In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about hobbies for founders. The life of a founder, and entrepreneurship, in general, can be very stressful. In order to avoid burnout and stress-related illness, it’s important for founders to disconnect from work and do other non-work related activities, and picking up a hobby is a great way to do this. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about whether having a hobby is a good idea, why you should decide if you’re a marathon runner and a sprinter, the benefits of hobbies and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:23 Why this topic was chosen. 03:06 Whether having a hobby is a good idea. 04:11 Why you should decide if you’re a marathon runner and a sprinter. 06:20 How most people go through different phases. 07:03 What Hiten hobbies are. 08:00 Why Hiten’s hobbies are not seen as traditional hobbies. 09:52 What Steli’s hobbies are. 10:29 The benefits of martial arts to Steli. 11:23 How Steli views his hobby.  3 Key Points: Are you a marathon runner or do you like to sprint?Some people might operate best in certain situations.I don’t particularly have any hobbies at the moment. [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 on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about hobbies for founders. Should founders have hobbies and a life? Should they not have them? Are there good hobbies and bad hobbies? Let’s just quickly talk about this and kind of unpack it for our listeners from our perspective. So I want to set this up with a story. Many, many years ago and I’m going to have to be careful, I can’t use real names, but I remember being at an event where one of our angel investors had invited us to, this is 2011 so long time ago, we had raised a small seed round back then and for what we were doing, and this is like a legendary [Angelo Messi 00:00:00:57] or somebody, everybody really knows in the start-up world, and I remember sitting in the audience, he was giving a talk and one of my co-founders is a super passionate skier. He loves the outdoors in general. He loves hiking, but he especially loves skiing. And remember at some point of the presentation of that angel investor, an angel investor going on on a rant that if you want to be a founder and now that it’s great skiing season, every weekend you want to go hit the snow and ski, then you know you need to figure out your priorities. He would never invest in people that waste their weekends for lifestyle instead of putting focused effort into their work and outworking their competition. I remember looking over at my co-founder, this angel just had invested in us. He just didn’t know that my co-founder was a passionate skier at the time and so we looked at each other and we both had to smile and laugh so much. And then Anthony, my co-founder, whispered in my ear, “Let’s not mention to him that I’m going skiing this weekend,” and we had a laugh about this and that stuck in my head. The is it a good idea or a bad idea to have hobbies? I feel since 2011 in the last nine years, a lot has changed and I don’t think that that same angel investor would be on stage telling the same story again and telling people that founders with hobbies or with interests out of work are not fundable. But I’m pretty sure he still holds the belief, but I think it’s not as politically correct to voice those. And a lot of people’s minds have changed over the years. So I wanted to unpack this for the founders, especially the earlier founders that are listening to us and are wondering, is it a good idea for me to have a hobby? Is it a waste of time? Should all my free time be dedicated to the company that I’m starting to get off the ground and if I have a hobby, are there good ones and bad ones? What do you think about this? How do you think about that? [0:03:06] Hiten Shah.: I find this one funny. It’s like one of those things that, “Hey, there’s these things that people have said about how to be a founder or what the rules are for starting a business, doing a startup, whatever it may be.” I know people who basically the way I would break this down is, are you a marathon runner or do you like to sprint? [0:03:35] Steli Efti: Mm-hmm (affirmative). [0:03:40] Hiten Shah.: And I think that’s what matters because if you’re a marathon runner, you’re okay. You’ll go at a sustained pace for a very long time without stopping and you’ll be okay with that. Your body will be fine, your mind will be fine, your feelings will be okay. If you’re a sprinter, you prefer to go as hard as you possibly can for as long as you can. And then you want to stop and then you want to rest and then you want to do it again at the same pace, which tends to be pretty aggressive pace. So I think you should decide whether you’re a marathon runner when it comes to work or you’re sprinter when it comes to work. Because that’ll determine whether you take a break or not. And to me that helps determine whether you know what type of hobbies you should have maybe or whether even a hobby is right for you. I think that’s the way to think about it. This is a recent analogy that I came to by talking to somebody on my team when we were just discussing how different people are and what their energy requirements are. I think it has a lot to do with energy. I don’t think it has to do with, “Oh, you need a hobby, you don’t need a hobby.” I can totally get that angel investors point. I see the point they’re trying to make, which is you have to work hard for this stuff, right? And sure, some people got lucky or will get lucky, but at the end of the day the work is what gets you lucky. So keep doing the work, keep showing up. And regardless of what day it is or what your hobbies might be. I get that. That being said, some people truly burnout if they try to marathon it when they’re really sprinters and if you’re sprinting and you really prefer marathons, you should really think hard about that too. [0:05:40] Steli Efti: I also think that it’s also a question of a phase, right? So some people might operate best in a certain way forever, right? They’re always sprinters or they’re always marathon runners but most people, I think they go through different phases. There’s a time in life where you feel the energy and the desire to sprint and then there’s a time in your life where you might have to change the pace of the rhythm of your work, right? And you have to run at a more endurance pace versus an all-out sprint. And that’s fine too. I think that’s a difficult thing that people… We all get stuck in one mode of identifying ourselves and our success with and then when life changes we’re not willing to change with it and maybe change up our pace and change up the cadence in which we do things and how we do things that is more appropriate for that phase of our lives and of the work that we do. So let’s make this more specific because I think it might be a little bit fun for people to hear this because I think we’re very different, but I think there’s a lot of commonalities in here. So I’m going to ask you a question I already know the answer to. Would you say you have hobbies and if so, which hobbies are those? [0:07:02] Hiten Shah.: Yeah, I don’t really particularly have any hobbies at the moment. I think your point about people depending on, in their life, being in different modes, I think that makes all a lot of sense. I don’t have hobbies. When people ask me that I’m like, “Okay, I have two things that I enjoy doing. One, I do enjoy thinking about other people’s businesses and two, I like playing with my kids.” That’s about it. [0:07:28] Steli Efti: I would add actually a couple of other things as well. I think that… Like my observation of you and I might be wrong, [crosstalk] is that you have a ton of… You could look at them as a ton of little tiny hobbies, but they’re not seen as such because they’re not traditional hobby activities. Right. I think when you drive your car, the driving as much more of a hobby to you than it is a utility activity to go from point A to point B along. [0:08:00] Hiten Shah.: I think that’s true. [0:08:01] Steli Efti: Which it totally is for me. Like I could not care less. I have zero enjoyment when I’m in a car driving somewhere, but to you, it’s a meditative practice. It’s a thinking practice. There’s enjoyment in that. Even I think to some degree, the way you consume and spread information, right? The way you interact on social media and the amount of information you consume or the amount of information you share, part of it is probably at this point just habit, right? It’s the momentum of habit of having built up all this throughout your entire life. Part of it I think is kind of a stimulation hobby. It’s not really work but it’s related to it in a way that’s interesting, that’s stimulating to you and in a way that’s useful to others. So sometimes when I see you on social media, I see a real playfulness to it and to me that’s again very different from me. When I see you on social media sometimes I feel like it’s much more of a hobby versus when I do it. The little bit that I do, it wouldn’t fit into the same category and there’s many little things like that. Even when you meet with founders, depending on what kind of meeting you have and what kind of advice you give, sometimes to me that seems like Hiten’s version of play. Right? Those are all hobbies that are related to your core life and the work that you do, but they’re not your work, right? But they help you with your work and they bring a little bit of variety to your day and stimulation and fun. At least that’s what it oftentimes it looks like to me. [0:09:32] Hiten Shah.: Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair. Totally fair. Small hobbies. [0:09:36] Steli Efti: There you go. For me, people that have been listening to us for a long time know this. I have discovered a big hobby in my life and this is been for the last, I don’t know, five, six years and that’s been martial arts. Now I’m training Muay Thai kickboxing, I’m training Brazilian jujitsu, and to me it’s been really amazing and really helpful to find a physical activity that completely exhausts me, that pushes me to my limits, that helps me completely disconnect mentally from everything that’s going on in my life. [0:10:18] Hiten Shah.: Mm-hmm (affirmative). [0:10:19] Steli Efti: And at the same time, it’s something that… One really interesting aspect of it is that just like with everything else in my life, I have brought myself to this. So I can’t help but be very ambitious about the things that I do and I’ve become a scholar of martial arts, I’ve consumed incredible amount of information about it and I know at this point a ton about it. And this is the one of the few areas of my life that I’m really incredibly passionate about where I have no chance of becoming as good as I’d like to be, right? So it’s a weird little beautiful function where I go to something where I give my all to it and I study it and I try to improve and I work hard at it. But at the same time I know I’m never going to be world-class, which is something I just intrinsically try to be at everything I do. And it’s a bittersweet mind-fuck that’s somehow good for me. It’s doing something passionately without… In a much more pure form because I know I cannot accomplish ultimately my goals in this, but I love the pursuit itself, right? And in everything else in my life that would be maybe very dissatisfying, especially in my work. But it’s interesting that this dimension opened up in my life where I have something that I am so passionate about that I spent a good amount of my free time with, studying, practicing and that I know I’m just never going to be as good as I’d like to be, but I still want to pursue it. There’s something spiritually fulfilling about that pursuit that’s different from anything else that I’ve ever done and it’s been helping me think better, work better. It’s helping me balance my emotional household a lot more. For me, it’s definitely been a massive blessing for my work as well, not just for my personal life. So if you can find something like that, I think it can be always really beautiful, but it depends on every person. And there’s a reason why I discovered this this late in life, and I have not been doing this since I’m 17, there’s probably a very good reason for that. [0:12:42] Hiten Shah.: That’s awesome. [0:12:45] Steli Efti: All right, well, I’m curious, we always love to hear from you, but on this episode especially, if you listened to this and you have had any insightful stories, experiences to share with either through yourself and the hobbies that you discovered being a founder or through other people, your co-founders, whoever else, if you have anything that you feel like sharing with us about hobbies and founders, send us an email, steli@close.com, hnshah@gmail.com. We always love to hear from you. This is it for us for this time until next. [0:13:17] Hiten Shah.: See ya. [0:13:18] The post 490: Hobbies for Founders appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to set up successful partner programs. Creating a partner program for your company is a great way to grow your customer base without spending too much on marketing and customer acquisition. However, like most things in business, you have to do it the right way for it to be successful. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten what partner programs are, how to create one for your startup, mistakes to avoid when creating them and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:19 What partner programs are. 03:00 Why you should create an ideal partner profile before creating a partner program. 04:22 The importance of finding the right places to promote your partner program. 05:10 How to determine who could make a good partner for you. 05:46 How the team at Close created their own partner program. 07:10 Tools to manage partner programs with. 08:39 When to start a partner program. 09:31 Mistakes companies make when creating partner programs. 09:57 Why you need an application process. 3 Key Points: Partner programs are different from affiliate programsA lot of SaaS SMBs have started investing in partner programsAsk yourself who would be an ideal partner for you. [0:00:01] 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 our thoughts on setting up a partner program for your business. So, there’s affiliate programs, and those are ones where you actually give somebody sort of a payment, whether it’s a fee for when they bring you a signup, or a fee on an ongoing basis when you get a customer from them, and then there’s partner programs. And partner programs are actually quite a bit different, and they usually involve actually partnering up and having something more official happen, doing joint PR and things like that. So, that’s the topic, and that’s kind of a high level of difference between an affiliate program or partner program. A partner program, in some ways, is a deeper sort of relationship or it tends to be. [0:00:55] Steli Efti: Yeah, deeper commitment relationship. And I don’t know if you agree with this, but just my observation has been that in the kind of past two years or so, two or three years, a lot of SAS SMB companies have started investing in partner programs that used to be a lot more of a play and a growth channel that… and took price, enterprise companies would go after. But now I see kind of more and more SMB companies go after that. Is that just my observation, or would you agree with that? [0:01:33] Hiten Shah: I would agree with that. I think it used to be something that larger companies would build out. Now it’s something that I think even if you’re targeting SMBs, or you’re an SMB, you might start working on this. I mean, the markets are bigger. There’s just more buyers out there, and there’s also more companies out there. So, in a way it feels like a natural evolution. [0:01:57] Steli Efti: Awesome. All right, so before we go any further, and we’ll talk about kind of a few best practices to set up a successful partner program. For those of you that are interested in the affiliate program and learning more about how to do that, check out episode 361, How to Use Affiliate Programs to Fuel Your Growth. That’s an episode that we recorded earlier. So, coming back to the partner program, and a little shout-out for the Close peeps out there, Close just is announcing the launch of our partner program, so this is part of why I wanted to talk to you about this. So for those of you that are interested in learning more about how we set that up, and even potentially for some of you that want to partner up with Close, you can go to close.com/partners and check out kind of how we have set up our partner program, how we think about partnering with people, and if it’s a good fit for you and what you’re doing. We’d love to talk to you, and you can always get in touch with me directly at Steli@close.com if you want to chat more about that. So, let’s go through this real quick and give people a couple of recommendations. We can like ping pong this. I’ll throw out my first tip for people, which I think goes back to a core principle that we’ve discussed many, many times before. My biggest recommendation is to always instead of just launch, instead of just putting these programs together in the hope that they will magically bring growth, ask yourself who would be an ideal partner for you, and who would be an ideal partner for you and the type of customers that you want to reach? And then I would actually advise people, and this is an exercise that we did, to write down an ideal partner profile. A lot of people know this about the ideal customer profile. Writing down and identifying who is the ideal customer that we’re going after, you can do the exact same thing for a partner and write down who is the partner that we want. What are the kind of identifying criteria for somebody that could be an ideal partner for us, and really help us grow, and help our customers grow? And then you can also do the non-ideal partner. Who are the type of people that might be interested in partnering with us that we don’t believe can bring value to us or our customers, or not sufficient value to what we’re trying to do? And so that, if you identify these two things in the beginning, it’s going to really help you craft your messaging, find the right places to promote your partner program. And when partners apply, for instance, to become part of your program, it’s going to be much easier for your team to decide, is this somebody we should partner with or not, and how should we go about it? So my first tip for people, if you want to put together a partner program to grow your company, to grow it as a growth channel, is first specify and identify who an ideal partner would be, and who would not be a good partner before you start setting up anything else and start promoting the partner program. [0:04:51] Hiten Shah: Well, it’s likely that you already have people who are such great advocates that some of them could be good partners. So there is the ideology of really thinking through who has actually reached out, who’s actually helping you get more customers, or who already wants to partner with you, which many companies, at some size, end up getting. So there’s that data point, as well, that you can use which is whoever’s already sort of tried to partner with you. [0:05:25] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that. And that’s actually something that we did with Close is when we started considering putting that together. One of the reasons was that there was an increased demand of requests, and we started picking a few and saying, you know what? This company, this person seems like such a potentially good fit, let’s do this in a very casual way. Let’s work with them one-on-one and see if this works and how it works. And once we had a handful of success stories where partners would bring in great customers, and collaborate and work with us really, really well, and we started seeing real meaningful numbers, we’re like all right. Let’s now turn this into a more formal thing. Let’s start promoting it a bit more. But we had, I think about like 30, 40 or so companies already that we were partnering up with in one way or another. And we had kind of a constant stream week by week of companies and people reaching out, a lot of our customers reaching out and wanting to partner with us. So, I think if you have that inbound demand, you can analyze and see what kind of companies reach out to us, what kind of companies could be really good for us or not. The other thing is, in today’s world there used to be, just like almost anything else, it used to be that you had to do so much heavy lifting to organize all of this to track it, to do the payouts, to do all this kind of stuff. But today there’s software for a lot of this. So, one recommendation that I can give for people that want to invest in a partner program, there’s Rewardful, which is kind of a SAS product that allows you to manage, host, promote, payout and deal with anything that comes with managing partner and affiliate programs. And there is partnerstack.com, which is a platform that’s gaining some steam recently where a lot of companies and people out there that are strong affiliates who have big audiences are looking to find new products to promote to the audience and customer base. And so PartnerStack and Rewardful are two platforms that I can recommend for people that are wondering, how do I manage all this? How do I deal with all of this? All right. Maybe we’ll do one more tip per person, then we’ll wrap up this. Well, but before, let me ask you, Hiten, I would typically tell people that, I mean just like everything else that we say, usually it typically depends on your particular circumstances, but I wouldn’t advise, in general, startups before they get their first hundred customers to start investing in partner and affiliate programs when it’s super early, when they don’t know if they’ve got a product market fit, when they don’t have marketing channels that work for themselves, and they don’t know how to acquire customers, and have good funnels, and conversion metrics and all of that. I would usually advise startups to start investing in affiliate or partner programs a little bit further down the line when they have kind of acquisition machines already humming, and they know how long customers stay, how quickly they churn, who is an ideal customer, all of that. Would you agree with that, or do you think there’s exceptions to this rule where some startup should look into this much earlier? [0:08:43] Hiten Shah: I think you need some level of scale to really have a partner program itself. Otherwise, if you’re earlier and you think that partnerships can provide a channel to your customer and can really be a scalable channel, it’s not a bad idea to explore it earlier. But usually it’s sort of two way mutually beneficial partnerships tend to be ones where once the companies are at scale. [0:09:09] Steli Efti: Cool. Any other big mistake that you’ve seen with companies out there that try to launch or run or scale a partner program, or particularly good examples of massive success? Like if you want to do a partner program, go and check out this company, or do it this way. I’ve seen this work really, really well again and again and again. [0:09:28] Hiten Shah: I think this is one of those tactics, just like affiliates and things like that, where people quickly easily fail at doing it. And so I think the biggest difference is basically two things. One, having an application process, being deliberate about communicating with whoever fills out your application as to like what the next step is, if there is one, and if you don’t want to partner with them or you can’t, you actually communicate that as well. I see a lot of people just ignoring applications. I don’t think that’s a good idea. And then the second piece would be they don’t iterate it. They don’t actually learn and iterate the program as they get more and more people into it. That’s really about it. [0:10:10] Steli Efti: Awesome. All right. Well, check out the episode, as I mentioned earlier, about affiliate programs, episode 261. If you’re already rocking and rolling, and you get a lot of high quality inbound requests, and you’re thinking about a partner program, or if you’ve done this incredibly successfully in the last one or two years, reach out. I’d love to hear from you. We’re just launching this with Close. We’ve seen some early success, but we’d love to partner up with you or learn from you if you have something to teach, so you can always get in touch with us. Hnshah@gmail.com. Steli@close.com. This is it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:10:47] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:10:47] The post 489: How to Set up Successful Partner Programs? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the role entrepreneurship plays in your childhood. Things that happen in our childhood play a big role in shaping our adulthood, and becoming an entrepreneur is no different. Most founders would agree that there were things that happened to them when they were kids that influenced their decisions to become entrepreneurs.  In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about events that influenced them to become entrepreneurs, how your past is not your future, how our natural tendencies can affect us becoming entrepreneurs and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:14 Why this topic was chosen. 01:15 Things that influenced Hiten to become an entrepreneur. 03:03 Why Hiten’s father gave him some early advice. 03:42 The effect this advice had on Hiten. 04:31 How you get a better understanding of your childhood as you grow up. 05:54 Why how you respond to what happens to you is super important. 07:05 How your past is not your future. 08:24 Things that influenced Steli to become an entrepreneur. 10:12 How our natural tendencies can also affect us becoming entrepreneurs. 3 Key Points: There were things that happened in your childhood that made you become an entrepreneur.My dad told me not to work for anyone.Your past is not your future. [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 what role your childhood plays in entrepreneurship and if it plays a role at all. So here’s an interesting question. When you think back to your childhood, I do believe … I have prior knowledge, but I do believe that there were things that happened during your childhood that played a role in you becoming an entrepreneur and how you develop as an entrepreneur. Is that true? Would you agree? [0:00:33] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Yeah. [0:00:35] Steli Efti: And I would agree for certain on my childhood and what role it played in me becoming an entrepreneur and how I approached the whole thing. So maybe let’s just talk personal on this episode and talk about kind of what role our childhood played in it and how it influenced us. So when you think about your childhood, what are the immediate things that stand out where you go, well this is what happened during my childhood and how these events of things influenced me becoming an entrepreneur and what kind of an entrepreneur I became? [0:01:08] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Mine was very direct. So my Dad, when I was four or five, told me I shouldn’t work for anyone. So I think he wanted to live vicariously through me and so he spoiled me at that point and said that. Then, over the years, he said three things. He said you could be an entrepreneur and work for yourself, the sky’s the limit. That was his take on it. And he was already a workaholic. He’s a physician, he’s an anesthesiologist. So what would happen is he would come home from work, we would have dinner and then he’d actually take me to work with him. I would sit in, basically, the IT room and I would mess with the computers and stuff. That was his version of taking a kid to work. It was literally every day. And then by the time I was seven or eight I just sat there and messed around with the computers. I had one since I was eight. I would build them and break them and take them apart and learn all about them and get on BBS’s and all that kind of stuff, the bulletin board systems from back then. I had dial up really early, Prodigy, AOL, all the good things and that was my childhood. The second and third things said were get married early and have kids early. So now what I’ll say, and then I’ll hand it over to you, is I’ve done everything he wanted so I don’t need to listen to him anymore. [0:02:36] Steli Efti: Well, wait, so on the entrepreneurship side I wanted to ask you, why do you think your Dad told you this? I think you said you thought that he wanted to live vicariously through you. On that note, why do you think he said you should get married and have children early in life? Was it just because he wanted to be a grandfather soon? [0:02:55] Hiten Shah: No, no, no. I don’t believe he really was just trying to live variously through me either, I think he wanted to impart the lessons that mattered to him that he felt like he wanted to impart in me. I was an only child and so he pushed them early and I think, for his agenda, that was smart. That being said, growing up, my rebellious streak impacted him the most. And I can blame him too. When you tell someone, “Don’t work for anyone,” when you’re four or five I think part of me took that in as like, “Oh, there are no rules.” I don’t need to follow anyone’s rules, even yours. Because he didn’t just say it once, he said it enough times that it just got ingrained. And so one thing I’ll say, and I really want to hear your take on this, but one thing I’ll say is of course your childhood impacts you for the rest of your life. And as you grow up, either you let it keep impacting you in ways that you don’t understand, or you start getting a better and better understanding of it, because you want to understand yourself better, or you want to improve or whatever. One of the things I have to say about it is, as harsh as this might be, it has little to do with what other people said or did to you. Even though I wouldn’t say I had a terrible childhood by any means, or anything like that, or people were mean to me or anything aggressive or anything like that. But at the end of the day, whatever those things are that happened, however extreme or however good or whatever, you took it in a certain way, you internalized it. It wasn’t someone else doing something to you, it was you internalizing what they said. So someone else, some other child with the other brain could have taken what my Dad said in a different way. My rebellion wasn’t against him, my rebellion was just against everything and it’s because I didn’t understand what rules were. I didn’t have that many rules. I had very few rules and that’s what shaped a lot of how I think about things. [0:05:21] Steli Efti: I think that’s a really important point and a beautiful one to make, which is … There’s two points actually. One is it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you respond to what happens to you, it’s how you interpret what happens to you, right? So two people could have the exact same event happen to them and interpret it very differently. There’s famously the story of twins that grew up in a very rough situation with drug addicted parents and violence and all these things and then ended up going down very different paths. One of those twins becomes a lawyer and a very successful member of society and the other one becomes kind of a big drug addict and a criminal and both interviewed about their lives pointed to their rough upbringing as, with this type of childhood, how could I become any different? One person took that rough childhood and said, “I’ve lived through hell, so I knew I needed to create a better life for myself. I had no other choice.” And the other one, who went through the identical experience and with identical DNA as a twin, or fairly identical DNA, said, “With that messed up of a childhood, how could I have ever made something out of myself? I could only fail with those experiences.” So it’s kind of the decision and the interpretation, your reaction to what happens to you more than the actual events. And the other thing is your past is not your future, right? So some people are kind of, I find that some people get stuck in their past and they use the narrative of it to hold themselves back forever, for their entire life, or to limit who they could be and where they could go in their future. We really don’t want to encourage these ideas, but I do think it’s important to understand your childhood and what happened there and understand your past to be able to transform it, or deeper understand why you are the way you are, who you are, how you think, in order to be able to either interpret what’s going on in your life better, or to change the things that you don’t like moving forward. So it’s fascinating to hear the whole you shouldn’t work for anybody and then that meaning, to your interpretation, there are no rules, I should do whatever I want. That’s kind of awesome. I’m sure you created a bunch of trouble and challenges for yourself and your Dad, but, but it does make a lot of sense and it’s kind of a good interpretation, good take on it. I think for me in my childhood, a number of things happened. I think that, one, we went through a period where a lot of bad things happened to our family. The death of my father, the sudden death of my Dad, us being kicked out of our home and having to go to public housing and to a totally different neighborhood, our family not talking to us. That was all happening during me starting first class in school. Then I had the bad luck of … My first school teacher was a terrible woman and a racist and just a horrible, horrendous human being. So there was a two year, three year period in my childhood where it seemed to me, my interpretation as a child was that the world was against us and we were very powerless. My Mum and my two brothers and I were pushed around in society and we were not able, not having the strength, the resources to push back and to have influence over our lives. And that definitely put a big chip on my shoulder and make me feel like I don’t want to be powerless, I don’t want to live a life where anybody can just come and do bad things to us and we can’t do anything about it. So I remember that was very impactful. I wanted to be strong and I wanted to be in a situation where I have control over my life and I’m not the victim of other people’s influence and decision making over what I can and cannot do in life. So that was a big thing I think that influenced me a lot. And then I think I naturally had a tendency to, I don’t know, I think I was born with a sense of confidence and a sense of a megalomania and thinking I need to be important and significant and I need to accomplish a lot and become rich and become famous and whatever, whatever. But my entire environment was low, poor income, immigrant neighborhoods, all of these people that were uneducated, not wealthy. So I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I desired to have some more power in my life and to be able to help my family and to create some kind of significance. And I think that desire in this situation that I was in as a child led me to discover, hey, there’s this thing called entrepreneurship. This is how businesses are started. You don’t need a diploma. Nobody needs to give you permission to start. Any type of business you create, it’s your creation and you can make it as big or as small as your creativity, your hard work allows it to be. Once I discovered that option, it was the answer to a very significant question that I had. So I instantly was … I was 16, this is when I discovered entrepreneurship, I was 16, I was like, wait, this is how business works? Anybody can start something and then make it this massive enterprise that has huge impact? You don’t have to have a boss and nobody has to agree that you are allowed to make this successful. I was like, all right, sign me up. This is it. This is going to be the way I do it. Literally, to me, this was like discovering a fucking planet. I was like, Holy shit, this is all this works. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about entrepreneurship. I didn’t know that you could just start a business. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that businesses could become as big as anybody wants. These things were all foreign concepts to me. So once I discovered them, I was like, Holy shit, this is it. I know what I’m going to do. But I do think that those more difficult years of my childhood paired up with my intrinsic desire for significance and my natural ambition, those two things led me down a path of asking myself the question, what the hell am I going to do in life and how am I going to be able to improve my life? And then those questions led me to discovering this beautiful idea of entrepreneurship and going, oh my God, this is it. I know what to do with my life. So yeah, I do think that influenced me a lot. Now having said that, I know that some people will listen to us and go, oh, my childhood, my parents didn’t like risk taking and they were both working for the government and I tried to do a lemonade stand in the summer and nobody bought. So there were these five things that happened to me and this is why, now that I’m an entrepreneur, this is why I’m struggling, because my childhood has influenced me to not be good at this thing called entrepreneurship. And what will we tell somebody that is thinking along those lines as they’re listening to us right now? [0:13:31] Hiten Shah: Oh man. I think the whole thing here is you’re making a decision. Excuse me. You’re making a decision at some point in your life and that decision is to start something of your own, right? So I feel like everyone’s going to have their own experience about this, but how childhood relates to it, it has a lot to do with the things that you interpreted as you were growing up and what that causes you to believe about yourself and the world. And a lot of times it’s not even your belief about yourself, it’s actually your beliefs about the world. For example, I think you went from thinking there was not as much abundance in the world to realizing there is a lot of abundance and how you can get it. And that would be my summary of what I heard from you. While for my Dad and the way that I grew up, he just told me, “Hey, it’s out there.” HW didn’t even tell me to go get it, he just said, “Hey, it’s out there. That’s all there is for you.” But it’s out there and that’s all there is is kind of weird. When you think about the fact that, well that’s all there is is abundance and it’s out there for you. And ultimately that’s, I think, the thing that, in different ways, shaped both of us towards the same thing, which is, to me, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a founder. You’re actually thinking more with an abundance mindset. I can do anything. Anything is possible. The world is abundant. And to me, the childhood things, all this boils down to is what is that story and if I were to really go there, Steli, it would be like, “Hey, what’s your story of abundance? How did you get to a point where you believe you can do anything? Or you believe that the world is abundant?” I think that’s the crux of it for me, which is what someone’s story is to that place. Because I don’t imagine anyone’s started anything without having some understanding that they can do it. Otherwise it wouldn’t start. And it could be a subconscious understanding, but I feel like that’s really what you get from childhood, this idea that the world is abundant. If you’re going to kind of get into entrepreneurship somehow, you get that from childhood. It could be because you’ve experienced the opposite, or it could be because someone told you, or it could be because you just, over time, realized it because you tried things and they worked. Lucky you. [0:16:05] Steli Efti: That’s amazing and so true. All right. This is how our childhoods influence and played a role in us becoming entrepreneurs. If you have a story that you feel compelled to share with us about your childhood and how it influenced you in a good or bad way, or on entrepreneurship, we’re always happy to hear from our listeners. You can always get in touch with us, steli@close.com, hnshah@gmail.com. Until next time, this is it from us. [0:16:33] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:16:33] /div>The post 488: What Role Does Your Childhood Play in Entrepreneurship? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about whether entrepreneurs are made or born. Is being an entrepreneur something that comes naturally to some people and not to others, or can they can anyone, through education, experience and mentorship, develop the skills needed to become an entrepreneur? This is a question that comes up all the time and one that is not easy to answer. So in this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how entrepreneurs and founders come from all works of life, the intent behind this question, why no one is born to be an entrepreneur and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:17 Why this topic was chosen. 01:14 How entrepreneurs and founders come from all works of life. 01:14 How It’s the hard work that comes after you’ve started that matters. 02:43 The intent behind this question 03:47 How hard work plays a big role in being successful.  04:45 Why this question might matter to some people. 05:57 Why no one is born to be an entrepreneur. 06:31 The biggest fear people have about starting their own business. 07:32 How there’s always an issue to solve when you own your own business. 3 Key Points: Entrepreneurs and founders come from all works of life.Everybody wants answers, but nobody knows anythingIt’s the hard work that comes after you’ve started that matters [0:00:00] 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 Show we’re going to talk about and debate the age old question, entrepreneurs, are they born or are they made? I don’t know if you’ve ever been asked this question, but I definitely have. So let me ask you right out of the bat, Hiten, and we’ve never talked about this before, I think. Entrepreneurs, what do you think, are they made or are they born? [0:00:29] Hiten Shah: What if I said neither? [0:00:31] Steli Efti: Yeah, if you said neither, I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s what would happen. [0:00:37] Hiten Shah: I don’t think this question needs to exist. And I think this question doesn’t need to exist because entrepreneurs, founders, people who start companies come from all walks of life and they come from all kinds of backgrounds. And there is no predictor of success. That’s bottom line. There’s no predictor of success. There’s no high likelihood that this founder, that founder is going to build $1 billion business or even a profitable business. There is no predictor of success. This stuff is hard. And so I think my response to the question of are they born or are they made, is that they are who they are and most are accidental to some extent. Right? They build something and it just works. And in some way, right? After 10 years of nothing working for example, or the first thing that they decide to do, they just get it so right. But that doesn’t make them a genius. It’s the hard work that comes after you start that matters, not necessarily the fact that you started. And this whole born or made almost basically suggests that it’s already taken care of before you start in some way. Even made, it’s like, “Oh, before you start, these are the things you need to do.” Your mate, a founder or an entrepreneur. Or if you’re born with it, it’s like, “Oh, your family comes from a family of entrepreneurs,” or, “you grew up in the Bay Area and you’ve been around it,” or whatever. That’s just not how it works. They come from all walks of life. There’s no real strong pattern. There are things that you can do once you start, there are a lot of things, but I don’t think that means that you’re made or you’re born. I think that just means that you’re in this current existing situation that you’ve got yourself into, whatever it may be. And it’s how you react to what happens. It’s how you react to the world. [0:02:33] Steli Efti: So before I give my two sense on this, what do you think is behind the… What’s the intent behind the question? Why do you think [crosstalk 00:02:42]- [0:02:42] Hiten Shah: Everybody wants answers, but nobody knows anything. Everybody just want to answer. They want to make it. They just want to answer. They want to know that there’s an answer. They want to know that it’s easy. Easy meaning easy, at least to have an answer of one or the other. That some people want a reason why they’re not being successful yet or they haven’t been, right? These are the reasons. [0:03:02] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:03:02] Hiten Shah: People are just curious. Right? Curiosity killed the cat is kind of the saying that comes to mind and it’s true. It’s like, the more curious you are about these things that are unanswerable, the more you’re wasting your time. Why waste your time with a debate? That would be my response. Like, who cares? Literally, if I was in a one-on-one with somebody in a meeting and they asked me this, I’d be like, “Who cares?” My answer wouldn’t be neither. It would be, “Who cares? What are you trying to figure out when you ask that question? Are we in some philosophical land about something that’s not philosophical?” Because look, at the end of the day it’s hard work. Even if you get lucky, it’s still hard work, because it’s not that your luck runs out, I’m not trying to say anything like that. It’s just that even if you get lucky, you still have to make it work beyond whatever you got lucky with. [0:03:51] Steli Efti: Well, let me play devil’s advocate. I think why it matters is that if they are born and not made, before going into entrepreneurship, I should figure out what are the characteristics of somebody that becomes successful in entrepreneurship. And if I don’t have these characteristic, I should not entertain the idea of doing that. Right? I mean, I think a lot of motivation behind this question is to go, “Is there a art type of person that will succeed as an entrepreneur, so it’s kind of part of their DNA? Because if there is, then I could look for that in myself or in others to determine if they should be entrepreneurs or not.” Right? Or if I’m going to be successful in it or not, or if I’m made for it or not versus I made it work. I think that a lot of the why this question matters to people is because they want to figure out if this is a talent, like being a good singer or being a good athlete. Obviously not every human being on planet earth could become a NBA basketball player just by our height. Right? Or some other kind of physical attributes. Not everybody could become a world-class singer because not all of our voices are equally good. So is entrepreneurship a type of talent that I have and can develop further or is it not a type of talent at all so anyone could do it? I think that that’s really what’s behind that question because people fear becoming entrepreneurs and failing because they never had a chance to becoming good at this. Or maybe they fear helping others or investing in others. They could never succeed because they were not born to be entrepreneurs. [0:05:45] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean I just don’t agree. I don’t think there is a born-to-be entrepreneur because there’s just so much variation as to what an entrepreneur is. And so there is no born. To anybody that’s worried about that, there is no born and the made part is like, I don’t even know what that means. I think the biggest fear, biggest issue that people have is, “I can’t do this.” And another one that’s related to that is, “I’m not right for this.” But entrepreneurship, starting a business, there’s no, “I can’t do this,” or, “I’m not right for this.” It’s just more like, “Do I want to put myself through what it’s going to take to make something that successful?” And we don’t know what it’s going to take. You don’t know when you start, what it’s going to take for you to make your business successful. You just don’t know. And so you just have to have some belief that you want to be in the scenario where, or the situation or job, if you want to call it a job, although I don’t, or career, although it’s not a career either, but in this sort of situation where you put yourself in a place where you’re getting knocked around all the time with new things, new challenges. And you just have to figure them out. And it doesn’t matter how successful your business is, there’s still a new challenge waiting for you the next day, if not the next hour. And the bigger the company gets, the bigger the organization is, the more of those challenges are there. And so there’s a lot of potential self-work and personal development that comes into play that you can never think about it logically and rationally like, “Oh, they are born.” There’s no reality. That’s an unreality. It’s not like that. Just look at all the variation of founders. There’s no way that it’s like, you’re born with it. It’s more like it’s Maybelline. [0:07:40] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:07:41] Hiten Shah: Exactly. [0:07:41] Steli Efti: I think that people want to identify certain characteristics that they think would lead to somebody being an entrepreneur, like, “Oh, they have a higher propensity for risk. They’re more risk-takers or they’re more…” [0:07:55] Hiten Shah: Yeah, but still, most of the characteristics can be learned. [0:07:59] Steli Efti: That’s true. [0:08:00] Hiten Shah: Least not all of them. All of them. I mean, look at you dude. You’re the one that tells people they can learn sales, right? [0:08:07] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:08:08] Hiten Shah: There’s no characteristics, you just learn it. And the thing is, and this is my point, right? Is you have to do what you have to do in order to be successful. The reason people fail is they just weren’t willing to do what they had to do in order to be successful. I’m not even being harsh. They just weren’t willing to do it. They didn’t know they could do it even or that they should do it. That’s a different thing. But most of the time the success and failure is a very thin line. There’s a very thin line in the difference and it just has to do with what are you willing to do what was required of you in order to be successful? [0:08:42] Steli Efti: Yeah. So you know what I love, because I took the devil’s advocate role, you got a lot more passionate pushing your position, as if I’m not on your side. So here’s my take on this- [0:08:56] Hiten Shah: No, I don’t think there are sides. Yes, what’s your take? [0:08:56] Steli Efti: But my take is, I mean, I agree with your general sentiment of this is irrelevant. We’re circle-jerking. This is a philosophical question in a field that is very practical and pragmatic. It doesn’t really matter. Pondering this will not help the world or make you better in anything. But if I was forced to give an answer, I think they’re more made than born because I don’t think entrepreneurship is a talent. It’s not height, it’s not weight, it’s not your muscular structure. I mean, to some degree, entrepreneurs made sure if you’re… It’s complicated because your personality or your health or where in the world you were born or your family circumstances or your environment or whatever, your DNA, maybe you have a markup that’s more aggressive dominant and that will lead you to entrepreneurship. But it’s never that because as you said, there’s a million different people that have been successful entrepreneurs that are completely different personality types, completely different upbringings, completely different DNAs from… Some people got really sick and that made them become entrepreneurs. All right? Find a solution to their sickness. Some people are very shy and that helped them. In hindsight, they’re like, “Oh, I was a really shy boy. That made me read a lot. That made me be really interested in science and that made me step into entrepreneurship to invent this thing.” When the other person would be like, “I always loved people and I was always a salesperson and always like a super public, and that’s why it was natural for me to become an entrepreneur and lead a group of people and be the messenger.” And so I think that people can look at their life and go, “I’ve heard this before. People were like, ‘I could never work with somebody. Since I was a little child, I knew I was born to be an entrepreneur because I can never work for somebody else.'” I think that you can look at your life and come up with a narrative that says, “I was born to do this,” but I don’t think there is a naturally born type of person that is more predicated to become successful as an entrepreneur than another type of person. There’s all kinds of types of people and types of backgrounds that can succeed or can fail at being an entrepreneur. So if I had to choose, I would say you made yourself a successful entrepreneur more than you’re born to be one. But I do think people are born with certain natural talents or tendencies that they could utilize in entrepreneurship, but it doesn’t mean that only the people with those tendencies and talents can be successful as entrepreneurs. I don’t think that that really exists. And I think it’s one of these questions that’s fun to entertain, but at the same time, it points to trying to get an answer, as you said at the beginning of the episode, to tie it in as we wrap this up, trying to answer a question that really is irrelevant and maybe points out more to your insecurities and your doubts and you never find an answer to those than to what really will help you succeed or fail at this game we call entrepreneurship. [0:12:12] Hiten Shah: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. Don’t try to find an answer to this question. I don’t think there is one. [0:12:17] Steli Efti: Just go and do the work. [0:12:18] Hiten Shah: That’s right. That’s right. [0:12:20] Steli Efti: That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:23] Hiten Shah: Cheers. [0:12:23] The post 487: Are Entrepreneurs Made or Born? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how Zoom became the best web conferencing product in a decade. Zoom is a popular video conferencing tool used by a lot of companies around the world, from small startups to big enterprises. However, the story of how Zoom became so popular is quite remarkable, as they were going into a very competitive niche when they started. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how Zoom got started, what makes it so competitive in a crowded market, Steli’s initial thoughts on Zoom and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:25 Why this topic was chosen. 01:15 Steli’s initial thoughts on Zoom. 03:11 How Zoom just works. 04:48 Some not so obvious things that Zoom did. 05:58 How Zoom got started. 06:20 What Hiten learned while researching Zoom. 06:37 What made Zoom succeed in a crowded market. 09:00 How difficult it must have been for the founders to make Zoom a success. 09:59 What makes Zoom competitive.  3 Key Points: One of the most interesting thing about zoom is that they went into an existing category and set the bar on reliability.What Zoom did was very subtle.We use Zoom extensively within our company. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat we’re actually going to talk about, I think a company that both Steli and I are big fans of, the company Zoom. I’m sure many of you listening are also big fans of the company. Many of you might know, I do these long write ups about companies just because I feel like a historian sometimes and I like really documenting kind of the history of a company and give my take on it. The company I did a little bit ago was Zoom, and it’s a blog post, it’s on the FYI blog. It’s at usefyi.com/zoom, Z-O-O-M dash history. And you’ll be able to get to it and you’ll read, I don’t know how many words it is, probably five, six, 7,000 words or something like that about Zoom, if you’re interested. But you can also listen to us now as we talk about Zoom. One of the most interesting things about the company to me is that they went into an existing category and actually set the bar on something very basic, which is reliability. It’s really reliability with this idea of video conferencing and being able to see people on video, and even the audio part of it. Now, ironically or not, we’re also on Zoom right now as we’re recording. [0:01:18] Steli Efti: That’s very true. Now, this is the funny thing, when Zoom first launched, or when I first became aware of them, I remember, and there’s an important lesson in this, I remember thinking, who wants to go into the video conferencing or web conferencing space now? Right? [0:01:43] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:01:44] Steli Efti: It was both, although I knew that all the web conferencing solutions sucked, it was not a single one that was out there that I thought was awesome or that I knew anybody else thinking is awesome. Although I knew all that, there was still something inside of me that went, this is a crowded and established market. There’s a few winners. Who’d want to get into this right now? Then I also remember checking out Zoom and the first impression … Now, I’m probably not as sophisticated or as smart at evaluating products on day one, but when I looked at it, it was not immediately intuitively clear to me why this is amazing. I was searching for something that stood out. But what Zoom did was very subtle, right? The interface was not different. They didn’t do anything that was flashy, right, and in your face, “Wow, they’re innovating because they’re doing web conferencing with [inaudible 00:02:41].” No, it was basic web conferencing. But from the start you realize that this kind of just works. Then when you used it a couple of times, you’re like, “This actually works every time. I’ve had five web conferencing calls and none of them had issues.” Then you had to start using it a little bit to start realizing this is actually really good. Then you started noticing little details that it just seemed like the team behind it was a bit more thoughtful. Although it was a simple product when they started, simple from a usability point of view, it seemed to have answers to some problems that were there for years and years and years, that no other competitor on the technology side of things could solve. So that was kind of my experience with Zoom early on was, “Huh, why would you want to go into that market?” And then, “It seems too simple. What’s different about it?” Then, “Oh, this just works always. Well shit, let’s just use this forever.” Right? We’ve never looked back. We use Zoom extensively within the company. We use Zoom extensively as a sales tool within talking to our prospects and our customers. We obviously use Zoom extensively and on this podcast to do the recordings between Hetin and I. But that’s my perspective, which is very far removed. I didn’t do the research. I didn’t do the detailed work that you did. What am I missing? What are the things that are not as obvious that they did? Or what was your analysis in a piece of like the details that made Zoom become such an amazing company in a space that when they entered it was pretty established already? [0:04:28] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So the founder, Eric had worked at WebEx, and he had worked at WebEx as an engineer. The thing is he, I mean he was part of the team that built WebEx and actually that company ended up being sold to Cisco, and basically Cisco wasn’t improving the product. And so yeah, I think Eric just had an itch to scratch. It was an itch about, “Hey, this product’s not being improved. It needs to be improved.” And he quit and went after it and decided to work on improving it. This is why we end up with this sort of game changing product in a very crowded and an early kind of online market of web conferencing. It’s amazing. When you look at the old homepage, it was literally cloud HD video meetings. They had an iPhone on that home page and literally it said start video meeting. It was free for iPad, iPhone, Windows. So that was it. It was just a very simple value proposition early on. And you know what? The biggest thing is what you just said, which is compared to any other alternative, excuse me, it just works and it works better. What I learned as I started digging in and it has become a little more common knowledge is they spent a lot of time, I think the first couple of years, it might’ve even been prelaunch, perfecting the technology and building a bunch of proprietary technology to make sure that the product worked really, really well. Better than the competitors. So what I think is when he said they weren’t improving it and I need to come out and do that is basically reliability, something really fundamental. And so that was the key. The key was the fact that they spent all their effort solving the big problem that everyone had with all the video conferencing products that came before Zoom. [0:06:57] Steli Efti: That’s crazy- [0:06:58] Hiten Shah: That is simple. Reliability. Make sure it just works. [0:07:03] Steli Efti: See the interesting one funny note is that when you said, we’ve talked about WebEx. I thought, there’re some listeners right now that don’t even know WebEx. Have never heard of it, right? Because there’s kind of a younger generation of startup founders that have just lived with Zoom forever or with whatever, maybe they were using Skype or something else more heavily. That’s another thing that I notice, a lot of personal use was Skype and then Zoom really killed a lot of that as well. But WebEx used to be the game in town. It used to be the dominant web conferencing tool and everybody hated it but it was the most dominant player in town. Then I remember Adobe came into that market heavily with the rise of Flash, and they did a Flash based web conferencing thing. Then there was some Indian start up that did an open source based web conferencing thing that Salesforce ended up buying and then never doing anything with. So many others. BlueJeans, I don’t even know. Blue jeans I think is a newer player that’s still successful and around but I’m not sure. So many players, but Zoom, I wonder how hard it was for them to pitch people. Oh we’re going to do web conferencing. Okay, what’s different about it? It’s just going to work. Okay, but what’s different about it? How are we going to kill all the competition that’s already hundreds of millions in revenue and has massive sales teams? It’s just going to work. [0:08:35] Hiten Shah: What’s going to work? [0:08:36] Steli Efti: But why does it matter? What is the marketing going to be? What is the virality? How is the distribution? We’re not just going to kill all these other solutions even when they suck. They have all these advantages in terms of sales and distribution and marketing and this, that and the other. What are we going to do? Well ours just going to work. And then how difficult was it to convince investors and other people to join and work for years, as you said pre-launch, on building the stuff to make it just work? There’s a big lesson in here, but I am amazed that they were able to pull this off. [0:09:15] Hiten Shah: It’s insane. The thing is like when you look at this business of Zoom, there’s one key advantage that it has that the other folks weren’t able to figure out, which is their R&D cost is a lot lower than any other company in the market. And it’s probably a lot lower than any other SAS company that’s gone public in recent years. The reason for that is that the R&D happens in China and it has since the early days. [0:09:42] Steli Efti: What? [0:09:42] Hiten Shah: Yeah, the tech they needed to build was built there. That I think gives them a massive capital advantage where it’s just cheaper for them to build their product and apparently they can build faster too. Because you walk into conference rooms now and it’s powered by Zoom. There’s some hardware and stuff like that. It’s not like Zoom is just software online, even though that’s what most of us see it as. So this is a really fascinating thing, because the business is basically predicated on really good technology that just works and also that the costs for them to build that technology, it’s much lower than most companies. So, that combination is really the key. That’s really the key to the whole business is the fact that they can build product cheaper than anybody else. [0:10:42] Steli Efti: Incredible. I mean, Zoom is one of my favorite companies of the past decade, especially in the B2B world. Hit people up again with the URL for the blog post if they want to go even more in depth on the how Zoom became the best of our conference and product in a decade. [0:10:59] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it’s a usefyi.com/zoom-history and you’ll see it. [0:11:07] Steli Efti: Beautiful. And then what … Oh go ahead. [0:11:09] Hiten Shah: No, I’m just going to say. It’s there. It’s long. Read it. [0:11:14] Steli Efti: Definitely read it. Then one thing in Close related news, so I mentioned Close, my company and my team, we’re big fans of Zoom. We use Zoom extensively in our sales process. We know that screen-sharing and web conferencing and video conferencing is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the sales process. But up until now it was very disconnected from the CRM world. So you use your CRM and then when you wanted to have a screen share or online demo or video call with prospects, that information that happened in Zoom was completely disconnected from all the other information you had in your CRM. We wanted to change that. So we just launched the tightest and the best integration with Zoom that any CRM in the world has, which basically allows you to within the CRM launch a Zoom room, have a video call or have a demo and all the information of that demo is automatically tracked and put into the CRM. So you have statistics on how many demos you’ve given, what the show rate is. You can watch the recordings of those demos. You can get all the information around any kind of communication that happens within Zoom natively in your CRM without doing any manual data entry. So if you use Zoom extensively in a sales context, you might want to check out our recent integration and check out close.com. All right. That’s it from us for this episode. Check out the article. Checkout Close and our integration with Zoom and big fans of Zoom. What they’ve done the test. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned here that are very subtle when it comes to entrepreneurship and startups. So definitely a company to watch and learn from. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:56] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:12:56] The post 486: How Zoom Became the Best Web Conferencing Product in a Decade appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Product Hunt do’s and don’ts. Product Hunt has become the ultimate place where founders go to launch their products to an audience that’s passionate about technology. While launching on Product Hunt can be great for your product, there are some do’s and dont’s you should be aware of if you decide to launch your product on Product Hunt In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten how Product Hunt is a strong community to push something out, the importance of finding a way to engage with the community, how to launch your product properly and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:17 Why this topic was chosen. 01:53 How Product Hunt is a strong community to push something out. 02:25 The importance of finding a way to engage the Product Hunt community. 02:59 Various ways to engage the community. 03:03 How to present your product on Product Hunt. 03:24 The importance of timing on Product Hunt. 05:43 How to launch your product properly. 06:19 Why you should be prepared to promote your page. 06:40 How founders should think about promoting their product launch. 3 Key Points: Most internet-related products are launched on Product Hunt today.If you can find a way to engage the community, that would be really smart.If you know there’s going to be a popular launch, you shouldn’t launch on that day. [0:00:04] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:06] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about Product Hunt do’s and don’ts. The reason for that is because I ended up getting contacted sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes it just comes in waves, to submit a company, post a company to Product Hunt. Or a feature, or a marketing tool, or something like that. I tend to have a response to people right away after I check out what they have. The biggest do is make sure you do your homework about what’s required when you need to submit to Product Hunt because there’s a bunch of stuff that’s required. There’s like a title, a sort of tagline, a description, a bunch of images or a video if you have it, ideally, the makers and the categories you want to be in. There’s just a number of things that are required. If you don’t pay attention, you’re not going to … Basically you’re going to come to me, or anyone else that might post for you, if you want someone to post for you, and they’re just going to come back to you and say, “Hey, I need these things.” So just be ready for those things. So that’s my first two. I’m sure you have some questions, Steli, or at least some idea of what we should be talking about here, because I could talk about this probably all day. [0:01:31] Steli: Yeah. Well first of all, I think that it’s important for to understand … I mean, would you say that most software products, most internet related products they’re launching on Product Hunt. It’s become a more and more popular platform to launch early access or to launch a new feature to launch a brand new product into the world. Right? It’s an exceptionally strong community to put something new out? [0:02:01] Hiten: Yeah, absolutely. I think, the community is great. I think there’s a lot to say about that. The biggest thing is like if you can find a way to engage the community, that would be really smart. That’s what I would highly recommend. But yeah, the community is great. I’m a big fan. I think it’s important, make sure that whatever you’re posting, you understand how it can be valuable for people in general. You understand who it could be valuable for, you understand kind of what it is that you’re providing, and it comes across in the things that you put out, whether it’s the images or even the first comment. So another do, is make sure that one of the makers has a really strong first comment. Spent some time on it, really think through it. Think through what the messages related to what you’re sharing. If it’s an actual product itself, you can even talk about some of the things that took to actually build it out, to technically, or whatever. That can be really helpful to you as well. [0:03:02] Steli: Cool. So on the do’s, make sure you understand all the assets that you need to have prepared for it the title, the images, the video, the description, all that. Then make sure that as the maker, you have a comment that you’re going to place that is basically your voice as the maker and your main message as a maker to the community, to the people that will be checking out the new product. What are some other kind of do’s and don’ts? How much does timing matter? For instance, is the weekend better than during the week? Is Monday a good day? Are there good days and bad days? Are there good times and bad times? Does timing matter at all? [0:03:45] Hiten: Yeah, some people say it does. I mean if you think about it, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are probably the most busy days on Product Hunt. So what I would usually suggest to people is, if you feel like it can be a really popular launch because you have a lot of people or using it that you’re going to email and let them know you’re on Product Hunt now, or you just feel like it’s a big launch. Then doing it on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday might be a good idea. If you don’t think about the launch you’re doing, it’s more of a sort of a little bit of a smaller launch, then actually would I recommend doing it on what I would call an off day. So that’d be a Thursday or Friday, or even a Saturday and Sunday. [0:04:31] Steli: What about, what I’ve seen a number of times in the past is, great product, company put a lot of effort and a lot of time in the launch, and then quote unquote, they got unlucky and they launched the same day that, I don’t know like fucking Tesla, Apple, or some other company … Like a number of other big launches are happening in the same day as yours, and yours just has no chance because all the attention is flocks to some of these bigger launches, is that an excuse? Is that not a problem because you could still have a killer Product Hunt, product launch if you’re number three, number four, number five of the day? Or is that something that people should pay attention to? Don’t launch on the day that Apple is launching four new products or that whatever? [0:05:18] Hiten: Yeah, if you know there’s going to be a popular launch, you should not launch on that day. If you happen to be in a scenario where you launched it and it is that day, what I like to do is make sure that we have communications we can do, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, any of our channels. We kind of sequence that communication so that in case like we launch, usually right after midnight, or by 1:00 AM, or whatever, of the day, that we get the maximum amount of exposure. We also are able to use our own marketing, our own channels, our own ability to reach users, customers, whatever to them know that we’re on there. We might do that throughout the day. There might be like some final shots that we do towards the middle or end of the day, depending on where we’re at in the charts. Because the whole idea is like you want to be as close to number one as possible. I mean why wouldn’t you? Right. So make sure that you’re prepared to promote the page. Basically the key is not to just rely on Product Hunt to promote you, but also promote your own. [0:06:24] Steli: How should makers of founders think about the idea of them promoting their Product Hunt launch? should they do a ton of social media? Should they send out an email to the email list? [0:06:40] Hiten: I would do all of the above. I would make sure you’re ready to go after it. For me I wouldn’t, I would have one link in that communication and that link is straight to the Product Hunt page. I mean if you’re on Product Hunt, it’s your job to make sure that you are promoting yourself to everybody that needs to know that you launched it and you’re encouraging them to leave a comment. You’re not supposed to ask for upvotes according to the Product Hunt rules and guidelines. So don’t do that because they reserve the right to do whatever they want, if they see you doing stuff like that. But at the end of the day, you want engagement on your page, you want to think about that. Like you want to reply to every comment, you want to really be there that day. So the other mistake I see founders make is they’re not there that day. It can be someone from your team too. It doesn’t matter, bring along your team. It’s fine. But like you have to be there that day. Replying to comments, having a really great comment yourself, being really thoughtful with the audience because it’s a community. It’s a community first. It’s not just some kind of like advertising thing or free whatever. It’s a community first and so treat it as such. [0:07:53] Steli: Sweet. What are some other mistakes? I remember for a time people would cold email us quite frequently based on some Product Hunt launch we had made, so they were scraping Product Hunt, then they would put together these lists of people that were in the top five or top 10, and then asking for collaboration or asking them for whatever. Like just it seemed like people were trying to game the system, or use the information that’s on Product Hunt to further their ideas. Have people done some really stupid things like just spam too many people? Then there were at the top, but like all of a sudden Product Hunt decided to delete them? Or in the comments when somebody was critical, start arguing with people or being shitty? Or like what have you seen this kind of like, stories not to be repeated where people really like just messed it up, and they could have had a great Product Hunt launch day and they just- [0:08:50] Hiten: Well, most people mess it up when they try to ask for upvotes. It’s just not something that Product Hunt … It’s something they frown upon. Right? So don’t ask for upvotes. I mean, it’s just a rule they have, right? You’re on their platform. That’s their rule. So some people get really blatant with that. The spamming, like if Product Hunt finds out because people are complaining about you spamming, that can be a situation too. That could definitely be something that I’m sure they might not like. That being said, it’s their community, they’re the ones that sort of moderate it. So you know the stories, I don’t hear them as much as I just see different things happen with the voting and all that stuff. Plus like they’re monitoring the voting too. So if you have votes coming in from certain places and there’s a ton of those votes and things like that, they could demote you in the listing even if you have technically the most raw number of votes. So I just see, one, I see people spending too much time worrying about that, to be honest.They should just follow the basic guidelines, don’t ask for upvotes, ask for engagement, ask for it people to actually be thoughtful, leave a review on Product Hunt, et cetera. So I think that’s really important. Number two, I think it’s really critical to just think of it as like, this is a community and we’re going to engage with the community and whatever we’re going to do to get promoted, and all that will be … It’s kind of like a lot of the work is set up beforehand. Your email list is a certain size because of the signups you have or whatever. Well use it, and if it’s not big enough prelaunch, then like go deeper with the people who are using your product and let them know, “Hey, we’re going to be launching our product and we’d love your support. Let’s talk about how you’re using the product,” et cetera. So doing good hygiene around like just whether it’s customer development interviews or just like engaging your own customer base. Those are the things that matter. Not these things where you’re going to go spray and pray to like people like me or whoever to upvote your product. That happens a lot, like I get a lot of DMs on Twitter, “Oh, check out my product, check on my product, it’s some product.” I’m like, Cool, okay. I don’t have time to check out everyone’s product.” But like, “That’s cool. So you have to think about the people you’re hitting up to and like, do they really have time for that, right? Like would you think they’re going to do that? Or are they going to tell Product Hunt that you’re spamming people? I don’t know. I don’t tend to care. I don’t tell Product Hunt that you’re spamming or anything. It just like another like, “Okay, great, just because I can upvote you or share you, or I have a lot of followers on Product Hunt or whatever,” it doesn’t mean I’m going to upvote your product. It just doesn’t work like that. [0:11:27] Steli: Yeah. That points to just a general philosophy of how about you built relationships with people over a long period of time and you add value to their life before you ask for something, right? It’s like you have put together a list of quote unquote influencers, and then you selfishly have a launch date of your product. You’ve never engaged with any of them. You’ve never interacted with any of them, but you think it’s a good idea to cold email or cold DM a hundred people and be like, “Hey, you’re really important and you can help me. Here’s a link to my thing. Please. Upvote it,” and you assume people will be like, “Well yeah. I’ve never heard of you, I don’t know anything about you, but I’m going to stop anything else that I’m doing and I’m going to follow your instructions and click this right now and read through it and use it and then share the news with the world.” That’s a very unreasonable expectation. Right? Versus other people that might put in the work and through the six months of building their product are building relationships maybe with five or six influences that truly can help them that are relevant. Sharing early x’s, asking for advice, giving feedback, and then eventually it’s like, “Hey we’ve been interacting, communicating for six, seven months. You’ve been really helpful throughout the entire journey. You’ve given us all this feedback, all this advice, and now we’re launching on Product Hunt. If you have any feedback, any advice, anything to share, that’d be really appreciated.” That’s a different … And still maybe you just don’t have time that day or that week to help, but that’s a very different proposition, that’s somebody you know, that’s somebody you’ve helped, that’s somebody you’ve been in communication with for a long time, and now that they’re launching, there’s a big possibility that you’re going to be like, “You know what? I have a soft spot for these guys, right? I have a soft spot for this person, and if I think that they’ve built something great, I want to support it.” Right? A lot of times people don’t want to put in the work and the time to build relationships, they just think, “Let’s put together a list of people that selfishly could help us, and are influential, and surely if we email all of them, a bunch of them will do what we tell them to do,” and that never works. [0:13:47] Hiten: Nope, that’s right. Yep. It doesn’t work. [0:13:49] Steli: All right, so this is it for this episode of do’s and don’ts on Product Hunt launches. I want to highlight and give recommendations to our listeners that want to learn more about how to think strategically around their product launch. There’s a bunch of other episodes that we’ve made around this topic, but I’ll give you two recommendations. One, how to launch your product, episode number 254, so you type in thestartupchat.com 254 in Google, it’ll throw you right into that episode. The second episode that I would recommend people checking out is the episode on what to do post launch, that’s episode 329. So episode 254 and 329, two episodes that are relevant to anybody that is about to launch their product. This is it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:14:39] Hiten: See you. [0:14:39] The post 485: Product Hunt Do’s and Don’ts appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about mistakes to avoid when trying to sell your startup. In the startup world, it’s very common for founders to sell their startups at some stage. While this can be an exciting time for the founders, it’s important that you avoid certain mistakes so that things go as smooth as possible. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about common mistakes to avoid when selling your startup, why companies buy other companies, how not to negotiate a deal and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:14 Why this topic was chosen. 01:18 On really big mistake to avoid. 01:33 Why you should think about the reason people buy companies. 02:54 Why you need to know what you’re bring to the table. 03:31 How not to negotiate a deal. 05:29 Why you need to know what you want to optimise for and what position you’re are in. 06:00 The importance of prioritising. 06:45 How emotions can get in the way of getting a deal. 08:15 Why you should learn to disconnect your emotions. 3 Key Points: Companies are bought not soldBuys are strategic.You need to know what you’re bringing to the table [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 mistakes to avoid when trying to sell your startup. So here’s the reason why I want to talk to you about this, Hiton. Well one, I think it’s compelling content and people are going to be interested in this. Lots of people that are running a startup might want to sell it one day. And currently it’s kind of part of my world because I have some friends that are in the process of selling their startup, and I’ve been very much involved in that and observing from the sidelines their approach and their strategies. And also, from my perspective, I’ve been observing a bunch of mistakes they’re making or have made. So I thought, and I know that you’ve helped a ton of people sell their startup, so I thought that we could provide some value to our listeners out there. So, let me start with asking you, if you think about the more recent examples, or maybe there’s just a top-of-mind. This is a big mistake most people make when they’re trying to sell their startup, and if there’s somebody that’s listening to us that’s going to be in this situation, this is the one mistake I’d like them to avoid. What comes to your mind immediately on this topic? [0:01:21] Hiten Shah: Yeah, the typical thing is that companies are bought, not sold. So, you got to think about, why would someone need your company, why would they buy it? Even if you’re going through a banker or one of the firms that helps with that sort of opportunity of selling your company, you still need a reason why someone would buy it. And I think that’s my number one tip is, if you know that and you’re going to sell your company either way, whether people are coming to you or you have to use third party and go to them, you have to think about this idea that companies are bought, they’re not sold. So why would someone buy it? What impact are you and your business going to have for them? And that’s often not thought about enough in the right ways. Because the best buys are strategic, not because they’re going to buy you and acquihire you as they say, and then shut down whatever you’re working on. [0:02:22] Steli Efti: That makes a ton of sense and that’s killer advice. I think the thing that’s top of mind for me when it comes to mistake to avoid what you’re trying to sell your startup, is … I mean, this is true in many different situations, but in this situation it’s very important. You need to know what your line in the sand is, and you need to know what you bring to the negotiation. And which you’re willing to lose and what you’re willing to gain for it. What’s your appetite for risk, how hard are you going to negotiate? What’s your position and leverage to even negotiate really hard? Because people are usually very confused when it comes to this. From a recent example, my friends are negotiating selling their company, there’s a new buyer that pops up that they culturally liked better than the main buyer that we’re talking to. They got very excited and they’re like, “This new buyer is offering us something that’s going to feel more exciting and more natural, and that it’s a partner that we’re more happier around selling our company to and working with closely.” But they are already super late in a situation where they’re about to run out of money. There’s all this pressure, they don’t really have much to negotiate with. And then they get this buyer that’s very interested and it’s very honest with them on why they would buy them and how much money, and what their possibilities are in terms of an acquisition. And then they’re talking to me and they’re like, “Well, how can we squeeze every dollar out of this deal?” And I go, “Well, do you guys want to really poker super high to get the maximum amount of money, or are you trying to get the fastest outcome possible? Because you’re a few weeks away from running out of money and you like this buy a lot, why would you want to tell them a number that’s three times higher than what you think they want to offer you to start a long drawn-out process to optimize on money, when it seems to me you might need to optimize for time. Unless you really don’t care, unless you’re in a situation where you go, ‘If we can’t get this amount of money, we’d rather just go bankrupt.'” And it’s those kinds of situations where people are confused. They’re like, “Let’s try to maximize for money.” Although they’re not in a situation to maximize for money. And what happened in that case is they gave that potential buyer a super high number, and their buyer came back and said, “No thanks. I don’t think this is going to work for us, but best of luck.” And it’s like, “Of course. You have days before bankruptcy and you’re playing high stakes poker, although you very much care about selling the business and you …” You need to know your risk appetite. You need to know what is the outcome you want to optimize for, and what’s the position you’re in. And if you’re not in a position to negotiate hard, don’t negotiate hard. [0:05:35] Hiten Shah: Right, right. [0:05:36] Steli Efti: Because if you’re not in a position where you have a lot of time, don’t act like you have a lot of time, optimize for time. [0:05:42] Hiten Shah: That’s right. [0:05:42] Steli Efti: Just be aware what the cards are that you have and what’s important to you in terms of outcome. I find that oftentimes people, they’re confused. They’re trying to get everything or they get overly excited and they’re like, “Oh, how we get as much money as possible?” When the reality of your situation is, you have very little time and you probably can’t optimize to get the maximum amount of money because that shouldn’t be your number one priority right now. So really knowing what your priorities are and what the cards are that you really have at the table, I think is important. It seems so obvious, but almost always when I see somebody struggling with [inaudible] it’s because of that. [0:06:26] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think, this has a lot to do with the idea of getting really excited about something. And it’s either excited about whoever’s going to buy you, or excited about what you can get out of them. But instead, think of it as a business transaction where there’s a value exchange, and that’s what you’re really aiming to do. So I think that excitement, that emotion, can really get in the way of getting a deal. Just because you get really anxious, you get nervous, you get excited, you get all these emotions when at the end of the day, the buying party is typically at some point going to treat you like a transaction. So don’t get hurt or disappointed when they do that, instead be prepared for that. There’s a friend of mine going through this right now, and it’s a pretty large acquisition and he’s fine. He knows how to deal with this high-level. But at the end of the day, this is a deal that the other company really wants to do. It’s very strategic for them, they’ve been wanting to do it. But at the end, at the last hour, they’re throwing things in that you have to negotiate. So the whole goal and key there is to not flinch. If there was something in there you need to negotiate, you figure out how to negotiate it and get it out of there. Or, figure out the give and take. And this is a deal that the other party, the buying party, wants to happen. It’s not a deal where they’re willing to let it go. And yet, they are throwing these things in there because to them it’s a transaction, and so to you it should be a transaction too. [0:08:09] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think learning to disconnect your emotions and not attach yourself to the idea of the sale is really important, because any number of startups that have entered a negotiation to sell their company … I don’t know what the percentages are, honestly, I don’t think that anybody has true numbers on this. But my guess would be that it’s a high percentage, probably 60, 70, 80% of the time a negotiation doesn’t end up resulting in a sale. [0:08:43] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:08:44] Steli Efti: You just need to be passionate about trying to make it happen, but emotionally you need to assume this deal will not go through. [0:08:52] Hiten Shah: Correct. [0:08:53] Steli Efti: So you can be rational and you don’t attach yourself to the outcome. That’s very outside your hands and a low likely proposition in most situations. The other thing I’ll say is, communication. In this specific case, and I think this is something I’ve seen before as well. Sometimes there’s a lot that you will not communicate clearly enough to understand what their process is to buying you, and where in the process you are at any given time. And there’s a lot of guesswork. “Oh, we had three calls. They told us there’s just one more call or one more thing they need to do. We did that thing, we’ve been waiting for a week. We haven’t heard anything. We’re not sure what’s going on.” Taking it up on you to be very proactive with your communication at any step of the way to ask them, “Where in the process are we? How many more steps? Who are the stakeholders? What’s going to take to get us from where we are right now to a final decision and a transaction?” And to manage that process, to overcommunicate and force the buyer to communicate with you so you have real information to understand what’s going on, versus a lot of the time founders feel awkward asking those questions and so they’d rather assume, “Oh I think they’re going to make a decision soon.” Versus, “They told us they’re making a decision Wednesday morning at a board meeting, and so by 11:00 AM, we will know.” It’s two very different things. One is information the buyer is giving you, and the other one is something you are assuming or you are guessing or you are hoping based on some information, and then you adding a bunch of interpretation on top of that information. So make sure that you have real clarity on their process, and that you consistently check in if that process is still in play, if something has changed, and where in the process you are. And what it will take and who will be involved in all the steps necessary to make the transaction happen, so you don’t fly blind and you spend as little time possible in that sitting around waiting, hoping, thinking, interpreting, assuming stage. Which is where unfortunately I see a lot of founders spend most of the time when they’re in the process of selling their company. [0:11:30] Hiten Shah: Yep. That makes sense. Yeah. [0:11:33] Steli Efti: Cool. [0:11:33] Hiten Shah: I think that’s a wrap on this one. [0:11:35] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think so too. [0:11:36] Hiten Shah: Lots of things about M and A, yeah. [0:11:37] Steli Efti: Yeah. If you are in the process of selling a startup, or if you’re ever going to find yourself in negotiations with a potential buyer and you have never done this before, and you’re like, “Ah, I need some more experienced people in my corner, somebody to help me,” we’re always happy to help and be in your corner. You can always get in touch with us, hmshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com. We’re always happy to help. And, this is it for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:03] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:12:03] The post 484: Want to Sell Your Startup? Avoid These Mistakes! appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the perfect onboarding plan for a new hire. Making a new hire is an exciting time for a team, however, it’s really to get onboarding right, as the experience that a new hire gets at the early stages determines if he’s going to succeed in the team or not. So in this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how Hiten handles onboarding of new team members, why you want to make new team members feel like they’re in the right place, How some onboarding plans set up new team members for failure and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:26 Why this topic was chosen. 01:14 How Hiten handles onboarding of new team members. 02:11 What Hiten’s onboarding process looks like. 02:45 Why you want to make new team members feel like they’re in the right place. 03:33 Why you should make sure that they can get to work as soon as possible.  04:35 How isolating it can be for new team members. 05:28 Why getting onboarding right is very important. 09:03 How some onboarding plans set up new team members for failure. 10:00 What you should do if your startup fails or is failing. 3 Key Points: We want to make sure that new team members feel supported.You make sure that they get to know the team.You want to make them feel like they’re in the right place [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 the perfect onboarding plan, the first 30, 60, 90 days of a new hire. What are the best practices to make sure that, once you’ve gone through the intense exercise of recruiting and hiring and finally making an offer and that offer being accepted. And having this new team member that you are now bringing into the company, into your startup, how do you make sure that you onboard these people in the most successful way possible to really set them up for success and longevity? And what are some mistakes that companies, teams and founders make when it comes to onboarding new hires that we have made or witnessed painfully and you should avoid? So let me ask you first, Hiten, when you hire somebody new, do you have a formal 30, 60, 90 day onboarding plan? Do you do that with everybody or is it something that with some roles you do, sometimes you don’t or? Is it something that you don’t like and just out of principle, you never do with anybody? [0:01:07] Hiten Shah: I don’t know if it’s like a 30, 60, 90 days. I like to do a [Koster 00:01:11]. The way we think about it is we want to onboard someone within two weeks and make sure that they have everything they need. I think one thing that we keep in mind is this idea that when an employee joins, one concept we try to make sure that we’re accounting for is the idea of they don’t want to look stupid and we want to make sure that they feel like they’re supported and don’t have this situation where they feel like they’re looking stupid to anyone else. And so we have a very deliberate process around that. [0:01:50] Steli Efti: What’s the process around that? I love the framing by the way. I’m not surprised that I love the way that you guys frame things but not making them look stupid. Just tell me more about that. I think that’s super awesome. [0:02:01] Hiten Shah: So you make sure that they get to know the team and the team’s really friendly. That could be as simple as a really solid welcome message inside of Slack, welcoming the person to the team and encouraging that person to write their own version of it as well after. I think a welcome email for the person. We haven’t done this yet, but one thing I’m really excited about is as we’re scaling teams and scaling people, it’s actually having a deck that’s presented by either myself or my co-founder Marie about the company and how we do things here and doing it either in cohorts as people join or one-on-one if we need to. So I think that’s a big piece of it. Basically you want them to feel like they’re in the right place and they know what’s going on. There’s a lot of details around, make sure they have access to the right accounts and documents and this and that and they have a computer if need be, whether it’s remote or in a co-located office. All those things are cool. I think those things, there’s lots of stuff out there about them. What people don’t talk about though is how do you make someone feel great during onboarding? And that’s the part that I think I would optimize for and emphasize that I don’t see enough people working on. And so when you have 30, 60, 90 days, I feel weird about it personally because I feel like it’s almost like they’re onboarding for a long time. So we simplify the onboarding process so that they’re not onboarding for a long time and we also make sure that they can get to work in whatever job they have as soon as possible. And they’re not inundated with a bunch of busy work just because we have a bunch of onboarding steps they need to take. [0:03:45] Steli Efti: Yeah. So I love that. Yesterday, just yesterday, I might tweet this later out, but it was a screenshot of a Slack chat that one of our directors shared with me in Slack. Where a new marketing hire that we had just pinged him in today, “I don’t know who you want to share this with, but today has been my first day and it’s been really amazing. The amount of personal one-on-one messages I’ve gotten from all kinds of people in the team. The warm welcome I’ve received, I had one-on-one sessions with a bunch of people. The culture’s really incredible. I’ve been really impressed by how enthusiastic and warm and friendly my first day has been here.” And so, the director of marketing took a little screenshot and shared it with me. And yeah, I think people on the estimate how isolating it can be to be the new person on the team, right? And to be the type of person that’s trying to figure out how does everything work here? And who are these people? And being friendly and being warm and welcoming and making somebody feel on the first day, yes, this was the right decision. These are the people that I want to work with. I feel safe here to speak up. I feel safe to bring in my passion into this business. I feel like this is a group of people that really deserves my energy and I’m going to do great things here and that will set the tone for everything that happens afterwards. Versus joining and feeling like, well, this was a weird day. I didn’t interact with anybody, I don’t know anybody. I still try to figure things out, but I’m not sure should I bother anybody since it’s silent here and so weird. That kind of an experience can bring up all kinds of doubts. Ooh, did I take the right offer? Is this the right company for me? And this is the worst thing that can happen. You don’t want somebody who joins you on the first day to be filled with doubt. So I think that’s an incredible useful tip. The other thing that you said that I want to comment on is the whole, don’t make them look foolish or dumb or whatever. Don’t embarrass them. I think the amount of times I see people putting together onboarding plans that setups and the new hire full failure is really astounding to me. In the early days, you want to find the right balance between not giving them a bunch of small busy work that is safe because it’s meaningless, right? That’s one extreme. They can’t look dumb. They cannot fail because what you’ve given them is utterly meaningless to the business and nobody will care or notice, but it’s safe. And then there’s the other opposite of the spectrum that I see often where you’ve given them something that’s so mission-critical, so complex and almost impossible to deal with well, if you don’t have an incredible amount of context. So the chances of them messing something up and then pissing a bunch of people off in the company or creating a first massive negative impression within the team and the business of super high. Those are the two extremes that I see most commonly used when it comes to onboarding plans. Either they give people too much too soon or they give them too little. And in both cases, either you’re set up for failure or you have no chance to succeed. Obviously the golden rule applies here as well, where you want to give people things where they can accumulate wins. Where they can shine but you want to ramp it up quickly, but taking step by step, the first thing somebody does in the business can’t be the most mission critical thing that if they make a mistake, the entire business collapses. Right? That’s not good for you and good for anybody. So finding the right balance, setting up people for success, allowing them to shine and show their talents early on and to have a little bit of impact in some meaningful but also public way is usually really good to set them up in the right tone. But what I see oftentimes, it’s one of those two extremes. Either it’s a 90 day plan, where it’s like if they do all these things, have they had any impact on the business? No. Will anybody notice? No. So what are we doing here? Why are they going to be working for the business for three months and nobody will notice that they’ve been there? They would have had zero real wins in the company. That sucks. And then I see the other examples where it’s like, wait a second, you’re giving them this for the first three weeks? This is a very complicated mission critical project that nobody, that everybody was avoiding in the company and so you’re giving it to the new person. That seems like setting them up for massive failure. And just avoiding these two things I think you can be way ahead of the competition because most companies make one of the two mistakes, at least in my experience. I’ve done this myself, I’ve seen this in my company, but I’ve seen this in many companies for sure. [0:08:59] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Over and over again. I think you want to think when you build a product and you build a business, you’re thinking about your customer. Where in this case when someone new joins your company, they’re your customer and you want to think about how they’re thinking about things and what you’re looking to avoid with their experience. And also what they’re feeling is and how much momentum they have coming into the company. The only thing you can do is support that. Anything else you do is bad. And so that’s why I’m not a fan of 30, 60, 90 days. I like two weeks and we also like to get people to work as soon as possible because that’s really the longterm environment they’re going to be in. [0:09:40] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that that makes a ton of sense. Anything else? To me, those are some of the biggest points for the overall onboarding philosophy. Any other big mistake or big success thing that you always do because it’s been working so well? Or thing that you never do anymore because you’ve seen it feel over and over again? [0:10:06] Hiten Shah: Not determining the basically off boarding and the opt-out. So, I don’t think companies should be keeping people beyond a certain point, whatever their tolerance point is, with a new team member. And those things should be made clear to the employee about what success looks like and if they’re not successful for whatever reason, you should be able to communicate that so you can let them go super early as well. [0:10:36] Steli Efti: Yeah, that’s a really good point. A big mistake that I see is once people hire somebody, usually because it takes a long time and a lot of effort to find somebody that the company or the team is excited enough to make an offer to, oftentimes what happens is in the first one or two weeks there are early signals that maybe this wasn’t the right hire, but then people have such a strong bias to want to make it work, that they ignore all those signals. They don’t have a clear off boarding plan, they don’t have a clear plan of these are the numbers or the criteria by which we’re going to measure your success and if we don’t hit these things together, then this isn’t going to work out. They don’t have this clearly defined enough. And then what happens is in the six months into some of these role, a company will part ways with somebody and when you ask them, when was the first time that you knew this new hire isn’t going to work out? Typically the answers are on the first week in the first three weeks. There were all these signs, but we really wanted to make it work and we really wanted to give this person a chance. And we were not sure if we maybe didn’t onboard this person right. And we didn’t make sure if we needed to maybe train and coach them more, be more patient. And so because it’s so hard to hire, once you made it, a lot of companies the mistake to not be clear enough on the criteria for success and on the consequences of failure. And be very strict on those in the early days versus because it took us so long and now we hired this person, we’re going to look away from all the early, maybe red flags that this might have not been the right hire and we’re going to string along somebody for months that we would have had to just reverse the decision. But it’s going to be more painful six months into it than three weeks into it. And that’s definitely something that I’ve seen over and over and over again. [0:12:31] Hiten Shah: Yeah, totally. [0:12:33] Steli Efti: All right, that’s it from us for this episode. If you enjoyed it, make sure to give us a five star review and rating if you have not yet. As always, if you have any questions, ideas for episodes, wishes, we would love to hear from you, Steli@close.com, hitenshah@gmail.com. And until next time we’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:48] The post 483: The First 90-Days Onboarding Plan appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about remote work worries? Are people working hard enough? Remote teams are relatively a new thing in the startup world, and deciding whether to allow your staff to work remotely can be a challenge. Questions about managing team members while they are working remotely are inevitably going to come up and how you address these issues is important. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about founders concerns about implementing remote teams, how some people are better at working remotely than others, why hiring the right people is very important for remote teams and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:10 Hiten’s thoughts on how to handle remote working. 02:36 How some people are better at working remotely than others. 02:58 Qualities a good remote worker needs to have. 03:15 The number one challenge of remote working. 03:34 How managing a remote team is ultimately the same as managing a non-remote team. 04:07 Why having good processes is important for remote teams. 05:29 Why hiring the right people is very important for remote teams. 07:21 Why Steli doesn’t worry about his remote teams.  3 Key Points: I don’t hear this specifically because I think people are not just willing to ask me.There are certain people who are better at remote working than others.The ability to direct themselves and be proactive about getting things done it super important. [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 remote work worries. Are your people working hard enough? Here’s why I wanted to briefly talk to you about this. This should be a fun little episode. This is the number one… I don’t know what your number one thing is that founders ask you regarding to remote work, but the number one thing founders and CEOs ask me when they meet me somewhere and they learn that I run a fully remote company. The number one thing that they seem to be worried about is that they, and usually they lower their voice and they look me deep in the eye and they look around as if it’s some kind of a dangerous thing to say. They look around and they go, “How do you know these people are actually working hard enough?” And I’ll tell you what my answer to this is, but I would die to hear two things from you first Heaton. Number one, do people ask you this as much as they ask me as well? I mean, I also direct a lot more internationally with people. This might be much more something people bring up in Europe than they do in the U.S and I would assume in the Bay Area it would be even less. But I’m not sure, so I’m curious. So do you hear this often or as often as I do or at all? And then what would your response be to this particular concern of remote work? And then I’ll give you my… [0:01:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I don’t hear this. I don’t hear this specifically because I think people are just not willing to ask because I think people are just not willing to ask me. And I also live in the Bay Area where even if people were thinking that, they probably wouldn’t ask unless they were… I have been asked it. When people are considering going remote, that’s the situation I’ve been asked similar things. But then it’s very tactical about, not out of curiosity, but out of, “Hey, how do I deal with these things that are easier right now when I’m remote? So right now I’m not remote. Our team’s not remote, we will be remote. How do I deal with these thing?” And so if the question is very specific like you said, my response to it would be, there’s a bunch of things you do. Well, one, there are certain people who are better at remote than not. And there are certain characteristics about it that make them great at it. And one of them is an ability to communicate about their work. What they’re working on, what the status of it is without a tool. So, how do you determine that someone can do that is a big one. That relates to them being self-directed, as in the ability to just direct themselves and be proactive about getting things done. Or asking when they don’t have things to do and they want more and they need more. Right? So, it boils down to, because the number one challenge with remote work ends up being communication. No matter how you slice it, all the studies, all the reports end up being communication. So, I think the reason people ask it is it’s so much easier to go walk over to someone’s desk or even just look over their shoulder, or talk to them at lunch, or go on a walk with them and just figure out what they’re working on. We’re not used to bugging people on Slack in general. And we have all these bad words for things that I think are just work like micromanaging and things like that. And it’s like ultimately the way you make sure people are working in a remote environment is the same way that you make sure people are working in a non-remote environment in my opinion. Which is you have such good process that you just know what everyone’s working on. I mean, I used to say this back in the day where like I, and I still believe it. I can walk into an office, walk to some random person, ask them basically what are they working on, why are they working on it? And if I just get answers to those two questions, I pretty much know everything about the culture of the company. Everything I need to know about the work culture, about getting work done. And so an example is what are they working on? Well, do they have a clear crisp reason why and how it impacts the business? Yes or no? Number two, why are they working on it? Are they saying they’re working on it because someone told them to work on it or because it’s a right thing to do for the business? That’s it. [0:04:34] Steli Efti: I love it. I love it. That’s super powerful. That alone is such a great framework. I’ll tell you what I tell people that come to me with that particular worry. At the end of the day it’s about… There’s a lot of things that you can do as a company in terms of the technologies that we use to make fully… The processes that we use and the culture that we have to make everybody’s work incredibly transparent. So there’s no place to hide because everybody’s work is so obvious on the table for everybody else to see. But I think more importantly, the very first thing that you have to do and the reason why we never had a problem with this is you hire the right people. And for us, one of the things that bounds us all in our culture and the kind of company that we work on is that, we do, we love to hire people that live full lives, that have hobbies beyond their work, that travel. A lot of people in our company have families and children and like a really full life. But what also connects us all is that we are, to some degree, incredibly passionate about work. And many of us are, if you want to use a negative word for it, workaholics or would be tagged a type of workaholics because we love our work. And so I tell people that we select the type of people that are passionate about their work, that have a track record of being passionate about their work, of being prolific around their work, of being productive at work. They have a track record. That these types of people, they leave a trail, right? And so when you interview them, you can look at the amount of work and the quality of work they’ve done and you can see the drive and the progression in their career, and you can tell that these people are passionate about their work and they’re willing to be part of something great. And so, for that type of person, my biggest worry with our people and with our team and with myself is not, are we working hard enough? It’s mostly, and usually who is overdoing it, who’s working too much? And so we have like, we had to come up with all these internal processes to make sure that we have red flags and yellow flags that pop up when somebody isn’t taking enough breaks, isn’t taking enough vacation days. In some cases, we’re very casual process between the three co-founders, between the three of us. Many times we had to force one of the three of us to take a vacation. We’re like, “All right, this is it. Next week you’re off from work. Find something fun to do but you need a break. You need it now.” Like we’ve been taking care of each other and have protected each other from overworking ourselves. And so, the reason I’ve never been worried about our people working hard enough, one, is we just don’t hire people that need to be monitored and motivated every day. Otherwise, they can’t work. That are not honest, transparent and authentic and don’t have the type of integrity that they would want to take advantage of you and lie and do pretend they’re working for you while they’re working somewhere else or whatever. We spend so much time trying to get to know somebody before we make a decision to offer them a job that these kind of, these big issues of not having trustworthy people and not having people that care about their career and their work when these things are never an issue, you don’t have the issue of like, “Oh, I don’t know if the people that I pay a salary to, just because I don’t see them in an office, I don’t know if they’re working.” It’s never been our problem. And then when you have, as a modern remote company, when you use the software, the tools, the processes to have real or to have a ton of transparency internally when it comes to people’s work, there’s no place to hide from people because of that. You take those two things together and really honestly in, I don’t know, in now seven, eight years, seven years maybe of running a fully remote company, are people working hard enough has never been the top of my mind as a big concern or a big issue. We’re never going to run into this as a big issue. So if you select the right people, that is the 80/20 that makes all the difference in the world and it’s definitely made one for us. So when founders whisper in my ear, “How do you know these people really work and aren’t you worried that they’re not working enough?” I always tell them my biggest worry is they’re working too much. Not too little. [0:09:41] Hiten Shah: Yeah. That makes sense. [0:09:42] Steli Efti: You go, that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:09:47] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:09:47] The post 482: Remote Work Worries? Are People Working Hard Enough? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about “not your typical advice”. Tweeter and Instagram are platforms that have made it so much easier for people to express their opinions and give advice about any topic. While this is a great thing for freedom of expression, it means that anybody, even if unqualified can give advice, and this dilutes the quality of advice that is out there. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how there’s a lot of startup advice out there in the world, how all advice is diluted to the point where it’s pretty much meaningless, how reading a book can be the best place to get the advice you need right now and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 00:47 How’s there’s a lot of startup advice out there in the world. 01:29 How we can get caught up in our ego on social media. 02:11 A typical scenario on Tweeter. 03:07 How Tweeter has made it easier for people to share their advice. 03:24 How all advice is diluted to the point where it’s pretty much meaningless. 04:01 Why you should take the best advice and leave the rest of it. 05:15 How reading a book can be the best place to get the advice you need right now. 05:50 How talking to people who have context and can actually help is a great way to get great advice. 3 Key Points: There’s a lot of startup advice out there in the world.We can get caught up in our ego on social mediaNobody is waiting for you to tweet. [0:00:01] 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 not your typical startup advice. And this is a topic that I came up with about a minute ago, and it’s been in my mind a very long time. I would say that both Steli and I gave a bunch of startup advice, and this is not your typical startup advice. The reason this is not your typical startup advice or advice of any kind is because, what’s in my head is that there’s a lot of stuff out there. I could use a worse word, but there’s a lot of stuff out there where people are telling you things about what you should do or what you should not do. And there’s also a lot of stuff out there now, as of recently in the last month or so, about how it’s not good to work hard or it’s good to work hard. It’s good to work a lot of hours or not. Steli and I are not going to get into that debate. Because the answer is it depends, and that’s the best answer I can really give you. And then I’ve seen something really fascinating that I haven’t been able to talk about publicly and this is as public as I want to get with it. I’ve talked a lot about it privately, but it’s this idea that we are all susceptible to ego traps. And what that means is that we can get caught up in our ego on social media, and then we turn into these advice machines, so to speak, because we just get to either share a bunch of crap on Instagram, or share a whole bunch of whatever we want to share, whatever we’re feeling, whatever on Instagram. I’m sorry, on Twitter. And what I’ve noticed is that what… The pattern that happened. Somebody gets good at Twitter and gets good at Twitter, just means they tweet a bunch of stuff and it gets… People like it, people retweet it. Maybe they get thousands of the retweets on it. Maybe tens of thousands of likes, whatever, on the highest level. And they might be somebody who many people look up to. Then what I notice, after that happens, it’s almost like they have their day on Twitter, right? And then it’s almost like their ego gets involved. They’re like, now I’ve got to tweet. And then you start seeing them tweeting things and you’re like, “Oh. That thing you tweeted that went off was great. You could have just stopped there. You didn’t need to go tweet about the equivalent of how you’re feeling right now. You didn’t need to do that. Like, it’s okay. Nobody’s waiting for you to tweet. It’s really okay.” And it’s almost like this thing where we went from, okay, a few people, expertise or experience or even just whether it’s very experienced or not very experienced, but having gone through stuff and people sharing that, whether it’s in blog posts or whatever mediums make sense on medium. But now we have this thing where it’s like so many people can go share their advice. And they do. And I believe they do because they just want more of those thousand likes. Or those thousand retweets, and that attention it gets and all the replies it gets, and I almost feel like it’s subconscious. And people are not conscious to that. So the result of that, to me, is that all advice is diluted to the point where it’s pretty much meaningful. I mean meaningless. Because it just doesn’t matter. There’s so much of it. So many people saying so many things. And the line that I like to use on this is like, take the best, leave the rest. But at the same time, if you’re looking around on Twitter and lurking around, or you’re on Instagram following a bunch of people and seeing all their crap, I think you’re not working. I think you’re not actually focused on what matters to you. Because if you were, you’d… [0:03:55] Steli Efti: You think? [0:03:58] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Because if you were, you’d probably be reading a book. Straight up. Right, a book about what you need right now that’s going to help you. Right? Like I’m reading books right now that are going to help me. I’m not the insane three bucks a day reader. I can be, because I can read really fast and I like reading. I’m the, let me find the book even if I read it before, that’s going to help me right now. Whether it’s personally or in business. And I’ll read it, and I’ll take notes on it. And I might even take notes and share it with people on my team, because there’s shit we want to do, and the books actually are helpful because it’s a much more thoughtful thing than a tweet. So the rant here is like, “Yo. You want some advice? Go read a book. Just make sure it’s advice you need right now.” [0:04:46] Steli Efti: All right. I’ve got a lot to say here, but… [0:04:49] Hiten Shah: Bring it. [0:04:50] Steli Efti: So, number one. I like the advice, go read a book. I would add, or go talk to somebody- [0:04:59] Hiten Shah: I like that. [0:05:00] Steli Efti: -That can help, has context and does care, right? [0:05:06] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:05:07] Steli Efti: The thing that you mentioned, like one thing that popped up in my mind when you were talking about this people start sharing their advice and their opinions on social media. They get a lot of positive reinforcement and endorphin rushes by getting lots of likes, lots of shares. There’s a certain type of thing that you say the more controversial it is, what you’re saying, or the shorter it is sometimes, the less nouns you use the stronger the response usually, right? If you write, the best advice I could give is it depends because everybody’s situation is the same. That might be a thoughtful thing to say, but nobody’s going to retweet that. Nobody is going to hate it or comment on it or… There’s really not going to be a strong response to something that’s moderate. So you start sharing advice, sharing your opinions, and then there is a training that happens, a positive reinforcement to your most radical ideas, almost radical moments. They get the most attention, the most response, the most love, which then trains you to do more of it. And often times I see people start tweeting and then at some point Twitter is tweeting them, right? It’s like the medium is taking over in this- [0:06:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:06:31] Steli Efti: -using you, you’re not using it anymore. Right. And you can tell by… Or I think I can tell by certain patterns. Is this person increasing their output? Right. So I would see they would tweet once or twice a day and then it became four a day, then eight and it’s like 40 a day and it gets more and more and more. Question is why? Does it seem healthy for somebody to spend so much time and an increased amount of time on this medium, sharing their advice, tweeting things? How engaged do they get with responses, and what kind of engagement do they give? Do they give into engagement when they are criticized? And if so, is it because they’re curious, they want to learn? Or is it because they’re defending themselves and they’re getting angry? Or do they get engaged in ways that helps their ego? What is… If you step back far enough, you’re trying to ask yourself, what is this person trying to get out of this? Why are they spending all this time creating all this content? What are they trying to get to? And there are people that seem to, I think honestly and authentically having moments where they feel like they’ve learned something and then want to pass it on and share it. And they seem to engage at times and disengage at others, and seems a healthy… I like playing around here, I like sharing my ideas here, but this isn’t my life and there’s not any addictive quality that jumps out of me when I see how they behave on these platforms. And then there are the people that do seem more addicted, and this seems very much to be an egotistic, egocentric game. Not even that they play, but the platform. The platform is taking over [inaudible] them, and now the platform is using them more and more, to create more and more of the type of content that the platform likes. And so there’s a lot of that. And a lot of that that’s going on. And then the question is really, who is learning anything here useful, and why? This is honestly something that I even struggle with sometimes. I’m not that great on social media, but sometimes when I see big debates erupt like they did in the recent past, and I see all these people tweeting about a certain thread and had me going back and forth and all that, it’s just… There’s a part of me that’s like, “Should I say something here?” And then there’s another part of me that’s like, “But I don’t want to, because I honestly actually don’t care about this debate. And I don’t know if I say something who is look…” Like, I’m not learning anything. Literally all these super smart people are polluting my Twitter timeline with things that I’m not interested in. And even when I try to read them, I’m not learning anything here. There’s nothing insightful here. There’s nothing nuanced here. So I’m like, this is all pollution. If I jump in, I’m just adding to the pollution because I really don’t care about this topic. But I know if I do, I’m going to get a lot of attention. I know purely from a marketing play. If I say something controversial about this, I’m going to get a lot of response. Certain people will look at my tweet, that are important or have a lot of following. They might respond positively or negatively, that might get me a few more followers. But am like, am I really interested in this? Do I really need this quote/unquote cheap attention right now? And if so, why? What will I do with it? If I tweet something controversial and I get another hundred followers and I get whatever, a few hundred retweets or something, and then, what? Would will I do with this? Other than, that I will spend the next day or two logging into Twitter 10 times more than usual, to see who responded or retweeted, but- [0:10:40] Hiten Shah: It’s the ego trap. [0:10:43] Steli Efti: It’s an ego trap, yeah. So I just decide to go, this is all bullshit and I will just look at Twitter in four days again, when this is over, because right now it’s just a lot of noise, but there’s nothing really meaningfully useful to learn here or read here. And this is something that honestly I find, not to be a Debbie Downer on all of this, but I find less and less… I find me as a consumer of social media, I find less and less useful stuff. I almost don’t use Facebook at all anymore. I use Twitter, but I have found it in the last two, three months, less and less useful or interesting in terms of- [0:11:28] Hiten Shah: I think it’s gotten weird or worse. I don’t know what’s happening to it. [0:11:33] Steli Efti: Twitter definitely has gotten worse. There was a time, and I was very proud of how curated my Twitter stream was, and how I was following just a specific type of people, and I had interesting news and interesting book recommendations and interesting thoughts and quotes and good shit in there. But recently I definitely have found myself saying at the end of my two minute Twitter sprees, this was not satisfying at all. This was not… I spent three, four minutes looking at all of this, but nothing of it was really that meaningful or interesting to me. Instagram the same way. The most useful thing about Instagram for me is I follow a bunch of Thai fighters and a bunch of martial art fighters. I’ll watch their fights or their little videos and that’s cool. And then I have a handful of friends who use it a lot and I’m interested in their lives, so that’s cool. But everything else is like, whatever. YouTube is really the only… It’s not even a social network really in a typical sense, but that still has meaningfully interesting content for me. So I can spend time on YouTube and find it satisfying in terms of… I watched a lecture or a video, an interview that I thought was really powerful or interesting. Or entertaining at least but, yeah. The amount of advice people give, especially on Twitter and Instagram, and the amount of it that is just empty air. It’s just nothing. It’s so short, so over generalized or poor that it’s like, I don’t know who’s learning something here. Who is reading this and is thinking, “Wow, this is amazing. This idea of thought is helping me now do better at life or do better with my work?” I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m not sure. At times I’m not sure if I’m just getting super hyper cynical, or if the information out there is just less interesting. And maybe because these mediums, maybe we can… Because we can overshare in these overly shortened versions of our thoughts and advices. Maybe just these mediums lend themselves to advice as something useful, and a book… The reason why that can be really powerful or a conversation with somebody, is because there is… It’s a longer form and by design it usually leads to more thoughtfulness. And more clarity and more completeness and more nuance, than a one sentence tweet can do. Or a ten second Instagram video can do. How much can you say in 20 seconds? What kind of… How much useful advice can you pack into 20 seconds, that you want to send out to tens of thousands of people at the same time? Oh, like all these 50,000 people need to hear these 20 seconds right now. It’s really going to impact them. Not that it can never… Not that a sentence can never inspire a thought, or be positive or make people smile or laugh. You can be brief and still be useful. But when it comes to the… When you take out and entertainment, and when you take out… Just like a mild stimulant. When you really go into the realm of giving advice and receiving advice for how to run your business, or how to lead a good life, for how to structure your day, for how to succeed with your company, I do find that we have to retweet to all the formats of learning and advice, which usually are more long form, more nuanced, more context aware forms of learning and consumption than a lot of stuff that’s out there. [0:15:42] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:15:43] Steli Efti: All right. [0:15:45] Hiten Shah: That’s it. [0:15:46] Steli Efti: That’s it. [0:15:47] Hiten Shah: That’s our rant on advice today. [0:15:49] Steli Efti: We will kickstart the new year as being grumpy, cynical… Two grumpy, cynical founders. There you go. [0:15:57] Hiten Shah: There you go. [0:15:58] Steli Efti: That’s what you get from us. All right. We’ll hear everybody very, very soon. That’s it from us. [0:16:05] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:16:05] The post 481: Not Your Typical Advice appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.