, or I feel at least the need. And then I see some people where I feel like for 20 years they’ve been running, they’ve been sprinting and just, they never stop and they just had this never ever ending fire that burns with the same level of intensity in them every single day. I just don’t feel that organically and naturally. So I wonder how to create or how to generate the benefits of that without the burnout that it would cause for me, which is why I think I don’t naturally just stay in that mode forever. I don’t know. Have you ever, who is somebody that you know most intimately? So it’s not like Steve jobs, right? We read some books and saw some interviews and heard some rumors and some stories about him. But is there somebody that you know personally that you’re like, “I have one founder or CEO that is a role model in this or that I think is amazing at this.” And if you had to analyze what makes that person good at this, how do they do it? [0:10:29] Hiten Shah: David Cancel from Drift. [0:10:31] Steli Efti: You mentioned that before to me. Why do you think he’s good at that? [0:10:38] Hiten Shah: I think that he is able to appropriately detach from almost anything when it comes to his business and determine what the best possible path in the least amount of time is. And that takes, I think for him, the way he does it is he has a lot of detachment and can detach from almost anything really instantly and take a different view on it. I don’t mean change his mind, I mean take a different view than most people would, but it’s a detachment. He doesn’t feel like he’s tied to the outcome. And I think just like other folks, he probably has a very healthy level of paranoia that helps him do that. So it’s almost like being able to see things almost like with fresh eyes is the skill set. And with fresh eyes with the filter of urgency basically, which I think is something that I don’t know anyone else that can do that but him that I personally know. And I don’t know everyone, so I’m sure there’s people that are very good at that. But from a firsthand standpoint, if I were to have to pick somebody, he’s the only one I can think of right now where I can be like, oh yeah, sense of urgency is there. The closest second would be my brother-in-law Neil. I think he has a very similar way of doing the same thing, and it’s almost like when he’s on something, nothing will get in his way. He will figure it out. He might even do things that you think are crazy in the process of figuring it out. I think they’re crazy. [0:12:23] Steli Efti: Yeah, I agree. I know some things, [0:12:26] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It’s just like, “What’d you do?” But if you understood why he was doing it and what urgency he felt around that thing, you’re like, oh, that makes sense. You know? You would do that if you have a sense of urgency and don’t give a crap about anything else but that sense of urgency and what you want to do. So I think he does it through brute force, like find the thing that I need to do now and then he just goes and does it. I think he’s more on and off on it. Well, he’ll do it when he really feels like he sees something and needs to move. It feels like this happens actually once a month, once every two or three months for him. And you know, I think it used to happen more often earlier in his career, so to speak. With David Cancel, I feel like it’s very steady. It’s like all the time. It almost feels like he has a sense of urgency and the people around him know it too. [0:13:21] Steli Efti: How do you improve on this? Like you said that this is something that’s been on your mind, that you’ve been pondering how to get better at? I have also thought about this a lot, but I don’t have a plan on how to improve it to be completely honest. This is not one of those items that I’m like, this is what I’m going to adjust or try. And maybe you’re not there yet either of like having decided already or having maybe recently changed something. But if you do, I’d die to hear it. [0:13:49] Hiten Shah: I’m still working on this, but I think it has a lot to do with what do you consume your thoughts with and trying to figure that out and figuring out how to make your thoughts more consumed by whatever makes sense for you having a greater sense of urgency. So like in Neil’s case, I think he’s just trying to figure out how to succeed and find the right problem to solve right now that just needs to be solved. But once he picks it, the urgency is uncanny on solving it. It’s just like literally, he’ll go in about 50 different directions at the same time towards that one goal until he finds the right path for him. That’s how he does it. I think David Cancel is a lot more on the paranoid spectrum of that where his lens feels like looking at the world or looking at these things and saying, well, this is a healthy exercise, but it also could be unhealthy for a lot of people. I don’t think it is for him, but I almost feel like he’s constantly asking himself what would kill us? What would kill this business? And then going after that with a sense of urgency, which I think is how he does it. And I’m making it up. I don’t know. I don’t know what goes through these people’s heads. I know both these people pretty well. I know obviously my co-founder Neil, who is my brother-in-law, in a lot of things. He’s my co-founder, but I know him really well. I’ve known him since he was 11 and I was 15. I’m pretty sure I know his method there. David Cancel, I’ve had to compete with him in the past, even had a company called Compete, and these days I’m more of an ally to him. And so yeah, I think that’s, that’s a contrast of approach. But they both are the pinnacle of sense of urgency to me, but they do it in different ways. And I think it’s about what you consume yourself with. Cause both of them get consumed by whatever they’re going after, but they have different ways to get to it. [0:15:59] Steli Efti: It’s so interesting. Have you ever… I’ve never read Only the Paranoid Survive. I have to admit, I’ve not read both books from the legend. High Output Management and Only the Paranoid Survive. What’s his name again? [0:16:16] Hiten Shah: Andy Grove. [0:16:17] Steli Efti: There you go. But I have been thinking about reading Only the Paranoid Survive just because I was curious, it popped up in my head. But anyways, we’ll wrap this episode up here. Obviously we’re both students of this, still trying to figure it out, still trying to get better at this. If anybody’s listening to us and you have an interesting book, an interesting article, an interesting story about somebody you know or something you have done to get better at creating a culture of urgency and really excelling with that, we’d die to hear from you and learn from you. So send us an email. Hnshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com. And until next time, stay safe, and we’ll see you very soon. [0:16:56] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:16:56] The post 506: How to Instill a Sense of Urgency in Your Business appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to be a good wartime CEO. In times of crisis, companies need strong leadership to make some tough decisions that will help them get through this crisis. However, there is a tendency for some CEOs to use the crisis as an excuse to behave badly towards employees and everyone around them. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what the concept of a wartime CEO means, why there’s no such thing as a peacetime CEO, the right way to think about this concept and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:40 Why this topic was chosen. 01:13 The concept of a wartime CEO. 02:55 Why there’s no such thing as a peacetime CEO. 03:57 How people think about wartime or peacetime in business. 05:07 How your business is always under attack. 05:23 The idea of wartime versus peacetime really means. 06:30 Why context really matters when deciding how to lead. 09:05 The right way to think about this concept. 10:09 How speed is the most important thing during wartime. 3 Key Points: There’s a very different mindset and leadership style as a CEO during wartime versus during peacetime.A lot of companies are under some level of threat at the moment.I don’t think there’s such a thing as a peacetime CEO. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about being a good wartime CEO. What does it take? What does it look like? What is it? How could it be useful to know more about this? You use this framework potentially during these difficult times. So first maybe we’ll break down for the listener the concept of peacetime CEO and wartime CEO. First time I heard about this was Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I think he’s the first one to use this metaphor. I’m not sure if he stole it from somebody else. I haven’t read that book in many years, but something tells me maybe not a bad book to read right now. [0:00:44] Hiten Shah: Definitely not. [0:00:45] Steli Efti: For some people, it just describes very difficult times, very difficult decisions for a CEO. But the way I remember his breakdown on wartime and peacetime, and then I want to focus on the wartime metaphor is that he basically describes, hey, there’s different phases a company can go through, and during the peacetime for a company, it means the company is not under any direct threat by a competitor, by industry, by markets, by whatever. And it is growing and it’s prospering. And so, it’s a time where you as a CEO, you have to manage that growth, that prosperity, you have to stimulate creativity. And it was describing how for a long time Google was in peacetime, right, not on the really aggressive attack of competition and all that. And there’s a very different mindset and leadership style that’s required during peacetime as a CEO versus wartime. And wartime is the exact opposite. Your company is under direct threat either by a competitor, by an innovation technology industry market economy, or like we are probably right now, the entire world is on fire, we’re in a global pandemic and that might create a ton of economic attacks to the lifeblood of your business. So a lot of companies are under some level of a threat right now. Will we survive this time? How will we survive this time? And wartime CEOs have to be very different in the way they think and manage and they lead their troops during this time. So, I die to hear your thoughts on this, even on this peacetime, wartime framework. Do you like it, do you hate it? And then, let’s maybe unpack a little bit about what it takes to be an effective CEO during these times that maybe is different from others. [0:02:33] Hiten Shah: I am actually a big fan of the framework. I have a build on it. I have a build on it, and it’s kind of interesting. So, I don’t think there’s such a thing as peacetime CEO. [0:02:56] Steli Efti: Okay. [0:02:57] Hiten Shah: I think that’s the conclusion I have come to when I think about that analogy and that content and that way of thinking about it. The reason I would say that is because, if you think about tech tack, which I’m sure a bunch of people who listen are in. Maybe not, just kidding. Definitely so. And some people might not be in. And you think about it, and this analogy applies if there is any peace to be had in a business. And in a business, most of the time, you’re not trying to be peaceful, you’re not sitting there having no competition, you’re not sitting there everything being fine and okay. And so, I think a wartime attitude is important all the time. That being said, and big caveat, the way that the wartime and peacetime has been described, it’s kind of like in wartime, anything goes. Your level of patience as an executive should be lower. Things like that. I get it, but then you’re almost asking for a tyrant mentality in a way. [0:04:18] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think it depends. [0:04:21] Hiten Shah: So, to me, it’s tough to even say, “Hey, it’s never peacetime.” [0:04:25] Steli Efti: So, I like that because there’s definitely truth. It seems to me that there’s truth in that, it’s just a question of awareness or maybe a question of severity of the attack. Right? Sometimes you might not know. We all know the famous book, Only the Paranoid Survive, and all the stories from Bill Gates back in the day. That was just always in a paranoid state that some small startup in some garage is going to kill Microsoft. Right? [0:04:54] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:04:54] Steli Efti: So there’s something to that, that even when you think there’s no attack on your business and things are going beautifully well, there is an attack somewhere. There’s a threat somewhere, right? You’re just not seeing and feeling it yet. Right? It might be years away from you or it might just be around the corner, you’re just not aware of it. So, in that sense, I think that you are absolutely right. I think the part of it that’s about style, right, during wartime you are going to work less to figure out consensus and get buying. The idea in general is think about it as a captain of a ship and now you’re in a storm. And in a storm, you will have less time to make decisions, hands, you need more of a military style. We discuss the options, I make the call, you go and execute, versus if it was beautiful weather, we might not have to have the discussion, the decision making and the execution done in five minutes. Right? With very limited- [0:06:00] Hiten Shah: But why not? [0:06:01] Steli Efti: Very limited conversation. I think that the reason why not is that the threat of life and death isn’t there, which gives you more time to explore, because the risk of being wrong is less and the benefit of time maybe is less direct. Right? I get what you’re saying, because if it’s right to lead in this style when you are in a storm, why isn’t this necessarily a bad style to lead the ship, let’s say, during sunny weather? I just think that context does matter to some degree. And if you are drowning and I scream at somebody to throw in a lifeguard or something, they understand that when I was screaming at them, it was not aggression towards them, it was not anger, they don’t need to feel attacked. The context, the severity of the situation makes it that I screamed because this is life or death, so nobody’s going to take an issue with it. But if we’re sitting around on a sunny day and I scream at you to give me the lemonade, because of the context of that situation, you might feel attacked and you might feel that that was inappropriate. [0:07:20] Hiten Shah: So, then the question is, does this duality here of the difference actually just promote bad behavior? [0:07:30] Steli Efti: I think it depends. I think for people that want to act in a shitty way or that are interested in being egocentric, that are interested in just having everybody do what they say, yeah, I’m sure that… Listen, I think that people that are shitty during normal times are just, it amps it up to 1,000 when things are bad. We hear all these examples right now where a company fires 200 employees through a Zoom call with an automated voice message. Right? That’s the worst way to let go of everybody. [0:08:14] Hiten Shah: Yeah. And here’s what’s funny. I know that company, I know people that work at that company. [0:08:19] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:08:19] Hiten Shah: And I actually think they did the right thing. But I know the company, I know the people that work at the company, and I know why they did it like that. And I also know how fast they did it. And so, in a way, it’s like, is that bad behavior? So, here’s what I’m trying to say. I think you’re always at war in a business. I just think that’s just true. You happen to have sometimes when you have an excuse as an executive or a founder or CEO or whatever, that you can get away with more abruptness in order to make the team and the company and the moves just happen faster, even if people don’t fully grasp them. The problem with that is when you take that to an extreme, even during extreme times, and then you just either burn out your people or people end up just leaving, probably both. And so, I think the right way to think about this wartime versus peacetime is a lot more situational. And by being able to communicate to your team consistently in the right ways to get them motivated to do what’s right. And that’s really why I think this duality of wartime versus peacetime and the explanation of it exists, because people tend to have a hard time to get other people to do things. And so, if it is at wartime and we can say it is because of the environment or the situation, then we are given a lot more latitude to be abrupt and push and make mistakes like the ones like the companies you’re referring to might have made. But in wartime, the most important thing as you put it would be speed of execution, speed of changes, speed tactically. It’s a lot of tactical stuff. You don’t actually necessarily have the time to be strategic like you might normally. My friend, I was talking to him a few weeks ago, and I was just talking about some things, and he’s like, “You know, right now would be the time to execute, not to think about strategy.” And I thought about that, and I’m like, “Well, most of the time you should execute and not think about strategy so much that it’s preventing you from making decisions and moves.” And right now I think the whole idea of revolving door decisions, so ones where you can walk through the door and walk back versus ones where you walk through the door, you can’t walk back. I think that concept might be thrown out the door right now, because you can almost walk back from anything you do right now, because anything goes. [0:11:21] Steli Efti: It’s so interesting because I think we look at two of the opposite extremes of this framework. I think I completely agree with everything you said, that people will take this time as an excuse to lead in an unproductive way. Right? Or to exhibit behavior that’s unproductive, or sometimes it’s erratic. Right? And they’ll excuse everything they do, everything they say, they’re flip-flopping, they’re panicking by saying, “Well, it’s wartime, so I’m being different.” That’s shitty. All right? That’s not going to be good, not in the short, not in the long term. I look at the other extreme. I look at the people that have never been in a life or death situation, that have never operated within that context, and that are terrified of operating differently from how they used to. They don’t know how to step into a mode that’s different. As I said, if you are in a military situation, there’s gunfire at you and you have a couple of people that you’re responsible for, it’s a different context and you have to behave… The core principles of leadership still apply, but you have to operate very differently from when you were barbecuing with a bunch of friends and shooting the shit. It’s a different situation. [0:12:44] Hiten Shah: My whole thesis, and maybe this is it for me at least, is why don’t we treat our businesses like that more of the time? That’s what I always get when I read this stuff, besides the fact of being abrasive and all that. You shouldn’t be that, but wartime CEO content tends to talk about just the difference between wartime and peacetime. What I’m saying is why is there a difference? [0:13:14] Steli Efti: I think that’s a fair point. And I think that if you look at a lot of very successful CEOs, it probably operated more often than not as if there is war, even if nobody else was aware of it. Right? Or they instilled that urgency and that we have to beat the competition or we have to beat this new innovation more aggressively than most people would think is necessary. Right? So you might be completely right. I think that the reason why people don’t do it is because it’s not everybody’s… A, I think most people would burn out at that level of intensity. Right? Most people, if they have to live their entire life as if they’re in a war situation, would burn out. Life would suck if you acted every day as if you’re under fire and your life is under threat. Right? I don’t think that that is necessarily a great way of living life. Hence, I think that people will extrapolate that to the way they want to work. Most people don’t want to work with the level of intensity of life and death for the business, their career, or this project every single hour, every single day. They can step into that mode and they’re willing to operate within that context for a limited amount of time, just like you said, or they burn out. But they’re not able to do that for long periods of time. And when you think about the kind of CEO’s that we all heard of that were tyrannical in the demands they made. Oftentimes, most people couldn’t really keep up that intensive for that long and would burn out, and only very few could do that for a very, very long time. I think that’s what it is. [0:14:52] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I agree. I think that makes a lot of sense. So, I would just encourage folks, like right now, yeah, it’s wartime. Do what you got to do. I think, to me, it’s about taking those concepts and seeing what we can do about them more regularly, or how we can think more regularly about having this pressure, so to speak, or this need for moving faster. [0:15:17] Steli Efti: Before we wrap up the episode, what do you think? Well first let me ask you, because I can tell you right off the bat, I don’t always operate with the same intensity that I have in the last… It’s not just during this unprecedented time of the pandemic that I’ve acted with more intensity. I’ve done it many, many times, but I don’t do it throughout the year for the last 5 years, 10 years. I don’t always act. I do relax, and it’s not always for the better. Right? But I do have a range of how much intensity I have. How about you? Do you always act with the same level of intensity? And what do you think is, when you think about the best examples that you have, friends that you have that you think are really fucking good at this, what makes them always act that way, operate like it’s wartime? What drives them? [0:16:13] Hiten Shah: The statement here is like having a sense of urgency. And I think when you’re running a business you need to have a sense of urgency. And so, I wish I knew how to do that consistently all the time. I really do. And I could do it in a balanced way where I’m not being abrasive or anything to the team. I would want to instill a sense of urgency. I wish I had the ability already to do that anytime and have a culture in a company where there is a sense of urgency, a strong sense of urgency. Not like a sense of urgency like, “Oh, we’re going to die.” But more of a sense of urgency of like, “We need to move fast, and we’re going to figure out how to do that.” And that is definitely where I’m at right now. It’s definitely where I have pushed the people I work with right now. I have not done it abrasively yet. I don’t plan on it because we are in a good spot in my businesses as far as I can tell. But that sense of urgency is really what I’m talking about. I don’t even care if it’s wartime or peacetime as their framework. I think it’s about having a sense of urgency. Probably another episode for us, to be honest. [0:17:31] Steli Efti: Yeah. Kinds of urgency. There you go. That’s a good one. All right. Thanks, as always. And for everybody listening, if you have any- [0:17:40] Hiten Shah: Yeah, thank you. [0:17:41] Steli Efti: Any two cents, any feedback, we’re always happy to hear from you. And if you have not done it yet, do us a favor, go to iTunes, give us a quick review, give us five stars. I highly appreciate you. Stay safe and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:17:54] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:17:54] The post 505: How to Be a Good Wartime CEO appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to notice your own bias. As humans, it’s natural for us to have biases in different ways. However, not noticing these biases can be detrimental to us and cause us to make bad decisions in business and in life in general.  In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about the importance of noticing your own biases, examples of how people can be biased, how people can be irrational during uncertainty and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:36 Why this topic was chosen. 01:31 The importance of noticing your own bias. 02:32 Examples of how people can be biased. 04:16 How people can be irrational during uncertainty. 05:09 How every prediction can be right at some point. 06:34 How people don’t like to uncertain. 08:40 Examples of how people can be irrational. 09:13 How people can be unhelpful with their bias. 10:04 How biases can be a defense mechanism against being wrong. 3 Key Points: Noticing one’s bias is sort of a superpowerThere’s irrationality that comes up when we have uncertainty.Every prediction can be right at some point. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about how to notice your own bias and how to ensure that you don’t make bad decisions because of a rigid internal bias that you might have. The reason why we wanted to talk about this, at a prior episode we were just talking about how to negotiate with oneself and we had shared a little bit about this idea that the one thing that I recently noticed of people wanting to believe something because of self-interests and then trying to selectively find the information, the experts, the articles, the data that confirms their bias and continuously defending their mind against everything that would attack their thought process and collecting the things that confirm that thought process. And how big of a waste, to me that seems such a… I mean, we always do this, but right now it’s such a heightened environment that I just notice this so much and just… I’ll give you one quick example and then let’s talk about this because noticing one’s bias, I feel like, is a superpower in avoiding making avoidable mistakes. [0:01:23] Hiten Shah: Absolutely. [0:01:25] Steli Efti: One thing that was really interesting at, I don’t know, maybe six weeks ago or so, five, six weeks ago when we were in the Western world in Europe and the U.S. Much earlier in the pandemic timeline. And it seems still very far away, like a problem that was in Asia and in China and maybe there are a few, a couple of cases in Germany, a couple of cases in the U.S. But there were still a lot of debate of it would ever become a problem in the Western world. I remember talking to a friend of mine in the U.S. And then I remember talking to a friend of mine in Germany. What was interesting was how both of them, my friend in the U.S. Was like, “Well, I’m sure I’m in the U.S., I wouldn’t want to be in Germany right now because…” I was like, “Oh, why is that?” “Well, if a pandemic would happen, I’d much rather be in the U.S. Than in Europe or Germany.” And I said, “Oh, why is that?” He was like, “Well, the U.S. Healthcare system is really amazing and it’s not as population dense and…” He brought up a number of reasons why. He was like, “You know what, I feel pretty safe, this is probably around the world, not the worst place to be at a pandemic and Germany would be much worse.” And then I talked to my German friend a couple of days later, without prompting it, he was telling me, “Well, I’m glad that you’re in Germany, Steli, right now and not in the U.S. Because you’re much safer here if there’s a pandemic.” I was like, “Really? How?” He was like, “Well, you know the German healthcare system, much better than the U.S. Healthcare system, it is a catastrophe. Then the politician…” And I was like, and that was the moment where I was thinking, “Wow, we are all so full of shit and everybody’s- [0:03:03] Hiten Shah: Yeah, either way. [0:03:04] Steli Efti: … Trying to convince themselves that their situation in this setup is probably going to be better than other people’s.” I’m like, “Holy fucking shit. This is so interesting.” [0:03:15] Hiten Shah: No, and I have a good friend and she’s… Basically maybe every two or three days, she’s like, “Should I get out of the city?” She lives in San Francisco. She’s like, “Should I get out of the city? Should I get out of the city? My friends in New York have gotten out of New York.” I’m like, “Yeah, but that’s New York.” Then she’s like, “Yeah, maybe a small city, of course. There’s more stuff here, more hospital, et cetera.” I’m like, “Yeah, sure, okay.” I don’t know what to say, right? There’s no right answer to her thought, right? There’s no like… I wanted to tell her, “Hey, don’t go anywhere. Please just don’t go anywhere. Don’t do anything. Just stay where you are. Everything will be okay just stay where you are.” You know what I mean? [0:04:13] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:04:13] Hiten Shah: It’s going to be okay. Okay, in the sense of like, it’ll be the best it can be, right? It’s same thing, it’s like there’s a irrationality that comes up when we have uncertainty. And when we have that irrationality and that uncertainty, we’re trying to justify that we know what to do. And in a situation like this, the number one thing I can tell you is nobody knows what to do. And if you think you do, you’re already bias. Because the level of clarity for our situation does not exist. There isn’t somebody who can tell you today and has any kind of crystal ball on this. You can’t say, this is what’s going to happen next. And you could even think that, “Oh, this person, they predicted what was going to happen or this and that.” But it’s like, every prediction can be right at some point. It’s just a matter of… What I mean by that is even people who seemingly are right, they didn’t know anything. They’re just guessing too. I think it’s like you’re making it up as you go. And the level of comfort we have as humans, on making things up as we go is very low. And so, this whole thing about Germany or America, whatever, wherever you are, there are people that are okay, literally, and there are people that are not. And in some places there’s more people that are not okay and they are like… If you ask me right now, I’m kind of worried about Florida to be honest. The pictures I see, the things I see. That being said, I don’t know if that matters, right? I don’t know if that’s rational or not. All I know is that there’s people out and about and they might be spreading these thing to each other. Now, is that factual? Yeah. Do I need to have a fear for my friends in Florida or anything like that? Probably not because whatever’s going to happen is literally going to happen. So, a lot of this has to do with just the acceptance that we controlled nothing. [0:06:22] Steli Efti: I think- [0:06:22] Hiten Shah: And this pandemic helps us do that, yeah. [0:06:25] Steli Efti: Sorry about interrupting. I think there’s an insane level of discomfort with the thought, “I don’t know and I’m still figuring it out while I’m trying to figure it out or…” Just like people don’t like to be in the, “I don’t know what’s going to happen or I’m not sure which side to take yet.” This friend of mine. And then they come up with these narratives. The other thing that’s been so interesting, it’s so interesting to see for me is that there are all these people that I know that, in hindsight, are changing the events in their life to fit a narrative that they’ve been hyper prepared or they saw this coming. [0:07:12] Hiten Shah: Really? [0:07:13] Steli Efti: Yeah. I had a friend that in the beginning of the January, he took a big loan. He has an E-Commerce business that’s doing quite well and then he took out a big loan to have extra cash. But back then I remember him telling me that his margins are not high enough and he might want to invest more in having just more stuff in stock. And so he felt he needed some cash cushion. And then now his story is that he knew hard times are coming, he didn’t know about the pandemic. He knew an economic downturn might be coming, our hard times might be coming. And he’s done everything right. Look at him, he has already some cash in the bank and he’s prepared for the downturn. I’m like, “That’s so interesting. Four months ago you told me something else.” But now he made these little edits in his own mind to fit a different narrative, to fit the narrative. I was ahead of the curve and I was prepared, right? I have told the brothers, both of them I love, but they’re idiots at times and my oldest brother is into some weird conspiracies at times. And I remember, I don’t know, two years ago we had a discussion, he was saying, “The population of the world, they can’t grow forever and eventually something needs to happen to do population control and who knows.” And now he’s like some degree convinced that this might be a government thing to do population control. All the old people die, right? This is, to me, thinking about everything that I’ve ever thought, to me, it’s such an obviously childish way of thinking about the world. How can I make myself feel like I’m smart or I was prepared? Why saw this coming? As if that is helpful, to me that’s not helpful at all. If I was walking around… I don’t know, what would… And saying, “You know, I started a remote company because I saw this company.” Like what the fuck? Right? [0:09:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah. That’s how I started. [0:09:12] Steli Efti: Yes. They always started it or even just like, “I knew that we have to be location independent and so, I’m so happy that five years ago I already did this.” First of all, even me thinking of a version of myself saying this, I’m like, “I want to punch myself in the face.” I’m like, “Shut the fuck up, you hassle.” Right? It’s A not true at all, and B it’s not helpful. Who would I help with? If I called my brother and be like, “Ha, you have local stores? I run a remote company, I was so smart.” How is this helping anybody? This is just, to me, it’s just dumb bragging or trying to convince myself that I’m smarter than I really am, right? That I’ve done something smart or was prepared or was ahead of other people when in reality I wasn’t. [0:09:59] Hiten Shah: I think it’s just a defense mechanism, right? It’s a defense mechanism when we have no control. All we’re doing is defending ourselves against being wrong, defending ourselves against something we don’t control, something we have complete lack of control over… A pandemic like this, we don’t have any control over it. There’s only maybe a few things we can do depending on who we are and what our capabilities are that might help. But at the end of the day, the world is in upheaval. There’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty and this is the time when people want us to feel, even in some resemblance of control, and there is none. You’re not going to get it. Good luck trying to find it right now. [0:10:55] Steli Efti: Good luck if you find it right now, I love that. All right, we’ll wrap up this episode on this point. If you have… You know what, maybe this is a weird call to action, but if your family has been especially point of frustration or weird lessons learned over the past couple of weeks, it surely has been mine, send me an email and Hiten, hnshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com. Tell us how you’ve learned new things about your family during this pandemic or they show you patterns that you now are determined to surpass, improve, or change. I find that with most people that I talked to, the number one source for worry and also the number one source of interesting things that are going on that they notice, it’s much more that families at this point than it is yet the global markets or politics or an industry or customers, lots of people are telling me stories about their family members and what’s going on with them right now. Super, super interesting. All right, this is it from us for this episode. Stay safe and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:04] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:12:04] The post 504: How to Notice Your Own Bias appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to negotiate with yourself. Sometimes, we talk ourselves out of doing something that’s good for us or we know we should do. This is a common habit that a lot of founders have, and is known as self negotiation. Tts a sabotaging tactic that keeps us from changing our habits or procrastinating. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why self negotiation is a very interesting concept, when to negotiate with yourself, what negotiating with yourself can look like and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:31 Why this topic was chosen. 01:06 Why this is a very interesting concept. 02:28 Why the biggest impact that we can make is mostly inward and not outward. 03:27 How a lot of people negotiate. 03:49 When to negotiate with yourself.  04:38 Things Hiten does when he negotiates with himself. 05:40 What negotiating with yourself can look like. 08:47 Hiten’s thought process for figuring out what the right thing to do is. 10:07 How Steli approaches decision making. 3 Key Points: Usually, you negotiate with two parties instead of with yourself.For me, it’s all about figuring out if what I want to do is the right thing to do.The biggest impact that we can make is mostly inward and not outward. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:05] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about, how do you negotiate with yourself. This is based on a tweet. I think it was James Clear on Twitter that tweeted it and then I retweeted it and Steli saw it, put it on our list to talk about. We’re jumping in. We’re going to talk about how you negotiate with yourself. I think it’s a very interesting concept. It’s something that… One of those things that when you read it you’re like, huh, what does that mean? How do I do that? I think that’s really where the discussion starts.So to me, negotiating with yourself is almost like… Usually you negotiate because there’s two parties and they want different things. They’re not aligned yet. I think in a way you could say either it’s because I’m watching too many shows right now and random things. There’s a show called Limitless and there’s also a movie called Limitless. The main character takes a pill and the pill makes him super smart. When he does that, pretty much when everyone takes the pill, they see a part of their psyche, whether it’s somebody else they love or themselves and they start talking to themselves. And literally what they’re doing is, they’re negotiating about what to do because now all of a sudden they’re super smart. They need someone to talk to apparently, but it’s all in their own psyche. But it’s someone to talk to you to negotiate what they should do. [0:01:38] Steli Efti: That’s interesting. I saw the movie. I’ve never watched the show. The reason I put this on the list of potential topics was that I don’t retweet that many tweets. When I saw this in my timeline, you had retweeted it, I instantly retweeted it. Then after the fact, I was like, why did I retweet this? Right? What about it was compelling? What made me want to share this more widely and to me, And to me I think that the biggest battles that we fight, the biggest impact we can have, is mostly inward and not outward. It’s like being in competition with yourself is the negotiations we have with ourselves, is improving ourselves. I think that an incredible amount of value can be created when you see all the versions of yourself that exist. When you are observant and mindful and present to your thoughts, your feelings, your mental states, your habits, and you’re not just the victim of your impulses and your thoughts and your character, but you’re in negotiation with that and you’re aware of it and you’re molding it and forming it. I think there’s a lot of impact that can be had that way and I think that most of us spent significantly more time outwardly. How do I negotiate with customers? How do I become a better negotiator with investors? Or how do I manage people effectively so they do what I want them to do? That’s, I think, a much more attractive world, the outside world to people. But it’s the internal world where we win or we lose and where we really have the chance to have an impact. This idea of becoming… Well, first the question, when do we negotiate with ourselves consciously or subconsciously? And how do we get better at negotiating with ourselves? I felt like that’s a super compelling question, right? Let me ask you, what are some of the things that you do when you negotiate with yourself if you want to use that framework. When you have, let’s say an inner voice that goes, maybe I should do this, maybe I should do that, or I really wanted to do this, but I’m not quite sure. When there’s some kind of a push and pull, when it’s not crystal clear what you’re going to do and you just go and do it but there’s some thinking before going on or some contemplating before going on. How do you do this? How do you make yourself do things? I’ll take that framework of, how do you make yourself do things that you wanted to do, but maybe in the moment you don’t feel like doing or maybe there’s another side of you that is fighting you around these things? [0:04:42] Hiten Shah: I think for me, it’s not a very difficult task because usually if I want to do something I tend to think through it and figure out if it’s the right thing to do. So to me, it’s really about figuring out if what I want to do is the right thing to do or if there are better options. I’m already kind of negotiating. To start with, I’m negotiating if that makes sense. I’m already at the place where it’s like anything I want I’m going to do anything I’m thinking of like wow, is that the right thing to do or not? So it’s almost like everything starts with some form of a negotiation. I don’t know how that is for other people, but for me there’s like constant negotiation about things to do. Sometimes it’s even about what to say. [0:05:45] Steli Efti: When we say how do you negotiate with yourself, who is the you that is negotiating with the self? Like please separate, how do we even think about, maybe this is too much of a philosophical question. I think it might be an interesting one of like realizing that we’re not a single unit of existence. Our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts, our habits, our impulses. Those are obviously all part of our organism in our being. But they’re not always in unity and they are not always completely aligned and we can even like, I think once I had written about this concept of the inner voices that we carry around with us, that we all kind of carry a village inside of us and we’re not just like one character. We’re multiple different characters and different types and different biases in different situations and paying attention to which character is currently dominating your mind and your body and your thought process. And if that character is doing things that are helping you and others or it’s a destructive voice inside your head can be super useful. So you said everything starts with a question, what’s the right thing to do? Is this the right thing to do? And then there’s probably some thought process. Maybe sometime there’s research or there’s reaching out and asking for advice, of collecting information or collecting data to try to get to the answer of the question, is this the right thing to do or not? Or how do you do? How to do this right? And sometimes that process is pretty straight forward, right? You collect this stuff or you follow that? You try to come up with an answer to that question and the answer in a fairly straightforward way crystallizes as, yes, no, do this or do that. Cool. But what do you do? What’s your process when you’ve done all that work? Will you follow that question? You don’t arrive at a crystal clear point of a yes or no. There’s some pros, some cons. There’s some internal conflict. There’s some push and pull inside of you of maybe I should do this. Maybe you should do that. I mean you’re an amazing human being but you would assume even you, are at times in the situation where you’re not quite sure, where you go back and forth. Or where you said you would do something, but then yeah, you’re still acting a little bit differently. Or is that really something that you’re kind of left behind so you’re rarely in this internal conflict situation. I would say like a negotiation with yourself inherently means there’s two sides that are fighting something out, either with words or with something else. Like there’s a back and forth that’s going on. What do you do when you are in that situation? [0:08:53] Hiten Shah: I guess I have a lot of practice. So if I’m always trying to figure out what’s the right thing to do or always debating something before doing it, saying it. It’s like if you’ve never tried it, you should just try it. And the easiest way to do this is like whatever you’re thinking, just think the opposite and see what comes up. [0:09:16] Steli Efti: Uhmmmm. [0:09:17] Hiten Shah: I think it’s just a practice thing, just try it. It’s just like, Oh, I’m going to eat pizza. Well instead of that I’m going to eat some broccoli. Right? Like, I mean it can be as simple as something just ridiculous, right? Like whatever it is, it’s like start practicing, thinking about the opposite thing that you are actually planning on doing. Play that out. [0:09:41] Steli Efti: I love that because that requires a level of mental flexibility that I think is at least surprising to most people. Like even I had this situation with the current crisis that is going on and there’s a lot of groups of people that I’m part of in WhatsApp or whatever that basically are right now at a point where they’re arguing between, it’s much worse than we think or is not as bad as we think, right. And they’re sending each other different articles and YouTube links and podcasts and different expert opinions or different data. And I have learned whenever I am overly committed to an idea or a position, and I find that even when somebody offers me an opposing position, I instinctively reject it before consuming it or considering it. I’ve build up the habit to notice that and go Ooh.My thinking is very rigid.I already want to say no to something although I only read the headline, I don’t want to even entertain that the other party is right. And I think flipping the switch and going, let me actually try to convince myself today that I’m wrong. All right, let me actually think the opposite that I’ve thought before. Or you know, the opposite today. Let me do exactly the opposite of what my instincts are telling me to do. I think that requires, I mean, there’s some playfulness in it, the way I’m describing it, but it requires real mental flexibility. And maybe that is at the core of negotiating effectively with yourself is that you need some level of flexibility where you don’t just rigidly respond to your thoughts, or your feelings,or the mental states that you’re in in the exact same kind of automatic way every single time your entire life. Well you have the flexibility, your build up lift, the mental flexibility to switch things up, to change your thoughts, to change how you feel, to try, an opposite approach, an opposite perspective. And you are willing to fight these things out at times versus just acting out anything that’s going on in kind of the same pattern that you always do. [0:12:04] Hiten Shah: That’s the key, right? And this is where the practice comes in. The only way to actually get good at then basically negotiating with yourself. And I mean ultimately making better decision as a result is basically by doing it. And so in any tiny way or big way, you should just try to do it and see how you feel and then eventually you’ll realize that it just helps you make better decisions if you’re willing to take an opposing viewpoint. And the thing you said earlier sort of did that about the current crisis and people debating it. I mean this is just a classic key example of nobody really knows anything and the future is a lot more uncertain than it was like in January let’s say, or December for men. So it’s like this is the best time to practice something like this where you’re actually negotiating with yourself and seeing what you can come up with. A lot of times at some point, I think when you do this enough, you just realize that most decisions don’t matter that much and the negotiation is really about picking and choosing who, which decisions are actually worth negotiating with yourself. I think broccoli or pizza, probably not the biggest deal, but if you do broccoli or pizza like a hundred days in a row and made that choice to go with pizza, it’s probably a big deal. Right. But that’s a different like that that has something to do with some other choice that you’re making around, should I be, you know, eating healthy or not, or should I lose weight or not? Or should I whatever. So yeah, I think for example, this whole debate about what’s going to happen, is it worse than people are saying or are not? Like honestly, nobody knows. We still know, but we really don’t know. And in a lot of cases if you just look at the information out there actually depends on where you live. [0:13:59] Steli Efti: Yeah. The other thing is also like noticing, and maybe we’ll, we’ll wrap this up around around this idea that this thought, but I think that people are just inherently uncomfortable with the, we don’t know. [0:14:16] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:14:16] Steli Efti: Part of everything. And so they want to believe something and then that makes them chase down all the evidence and all the people and all the articles they can find that puts them at ease and makes them mix them. Go see, I knew I am right. This article says the thing I’m thinking or the thing that I want it to be and this person also agrees with me. And then the funny thing is the last two weeks I noticed the people that are sharing lots of articles and stuff, they always share the same stuff. And it’s like what is happening here? It’s not like information gathering. It’s not like all these interesting new facts and ideas and thoughts. It’s basically trying to champion and convince everybody else they know and probably convince themselves. See, I’m finding more and more evidence every day that my original position is right. [0:15:10] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:15:10] Steli Efti: And I mean there’s very few pros but lots of cons around this. And maybe we’ll do an episode at some point about like how do notice your own bias and when your bias is dangerous to yourself. [0:15:24] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:15:24] Steli Efti: It might be something interesting there, but I think just for people, especially in uncertain times, noticing what you want to do, what thoughts you have, what your feelings are, what’s going on in your life, and then ask you, whenever you can’t. Whenever you end the day, you’re disappointed with your actions or the results you’re generated. Maybe you didn’t negotiate successfully enough with the right side of yourself and just ask yourself, what, when did things go wrong? When did I, when was I at the crossroad between should I do X or Y and why did I choose something that ultimately and very simply I knew I was regretting and how can I get better at negotiating with myself? How do I get better at making myself do the things I want myself to do versus not? This is an interesting, weird, curious, compelling topic. So as always for those of you that have an idea or a story, you’re like, ah, I wish I could tell Hiten and Steli this right now about this episode. Just get in touch with us. We always love to hear from you, steli@close.com H [inaudible] @gmail.com and until next time, stay safe and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:16:41] Hiten Shah: Be negotiating with yourself. Yeah. [0:16:43] The post 503: How Do You Negotiate With Yourself? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to maintain mental health during a global pandemic. Due to the current coronavirus crisis, a lot of companies are struggling, and this is going to affect so many founders mental health. So it’s important to know how to cope with the current climate an avoid harming your mental health In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how this current crisis can affect your mental health, what Hiten is currently doing to take care of his and his family’s mental health, how Steli is coping with in the current crisis and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:23 Why this topic was chosen. 01:39 How this current crisis can affect your mental health. 03:48 What Hiten is currently doing to take care of his and his family’s mental health. 04:49 Why Hiten was consuming a lot of content about the crisis early on. 07:22 How everyone has their own wy of dealing with this crisis. 09:13 The importance of knowing when to cope. 09:45 How Steli is coping with in the current crisis. 10:23 How making checklists is helping Steli cope. 11:57 How Steli is coping through exercising.  3 Key Points: The staying at home part is not just challenging for meYou need to know when enough is enough when consuming content about the crisis.You have to consume information in order to understand what’s going on for myself. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about how to maintain one’s mental health during a global pandemic. So, for those of you that don’t know, we recorded… The last, I think four episodes or so, were very focused on the current COVID-19 crisis around the world, and this is very unusual for us. We’ve been doing this, I think this week we’re going to surpass, or just last week we surpassed the 500 recordings. We’ve been doing this for five years plus. We had never done episodes that were centered around world events at the moment. [0:00:41] Steli Efti: Nope, that’s right. [0:00:42] Hiten Shah: But then again, there’s never been a world event that’s so big that it literally has captured- [0:00:50] Steli Efti: Impacts everybody. [0:00:50] Hiten Shah: The entire world. [0:00:52] Steli Efti: That’s right. [0:00:52] Hiten Shah: So this is a different time even for us in this podcast. We did an episode on sales during this crisis, marketing during this crisis, and working from home during COVIT-19. I felt that it would be helpful and useful to people that are listening to us to talk a little bit about mental health. I think that in step one, when all of this started rolling, or becoming a bigger topic in the Western world, in Europe, in the US especially, I think that first mechanism of preparedness was about shopping, having groceries, having toilet paper, obviously. The most important item of all. And just thinking cash and in the US a lot of people were buying ammunition and guns and whatever. There’s some kind of a, how do we survive in our homes if we can’t go out and if it’s really dire circumstances outside for long periods of time. So people were thinking about that. And now… But I feel like once people have gone through, one, two, or three weeks now of actually being mostly at home and having, if they have children, their children at home and not in school, and their significant other at home, not at school, and they’ve been in this cramped up environment and space for a good amount of time. And on top of it, there’s been now two, three weeks of nonstop bad news and anxiety just ramped up around the world to a really high level. I feel like now more than ever, people will start thinking about this, and need to start thinking about not just the physical health of food and toilet paper and shelter, but also the mental side of things. How do we go through this time and make sure that we stay mentally healthy? What are the things that we can do every single day to make sure that our minds are healthy and vibrant and vital. And not just our body has food and our asses have toilet paper. Right? How do we take care of our mental health during this time, which isn’t easy. So I thought it’d be really valuable for the two of us to talk a little bit about that. How we deal with this. How we deal with our families, what we’ve seen with friends. So let me just straight out ask you, Hiten, what do you do right now? Because I know this is not the normal setup that you have. You’re usually outside in your car driving to meetings, to coffee shops, meeting people, helping people. You’re kind of out and about Monday through Fridays and the weekends you’re home. But now you’re at home all the time. What do you do to take care of your mental health? What do you do to make sure that the mental health of your families is in a good point? What are some of the things that you have started doing? Well, I’m dying to hear what you do, partially because I know you’re out and about too. You’re very much a people person like I am in a lot of ways. I think for me, the one thing about me maybe because I was an only child or am an only child growing up, I can go either way, personally. And here’s the other thing, this is really weird, and it’s kind of… I’m not sure how to fully explain it, but the staying at home part is just not challenging for me. The only thing that’s really different for me is the fact that I actually stay up much later than normal these days. [0:04:31] Steli Efti: Interesting. [0:04:32] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the only thing that’s different. And it’s probably because there’s just a lot going on in the world or whatever. It’s not like I’m thinking about anything though. I know better than to think about this crisis unless I’m able to help or something. I know way better than that, because that’ll just drive you crazy in my opinion. There’s just so much content, so much news, and so many things you could consume about it every day. I was consuming a bunch of it early on. So this relates to this. The reason I was consuming it early on is I really wanted to get to my own personal understanding of what’s going on and why, and try to find the simplest explanations for things. So I think for me, one of the ways I take care of my mental health is almost knowing when enough is enough when it comes to consuming information about what’s going on. Because everyone’s consumed information about what’s going on. Many people continue to consume that information at the same pace they used to. Most people I think are coming around to, well, consuming this information is not really that helpful on a minute by minute, second by second basis. But when it first happened, I was definitely consuming information. And the reason I was consuming that information is because I wanted to understand it, and I wanted my own understanding, and I couldn’t do that by not consuming the information. I had to consume information in order to understand what’s going on for myself. And if there was anything I could do, I would do it. So that could be as stupid as go get toilet paper. Right? Or learn what the precautions are when you go out. Right? And everyone has their own thing. For example, my wife, she’s the one that usually goes out and gets things like groceries and stuff like that. Mainly because she doesn’t think I’ll do a good job. That’s really actually the reason why. So, that’s just how she is. And it could be a system I created a long time ago or it could be just true. I don’t know it. Either which way, that’s the reason. And so she has been going out with a mask and gloves longer than most people have. At one point she was the only one in the grocery store going out with gloves and a mask and she just wanted to be careful. Right? And that’s just how she is. She has that risk adverseness and wants to make sure that she’s just taking care of things and protected, et cetera. Because there’s other things where she’s just not as careful during this crisis which is hilarious to me. But whatever it is, she’s just like, our house is always clean and stuff like that because she really likes everything to be clean and tidy, et cetera. I get in trouble for making even the slightest mess, because that’s just not okay with her. And I’m not even that messy really. In my opinion. I think everyone has their own way of dealing with this. The other day she just started to clean and she kept cleaning until she was done cleaning whatever she wanted to clean. And I think part of it is cleaning helps her to just get her mind off whatever might be bothering her about this whole thing, if it is bothering her. Right? So we all have our own ways. I think during this time it’s… I’m not even sure if I want to suggest this, but one thought is like, “Hey, just recognize when you’re doing things because you need to comfort yourself.” The only reason I didn’t want to recommend that is because maybe you don’t want to know you’re doing things to comfort yourself. Right? But I would want to know. So, I’m just saying, whatever you’re doing to comfort yourself. For example, we happen to have a Tesla. We’ve had one for a while, and we got a new one recently, and I get a lot out of actually going and driving the Tesla right now. And I don’t have to go touch a gas station pump or anything. I don’t have to worry about any of that. Not that I’m like super, super paranoid. I’d be careful, but then I have to go be careful about it because that’s about the right thing to do right now. From what I can tell, or at least that’s the thing I want to do, but I don’t have to do that. The car is charged at home and it’s all good. So I’m kind of happy about that. I haven’t got in my car as much as I’ve kind of threatened to, to myself. But I know that if I’m really feeling cooped up or I’m not feeling great for whatever reason, something’s on my mind, whatever it may be, I just go for a drive, and I will be fine by the time I get back. I know that about myself. And so part of it is just know that things are very different now, and whatever you’re doing to cope, whatever your mechanisms are to cope with uncertainty, or just when you don’t feel great, they might need to be a little bit different than they used to be. Because you just probably can’t do… Well, now probably you definitely can’t do most of the things that you used to do. When you think about all the people that are going, all their home workouts, and all that kind of stuff. And I think that’s a good segue to you because I know you definitely you get a lot more physical with yourself than I do. So, what are you doing? [0:09:38] Steli Efti: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, I think it starts with recognizing that it’s a priority. I do need to take care… Just like I need to eat and I need to sleep, I need to take care of my mental health, especially during these times. I made a small list and I’m fucking around with it a little bit. But there’s certain things I know that if I do them every day, it doesn’t matter how little or how much I do them, that they are helping. Right? So one thing that I do is in the morning I write these things down. It’s like, I don’t know, seven things. And then during the day I try to check off as many of these things as possible. Right? [0:10:24] Hiten Shah: Cool. [0:10:24] Steli Efti: I have a little sticky note. Every day it’s the same thing. Maybe I’ll change some of these things. One of it is talk to loved ones. [0:10:32] Hiten Shah: Oh, nice. [0:10:32] Steli Efti: So right now I’ll do a video call every day with my mother, but almost every day I think about somebody that is, somebody I care about, that I haven’t talked to in a while. And so I’ll just send them a voice message, or I give them a call, or I text them and just checking in with people, asking how they’re doing. Today I’m with my boys, and they have a cousin and he’s an only child, and he’s kind of a little older than them. So he’s nine years old and it’s much tough on him. Right? He’s nine years old and he’s at home most of the time alone. And I was telling my boys yesterday how lucky they are that they have each other. Right? Because they are playing all day long with each other. And so today we decided to video call their cousin and then I came up with this idea of doing a… Oh, how would you even say it in English. Do like a contest to make the funniest faces. And I would give them key words and they would just make a face and it would take [crosstalk 00:11:33]. [0:11:36] Hiten Shah: That’s good. Nice. [0:11:36] Steli Efti: And so they were on the phone with their cousin for an hour just chatting with him and coming up with games and stuff, so that’s one little [crosstalk] try to do every day is just check in with somebody and talk to somebody that I care about. When it comes to physical fitness, this is definitely a really difficult time. I love training Muay Thai and training martial arts, and it’s a big part of what keeps me sane during normal times. And obviously all the gyms are closed. Right? I can’t train with Thai, can’t go to jujitsu classes. I can’t do the normal martial arts workouts that I would like to do, and that’s something that I haven’t really tackled well yet. One thing that I do is I go on runs, I jump the jump rope. I do a lot of shadow boxing, and then I’m lucky I have a friend, a very good friend, who basically has a private gym that’s quite nice and large. And so once or twice a week I might go there and work out at his gym because there’s nobody there. So that’s to me, those are coping mechanisms to be able to do some physical fitness during the week. Some of it, although I’m not getting really what I would like to do. [0:13:00] Hiten Shah: What you’re used to. [0:13:01] Steli Efti: What I’m used to and what I prefer, but I still try to do something, because I do know that it helps me. There’s one other thing. Obviously meditating and eating well and sleeping enough, and there’s a bunch of things that are probably really helpful. To me, one of the things that has always been challenging, but now even more challenging than ever before, but at the same time it’s really impactful, is silent time. And that’s not meditating, that is just sitting somewhere thinking. Just contemplating. [0:13:41] Hiten Shah: Yep. That’s a form of meditation. [0:13:43] Steli Efti: It is. Yeah, it is. And that, I try to get 10 minutes of that in every day. And oftentimes, sometimes it’s very hard. On the five minute mark, I’m already dying to distract myself with something. And sometimes, I actually start having real insightful thoughts. I start really thinking about something, or I just enjoy it so much the silence, I bathe in it, that it might turn into a 20 minute session or so, or 30 minute session. But silence has really been golden. It helps me clarify my thinking now more than ever because now it’s such a noisy world, and my head is almost always a noisy place. Meditating also helps with this, but I don’t know, even more so it helps me when I don’t just focus on my breathing. I can just sit there and think and just observe my thoughts and just contemplate things. I think, so those are all the things that have really helped. But on top of all of this is the recognition I think that, or the forgiveness, that these are really extreme times. Most of my days I’m not as productive as I used to be and that’s okay. And once in a while I’ll do a workout that’s really shitty and that’s totally okay. And often times, I’m eating my feelings more than usually. Right? I’ll eat shitty food and most of the time I fight them and I don’t eat shitty. And once in a while, more than usually, I’ll eat some shitty food, especially at night. And what I don’t do is I don’t beat myself up about it. I just go, “Well, I’m a human being. This is confirmation. I’m still human.” [0:15:42] Hiten Shah: There you go. [0:15:42] Steli Efti: “Just shut the fuck up. Yes, you ate all this shitty food, you feel a little shitty now. Oh, tomorrow is a new day.” [0:15:51] Hiten Shah: It’s okay. [0:15:52] Steli Efti: [crosstalk] Right? It’s okay. And I think that is a release of pressure, especially for very ambitious people, especially for entrepreneurs. I think when we’re, in this environment, I could see a lot of entrepreneurs making it even harder for themselves and their mental health by being overly critical with not being myself and not be productive and not eating healthy and not working out enough and whatever, whatever. And if you stress yourself out on top of all the stresses of a global pandemic, it just escalates things to an unnecessarily bad place. [0:16:30] Hiten Shah: Totally agree with that. Yeah. I think your list is really a good tactic of having a list of those things that you just do every day, because that just helps you keep your sanity. I think one of the things I’ve done in a similar vein is I’ve actually created multiple groups. On, for me it’s been iMessage, and these are just groups where it’s people who I have some affinity with for some reason. For example, I created a group with I think it’s seven or eight of my friends from college. And we don’t really, we didn’t have a group where most of us, if not all of us were in it. And we actually did a Zoom hangout a few weeks ago. Well, no, probably 10 days ago, week ago, because one of them was like, “Hey, let’s go hang out on Zoom at nine o’clock.” And I’m like, “Cool, sounds good.” And there’s just random texts that happen back and forth. Like apparently pokey or whatever fish has been cheap in San Diego. Majority of them are in San Diego, a few are in New York. And so they’re talking about that. I don’t eat meat, so I’ll just show them the food that I eat. They’re making fun of me. But yeah, it’s almost like the pandemic for me has caused, at least with a few of these sort of things, a level of closeness that I wouldn’t have… We weren’t at for the longest time. We weren’t really, we don’t have a group, and now we have a group, and I decided to start it. Another one is, I was talking to my wife Amy, and for at least a week I was telling her, “Hey, you should start a group with the neighbors.” Similar type of thing. She actually, this was before I started my group, she started one with the neighbors. So now the neighbors are asking things of each other. Not even favors or anything but more like, “Is the grocery store busy? Did they run out of stuff? Anyone been there recently? Is anyone doing food deliveries?” Like grocery deliveries. “What service are you using? Everyone’s delayed, blah, blah blah.” And I think to me, this is, I wouldn’t call this an opportunity, but there’s a need for us to have a level of communication if nothing else, a closeness to people, and it keeps us sane. I’m sure that group I started with my college friends, it’s been beneficial to everybody somehow. Even after one of the Zoom calls I hung out with one of my friends from the college that’s on that list in that group, and we haven’t caught up in many years, and it was just nice to catch up and just hear what he has to say. It was just fascinating. So I think to me it’s an opportunity. It’s not really an opportunity, but it’s a need we have to just talk to other human beings, right, about what’s going on, or remind ourselves that there are people in our lives that we might not always be in touch with, they might not be family, but they’re important to us, and so I’ve been doing a bunch of that. [0:19:53] Steli Efti: That’s beautiful. All right, we’ll wrap up this episode here. We always love to hear from you. If you have hacks for mental health, if you’ve tried new things that have worked particularly well or not worked at all, we would love to hear from you. Send us an email, steli@close.com, hnshah@gmail.com. If you’ve not done it yet, hey, you have all the time in the world, now more than ever probably- [0:20:17] Hiten Shah: That’s right. [0:20:18] Steli Efti: … For some of you. Go and give us an iTunes review. If you find the podcast helpful, it helps us being discovered more, so it helps the community to grow. So we really appreciate if you’ve gotten value from the podcast, give us a rating and a review on iTunes. And as always these days, stay healthy, and we’ll see you very soon. [0:20:38] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:20:38] The post 502: How to Maintain Mental Health During a Global Pandemic appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to do product management during the COVID-19 crisis. The current crisis is causing a lot of disruption for many companies, and one area in particular that most companies will be affected is in their product development roadmap. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how product development will be affected by this crisis, how this crisis has affected Hiten’s roadmap, if changing your roadmap is a good idea right now and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:29 Why this topic was chosen. 01:19 Questions some companies are having right now. 03:02 How this crisis has affected Hiten’s roadmap. 03:42 How this crisis is affecting Google’s Chrome. 05:08 How most companies still work from offices. 06:10 How most companies don’t know how to do product development properly. 07:51 If changing your roadmap is a good idea right now. 08:15 How product launches are going to be very tricky right now. 09:00 Products that are doing well right now. 3 Key Points: The big question that a lot of companies now have is how is this going to affect our product development roadmap.Google has slowed down or stopped releasing updates for Chrome.Be aware that you may not be as productive as you normally are. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti  [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: and this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to do product development and product management during a global pandemic. [0:00:05] Steli Efti:So here’s a question for you, Hiten. Most software companies. Let’s talk just about product companies and software companies brought up, they had a product roadmap. Very likely that roadmap was spanning over a couple of weeks if not months. Many of them will have one that they had set for the entire year. But usually these product development cycles, they’re substantial long and they need a good amount of head time to plan for them and to put things in motion and have a dev team work on things before they can ship things. So now you had this roadmap for whatever quarter two, let’s say in quarter three this year and now the world is melting down. We’re having with world pandemic, people have to work from home. And the big question that many people have is how is this going to affect our product roadmap and our product development process? There’s one bucket of questions that is centered around productivity, right? Our dev team, are they going to be productive working from home with their families there? Are they going to be able to ship on time as our original timelines were how is this going to affect the productivity and the timelines and milestones and all that. And then there’s the other bucket of questions that I see floating around, which is do we have to adjust or should we adjust our product roadmap because the world is melting down. Maybe the things that we thought launching to our customer base in a month or two from now would be very exciting and very useful. Maybe it’s not useful, exciting right now. Maybe launching product features right now in general is a bad idea because people are running around with their hair on fire and us sending them an email that we’ve launched a new whatever, settings feature is… Nobody will care about any of this. You have been developing many, many products over the years and you’ve been studying kind of product habits. I mean it’s your email list even in a product in and of itself, dealing with product leaders, product managers. How do you think about this? How much or little should a global crisis like this influence the way you think about your product roadmap and the things that you are building and planning to ship in kind of the short to midterm? [0:02:51] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think there’s a few things. One, because this involves companies working in ways they might not be used to. So working from home. It’s likely in a lot of companies product development has slowed down, maybe even came to a halt. I’ll give you a good example. Google, which is not a company known for working from home. I’m sure people did it and do it. They actually have either slowed down or stopped releasing updates to Chrome and they sent out an email about that. They said they do security updates because I think they have to, it’s critical, but they basically said because of this crisis and team, whatever they said in their email, they literally sent an email and said that to everybody. Now that is unprecedented. I’ve never heard Google say we’re stopping development on something or pausing development on something because we just have to. And this is what the pandemic is causing. So one, be aware of the fact that you might not be able to be as productive as you normally work if your team is not used to working from home or if your team is emotionally impacted by the situation that’s going on or if some people on your team are, so there’s a bunch of slack you kind of have to give people. And so you just don’t have a choice. And so if you were checking in on your team by walking to their desk and talking to them or using whiteboards, physical whiteboards or going in conference rooms and talking together and having these meetings, you don’t get to do that anymore until this thing is over. We don’t know when it’s going to be over. We don’t know when we can go back in that office if we do go to an office. So that implication I think is really great and big for any company that’s used to collaborating in the same room, which is not every company but it’s most companies. Truthfully. As much as you and I are advocates for this, most companies still work in an office and I know you and I are not like the folks at Basecamp who are shouting from the rooftops about remote work right now. Literally shouting from the rooftops. And even their own product is delayed. They had a product they were going to launch an, email product called HEY in April and now they said it’s indefinitely delayed. So if that’s any indication, that should tell you at least the whatever delays you’re having internally because of all this stuff, you’re going to be either delayed or you’re just so used to working from home and your team is resilient, whether it’s emotionally or just in general that it’s not going to impact you barely. That being said, who knows? Things can change really fast around that. So that’s I think one thing to be aware of. And that means that this is not normal. This is not normal at all. That’s a big deal. I think that’s the thing that… I don’t have specific product development advice. I mean most companies don’t have the proper processes. They don’t know how to work from home and get product development done. They just don’t. Until they’re using Zoom. They’re finding their alternatives to white boarding if they’re really into that, they’re hopefully documenting more. I mean these are all tips that we’d tell you if you are working from home and how to do it and then that’s fine. Those tips are out there. Please go pay attention to them and see what you can do to change up your processes really quickly. It’s probably just number one thing is people are just having [inaudible 00:06:33]. That’s just obvious, and Zoom is holding up. Oh my God. [0:06:37] Steli Efti: Jesus. We’re using it for my podcast right now. [0:06:41] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it’s working. [0:06:44] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:06:45] Hiten Shah: It’s a miracle. [0:06:47] Steli Efti: It is. [0:06:48] Hiten Shah: So I know a lot of people have praised Eric and praised the company and praised the team. I don’t think we would be any different, right? In this case, yes. Wow. So, Zoom meetings… Because Google Hangouts is actually not working consistently for me. The way that Zoom does right now. Whenever I try it, something goes wrong. And this is way more wrong than usual. Anyway, so that’s happening. Let me the only other part- [0:07:17] Steli Efti: Oh, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. [0:07:19] Hiten Shah: No, no, you first. Go. [0:07:20] Steli Efti: I just wanted to ask about do you think it’s smart to maybe change your roadmap because you think maybe doing a feature earlier would be more relevant during this time? Is that a good idea to change the timeline when you don’t know how long this crisis will take and what the implications are? [0:07:40] Hiten Shah: I think changing timelines on roadmaps to be more relevant right now, if there are features that you think are more relevant for your customers right now, that’s great. But in normal product development, we’d be talking to customers, understanding what problems they have and building products for them and making improvements for them. So it should be business as usual there, except you might already have a plan that you need to kind of blow up or rethink based on new found information about what’s going on with human beings on the planet right now. That’s cool. That makes sense, as long as you have some potential there. Not all products have that potential. But we’re thinking the same [inaudible] FYI as well. I think the other thing I wanted to mention is product launches right now are going to be a little tricky. [0:08:32] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:08:33] Hiten Shah: They’re just going to be tricky. Just your expectation shouldn’t be normal. It should either be wildly indexed so that because it’s relevant right now you might get a lot more signups. I’ve seen a lot of data on this recently. It’s not as good as people might be tweeting about in terms of the amount of signups certain companies are getting. That being said, if you’re anything video related right now and you help people collaborate via video specifically, maybe audio. You’re probably seeing a major uptake, but most other categories I’ve seen, besides like certain things around like e-commerce and direct to consumer, I’m not seeing the uptick. In fact, I’m seeing the opposite. The traffic might come but it’s not signing up like it used to. And there’s always opportunity in this stuff. You can find a way if you have numbers that you’re looking and still need. That being said, these product launches are very different right now, because the majority of stuff that’s launching is relevant to what’s going on in the world. Yeah, and that’s not normal at all. That’s not usually how it is because there’s so many different are things going on in the world. Right now? There’s one thing going on. [0:09:45] Steli Efti: One thing. One thing in the fucking world, yes. [0:09:48] Hiten Shah: One thing, dude. One thing, so that’s the big difference, and that impacts everything. [0:09:54] Steli Efti: Insane times, man. Well, thank you so much for sharing some of that perspective. I do think it’s helpful for people- [0:09:59] Hiten Shah: Thanks for the questions, yeah. [0:10:01] Steli Efti: All right, we’ll wrap up this episode. As always, if you have more questions, just shoot us an email. Hnshah@gmail.com, Steli@close.com. We’re always happy to help if we can, especially during a global pandemic. We want to be more helpful, probably. Besides that, we’ll see you next time. [0:10:17] Hiten Shah: Absolutely. [0:10:18] Steli Efti: Stay safe. [0:10:18] The post 501: How to Do Product Management During the COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.