In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about revenue model sharing for startups. While revenue or profit-sharing is a good option for attracting quality employees to your startup knowing when and how to distribute profits with your employees can be a challenge, especially for self-funded companies. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how startups can share revenue, when to build an elaborate revenue-sharing model, how to incentivize your team and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:38 Why this topic was chosen. 01:52 How startups can share revenue. 03:18 How revenue is shared most of the time. 03:22 How Hiten thinks about revenue sharing. 03:51 How to incentivise your team. 05:09 When to build an elaborate revenue sharing model. 06:15 Why this doesn’t make sense for self-funded startups. 07:38 Why it’s good to have team members get healthy bonuses. 09:10 Why it makes sense for self-funded startups to look into this. 3 Key Points: Profit-sharing based on the growth in profit.Everyone is getting money but not because the business is getting better.You should worry about revenue sharing when you believe that the company is stable. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti … [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’ll talk a little bit about revenue share and profit share models for startups. So you are running a startup. Let’s say in this case it’s more likely that it is a self funded startup, right? [0:00:17] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:00:18] Steli Efti: It’s not very common in the VC world to raise venture capital and then to do revenue share with your employees, especially not in the early days. So you’re self funded, you get to some level of success and then you see this pop up more and more that employees of these well growing companies that are doing really well, are at some point probably asking themselves, okay, so I’m part of this startup but I’m not getting equity. We’re not raising money so we’re not going to IPO or anything like that. So how do I participate in the continuous success and growth of the startup beyond maybe my salary or something? And so I see more and more startups come out and share their profit sharing models or revenue sharing models. But I still feel like it’s a new thing, especially in the startup world. It’s not a super set, it’s not as common and there’s not as many best practices for this as for handing out equity and building and setting up option pools and all that kind of stuff. So just wanted to tap into that. Who would we advise to do this? How should people think about it? When is the right time? When is too early? When is it too late? And what are some successful models that are out there or some ways to think about this, or some mistakes to avoid? [0:01:40] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think one model I’ve heard of, it might be the Basecamp folks, it might be somebody else, was that basically, it’s a profit sharing based on the growth in profit. [0:01:55] Steli Efti: Hmm. [0:01:56] Hiten Shah: And so then, because a lot of things like this, when you’re sharing revenue, whether it’s commissioned for salespeople or sharing profit like in this- … Probably would be like the owners. So it would be owners of the company who have the majority of the shares or the majority of the equity in the company. And then the business, which is basically the thing that we’re all working on and then the team members. And so if you do it so that no matter what everybody gets profit regardless of whether the company grew or not, I think it can lead to some really weird incentives. And incentives where like the team members aren’t necessarily incentivized to grow it in the way they would be if their profit sharing was based on actually growing the business. It would even impact the owners in that way. Because if you go out like three or four years, the company’s flat and there’s profit sharing happening. Everyone’s getting money, but they’re not getting money because they’re making the business better. They’re just getting money because the business is still there. [0:03:18] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:03:19] Hiten Shah: Which is different than the business getting better. So when I think about this, I don’t think about revenue share. I think about profit sharing and I do think about making it based on growing the business. So even if the business grew 5% and there was more profit, that’s great. And now think about it, even if the business … And if you really make it about profit then you could not grow revenue, but grow profit, and that would still be okay. Because then the team gets incentivized around, let’s make more profit. Let’s not worry about revenue as much as we worry about profit. [0:03:54] Steli Efti: Profit, yeah. [0:03:54] Hiten Shah: What’s it going to take to help us make more profit? And there’s two ways, right? You are more profitable from a percentage basis margin, things like that, or you’ve grown the business. [0:04:08] Steli Efti: I love that. I love the model of using both because the profit sharing thing has always struck me as curious because of these very reasons. I’m like, if a startup does profit sharing in a phase where the company’s still trying to grow really fast, isn’t this focusing everybody on increasing profit margins versus increasing growth? Isn’t it also that it might’ve been better for the business to use the profit to build out, maybe a cash cushion or do some other investments in the business. And now instead of doing that, we’re just instantly paying out a huge chunk of profits that are there because we incentivize to want to pocket all these, everybody that works in the business. Versus if there’s some kind of a bonus structure based on revenue growth, then that’s much more aligned. But I love the combination within the two. What about a phase? Is there a phase where this is too early? And I think I would tell people when they’re just starting out, it’s probably not a good idea to build an elaborate revenue profit sharing model if you don’t have revenue or profits. But what typically would you advise, when is a good time for a founder or [inaudible] to worry about this, what do you think? [0:05:21] Hiten Shah: Well, my opinion is when you believe that the company is stable and has a repeatable ability to make money. Even if it’s not initially growing yet, it’s a repeatable way to make money and there’s actually enough profit there to go around. So you could say it’s when there’s 100K a year profit or when there’s like 250K a year profit, but when there’s a significant enough amount of profit that there’s enough to go around. That would be my take. [0:05:51] Steli Efti: I love that. Yeah. Any other things that you’ve seen? We’re talking about self funded startups and so one of the big tools that … And maybe they decide to still do this, but a lot of self funded startups they’re not as heavy on the equity side of things and option pools and all that as the VC funded side of things. [0:06:10] Hiten Shah: It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t necessarily make sense for a self funded company. [0:06:14] Steli Efti: Yes, so if you take off the equity as a form of compensation off the table, then obviously there’s salary, there’s quality of life, there’s maybe other benefits that you’re paying, but profits and revenue or cashflow profits, maybe that’s more abundantly available than in a venture funded startup is. So that’s obviously a pull to get to. Have you seen any other models of things that self-funded startups do to incentivize their employees to, you know basically- [0:06:45] Hiten Shah: I think- [0:06:48] Steli Efti: but- [0:06:48] Hiten Shah: I think there’s the classic bonuses. It’s classic, right? I don’t hear enough about that, but you can give out pretty healthy bonuses based on certain metrics about the business. What’s wrong with that? [0:07:01] Steli Efti: Nothing. [0:07:03] Hiten Shah: Right, that’s like a cash basis. You could base it on performance of the business. You could base it on revenue, not profits and make sure people have a healthy bonus. So the reason I like something where it’s profit sharing type thing is because you can imagine someone who’s making a 100K or 120K or 80K, whatever a year, end up making an extra 10, 20, 30, even 50K on top because of the success that the business have had. And that actually increases retention with folks and things like that, because at some point there’s no other way that they can make that kind of money, especially if the business continues to grow and they’re contributing part of it. I think, there’s actually a book on basically some of this stuff. I forgot the name of the book, so I’m sorry, you’re going to have to dig around for it. I don’t know the name. But after [crosstalk 00:07:56]- [0:07:58] Steli Efti: [crosstalk] Tweet us. [0:07:59] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it talks about a tire company that basically has a pretty solid way of thinking about profit sharing and all that. I believe some folks in the company became millionaires because of the profit sharing. I could be wrong, but the folks who are incentivized appropriately in the company in that way ended up getting a huge benefit. And so giving team members that benefit I think is another thing, and part of it. And also there’s a system of, the longer you’re there, the more that you get and things like that. So there’s a system and it can work. It’s just a matter of being really thoughtful about it and studying up a little bit. I do think that the Basecamp folks have the model that’s based on percentage of growth in terms of profit, but I could be wrong. And they are actually a pretty good starting point for this, if you’re thinking about doing this. And then I know there’s other examples but I actually studied this a little while ago and I felt like they had the most thoughtful model and most thought out model around doing this. Especially because they are a highly profitable business that has had to figure this out. [0:09:10] Steli Efti: Love it. All right, so I think that if your a self-funded startup, it might make sense to look into this as you probably don’t want to do this too early when you’re still trying to figure out how to acquire your first hundred paying customers. Putting together an elaborate revenue or profit sharing model might feel like meaningful work, but most likely it’s just a waste of your time and everybody else’s time to focus on these things. But once you are at a point where you have repeatable revenue, you have some predictability in terms of your growth, you have a “real business” right? It’s not just an idea. It’s not just a wild project, but it’s a thing that is thriving and growing and generating cash flows and profits and revenues. It might make sense to start spending some time and think about this and putting some thing in place to really empower everybody that’s investing and contributing to the growth and the success of the business, to participate in that growth in some meaningful way. If you have any great examples, great books, if you’ve tried things and failed with them or succeeded with them, we always love to hear from you. Just shoot us an email at steli@close.com or hnshah@gmail.com and until next time, we’ll hear you very soon. [0:10:19] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:10:19] The post 470: Revenue Sharing Models for Startups appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Fundraising for startups. When it comes to funding a startup, previously, you had two options to choose from self-fund your start or get VC funding. Now times have changed and there are more funding options available to founders. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how there are so many options for fundraising, self-funding versus VC funding, why it’s important to do what’s right for you and more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:31 Why this topic was chosen. 00:58 How there are so many options for fundraising. 01:23 Self-funding versus VC funding. 03:22 How Steli and Hiten have always preferred self-funding to VC funding. 04:05 How the world has changed. 05:00 An example of a company that took VC funding after discouraging it. 07:49 Why it’s important to do what’s right for you. 09:03 Why there are different ways to be successful at anything. 00:00 How there are more funding options available today.  3 Key Points: There’ve never been that so many options.We don’t hate VC funding.Business is THE religion. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about something that we know ends up being on people’s minds off and on, especially if they haven’t done it yet. This is for all of you that haven’t done this yet and for some of you that might be doing it again. The topic is basically we wanted to check in on the fundraising climate when it comes to startups raising money. We both get to see that all the time in different ways. We also get to see self-funded businesses. So yeah, what are you seeing Steli? [0:00:36] Steli Efti: Well, I do see that there are more options out there today than probably ever before. It used to be that you had to decide if you wanted to be a venture-funded startup and go and raise a C round, series A, series B, series C, just do the whole typical VC model of raising money, going for hyper growth. Or you were deciding that you wanted to be a self-funded startup, a customer-funded startup, a bootstrapper, a micropreneur, whatever term you want to use, which basically just meant you were generating or trying to generate revenues and profits ASAP and you weren’t interested in raising money from the outside world. And typically these two worlds where… And traditionally had been very hardened camps. One camp thinks the other one is dumb or bad basically. The VC funded startups would think that the self funded ones are thinking too small and the self-funded ones thought that VCs are evil and all these VC funded startups, I don’t know, are full of bullshit and a bad quality of life and are going to whatever. [0:01:50] Hiten Shah: And the thing is it’s funny, they say it’s hardened camps, or it’s been hardened camps. I have never said anything against VC funding. I’ve raised money and people think like, “Oh, he’s a self-funded founder and hates VC money or something.” I’m like, “No, that’s not true. That’d be a very absurd way to think about business, in my opinion.” And even the camps, I think it’s absurd. It’s like in life what they call a duality. You act like there’s only two options. There’s this duality in your life between good and bad. One’s good and one’s bad. It’s furthest from the truth. [0:02:36] Steli Efti: I love that you’re saying this because it’s so true. I guarantee you, our very listeners that are listening to this very episode would have thought that both you and I are totally against VC, right? [0:02:48] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:02:49] Steli Efti: Maybe with you even more than with me, just because they think you’re a better person probably. [0:02:53] Hiten Shah: No way, no way. [0:02:57] Steli Efti: We’ve been both such strong advocates of self-funded startups and bootstrappers and we’ve been… Recently, we have not been raising money for our companies. [0:03:07] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that’s right. [0:03:08] Steli Efti: So, I think that these things combined just make people believe or instantly assume, “Oh, Hiten and Steli hate VCs and investors,” which is just not true. I think that we, the two of us, and a few other people, even back in the day when those two camps were very much against each other, I felt like always there was a middle camp that had no voice because we didn’t have a dog in the fight. So we didn’t just argue as loudly. But I was always telling people, I’m not dogmatic about this. This isn’t a religion. [0:03:37] Hiten Shah: It shouldn’t be! [0:03:38] Steli Efti: It shouldn’t be! [0:03:39] Hiten Shah: Business, business is the religion. [0:03:41] Steli Efti: There you go. [0:03:41] Hiten Shah: Business is the religion here. [0:03:41] Steli Efti: There you go. [0:03:43] Hiten Shah: Not, not funding or not funding or whatever. No. [0:03:46] Steli Efti: If it makes sense, I will do it. [0:03:48] Hiten Shah: Do it! Yeah. [0:03:48] Steli Efti: If it doesn’t, I won’t. [0:03:50] Hiten Shah: Don’t do it. [0:03:50] Steli Efti: I don’t think that there’s a this is the only way to do it in all circumstances. Now I do think that the world has changed. So this is why it’s interesting for us to check in on the world right now because in the last, I don’t know, two years or so, a lot of “bootstrapping” or self funded thought leaders or celebrities or whatever, the people that were waving the flag the hardest have moved on and raised money. And had to reconcile their world view and talk to their audiences about why they changed their mind and why they’ve done that and vice versa. But a bunch of people that were super well known founders that had raised a ton of money have gone on to start another company and be like, “I’m not going to raise any money on bootstrapping profits. I’m doing this a completely different way.” So the crowds have mixed a little bit. I think people have moved camps and have created a bit of confusion, but maybe also enlightenment. [0:04:46] Hiten Shah: Let’s talk about the company that actually talks the most shit about VC funding. [0:04:51] Steli Efti: [inaudible 00:04:51]. [0:04:51] Hiten Shah: Let’s start there. [0:04:52] Steli Efti: [inaudible 00:04:53], right? [0:04:52] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Seriously, I have a lot of respect and love for those folks, but I got to say I’m tired of it. Hey, if you’re listening, which you’re probably not listening to me, because you won’t listen to this. We’re all doing business, including you guys, including new people. We’re doing business. That’s the bottom line. And for the amount of people they used to be able to influence and the amount of influence they’ve had even on my businesses, I am sad. I’m sad because all they want to do is talk crap on VC funding and it’s not cool. It’s not cool at all. It’s like, you know how many businesses wouldn’t exist without VC funding? Most of them. Straight up. So I’m not angry, but I’m disappointed in people I respect a lot and their just attack on it. It’s a gap. There’s going to be companies that are venture backed and went all the way and there was a focus on growth and all kinds of, there’s these problems that happen, but it’s none of your business. You don’t know about it. You haven’t done it. Straight up, they don’t get it. [0:06:03] Steli Efti: You know what makes me sad? Not to shit on them too much, because they were and they are an amazing company- [0:06:10] Hiten Shah: Honestly. Honestly, Steli I’m not going to [crosstalk 00:06:12]. [0:06:11] Steli Efti: They deserve a little bit of that. [0:06:13] Hiten Shah: No, they deserved it for what fear, uncertainty and doubt they are putting an entrepreneur’s minds about something they don’t understand. It would be totally cool and they’re the ones that say, “We don’t talk about things we don’t understand.” Jason Freitas came out and said that himself. It’s not about shitting on him. It’s, look, they have influence and a ton of it. I’d say less than ever before now. [0:06:34] Steli Efti: That’s true, yeah. [0:06:35] Hiten Shah: But they should not be lying to people, as if they know what they’re talking about, because they don’t know what they’re talking about here. [0:06:44] Steli Efti: You know what it is. I think when they came out, I think they were a really necessary voice in the market. That’s why they became so famous. Everybody was thinking about these VCs and investors and these startups in such unhealthy and unrealistic ways that the market needed “some rebels” that were like, “You know what? You guys are the cool kids? Fuck you.” Somebody needed to be the punk rockers. The people that are like the anti-establishment that’s like, “You know what? Everybody wants to be like you? Nobody cares about you.” [0:07:13] Hiten Shah: Now, they’re curmudgeon, cranky grandparents. Right? [0:07:17] Steli Efti: Yes, yes, yes. Now it’s changed. [crosstalk] [0:07:20] Hiten Shah: It’s like “Yo, your schtick was cool, back then.” I’d rather them talk more about remote work. [0:07:26] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:07:27] Hiten Shah: Like really, because you know, that’s something they can teach everyone about and they were on first and they were honestly correct about where the world was going there. And I’d rather hear their dogma on that. But again, you talked about dogma, right? [0:07:41] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:07:42] Hiten Shah: I just wanted to basically, for lack of a better word, go after them for dogma. Right? [0:07:47] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:07:47] Hiten Shah: That’s the problem here. It’s like, look, if you’re going to dissuade an entrepreneur who should raise money because of your dogma, and then they fail because they’re self-funded and endeavored shouldn’t be self funded, that sucks. What if they would’ve been able to raise money because they had the ambition, they had the idea and it would have helped them? Then you’re doing a disservice to founders and I know that’s not their intention. That being said, that’s how it comes across when you just shit on something so hard. And so, to me it’s like don’t listen to them. Do what’s right for you. [0:08:25] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think in today’s world, whoever is telling you that there’s only one way to do things and it’s their way, that’s to me the strongest signal that you should stop listening. [0:08:37] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:08:37] Steli Efti: Right? No matter how successful somebody is, and I say this all the time, I tell, whenever I give people hyper strong advice, whenever I start screaming because I’m so convinced of myself, I give this disclaimer and I say for what I just told you with all my conviction, there’s probably 1000 counterexamples of people that did the exact opposite and succeeded. There’s just not one way of doing it. But this is what I believe right now. As you asked me, I’m telling you what I believe right now, but there’s not one way of doing it and for every formula of success, example of success, I can find you a bunch of counterexamples of people and companies that did the exact opposite and still succeeded. Right? So- [0:09:19] Hiten Shah: Yeah, yeah go ahead. [0:09:21] Steli Efti: So I wanted to move on a little bit, because I do feel like the people on both sides, the people that were there were laughing, the cool kids that were laughing, haha, lifestyle business not important enough. And also the people that are like “Haha, VCs, you’re all fucking assholes and this is dumb.” Both of these camps are less relevant today than ever before. You see their message get less attention, less likes, less spreading. You hear them being mentioned less often as thought leaders or as people people pay attention to. So I think that that message isn’t resonating as much. And I feel like the people that are in the middle that have transitioned and transformed in their opinions are getting more attention because people are thinking, “Wow, if this person did something that was VC funded and now they’re self funded, that’s interesting.” Or vice versa. This person has done a bunch of self funded, bootstrapped small things and now they’re raising tons of money? That’s interesting. What made them change their mind? Why did they raise here when they didn’t raise there? These people get a lot more attention. Then there’s these new forms that are popping up now. There’s more, there’s not just The Angels and Accelerators in VC money now. There’s this new form. TinySeed is a big example of a new kind of funding vehicle for a new type of person. It’s the we’re going to pay you a salary for one or two years so you can start your self funded business and our model doesn’t require you to become a unicorn. We’ll take an equity and a profit sharing that is more conducive to maybe a business that’s very healthy and doing well, but that isn’t going to be acquired for billions of dollars and TinySeed is just one example. There is, I think, at least three or four other funds out there. [0:11:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah, there’s Earnest, there’s Indie.vc. [0:11:13] Steli Efti: Yes. [0:11:13] Hiten Shah: I lost you for a second. [0:11:37] Steli Efti: Yeah, I lost you after Earnest, Indie.vc. You said there’s a couple of examples. [0:11:43] Hiten Shah: Oh, I was just saying there’s Earnest, there’s Indie.vc On top of TinySeed and then there’s a few others as well. [0:11:49] Steli Efti: Yeah, I feel like more than ever before, there are options out there, right? [0:11:54] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:11:54] Steli Efti: And so I think both are options out there and maybe more than ever, there’s less dogma. You don’t have to choose a camp. You need to just do whatever is best for your business right now and maybe you should raise some money. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you should not be compelled or forced to choose a camp and then die in that camp, no matter what happens in your life. [0:12:18] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think it’s the job of a business owner to do what’s best for the business and make sure that the business can grow in a way that makes sense for the actual opportunity and the market and even the business owner’s level of the ambition. Because a lot of this truthfully has a lot to do with ambition too. And I’m not saying that you’re not ambitious if you’re self funding or you’re more ambitious because you raised money, but a lot of it is, especially today where there are some ideas that actually self funding makes the most sense for. So if you’re going to enter a crowded market and copy the 10 other companies that are in it, you might actually want to consider starting self-funded until you figure out oh, this is an opportunity that can keep growing or that can be really massive in that market that’s crowded, because it’s likely that it’s going to be hard to build the venture scale type of business. There’s other opportunities where you enter a market and you just need a lot of capital at some point in order to support what you need to build or what you need to grow into. For example, I don’t see anybody building self driving car anything without raising money. I don’t see it. Maybe it’s out there, maybe really early on you do that, but eventually you have to hire dozens of people and go after lots of experimentation in terms of actually the car and the streets and all kinds of stuff like that. So what ends up happening is you need to raise money for some of these things. Another example is there is a lot of self funded eCommerce companies that sell goods online and then deliver them to people. There are some categories, the one that comes to mind right now, because of some recent funding, is mattresses where there’s a heavy cost to it and there’s still some innovation if you build a next generation, like digital mattress or something like that, which is a thing. It helps you with your sleep, blah blah blah. Probably need a bunch of funding for a business like that these days. And also if you go back all the way back in the day, there were things that were started bye a family, a person in a family and the businesses kept being handed down. And that was when brick and mortar was a bigger deal. So in a way it’s almost like, in the digital world today, the way we think about it, there isn’t these multi-generational businesses that are being handed down, self-funded kind of businesses being handed down. But in some ways that is a form of funding. If you get handed a business, you basically got a lot of funding before you even start because you got handed a business back then. Also there were things like small business loans that were a much bigger thing early on and in a way that that’s a form of funding. You’re funding the business, but it’s not your money. So I think that there’s also other alternative capital that’s happening too, that there’s things like Clear Bay, whatever your opinion is of it and all that. But there’s ways to, if you get something started, ways to get capital in to help grow it, that isn’t necessarily equity based or making you go think about it as venture scale, even if you do have a lot of ambition to grow the business and want capital to do it. And then there’s the other side of it and I know I mentioned this, but there are businesses and the one that keeps striking out to me is ones that are in super crowded markets, [inaudible] specifically that should not be funded. They should not go into YC or 500 startups or some of those things, because they’re in a crowded market. And if they can be profitable and keep growing, they’re probably better off than having the pressure of a Y Combinator or 500 startups around growth and things like that, when the business would just be fine if it was self funded and they just kept growing it. [0:16:21] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think to wrap up this episode, there’s more options than ever. As you said today, there’s options for raising money to invest in your paid advertising. Or to raise money for inventory of your eCommerce or to finance all kinds of different things online. And there’s all these different shapes and forms of funding capital out there to fit your need, your business, your lifestyle, whatever is needed to get you to that next stage if you need it. And if you don’t, you can ignore all of this and just go on your way of building your profitable, successful, self-funded customer funded business. But more than ever before, I think the VC funded, self funded, lifestyle business, evil, bullshit, unicorn camps, they all collapse and I think that you are going to be best served if your focus is your business and your customers, and you don’t choose camps. You just choose whatever the best way is to build what you’re trying to build and to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish and you take all the options into consideration on how to get to your goal in the best way possible. Versus you’ve chosen a camp five years ago now you’re stuck and your identity should not be connected to any kind of funding sources or no funding sources. That’s just crazy, right? [0:17:46] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:17:47] Steli Efti: Who you are has nothing to do with if you’re raising money for your business or not raising money. It doesn’t make you better or worse. It doesn’t make you cooler or dumber. It doesn’t make you smarter or more accomplishing. It doesn’t make you more a person with more integrity or more quality of life. None of that will determine who you truly are and if you embrace that attitude, and if you’re very pragmatic, you’re going to do much better in today’s world. So I think that that’s it from us for this episode. [0:18:18] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:18:18] The post 469: Fundraising for Startups—There’ve Never Been That so Many Options appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to ask better questions. Asking questions is the best way to understand or gain deeper insights about anything or anyone at any time. Unfortunately, most founders don’t do it. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about the importance of asking questions, how asking questions helps you gain a common understanding, how to improve your questioning skills and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 02:29 How people tend to make a lot of assumptions. 03:01 How asking questions helps you gain a common understanding. 05:00 Why you need to ask a lot of questions. 05:50 How you can miss a lot of information if you don’t ask enough questions. 06:31 How active listening is super important. 04:43 How Hiten is able to help people by asking them questions. 10:38 How to improve your questioning skills. 3 Key Points: Most people just don’t ask enough questions. People tend to assume a lot of things.Asking questions helps you gain a common understanding. [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 Chat we’re going to talk about how to learn how to ask better questions. Here’s the deal on this episode Hiten, and why I wanted to talk to you about this. The last two weeks I’ve been a number of different workshops and events and I’ve, for whatever reason, I piled on a ton of coaching sessions and now I’m done for the year, so that’s great. But one thing that I noticed in the last two weeks, of just interacting with a ton of founders and doing some deal coaching with them. Asking those founders to tell me about a customer deal they’re currently trying to close, they’re in the middle of a negotiation that may or may not be going well or there might be some questions of how to make this happen. One thing that I noticed doing this with many different founders in many different countries is that the common denominator of the source of everybody’s problems when it comes to closing a customer deal. And I’m sure not just that, it’s the core problem for a lot of things is that these people and most people just don’t ask enough questions and they don’t ask the right questions, so they inevitably find themselves in a position where they have to guess what is going on because they never took the time to ask the right questions and get the information and context needed to know what’s going on. Does that sound familiar? I assume that you have witnessed this pattern yourself many, many times before? [0:01:42] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think in general people tend to assume a lot of things and as a result of making a bunch of assumptions, what ends up happening is they operate without actually checking in on what kind of is really going on or what’s happening or checking in on some of those assumptions they have. One way to think about this is, we run around the world kind of assuming things based on our own sort of opinion and it’s not necessarily the right way to think about interacting with people and getting stuff done. Simply because if somebody says, “I think we need to grow our business and we need to get more signups.” You can assume a lot of things about that. Even something like even that specific. If someone said, “Oh we need to go our business,” you can assume, oh we need to grow revenue if they didn’t tell you about the signup thing in their head. You could ask them, “Well what do you mean by that?” And I know that’s a really simple question, but it could be as simple as that. To me, asking questions helps you gain a common understanding that you might not have if you’re making assumptions about what the other person means when they say something. [0:03:03] Steli Efti: I love that because that really points to the heart of the issue. I think that most of us are not really aware of how we interpret or parse language. And in many ways, in order for language to be practical, we are at all times in need of adding a ton of information to make sense, quote unquote, of what somebody is telling us. And so we are constantly adding pieces and bits of information that is missing from the language, those sentences that somebody’s communicating to us. And that can be useful in order to speed things up. But it can be very detrimental when you really want to understand 100% what the other person needs. Even if I say a simple sentence like, “I bought a house last week.” Now that sentence sounds perfectly fine. Most people will not be confused by that, but your brain has to add a lot of information to make sense of this sentence because it’s not complete. I bought with what? Money? What money? What currency? US dollars? Euros? Zlotys? I didn’t specify any of this. Maybe a bought it with something else than money. It could may be equity in my company or something else. But we just, because it would slow us down to explain everything in such detail, you hear me and think you understand me because your brain added a lot of information that’s contextual for you. Bought from whom? The owner? Was it the state? The police department? Is this from a ex-convict? There’s a lot of things that aren’t in the sentence I bought a house last week. But we add a ton of information that is lacking within that sentence to make sense of it. Now, when it comes to situations of high importance, where you’re trying to understand people that work with you, when you’re trying to understand people you’re trying to hire, when you’re trying to understand your customers, you don’t want to just be interpreting everything they say because a lot of your interpretation is just going to be wrong. Somebody telling you, “Hey, please send us three proposals,” is not giving you enough context to understand why three? What are you going to do with those proposals? What are you’re trying to accomplish? What do you want to see in those proposals? Others’ proposals going to be compared with competitors’ proposals? There’s so much more to know and this is just one of the examples of people that I was asking. And most founders when they talk to a prospect and eventually the prospect says, “Hey, send me three proposals.” They just go, “Cool, sounds good.” They hang up and they go, “Whoa, all I have to do the three proposals and then hope for the best when I hit send.” But really, you’re really missing so much information. What is really happening? What is really the purpose and the goal here? And what’s fascinating Hiten is that we’ve all at least had to learn at some point in school how to read, write and speak. But I’ve never heard of anybody ever taking a class in asking questions and active listening. There’s really nobody that’s teaching us how to ask good questions and how to actively listen so we elicit the correct and complete information from the person that’s communicating to us. [0:06:29] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous because you can get away with a lot if you’re just asking a lot of questions. And get away meaning you can understand almost anything, pretty much anything if you’re just able to figure out what’s the right question to ask. For me it’s I’m not an engineer. I don’t know how to code and I tend to have great conversations with engineers just because I’m able to ask them good questions. And that helps me understand how to help them because usually their efforts lead to different choices and options that lead to different things that cause our product to be a certain way. And if I don’t understand what they’re dealing with, especially when they’re coming to me and needing to make a trade off, I don’t know how to ask questions, then we can go down the wrong path for months or even longer sometimes. For me, it’s this learning that if I don’t figure out how to ask good questions to whoever about whatever they’re coming to me with or whatever I’m going to them with, then basically what happens is I don’t get the best outcome and that means we in a company, as a team don’t get the best outcome. There’s one other part of this that I find really fascinating that is more from a relationship, interpersonal relationship sort of standpoint, which is even someone who you’ve known for a long time, you might not really understand where they’re coming from when they say something. And you could make assumptions about what they’re saying. If for example, someone says, “I can only meet for two hours,” and maybe you want to meet longer. You can ask them or you can tell them, “Hey, I’d like to meet longer,” and tell them, “I’d like to meet for three hours.” This is just an example. It’s actually an example from a few weeks ago for me. And instead I’m saying that I actually just said, “Oh, can you help me understand what your constraints are? Why it’s only two hours. Because usually when we meet it’s not constrained like that. I’m just curious, what’s different? Or what’s going through your head?” And that opened up the conversation and I actually got a much deeper level of understanding about the person and how they think about their time and their time with me. That was completely amazing just because I asked instead of trying to say, “Hey I want to meet longer,” or anything like that. I was just like, “Hey, why is it two hours? What’s going on?” And I even gave my context, which is sometimes when we talk it takes a while. And I come in with no expectation of how long or not. And so I’d just love to understand because maybe we might take longer. And then it turned into a great convo about just understanding where that person was coming from. I think that’s just an example, but it really matters even in interpersonal kind of relationships and things that you’re trying to figure out on seemingly obvious things where you could just respond. I could just respond to say, “I’d like to meet longer.” Instead I was like, “Whoa, What’s up? What’s different?” [0:09:47] Steli Efti: I love that. There’s an episode I want to recommend to people if you’ve not heard it yet, even if you heard it, it’s been a while. You might want to go to episode 225 of the Startup Chat. 225, listening skills for startup founders. We talk a little bit about this subject there. Here’s one thing that I want to highlight here. There’s going to be a bunch of people listening to us at this point Hiten, that think this sounds good. I probably could improve in what questions I ask and how many questions I ask, but how do I improve this? How did you guys get good at this? Why do you do this a lot? When did you learn this? Who did you learn it from? I’ll go first. I’ll go first at this point and I’ll say, I never, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book about this. I never went to a seminar workshop. There’s not a one person probably that I can point to as this person really influenced me on this. But I do think that for me, I’ve learned asking a ton of questions first as I was kind of entering the world of selling and entrepreneurship and I was trying to convince people of purchasing my product or my services. I think in the beginning my framework was always that selling is probably just talking. Let’s just talk a lot and hopefully one of the many things you say will convince people. And then, I realized that, the person that’s talking is not really in control of the conversation. And really the core way of really guiding a conversation and having more control over it is to ask questions. And then I think studying, and we have episodes about this as well. Studying hypnosis really helped me a lot with this because it was when I started studying hypnosis and we did an episode, I think episode 93 was hypnosis 101 and a lot of people had told me that they really didn’t want to listen to that one, but it turned out to be one of their favorite episodes. But like many things in life, the things you are really turned off by might have a big value somewhere hidden below the surface waiting for you. But hypnosis was so interesting to me because I really started studying language and understanding kind of how language works and even the little comment that I made at the beginning of this episode of understanding how much information is missing from a typical sentence and hypnotic language patterns are all about using very, making language even less clear and concrete in ways that influences the brain and the subconscious mind in a certain way. Playing with that topic and reading and experiencing and learning more about it taught me a lot about how much information is missing from a typical conversation. And it made me a lot more aware of when I want to zero in and elicit more information through asking more questions versus when it’s fine to leave things kind of a bit blurry because if you try to really understand every sentence and every person perfectly, it would just slow things down to almost a halt. But I think that those things really helped me. I don’t know if this is practical for people that are out there that want to learn how to ask better questions, but maybe the one hack with my side on this is a piece of advice I’ve given and we have given in many different other situations which is, just surround yourself with people that are great at this. Just ask yourself, who is the best listener I know? Who is the person that I know that asks the best questions? And just spend more time with that person. When you interact with that person, try to understand how that person is interacting and communicating with you versus just communicating with them. And if you have more people in your life that ask more and really, really great questions, it is going to influence you. It’s going to rub off on you and it’s going to teach you how to do that yourself as well. [0:13:50] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I started asking good questions because people were asking me bad questions. I think a really good example is when you were raising money for Kissmetrics for the first round, what did you do? How’d it go? I’m like, are you trying to raise money? How much? What do you have? I started asking questions because I was like, wait, that’s not really a good question to ask me because whatever I did is likely not going to be what you need to do. And so that’s a pretty simple example because I’d meet with people and they were like really interested in raising money. I think another thing that is a little bit of a side note but really fascinating is that if you’ve done something, people normally try to bucket you. The amount of introductions I get to anything that’s analytics related or marketing related is really interesting because people think, oh you built a bunch of analytics companies or you’ve been in marketing or whatever. And they get, and when they come to me, most of the people I get introed like that, they’re being very specific about what I did instead of asking me about what they should do. And so that just helped me get better at asking questions because I wanted to be as hopeful as I could be to them and I didn’t need to sit here and repeat my story because it wasn’t what they wanted. It’s not actually what they needed even though they asked it like that. I would say that’s an example of what I would call bad questions. If you’re looking for advice or help with something, don’t ask people what they did, give them your situation and ask them for kind of what they would do in your situation and I think it’ll turn out better in terms of the value you get from them. For me, my co-founder Marie is really good at asking really good question and a lot of them too. And so when something comes up, her first reaction tends to be asking a lot of questions. That it has taught me a lot about asking questions as well. While I’m giving advice, a bunch of taught me it and then working with her has taught me and especially when it comes to different business type of things that we’re doing. One thing that’s also done as a side effect is it made me actually go more thorough before I present something to her because I can anticipate the questions she’s going to ask. I’m not thinking like, oh, she’s going to ask these 10 questions. I’m just like, you know what? I’m just going to go to a little bit of extra level than I might normally because if I do that then she could ask even better questions and that enables us to get to the same place faster. Same place, meaning getting aligned or making a really great decision about something. And I only do that with things that I think are really important. The other thing I learned, and this is more on someone who I would say on my end, wasn’t necessarily as good at answering questions that she would bring up in the beginning is I would just tell her, “I don’t know the answer to that yet. And here’s when I think that answer might be important.” Or, “That’s a really good question. I don’t know. Let me go find out.” It was even being able to respond to questions like that has been really helpful too. I think there’s a back and forth of being able to answer questions and also being able to ask them that has been really helpful, like you said, by being around someone who’s actually really good at both of those things. [0:17:25] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right. There is really true power behind asking more and asking better questions. And I think we all have probably a life in front of us of continuous improvement on this. I don’t think that anybody’s great at it, but people are less bad at it than others. There’s definitely a lot more to learn even for us. And hopefully this inspired a bunch of you, the guys that are listening to spend more time and more attention and practice this and invest more in it because so many problems, so many challenges could have been solved if you only asked the right questions earlier. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:18:11] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:18:12] The post 468: How to Ask Better Questions appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about The challenger, helper, victim cycle. The victim mindset is one that some people have and it can be depressing being around someone who is always negative and constantly complains about everything. And while playing the victim might seem advantageous to certain people, other times it can prevent people from wanting to help you. So in this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how some founders can either be stuck in the helper or the challenger frame of mind, Hiten’s philosophy when it comes to giving advice in general, how most people with a victim mindset have a hard time getting out of it and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 01:23 How some founders can either be stuck in the helper or the challenger frame of mind. 05:00 Hiten’s philosophy when it comes to giving advice. 05:32 One very useful way to help someone. 06:20 How people, in most cases, want to feel good about themselves. 07:30 How Hiten approaches giving advice to people. 08:34 Why Hiten started sharing more about himself. 09:14 How most people with a victim mindset have a hard time getting out of it. 12:56 Hiten’s approach to giving advice to people with a victim mindset. 3 Key Points: My philosophy is to tell people what I think they need to hear, not what they want to hear.There’s a way to help someone by actually seeing what they are not and communicating it to them.I think that as a founder, you can be either stuck in a helper or the challenger frame of mind [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to become more of a challenger versus a “helper”. Here’s the deal, this could be a super tiny episode, but something about this made me think of you and thought this could be a cool little conversation to have that might be useful to people. I saw somebody tweet this the other day, and it was just a little graph. I don’t know, honestly, I apologize for this. I didn’t do my homework to research where the graph is from and which book it is associated with, and who wrote this or who came up with it. But I don’t think it’s really that important for the purpose of this conversation. But it was a little bit of a circle and it just … A graph or a circle that described a concept, and it was called something like the helper victim cycle and how to break through it. And it basically was describing how people can take on a victim frame of mind of describing their problem or their challenge from a passive, “This has been done to me. I’m powerless, and I need help,” kind of framework of mind, which will then elicit somebody to step in as the “helper”, and a helper is somebody that will look for victims to be useful to, right? That person will step in and will give the victim advice, comfort, empathy. Typically, basically the message of the helper will be, “I hear you, I feel for you, and I can help you.” Right? Either by telling you what to do, or by doing it for you. And how these two … These frameworks are obviously not that useful because they leave both people … Maybe they feel slightly better in the moment, but they’re not really changing anything about the situation. And then they introduce this different framework, which is the challenger framework, which is somebody that is in a victim frame of mind doesn’t really need somebody to come and be a helper but need somebody to come in and be a challenger. So somebody that maybe as well says, “I understand that you are in a challenging situation. I understand that this is difficult for you. I am happy to listen to you, but my amount of listening has limits. I’ll listen to you for 50 minutes complain about this or whine about this, and then I will ask you questions to help you think differently about this or to come up with a solution, and then I am happy to be the person that holds you accountable for making the changes necessary to get out of this situation and move from a victim to a victor,” or whatever they would be called if it’s the feminine version of this. “And I will be there for you as long as you do your part. If you don’t follow through on your commitments, if you don’t make changes, then I will not be around for you anymore.” Right? So it’s a very different kind of framework that helps the victim to break through and is much more helpful than just being a helper. And I don’t know, I felt that that grab was beautiful because I do think that, as a founder and as somebody that is hiring people, building teams and in a leadership position in one way or another, you can be either stuck in a helper frame of mind that then makes people be victims and codependent of you, or exhibiting the challenger mind frame that really empowers people to grow and become more and more independent and not really needing you in order to affirm them or help them or whatever. I see a lot of times founders, or managers, or leaders be much more in a helper framework where they constantly do the work for people, giving them solutions, telling them exactly what to do, listening to them with all their problems, being there for them, and really never being able to empower that person to really grow beyond their past limitations. So I thought it would be an interesting little thing to discuss. Maybe you know a lot more about this. You are particularly good at being a challenger and not a pure helper, at least in my observation, although people would probably describe you from the outside as the super helpful person. I think you are, but you are because you are very good at challenging people. So, just curious to hear your response and your reaction to this. [0:04:38] Hiten Shah: Yeah. It’s like I don’t … My philosophy is to tell people what I think they need to hear, not what they think they need to hear. People really want to hear certain things about themselves and it makes sense. If they ask you a question, or if they’re talking to you about something, sometimes they’re looking for compliments. Sometimes they’re looking for a positive reinforcement. I think that there’s a way to help somebody by actually seeing what they’re not seeing and communicating it to them. I’ve been through my own journey on this where I would really be quick to respond and give people my take on something, because I can get a take on something pretty quickly. Lots of practice and just lots of, I guess logic and pragmatic thinking, is what I tend to use, especially when people come to me with their stuff. When I come to myself with my stuff, it’s a whole different story. So, I think that … And there’s people in my life that I can bring something and they’ll do the same thing to me and that’s awesome. I think you’re one of them. So, this is really interesting to me because everybody really wants to feel good about themselves. That part makes it somewhat difficult to tell them things that they don’t want to hear. So I’ve spent now more of my energy, and I think I’m in a very great place about this where I just want … Sometimes I just won’t say it, because they’re just not ready. They don’t want to hear it. There’s no point. If I say something that I really think about them, or think about what they should do, or I have some thoughts, maybe they just want to vent. Maybe they just want to talk, and I don’t need to respond in a way I normally would, let’s say. I think what’s interesting is I’ve seen more people offer some thoughts on this, such as, “Oh,” you ask the person, “Do you just want to vent? Or do you just want to share something? Or do you want my advice?” You know what’s fascinating? I almost feel like that … I like that tactic. I’m not against it. I don’t think I’ll ever use it though. The reason is, it’s my job, if someone comes to me for something, or a friend, or anybody, to really decipher what they’re looking for. The reason I make it my job is because I don’t want to interrupt the flow in the conversation. I feel like if I stop you and say, “Are you looking for advice, or are you just trying to vent?” You’ll be off-put. It’s like off-putting in a way. It’s like, “Well, I’m just trying to talk. I just want to talk. I don’t if I want to. I don’t know if I need advice.” A lot of times people just don’t know what they need. So these days I just feel it up. I’m just like … I don’t know, I enjoy it when people talk to me. I enjoy it when people come to me with things. It’s something that … Not just … And I used to think it’s, “Oh, I like helping people out,” or whatever. It’s not to help them out, it’s just, I like people. I like listening to them. I like hearing what’s going on with them and what’s happening to them, and it’s actually even helped me do something that has been a little harder, which is, once I stop thinking about advice, I think we talked a little bit about I like to encourage people these days. I actually started sharing more about myself, and people seem to see that, and they’re like, “Oh, I’ve never heard that about you,” or, “Oh, no, I understand you better,” or this and that. I’m like, “Yeah, I’m not just trying to help you. I’m not just here to give you advice. I’m here to just talk. You want to talk? Let’s talk.” Right? Who cares what the label is, or let’s not call it that. And things just got a lot easier. So, I think when it comes to the example you gave with the victim and things like that, if that person’s ready to hear the message, by all means, go for it. But it’s your job when you’re delivering the message to figure out, “Are they ready for it? Do they need this?” And I do believe asking them is one way, for sure. It’s not my way, but it’s definitely one way where, if you don’t know what they’re looking for, it is totally reasonable to ask them. At the same time, in that victim situation, I don’t know. [inaudible 00:09:14]. Most people who have a victim mindset … I have a few people I know really well that have that. They have a hard time getting out of it. They have their own personal work to do. It’s not much you can do for them. There really isn’t. It’s just the way they are. It’s some childhood things, same things they repress. I could go on this, because I have a few folks in my life that really take that stance, and some people take that stance when they’re under stress, or something bad happens. Some people just take that stance normally. And you can see it manifest in almost their whole lives, and lots of parts of their lives. But the thing is, if you ever told them, “Hey, this is what you’re doing,” it’s likely that they’re not ready to hear that, and then you’d have to justify it. You’d have to give them examples, you’d have to do things like that. Now, the only caveat I have is, if someone is operating like that at work, and you see the pattern is continuous, and let’s say you’re their manager, or even if you’re not, it is worth, I think everyone’s time to find the right way to talk to this person about it. That’s a part that I find very fascinating, because at work, if someone has a certain mindset and it’s … Let’s say, let’s just call it negative, or negative to them but also probably harmful to the organization and people in it, it is someone’s job to talk to them about it, I think, because it’s not something that should continue and it’s something that the person should be aware of that they might not be. The people I’m referring to that have that mindset that I know, I don’t … I’m really close to them, I don’t think I can tell them. I really don’t feel comfortable telling them, because I think … But I’ve also seen them improve over time. So, instead of telling them, my reaction are different than they used to be. So they used to be a reaction where I would internalize their victimhood, and I would almost feed it. So then I was an enabler, and there’s lots of ways to feed something like that. If they’re the victim, you’re like, “Aw, I’m so sorry.” Oh, wait, hold on. Is there anything for you to be sorry for, for them? No. You’re essentially being sorry, as if you’re them, because they’re feeling like a victim, they’re sorry for themselves. It’s essentially one of the ways that the victim thing comes up, instead of, I listen and I actually give an alternative non-victim viewpoint to them. But I’m not telling them they’re being a victim. I’m just giving him an example of another way to look at it. That’s been really valuable for me in those scenarios instead of being more direct. [0:12:01] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love it. That makes a ton of sense. I think one thing that I want to just highlight before we wrap up this episode is, sometimes this pattern happens in not a distinct and strong of a manifestation, especially at work. Some people, they might not be outright victims at work where they complain and they whine and they’re passive and negative, where it’s very obvious to everybody, but the dynamic that’s created is one where there’s dependencies. This person comes to you always slightly too early with their problem, looking at you to suggest some brilliant solution, and you gladly step into the role of going, “Well, have you done X, Y, Z? What about if we did this, this, or that? What about this idea?” And then they give you the positive reinforcement of admiring you and going, “Oh, my God. No, I hadn’t thought about. That’s a brilliant solution to my problem. Thank you so much,” and then they leave. That can seem like a productive interaction, right? Person A had a problem, I come up with a solution, person A is now grateful and left with that solution. That’s a wonderful thing. But when that happens again and again and again and again, you’re training oftentimes that person to nothing for themselves. You train that person to not sit with a problem a bit longer and come up with their own solution, but just instantly come to you as a lazy way of finding solutions. And you may be feeding that, or training that behavior, or programming that behavior into somebody because you get a dopamine rush by solving other people’s problems. It makes you feel good. You feel brilliant. You’re like, “Oh my God. I’m so creative. I come up with ideas. I don’t even know how to do it.” That can be a really … To me, that mirrors very closely to the help-a-victim dynamic where it’s not productive, because the more people are joining the team or the more people you’re doing this with, eventually you’re going to start being overwhelmed and used. You’re going to start complaining why you’re solving everybody’s problems and your own problems are never being solved because you don’t have the energy and creativity anymore for it. And these people never … You’re not allowing them and helping them grow beyond your ideas, your capabilities. You’re making … Your coding them into a behavior of relying on you way too much, and I’ve seen this so many times. I have done this myself so many times in the past, and so that’s a framework that I would advise people to observe, either with themselves, or with their managers, or with other people within their teams or within their startup, and to try to break through and go beyond, because it’s a really limiting way of collaborating and working together. [0:15:01] Hiten Shah: Yup. Yup. I couldn’t agree more. [0:15:05] Steli Efti: There you go. There you have it, folks. That’s it from us for this episode. We will hear you very, very soon. [0:15:10] Hiten Shah: Cheers. [0:15:11] The post 467: The Challenger, Helper, Victim Cycle appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten try to answer the question, what color is boredom? One of the most important roles of a parent is helping your kids get through school. Sometimes, they may act in a way that doesn’t align with the system of the school, which could land them in trouble, and how you deal with the aftermath of that situation can make a huge impact on your child. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how to handle awkward situations with kids in school, the importance of following the rules, lessons Steli’s wants his kids to learn and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:37 Why this topic was chosen. 03:52 How to handle awkward situations with kids. 05:40 How Hiten handles tricky situations with his kids. 06:42 The importance of following the rules. 05:00 How Steli handles tricky situations with his kids. 09:09 Why Steli enables his kid to experience the real world. 10:24 Lessons Steli’s wants his kids to learn. 10:50 Why Steli doesn’t care so much if his kids go to college. 11:10 Hiten’s experience in high school. 3 Key Points: I like treating kids like adults as much as possible.There are different views in the world.My wife a more difficult time with conflict. [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 Chat we’re going to try to answer the question, “What color is boredom?” So, for you Hiten, you have no idea what I’m talking about and our listeners. Let me set this up a little bit. Another way of describing this, today’s episode is how to help your children get through school, especially if they’re getting into trouble all the time. So here’s the situation. I’m just curious to hear and discuss and digest this with you. And I feel like I could see a lot of entrepreneurs and startup people out there, at least those that have children, to have to go maybe through a similar experience, so they might benefit from this discussion. So, my oldest, I have two boys, my oldest is currently going through second grade and he has now started to get into daily trouble in school. And just recently he was thrown out of the class, a classroom. And when he explained to me what happened, it was very hard for me not to laugh. So he was telling me that the teacher was describing to them that colors could be an expression of emotions. So she was describing that red, for instance, could be love, could also be anger. And she was going through a couple of colors and what their emotional meanings could be. And then my son decided to raise his hand and ask, “What color is boredom, because I’m very bored right now?” [0:01:38] Hiten Shah: Wow. [0:01:39] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:01:39] Hiten Shah: Wow. Wow. [0:01:43] Steli Efti: That got him thrown out of the classroom. And now, not to defend my son too much, because he can be a smart ass. Right. I don’t know who has got that from. He definitely has that from me. But, in this specific case, for all his smart assness, he is surprisingly honest sometimes and sweet. And so, he told me afterwards that he actually really didn’t know why that was a bad thing, and he was actually curious. And then we proceeded to Google search what color boredom is, and we couldn’t quite get a definite answer to this question. But we landed on maybe beige, maybe brown, we weren’t sure. But that was a funny encounter. But he’s getting into trouble all the time with teachers. And so now we’re in this situation where I now, for the first time, have to figure out, as a parent that may or may not completely believe in the principles that the teachers have that my son is in class with, when he gets in trouble with school or with his teachers, what do I do? Do I just completely take myself out of it? Do I support him? Do I support the school? What do I do? In general, I’m not the biggest fan of the school he’s in and the teachers there. It’s a nice place, but I don’t fully agree with the way that they think about things, obviously. So I’m like, how do you handle this? How do you do this? And I have a little bit of a philosophy in a way of thinking about this, but I thought it might be fun for the two of us to jam on it since you are ahead of me when it comes to children in schools. Your children might be, or probably are, better behaved and definitely better behaved than my children apparently. But I was just curious in terms of your philosophy as somebody that may at times disagree with what the teachers will try to teach your children or the way that a school system is set up and designed. What’s your philosophy on encouraging, discouraging, or completely keeping yourself out of it? How do you deal with supporting or dealing with your kids in school as somebody that may think differently from a lot of the ways that teachers might think in the school that your children are with? [0:04:09] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting one. The worst thing that my kid has done so far is my son… My daughter’s five, so she’s still figuring it out. And we’ll probably have some interesting times ahead. And my son is nine, so he’s figured a bunch out. Was he would talk a lot in class, and the teachers basically took care of that because the next year they split up all those kids that were talking to each other. So he didn’t get to hang out with his friends in class anymore because they were talking too much together. So, they’re still friends, but they’re not the same kind of friends anymore. Right? Because we’re talking about second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade. That’s the level, an area. I think he’s in fourth grade right now, if I’m not mistaken. And so, basically I like treating kids like adults as much as possible. And in this context, for me, I would explain to my child, “This is what the teacher said, this is what you said, and this is why this happened, just so that you know, objectively, why this happened.” And make everything just a lesson and a teaching moment and let them make decisions for themselves, and be like, “If you keep doing things like that where you’re essentially trying to outsmart your teacher, you’re going to keep getting in trouble. So it’s not that you shouldn’t think like that or anything like that necessarily because I think there’s a really great quality to it. But you should use it for good, not bad. And you should use it to not get in trouble, because getting in trouble is bad.” Right? And then, at the same time, I would encourage the creativity, because I think he was very creative, what he did, and what your son did. And I think it’s actually pretty… It made me laugh still. It’s like, “Oh, that’s really good.” And in terms of the way that the teachers teach and disagreeing with them, I think it’s a moment and a way to teach a child there are different views in the world, and that’s okay. And that’s good. That’s a good thing. And if you don’t agree with it, then, in the current environment you’re in, you can’t do anything if you don’t agree with it. You don’t have any power over changing things in this scenario because you’re in school, you’re there to learn, and the teacher is the equivalent of your boss. Right? And not just you have to do what they say, but you have to follow the rules because you’re in a system that has rules. Maybe when you grow up, if you don’t want a system that has rules, you want to make your own rules, there are ways you can do that. And then I would say, “Look at your father. I make my own rules as much as I can. That’s why I run a company and I started a company.” You know? So I think all these things are just teaching moments and ways to help children understand the world. That’s my take on it. [0:07:05] Steli Efti: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think that it’s funny in the dynamic between me and my wife. Obviously, she has, to be fair to her, she is more impacted because oftentimes teachers will reach out to her or she will have to engage with them first before I get too involved in any of this. And my wife just has a more difficult time with conflict and feeling a bit ashamed or feeling a different type of protective of our son than I do. But, for my wife, this is usually much more overwhelming and, “Why don’t we put our children in a school that has much better principals and teachers that are thinking more aligned with the way we think.” But my thinking is that this is the real world. Right? And of course I get the appeal of putting your children in some kind of a “super school,” where teachers are these amazing human beings and they are up to date with the best, newest ways of teaching children and they empower creativity, individuality, and all that. And of course that’s awesome, but at the same time it’s not a really good reflection of the world at large. And so, I feel like my stance was always like, my children, they are pretty lucky. They have a pretty good setup at home and they have parents that can hopefully share a lot of things with them and are very encouraging. And so if they’re in a school environment that is not as encouraging, not as creative, not as aligned with our values, that’s actually a good thing that enriches their experience of the world. And now they can build the skill of how do you deal with these situations where maybe you’ll disagree with a teacher, but as you said, you are now in a environment where you don’t have the power to actually act out on all your thoughts or where you’re not running the show. And you just have to know how to play the game and get along and get by and progress without letting others suppress your ideas or your personality, but without having to completely check out or confront or create trouble, because that will not get you anywhere in many, many different situations. So, to me, my children or my kid being in a class with a teacher that I don’t think is this amazing human being that can teach my children a huge amount, that’s not a bad thing because they can teach them other things. They can teach them how do you deal with a bad boss? How do you deal with conflict? How do you deal with understanding your place, and how much power you have and how to play the cards that you’re dealt with? And also understanding do you want to be right or do you actually want to have a good life, and do you want to get ultimately what you want versus just being “right?” And so, I’m not as concerned as my wife about all this. I take it much more lightheartedly, but I also understand that it’s easier for me. It’s much easier for me to do that. But it’s funny and it’s like, recently, a couple of times randomly I was asked from people how much I care about my children getting a college degree education and going to an Ivy League school and getting a really great diploma. And, obviously, I barely made it to kindergarten. I didn’t go through college. I didn’t go to any great school. And so, my view is skewed by my personal experiences, but I really don’t care. There’s certain jobs where I feel like my children would have to do really, really well academically. Do you want to be a doctor? You probably won’t be able to do open heart surgery without studying very hard and getting very good grades. [0:11:06] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:11:07] Steli Efti: But there’s other jobs where it doesn’t matter as much. Hopefully I can instill a love for learning and discipline and work ethic and lots and lots of other good skills onto them. But do they need to go to college? And do they need to have amazing grades? For me, personally, no. And it’s funny that the people that asked me were surprised when I told them that, because they felt like maybe a lot of people that don’t get to experience that when they’re young, maybe they want that for their children. Like a lot of immigrants want their children to do really, really well in school. But I personally couldn’t care less. But how about you? I think that you are the type of person that people would imagine you were amazing at school, but I’m not sure, I think you were a little bit of a trouble maker as well. [0:11:54] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I definitely had a little bit of class clown in me. And I just knew I could get away with a lot without doing a lot of work. So I was definitely not trying to do… I think it was the second I hit high school, I don’t… Well, I think it was sophomore year onwards, I think I cared a lot less about getting straight A’s and stuff like that. I’d still get pretty good grades and get away with it, but I was okay with an occasional B and whatever, even though my dad was probably not as okay, but he didn’t complain a lot. So, yeah, I definitely was happy to be disruptive at times and say things that made the class laugh but made the teacher kind of pissed off. So I definitely did that in high school quite a bit more than people might imagine. I also would come up with really creative ways to cheat. Because this was before computers and all that good stuff. So writing really tiny and then creating a slot in your pen so you could rotate and get answers. Or I would cut out the pen, like a window in the pen, and put a paper there that I could just twist and see a bunch of notes during a test, stuff like that. Yeah, my go-to was always small, handwritten stuff. And just because I could. And then I wouldn’t have to study as much or whatever. I think those were fun things. Even in college, I’ve had so many experiences where I would still wake up, and this has stopped happening thankfully, but I would wake up and the dream that I had would be about having a test and not studying for it. And it’s been a recurring nightmare, basically, for me. And that’s because it happened at least 10 or 20 times in college. And even worried about… I don’t think I stepped foot in class that much in college either. I just went at the days I needed to because there was something view or something like that. Just so many things like that, for some reason, that I just experienced. So, yeah, I’m definitely not as good of a student and studious the way that people might think. [0:14:24] Steli Efti: People might think. What about your children? Do you have any ambition standards you would set, expectations you have on them when it comes to how they are going to do in school? [0:14:33] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So, I think the deal I have with my wife right now is, because she really studies hard and used to study really hard and would stay up as late as she could before a test and all that stuff, and that’s her style. I think she’s basically responsible for those aspects of their lives. And then, as they grow up a little bit more, the responsibility is going to fall more on me. So that’s kind of the deal we have, because she knows I’m not going to sit there, and I would teach them things of how to cheat the system without cheating the system more than I would… I wouldn’t teach them how to cheat, I think they’ll figure that out on their own if they want to, or they won’t. But I would definitely teach them the short cuts as much as I could, which is not necessarily how the teachers want you to teach your kids the stuff that they want you to teach them. I have a lot of respect for teachers and their ways regardless of whether I agree or not. And my kids go to public school at the moment. So, yeah, I like to conform to what they want as much as possible until the day comes when the kids don’t need to worry about that stuff. [0:15:40] Steli Efti: Beautiful. That makes a ton of sense. Well, all right, I don’t know. Well, let’s wrap this episode up with your answer to this question, and maybe you have a better answer than I could come up with. But what do you think, Hiten, what color is boredom? What would you guess? What would you say? What’s the first color that comes to mind? [0:15:56] Hiten Shah: Black. [0:15:57] Steli Efti: Black? [0:15:58] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:15:59] Steli Efti: Very interesting. Okay. [0:16:00] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Black. [0:16:01] Steli Efti: Black. All right, my man. That’s it from us for this episode. We will hear all of you very, very soon. [0:16:11] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:16:11] The post 466: What Color Is Boredom appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about scheduling principles for startup founders. Being a founder of a startup means you’re extremely busy most of the time. It also means that you’re being asked to certain things like speak at events, be a guest on a podcast and so on. When not managed properly, fitting all these into your busy schedule can get out of hand, especially if you schedule way in advance. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about a bad habit Steli picked up recently, One way to decide if you should schedule an event in advance and how Hiten schedules events much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:31 Why this topic was chosen. 01:58 Steli’s latest tip in sharing philosophy. 03:22 A bad habit Steli picked up recently. 05:32 One way to decide if you should schedule an event in advance. 06:49 How Warren Buffet schedules events. 08:01 How Hiten schedules events. 09:00 Why you shouldn’t say yes to everything. 09:34 Why you need to ask yourself how saying yes to something will benefit you.  3 Key Points: One bad habit that I’ve recently developed is scheduling things for many weeks in advance. If this is gonna happen next week would I do it?We are not Warren Buffet. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah. [0:00:06] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about scheduling hacks or scheduling tips for founders. Here’s why I wanted to talk to you about this. I think we’ve, with the years, we’ve talked about how to manage your time in a couple of episodes and shared some of the kind of time management principles that we use to make sure that we get the most out of our time. But recently I made a pretty big shift, there was one … I’ve changed many things over the years in terms of how I handled my time and especially the requests for my time. But just recently I made one I feel final big change that I wanted to share, and then I thought it would be fun for us to just share a little bit of how we decide what to schedule, how to schedule things and all that good stuff. So, I’ll kick it off by sharing my latest change in scheduling philosophy, and then we can just go back and forth on some tips, tricks. I know that you are really principled and disciplined in the way that you give out your time, because of the demand and requests for your time is so high. So, for me the latest and greatest on this is that, I have stopped allowing anything to be scheduled in my calendar that is further out than four weeks. And here’s why. One bad habit that I’ve developed over the last two years, especially I feel like, is that I’ve been pretty good at pushing back on requests for my time if I know that you know, this month or the next couple of weeks it’s not really … It doesn’t really fit. But it might be something, it’s a nice to have. Yeah, “I’d like to talk to you one day,” or, “I’d like to maybe do your podcast one day but just this month it doesn’t really fit into my schedule.” And then one really bad habit that I picked up was that I would just tell people, “You know what, whatever, October, November are not really good months for me to be on your podcast. But maybe early next year.” And then they would send me an invite for some random time in January or February and I’d be like, “Sure.” If it was far enough out, it would be easier for me to say yes to it, because it just felt so far away. I’m like, “Do I know what I’m doing July, 2025? No. Ah, sure, I might do your whatever.” Podcast events, whatever it is. But then inevitably time passes and I look in my calendar and I go, “What the hell is this thing in my calendar?” Why am I doing this this Thursday if this doesn’t work at all with the rest of my day? And so I would have a lot of regrets for especially things that were scheduled many, many weeks in advance. And so I made a big change on saying, “Hey, if I’m not ready to schedule this in the next four weeks, if it doesn’t fit into my current schedule, then ping me again in a month and we can reevaluate.” But nothing is being put into my calendar two months, three months, four months out. Because inevitably I will regret what have I scheduled, it won’t fit into what my priorities are, what my week and month looks like. And so it’s just a really bad habit to develop and I definitely was suffering from that. And then I would have all these things that I didn’t want to do that week and that I felt committed to, so it would be in constant conflict. So the most recent change in the way I schedule things is that I don’t schedule anything that’s further out than four weeks. I think I told this to a friend a couple of days ago, and he told me that he read somewhere that Warren Buffet, you can’t even schedule something out 48 hours in advance, which is much better. Where apparently if it’s not within the next two days, he refuses to schedule anything. I’m not sure how true that is, but that’s what a friend of mine told me he read somewhere about Warren Buffet. So that’s my latest and greatest. Is this something that you’ve ever … Is this a pain you’ve ever experienced or were you too smart to make this mistake? [0:04:15] Hiten Shah: I don’t know if I was too smart for anything. I’ll say that I learned something new yesterday related to this so it’s ironic we decided to talk about it today. [0:04:25] Steli Efti: Yes. [0:04:25] Hiten Shah: Just yesterday I learned that, somebody learned that this really works for her. And she was talking to me about it and she was a founder, and what she said is, “If someone invites me to do something or email me and wants my time or whatever, and it’s far out …” Let’s say a speaking thing or a meeting or a podcast, like you said. Even if it’s further out, the way she thinks about it is, “If this is going to happen next week, would I do it?” [0:04:58] Steli Efti: I like that. [0:04:59] Hiten Shah: And she bases it on that. Because usually we think about it, “Oh, this is going to happen three months from now, wouldn’t we do it?” Right? [0:05:07] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:05:07] Hiten Shah: Are we going to do it? Should we do it? And if you’re not going to schedule four weeks in advance or next four weeks or whatever, then you’re obviously not going to do it. So she said this has been really helpful to her, which is basically like, “Would I do it next week if it was happening next week?” And then she uses that as a criteria or main criteria to decide whether she does a thing or not. [0:05:30] Steli Efti: I love that. Yeah, that’s really smart. [0:05:33] Hiten Shah: I found that one to be really good. Yeah, I found that one to be really good. So, it’s kind of interesting thing. I think we all have different domains, and I find all the Warren Buffett analogies and tips around the way he lived his life and stuff, very interesting because we are not Warren Buffet. [0:05:56] Steli Efti: No shit. [0:05:58] Hiten Shah: We all apparently might want to be, and maybe we don’t want to be, I don’t know. I don’t want to be, I’m good. [crosstalk 00:06:05]. [0:06:05] Steli Efti: I don’t want to be Warren Buffett. [0:06:06] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I want to be me. I have the utmost respect for everything Warren Buffett though, obviously just like many folks do. I haven’t heard many negatives, or except maybe he drinks a lot of Coca-Cola or something, but apparently so does Bill Gates, so whatever. [0:06:21] Steli Efti: Diet Coke. Apparently the both drink- [0:06:23] Hiten Shah: So, the only thing I can think about is that I guess. [0:06:25] Steli Efti: Metric tons of Diet Coke apperently, both of them. It’s great. [0:06:30] Hiten Shah: So, when it comes to how he schedules you don’t think about it, like this person … Actually, from what I understand, and again, I don’t know much, I don’t think he’s an operator. I don’t think he has to manage people. [0:06:41] Steli Efti: No, no. [0:06:42] Hiten Shah: Right. Most of the people listening on this show either are managing themselves, not like Warren Buffet, or they are managers managing other people. And so the demands on your time are oriented around that. They’re not oriented around finding great investments to make, or thinking about where the world’s going next so you can make great investments. That’s a different life, that’s not most people’s lives. And that’s why when I hear this stuff, I’m like, okay, that’s cool that apparently Warren Buffet has this rule. And it’s also cool that he’s someone that has been known to say, “I keep my schedule very open.” Or free, or whatever. [0:07:25] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:07:26] Hiten Shah: At the same time, the way I think about it is today, especially after a lot of ups and downs on scheduling and all that, is like, there are things I’m required to do. Those things that I’m required to do I try to put on my schedule on a regular basis, and make sure that those things are there. So that could be one-on-ones with people on the team. It could be a weekly check in with my co-founder, it could be the leadership team meeting that we have. It’s things like that. They’re on my schedule, they’re happening weekly and they’re very static, they’re there. And I do my best to make sure that they happen or they get rescheduled within the same week that they’re in if I have to, and I hate rescheduling those things. So that’s very important to me. Then there’s things are ad hoc. An example of something somewhat ad hoc is, you and I try to do this every week. [0:08:18] Steli Efti: Right. [0:08:19] Hiten Shah: And we used to have a weekly schedule and then we decided we don’t need a weekly schedule, we’ll just do it when we can. And it’s a priority when it does show up and you and I schedule it, so it’s probably in the second bucket, which is things that get scheduled that needs to happen that are a priority. So they happen. [0:08:34] Steli Efti: Right. [0:08:35] Hiten Shah: And I’m prioritizing them. And then there’s the thing that everybody talks about, which is that third bucket, which is just stuff that’s coming in that you have to decide on. And truthfully, stuff that’s coming in that you have to decide on, you can just say no to all of it. You can just say no to all of it. Literally you could say no to all of it. You get invited to a conference, is that conference really going to help you? You figure it out. But if you’re really into conferences and your company benefits from them, your company should be doing them, literally. Not necessarily you. And that’s some, that’s a big different between how most people that I know that go to conferences think about it. And sure, if you need to go along and speak, all good. But shouldn’t that just be a system that people are taking care of in the company, marketing for example?Especially if those conferences benefit you, then there’s a system. Even if it’s you being scheduled to go, I would almost put that buffer and say, “Hey, someone needs to figure out how this is beneficial to our business, and it needs to be systematic and measured, and so it shouldn’t be my problem.” That’s the way I think of that as a founder now. And I also have this other lens that I put on things. It’s, how’s it going to benefit me? Just period. Like how’s it going to benefit me? Is there a tangible benefit I can get from doing this thing that’s in this third bucket of just random things. Not ad hoc, because ad hoc is more things I know I prioritize, I want to schedule them. Obviously I just spoke of weekly scheduled stuff or monthly scheduled stuff. This bucket is the one I think everyone wastes a lot of time on, whether it’s getting on a podcast or anything like that. For me it’s how’s it going to benefit me, how’s it going to benefit my business? If it’s not going to, I actually probably am not going to do it. Or I’m going to make it such low time and effort for me that I don’t get sucked up in it, it doesn’t take up much of my time. That’s basically the way I think about it. And so things either get systematic and they fall in the first one or two bucket, one or bucket two. Or I’m just trying to either not do them [inaudible] as little time as possible, and I’m really thinking about what’s the benefit for me. [0:10:49] Steli Efti: I love that. So I think there’s a couple of things there that I want to comment on. I think number one, on the third bucket, I think the most difficult thing for people is the fear of missing out. It’s like, “I’m not sure if this is going to be worth my time on not.” When it’s clearly a waste of your time I think most people have an easy time saying no, but most things aren’t a hundred percent clearly a waste of someone’s time. So I think that that’s when people struggle with just saying no, because they’re like,”What if this meeting would lead to something good? What if this podcast interview lead to some customers? What if this is some good exposure, some good opportunity?” And so they lean towards saying yes to too many things versus being okay with missing out on some opportunities in order to focus and make sure that the things that they are prioritize right now in their life and in their business, that they get enough time, energy and attention. So really having the courage to say no and you’re growing past that fear of missing out I think, is a big one. I think the other thing that I would highlight to people is, in general, and I think we’ve talked about this before. But in general, the amount of time that we either say yes to or request from other people is way too much. Most meetings are 60 minutes and it’s not because 60 minutes is some magical, perfect number for anything to discuss and to do. It’s just because people are lazy and it’s the easiest time block that we think. And so we just try to request and ask for 60 minute blocks on anything and everything, and then we will fill them. If you have 60 minutes on the calendar, you will find a way to fill that time in some mindless way. So, just pushing back on that, asking yourself, most things that you need 60 minutes for can be accomplished in 15, or in extreme cases in 30 minutes. I find it very rare that you need a full 60 minutes to discuss something, decide something or get something done with somebody else. And so just being more careful in accepting any kind of 60 minute requests for your time, in general accepting requests for time. I think, today we’re pretty in sync in the way that we handle a lot of this where a lot of people want to talk to me and then when I ask them to tell me exactly what they need, oftentimes I could just send them a podcast episode, a blog post and a talk. And I’m like, “I addressed this concern in these places. Please take a look and then let me know if you have a followup question, or if you try this and it doesn’t work and you want to share the results with me, I’m super happy to talk with you. But next four weeks I’m traveling so much, I have so many meetings, so many commitments. I can’t schedule a 30 minute call to answer something to you on a one-on-one level that I’ve already answered in 20 other places that I’m happy to share with you.” And so, that helps a lot, just answering things in email and pointing to all the content that we create to try to help founders and help people out there. But then even just being very mindful when you ask for other people’s time. Do I really need 60 minutes? Do I even really need 30 minutes? How much time do we really need for a focus [inaudible] prepared? Oftentimes there’s a lot that can be accomplished then. And I’d say this, one of the worst things that … One of the biggest signals that things are really not going well for you is when there’s a ton of reshuffling, rescheduling and cancellations or no-showing happening in your calendar. That means that you don’t have really a good system in place yet in the way that you manage your schedule. Because if you feel the pressure to move things around and reschedule, you probably over-committed. If people don’t show up to your calls or meetings, or last minute always asks you to move things around, maybe you’re asking too many people for things or you’re not selling them enough on what you’re doing is a really valuable use of their time. But that would always be a signal that I would give people advice on paying attention to. Do you feel like you’re in control of your time? Do you feel like your weeks are focused, or do you feel super overwhelmed, and do you constantly see that calendar events have to be moved around almost on a daily basis? That’s usually a good sign for, you might want to take a couple of steps back and come up with better habits in the way you do scheduling. [0:15:10] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Couldn’t agree more and more. The more you manage it, the more [inaudible] and more time you’re going to have for what’s important for you. [0:15:17] Steli Efti: There you go, and is that not what we all truly want and need in life? All right. [0:15:22] Hiten Shah: Yeah, make time for what’s important. Yeah, please. [0:15:24] Steli Efti: There you go. I think that’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very, very soon. [0:15:29] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:15:30] The post 465: Scheduling Principles for Startup Founders appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to foster a state of flow in startup teams. Sometimes, we are completely immersed in an activity that we don’t realize how much time flies by. This experience is a mental state that psychologists refer to as flow.  In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what it means to be in a state of flow, examples of being in a state of flow, what flow state is all about and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:39 What it means to be in a state of flow. 02:00 Examples of being in a state of flow. 02:30 What flow means to Hiten. 02:50 How you can have influence over people’s states. 03:49 The kinds of people Hiten likes to work with. 04:43 What flow state is all about. 07:17 The stress can affect founders’ flow. 3 Key Points: Flow is when everything you do feels so easy. You can be watching TV and be in a state of flow.You can have influence over people’s states. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:06] Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about flow states. What are they? Why are they valuable to you? But also more importantly, the thing I wanted to talk about is how to set up your team and your company in a way where those people get as much into a state of flow as possible. The reason why I wanted to talk to you about this, I went to the gym with a new found friend, a young entrepreneur from Switzerland who just moved to New York and we were talking about work and all the challenges and this, that and the other, and eventually he was telling me how everything in his life, he’s trying to design around being in a state of flow for as long of a period of time as possible in each day. Then he was like, “Flow is such an important thing to me. It’s such a fundamental thing to my happiness and my mental health. I feel flow needs to be a human right. Like everybody needs to have the rights to be as much in a state of flow as possible.” I had to laugh about that statement, but then it stayed in the back of my mind. I was like, “Yeah there’s real power in being on a state of flow.” So I thought that it might be really useful for us to unpack that. So first let me ask you, Hiten, what is… For those that don’t know, how would you even describe being in, quote unquote, flow, on a state of flow? [0:01:29] Hiten Shah: Things just feels so easy, whatever you’re doing right now. They feel so easy, you feel like you can just keep doing it. Another example is, that people bring up about flow is, you don’t realize how much time has passed. So in a way when you’re watching TV, you are in flow, so you don’t know how much time has past. So I think flow is just the state that you can get into. A lot of people talk about it because there’s a whole book on it and stuff like that about how, it’s like this a place where you’re learning but it’s not too hard and it’s not too easy. I want to call bullshit on that, and say like, you can be watching TV and be in flow, which is something super easy for you to be able to do. Right? For most people. To me, flow is just like, I’m literally happy and satisfied with what I’m doing right now and I feel like I can do it for very long time at this pace. That’s one reason why when you talk about like, “Oh, your team and flow and this kind of stuff,” I don’t control anyone’s flow, Steli. I really don’t. I don’t control anyone’s flow. I really don’t. [0:02:43] Steli Efti: Well, you may or may not. You may or may not control it, but you can have influence over people’s states. [0:02:50] Hiten Shah: I get it. I get it. I mean, as somebody who manages people, I’m like, okay, I get it. But the best I can do is give them freedom to work, and at the same time provide help and assistance when they’re blocked. And so my whole framework on this for other people is simply like, I like to work with people who… And I like to, that doesn’t mean everyone I work with is like this. That’s okay. I like to work with people who can be given a lot of freedom to do whatever they need to do to figure out the how of their job. Right? Like how are they going to do their job? That’s pretty much their problem. If they are blocked, I just want them to talk to me if I am their manager. Or if I’m in the company and even if I’m not their manager and they need help, I’m happy to help them. Right? That’s it for me, because what I believe is that that someone’s flow state is someone else’s flow state. I don’t have much right to come in there and say, “This is flow for you, this is not flow for you.” Or even have a lot of influence on it. Because at the end of the day we have our own habits, we have our own way of working. Like for example, if you want to go walk your dog once an hour because you want to and that breaks you out of flow, is that my problem or your problem? Do I have any control over it or do you? One, it’s not my problem. Two I have no control over. If you need to do that for whatever reason that you think you need to do that, that’s on you. And if that breaks your flow, what am I going to say? I’m going to say the obvious, which is walk your dog every two hours. Not every hour. Right? I know I’m getting pretty prescriptive, but flow state is all about the things that an individual is doing that’s either helping them get stuff done and be happy doing it and satisfied or not. And so if you complain that you’ve got to walk your dog every hour, I mean you’ve got to walk your dog every hour. That’s a complaint, complaining about it. If you’re saying you can’t get in flow or work is suffering, all right, fix it. But what can I do? That’s what I really think about this topic. I like the topic, I do feel influence, but to me influence is pretty straight forward, which is, does the person have enough freedom for their role in order to achieve the results for the business without feeling like so they’re being micromanaged? Without feeling like there are constraints put on them that they don’t want? Such as meeting and lots of meetings or something like that. [0:05:22] Steli Efti: Right. That makes sense. What about the goals that you set? Right? In many companies if the people that they hire, if they give those people… If you hire somebody and you’d give that person a task that’s impossible for them to accomplish, right? Within an hour you have to double our traffic. Just go, you can do whatever you want. You have creative freedom for the next hour. [0:05:45] Hiten Shah: Do I have unlimited amount of capital, to do it? I’m just kidding. [0:05:50] Steli Efti: No. [0:05:50] Hiten Shah: Yeah, go ahead. [0:05:51] Steli Efti: No, no. [0:05:51] Hiten Shah: There’s constraints. [0:05:52] Steli Efti: No. But even if, there are constraints, right? I mean, the constraint is that you’re giving them something that they cannot do either because they don’t have the experience, the resources, the time, whatever. Right? You’re giving them… You’re setting goalposts where it’s not just stretching their ability, it is breaking it, right? Or on the reverse, you set no expectations, right? There are people that work in teams, or with vantages where they go, “It doesn’t really matter. Nobody expects much from me,” right? “Nobody really looks if I’m very productive or not, or if I have impact or… Nobody, as long as I show up at work and I seem busy, everybody’s happy and it doesn’t really matter.” Both these things can be really soul crushing to people. And I think that both of them lead to a not never getting into a state of work flow right? Now, obviously everybody’s responsible for their own life. They could just go and find another job or reject these goals and propositions or challenge them and all that. But I have found that a lot of startups, what they do is they’ll set these super hard goals to accomplish. Everybody will stretch way beyond what they’re capable of. They may reach them or may not reach them, but there’s always kind of a burnout or crash afterwards, and then there’s going to be the next kind of sprint that really stretches every way above their possibilities. It’s rare to see a TIMO structure. It’s very rare that startups will set such low goals that nobody really cares and nobody really feels any stress. But you definitely have this like, not just pushing everybody beyond their boundaries, but pushing them so far away that they’re just going to crash. How do you feel about that? What’s been your experience with that? Or how does that relate to basically empowering people to get into a state where they do their best work and it’s easy to do and it feels like time flies and it feels like they’re accomplishing a lot because they’re in the zone and staying in the zone? [0:07:54] Hiten Shah: I think folks are really a bad at setting goals. That’s really where the start of it is for me around some of the stuff, which is like if you set unrealistic goals, of course, you’re not going to achieve them, and people aren’t going to be happy at work. The way I think goals fit into this is literally setting realistic enough goals or even saying when something’s a stretch goal saying it’s a stretch goal, or setting three different sort of goalposts for that goal and saying this would be acceptable outcome. Here’s a stretch goal and here’s what would be amazing before you get into something and then going after it. That’s one way to think about it. Like doubling traffic in one day, not necessarily possible, but saying that, “Hey, I’d love for us to get 25% more traffic today than we did yesterday.” It’s probably still a stretch goal, but it’s possible. Especially if you just decide that in the morning. I think a lot of things with goals are also how much preparation time you have for them. I think that’s something that’s very underappreciated. How much prep time do I have to reach this goal? Not how much time do I have to reach this goal? How much prep time did I get to reach this goal? I think that, that like when does the clock start? Is another example of this, and that can cause you to start preparing and things like that. So then when you’re actually actively looking to reach the goal, you could be in a flow state, because you’ve had enough prep time and you feel like you’re up to the task. [0:09:41] Steli Efti: Yeah. I feel like the goals’ thing is one where we probably should do an episode on it. Like how to set better goals, what mistakes to avoid, this such a big topic. But I do believe that at least on an individual level, like even switching away from the team level, it is a good question to ask yourself, “Am I in the zone or in the flow? Or, when was the last time that I felt that it was really in the zone? Like that it was really in the flow of things, especially at work?” Let’s just focus on the work side of things. If the answer to that question is, “I don’t remember or not anytime recent,” then there’s a big opportunity to tackle and maybe to ask yourself, when was the most productive time I’ve ever had? What was the time that I had that I felt like I was really productive and happy? I was productive and didn’t feel like I am overloading myself, right? Putting on too much, doing too much. Just feeling like I’m doing just the right amount, just more than I’m comfortable, but at a pace that I could do for very long periods of times with incredible determination and focus and persistency and what did it take for you to have these times and how can you reproduce that today? Because I think that many, many founders, many startup team members, many people that work in a challenging environment, they struggle really getting to long periods of being in the zone and being in the flow, and they’re either out of it because they overstretched or out of it because they’re under stretched, and just finding that right balance for you, whatever that means or the right components that you need and things that you need in your life, and your day, in your work setup to get in there I think is a really good exercise really to make a massive difference in how much you are able to accomplish. All right. There’s a book I know, but I don’t remember what the book is called, but probably if you type in flow state book, you’re going to find it in Amazon or somewhere. There’s a very famous book I think, about this topic, and maybe if you find it tweet it to me and I’ll buy it and read it myself as well to get more knowledge as well about this. But I think this is it for us for this specific episode. Look out for the episode in the future, we will talk about all the mistakes people make when they set goals. Until then, I wish all of you as much states of flows and zones as possible. [0:12:23] Hiten Shah: See you. [0:12:24] The post 464: How to Foster a State of Flow in Startup Teams appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to overcome creative blocks. As a founder, creating new things is something you’ll need to do all the time. Whether it’s creating a new blog post, shooting a marketing video or writing a new line of code, creativity is part of being a founder. However, there are going to be times when you can’t think of what to create and this can slow down the progress of your startup. So in this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why creativity can’t be defined, ways to overcome writers’ block, how Hiten uses context switching to get past creative blocks and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:29 Why this topic was chosen. 02:03 Why creativity can’t be defined. 03:09 One way to get over writers’ block. 05:00 How internal resistance can cause creative block. 06:20 Another way to get over creative block. 06:56 How overthinking doesn’t help. 08:37 Hiten’s process for creating stuff. 10:19 How Hiten uses context switching to get past creative blocks. 12:56 Tips to help you get past creative blocks. 3 Key Points: As a founder, you have to create stuff.I’m not sure if creativity can be defined.So for me, getting past it means just doing the work. [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: Today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about how to overcome creative blocks or internal resistance to get certain work product done. So this is probably something… This is not probably, this is definitely something everybody has gone through. And when you are a founder or when you’re in a startup, you’re going through this probably quite a lot. You have to create things. Right? You have to create work product. It doesn’t matter if it’s writing an email, it doesn’t matter if it’s writing a sales script, creating a landing page, publishing a blog post, creating a video, writing some code to finish up a feature. Whatever it is, you have to create. And whenever humans are involved with creative and productive endeavors, they do encounter internal resistance. Right? Or what you would call writer’s block or whatever, creative blocks. And those are those moments where you have a difficult time getting started or you have a difficult time not getting distracted. And so finishing the thing that you need to do. And I thought it would be fun for the two of us to just jam a little bit on this and share some of our ways that we found around this, some of the tips that we have to share to overcoming any kind of creative blocks or resistances. [0:01:24] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I’m going to first say that I’m not even sure if creativity can be defined. [0:01:30] Steli Efti: Ooh. All right, tell us more. [0:01:37] Hiten Shah: Look, the reason I’m saying that is it’s one of those things where it’s like, what does being creative really mean? Sure, if I’m an artist and I can’t paint, and I’m a painter, I paint paintings, we can define that as there’s a creative block. Or there could be something else going on. But we can say there’s a block in creativity. If I’m a writer and I just can’t get myself to write, you could argue, “Okay, that’s a creative block.” Right? There’s books for that. There’s a book called The Artist’s Way. And there’s other books too. And they talk about things like write morning pages. So when you wake up, just write a bunch of stream of thought, and that’ll help jumpstart your creativity. I don’t know though. In business, in the life of work, I’m not sure if creativity is something that’s definable in the same way that it is in other places. And I feel like we always have the opening and ability to be creative, whether it’s in our personal lives or in our work lives, even if we’re not artists, even if we’re not writers. And that’s something that I would want to stress, and say, “Okay. If you feel like you’re blocked creatively, I would recommend you get very specific about what’s different in your life from when you are creative, I guess in your own mind, and then try to figure out how you want to fix it.” For example, in my own life, if I’m not very creative, if you want to call it that, with my words, when I speak, if when I write it’s just not coming out properly. Like if I write an email or something like that. I know that I’m just not feeling right. I don’t know if I’m creatively blocked you, some would say that. Just not feeling right. Or, even in my case, it’s like I’m trying to tweet something and share something I’ve done or just come up with something that’s in my head that I want to share and it’s just not coming out. That could be a creative block, but really for me, that has a lot to do with something that I think I relate to creativity in this way and creative blocks, which is your feelings. And I think that it’s not really about creativity. I think it’s more about how do I feel. So that’s what I’m going to throw down, see what you got. [0:04:08] Steli Efti: Right on. I’m not going to even challenge you because this is going to become too big of a topic. And I don’t even know if I want to. Although this reminds me, we need to find more things to argue about. This is actually a fun part of this podcast that we haven’t done in a while. We just like each other too much and agree with each other a lot. But the thing that I want to focus on real quick is, you have created so many different things. But let me just ask you, when you have to, or the last time that you wrote a more long form blog post or something along those lines, you have surely encountered times where you didn’t just say, “I need to write this.” And you sat down, you opened your editor, and you started writing. And then you were like, “Oh, it’s finished. I’ll edit it later.” And that was it. That’s kind of a very smooth experience. But you surely have gone through phases where you opened the editor and you started, you thought about the first sentence, and then you got distracted by email, and then you text to somebody, and then you Slack with someone, and then, “Oh, it’s time to go and meet up for coffee with somebody.” And you went back and tried to restart again. And did this for a couple of days and didn’t really progress anywhere or just had a difficult time to sit down and finish the thing that you really wanted to finish or work on. Because there was, what I would just call, internal resistance. Right? There’s something inside of you that was blocking. It might not be blocking your creativity, maybe it’s just your focus, maybe it’s your energy, whatever it is. I think what a lot of people encounter, I definitely encounter this, is that I want to create a work product, whatever that is, could be a piece of content oftentimes, and it’s not always as smooth as just saying, “I’m going to do it now,” and then I’m doing it. Oftentimes, I’ll have to go some form of resistance either because my attention is split, because I don’t feel like doing it right now, or because when I start working on it, I have a difficult time to get into “a state of flow” where things just happen. And so I have a few false starts before I finally get to the creating part of it. Do you ever encounter that? [0:06:31] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I’ve learned that I just need to spill the beans on things like that. And what I mean by that is I just need to not get caught up in being blocked. And if I have to, write something crappy. So, for me, getting past it is just doing the work. And whatever it is, just starting, even if it’s a sentence or a word or whatever. With writing, I think a lot of it has to do with that. You can easily overthink what you’re trying to write, and that usually leads to this lack of freedom, and then your words just don’t flow. So you’re just overthinking it. So one way to think about it with any endeavor that I would say you feel blocked on creatively or whatever is just don’t let yourself stay in your head and get it out of your head, whatever you have to do. So even if you’re blocked on creating an interface, or you’re blocked on, “How do I send the sales email,” or whatever, just start writing or start drawing on a whiteboard or just start… For me, a lot of things with product have to do with I’ll look at other products if I’m blocked, just to get some inspiration going, or get some criticism going about them. And then that can pump me up to just start. So I think just starting is the key. And I know, I’m sure a lot of creative things that tell you how to do this stuff say that. But, yeah. [0:07:54] Steli Efti: I love that. So let me ask you about dealing with distractions when you have these blocks. Right? So you’re somebody that is incredibly “on.” Right? You are involved in so many different communities. You’re very active on Twitter and social media. Your inbox is probably a very noisy and loud place. And I know how good you are at being super fast in responding to things. And you’re part of probably a million different places and communicating with a million different people and organizations and teams during a normal day. What’s your process for when you need to do, when you’re not in manager mode anymore, but you’re in maker mode? What’s your process for that? Do you block out everything? Do you disconnect from the internet? Are you just like you’ve gotten so good at it, even if you have a thousand tabs open in Slack and notifications, and your phone rings, you just don’t respond to anything. You sort of get in the zone? How do you deal with blocking out price for your attention or distractions when you are in this maker mode trying to create work product yourself? [0:09:13] Hiten Shah: I’ve gotten pretty amazing context switching. So I think if you’re going to work on… It’s not even work on a lot of things. I think I love the idea of maker and manager mode. My biggest issue isn’t when I’m sitting in front of a computer, it’s actually when I’m not. So these days I’m out and about more, having meetings related to FYI that are outside of my home office, basically. And I have meeting days. Like today’s going to be a meeting day. And it just means I have two or three meetings that are outside my house. So for me the issue is more like, “Can I whip out my laptop in my car?” Which is my second office. And will work for like an hour in between meetings. Literally, I do that. And so for me sitting in front of a computer is my biggest hack, if you want to call it that, or my biggest issue that I try to solve for. I could go sit at a coffee shop and get on my laptop too, don’t get me wrong. That’s fine. I like my car though. I’m weird like that. And so I think there’s these habits and behaviors that we develop to make sure that we are productive. And for me I’ve found those. So it’s not so much like I’m in front of the computer, there’s a million tabs open, people are Slacking me and I can’t concentrate. Because I can switch between tasks pretty fast. And so that helped. And so I don’t have any routine of turning things off. I think I’m a little different than most people like that because I feel pride in being able to process those things. I don’t think I would call it multitasking. I think a lot of people have a bad connotation to that. For me it’s simply this. If my attention is drawn to something and then all of a sudden I need to shift my attention to something else, how quickly can I engage in that something else and then get back to my other thing? [0:11:11] Steli Efti: I love it. [0:11:11] Hiten Shah: And that’s context switching. That’s what I would practice if someone wants to get to what I would say is advanced level. And the reason I call it advanced level is when I talk to people about this they’re like, “Yeah, I can’t do that.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, we can do anything we want to do, so that’s cool.” You just need to decide if it’s important to you in order to be able to context switch. And I think context switching is what I would advise anybody who wants to get better at, even the creative blocks and things like that, is if you can switch from a task to another one and then switch back, and then possibly switch to another one and then switch back, you’re mastering this ability to take your attention from one thing to another and being able to shift your mind really fast. And so, I think that’s the way I think about a lot of this stuff, which is very basic things that are happening that are reality. How did I just get better at them instead of trying to resist them? I think a lot of people do resist. Obviously, the natural thing to do is turn everything off. Because when I’m in this mode, I’m in this mode, and this is what I need. And I get it, but do that if that works for you. For me, I prefer to not have such strict rules around my life and my work so that I can be a little more fluid. [0:12:24] Steli Efti: I love it. The one thing I liked the most about what you just said was the, when somebody’s like, “Ah, I’m just not good at that,” and you’re like, “Yeah, if this is what you want to tell yourself.” Right? We can get good at anything we want to. That’s the most Hiten thing about everything you said. It’s like, “Ah.” [0:12:39] Hiten Shah: I don’t know if I buy into this way of thinking. I love it. I love it. [0:12:43] Steli Efti: I think that there’s a certain… There’s a lot that I want to say, but I want to keep this episode short. So two cents and then I’ll give a book recommendation, we’ll wrap this up. I think that, A, just like anything in the world, if you want to get good at things, you have to practice them and do them a lot. And it helps if you believe you can get good at them. And if you can bring a certain lightheartedness to things. If you mentally make this a massive mountain, you’re like, “Oh my God, I cannot focus. Focus is impossible for me. It’s 400 generations of people without focus and I am haunted by the spirits of my DNA. And also, I have all these proofs, all these stories I could tell myself about my past and how I had a difficult time focusing. And so I know I need to focus tomorrow, but I can’t, I already know.” If you make this a huge deal, you are going to make those thoughts realities. Right? You’re going to follow… Your thoughts will influence your actions and your state. Your thoughts will influence how you feel. The way you feel will influence what you do and what you’re capable of in terms of tapping into resources. So thinking about these things and these massive challenges will make them bigger than they need to be. So if you can think lighter thoughts, if you can think better thoughts, if you can just look at this and go, “Huh, yeah.” Maybe in this example that I gave, if you think, “Oh, I’ve always struggled, so now’s the time to get better. Right? I have a lifetime experience in struggling, so now it’s time to accrue a lifetime of experience on being great at this.” And if you can just attack some of these things that you want to get better at with a little bit of humor, with a little bit of curiosity, with a little bit of lightheartedness, it makes a world of difference. And then it’s a thing of practice, right? Where the more you create, the more you do, the better you get at these things. And eventually some of the things that were incredible challenges to you in the past now seem super, super easy. So, the best thing to do to get great at whatever, creating stuff or having less and less of blocks and resistance is just to create more and more stuff and get better at creating. And a quick book reco, you gave one, I’ll give one to wrap up the episode. The War of Art from Steven Pressfield is a super short book. I love his writing. His writing is super succinct. I like when I read something that is at least well-written. I really appreciate that. I’m like, “Oh, he said this really nicely in three sentences.” This book is so small and the pages are usually just half-written, just one paragraph or two paragraphs. I love that. It’s a very quick read, but it’s really well-written, and focuses exactly on this, on breaking through mental blocks and all that. So, that’s the book reco. Those are our experiences. And we’ll wrap this episode up with that and we’ll hear you very soon. [0:15:50] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:15:50] The post 463: How to Overcome Creative Blocks appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Extreme Ownership. Extreme Ownership is a book written by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin and it talks about the leadership concepts used by US Navy SEALs to accomplishing the most difficult missions in combat.  This book also provides readers with Jocko and Leif’s formula for success and demonstrates how to apply these directly to your business and life to likewise achieve victory. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten share their thought on the book, how the concept can be applied to your startup and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:38 Why this topic was chosen. 00:58 What you need to know about extreme ownership. 03:33 Jocko Willink’s response to every problem. 04:32 How a leader can have extreme ownership over everything that’s going on in the company. 05:58 How ownership can be empowering. 07:54 How Hiten and Steli are very much aligned. 09:09 How getting people to take responsibility can be really difficult. 11:04 Behaviour patterns that can be associated with extreme ownership.  3 Key Points: Every problem is a leadership issue.If you can say the words “we have a problem”, you’re still alive.Ownership is empowering. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. This is one of those topics that Steli just knew we were going to do today. We do a few every time. So, the topic is about extreme ownership and I have not read any of the books on it. So, first, I’m going to say, Steli, have you read any of the books on this topic? [0:00:23] Steli Efti: Yeah. I’ve read the book, Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink. I have. [0:00:28] Hiten Shah: All right, so let’s start there. What do I need to know about that, or what were your takeaways about it? Because I think that would be a good start because I know nothing. [0:00:40] Steli Efti: Yeah, so- [0:00:40] Hiten Shah: … Sure a lot of folks who are listening are not ready yet. [0:00:43] Steli Efti: Yeah, so- [0:00:43] Hiten Shah: I do have the book though, for the record. [0:00:46] Steli Efti: Yeah. I’ll tell you this in all honestly, this will now prove to people that constantly telling me they can’t believe that we do absolutely zero prep work for almost 500 episodes that we’ve done so far. Here’s the truth. I read the book, I would say, three or four years ago. I can’t tell you much about it. I can tell you this, I am a big fan of Jocko Willink. I think the book he talks a lot about his experience of running a military team under very, very difficult circumstances and some of the principles that he applied to running that team, which is basically summarized in the title, which is like you’re responsible for everything, basically. I think what I remember from the book is that everything is a leadership problem. Every problem is a leadership problem. Every issue is a leadership issue. And a core principle of being a leader is that, you own everything, you take complete responsibility and ownership over everything that’s going on within your team or within your sphere of influence. And you teach your people to do the same thing. I’m sure there’s a lot more awesome stuff in there that I just don’t remember anymore. But I’ll tell you one little tidbit on top of it. There’s a video out there from Jocko Willink, one of the authors of Extreme Ownership. If you go to YouTube and you type, Jocko Willink and then the word good, G-O-O-D, good, there’s a two minute video that was cut out out of a podcast recording that he made, that is one of my favorite, most motivational two minute videos on YouTube. Fucking love that. Which is basically where he describes that anytime somebody would come to him with problems before he could answer or respond to that problem, they would eventually go, “I know what you’re going to say, Jocko. You’re going to say, ‘Good,’ right? Because you always say, ‘Good,’ when I come with problems with you.” Right? We don’t have enough money and budget, and we’re in trouble for it. “Good.” This thing didn’t work out the way we thought it would work out. “Good.” And then, he just talks about, it’s like, “Good, good. There’s time for us to learn, there’s time for us to readjust, reengage, dust ourselves off. If you can say the words, ‘We have a problem,’ you’re still alive. You still have fight in you. We can move on, learn, grow from this, expand from it.” So, “Good,” is his… “Good. If there’s a problem, good.” Right? And I love that he was using this so consistently that people would come to him and be like, “I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say, ‘Good.'” And so, that’s my imperfect recollection of the book and the things I like about the author of the book, for sure. [0:03:29] Hiten Shah: Awesome. I think this is an important topic. I like the way he thinks about it around people taking a leadership position in things. I had a really… With a bunch of founders just yesterday, because I was out at [inaudible] and the topic was on managing yourselves, basically. And it was a voted on topic and people wanted to do it, so I had like 22 people out of almost some 200 person event. And there was a bunch of breakout sessions, and I was like, “Well, I’ll pick one of the eight or something” and at that time slot. And it was a lot of fun to talk to founders and just hear that they have trouble managing themselves, and it has a lot to do with prioritization and tasks and things like that. And one of the things that, to me, I didn’t bring up, but I’m excited to talk about this and think through it is, how do you as a leader in an organization have extreme ownership over everything that’s going on, even if you didn’t work on it necessarily or it was on your team? And one thing that I always find really… Everything that’s going on that is related to those responsibilities. And it’s really fun to watch because there are some people when something goes wrong that just want to deflect, just based on personality, it’s not necessarily something they can control as easily without a lot of awareness. But it’s basically, they’re just trying to deflect it, and you can just tell that they’re just not willing to take that ownership over the mistake or they’re not even willing to take the ownership over something great that happened. And it has a lot to do with their personality of not wanting to make a mistake or not wanting you to do something bad. And I find that it gives me an impression that they don’t have ownership over what they’re doing. They don’t have this extreme ownership attitude, and it’s not good or bad, it’s just something that if someone’s like that, I actually look forward to ways to help them see things differently. And so, I think a lot of this has to do with, when people aren’t taking ownership over whatever work they are doing or their team’s doing, how do I help them see it differently and help them see that they do… Ownership is empowering, regardless of what the negative or positive is, and I think that’s where this idea of good comes in because it’s just powerful just to own. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, own it. And if you own it, it’s just good in the first place. [0:06:16] Steli Efti: I love that. One interesting thing, I think this topic, to this kind of philosophy of taking a very extreme stance when it comes to owning… Usually extreme ownership or taking responsibility typically applies to the negatives of life, right? Nobody’s talking about like, “Why aren’t people taking more extreme ownership over the good things they’re doing?” Right? That’s not typically the issue. The issues usually when there’s problems, when there are challenges, when there are things the team outside a person’s control. Do you tend to feel like a victim, or when you fail or when something isn’t going your way, are you going to look for explanations or excuses to push away blame from you? Or are you the type of person that assumes responsibility for things because you always ask yourself or find ways to relay back to what you could have done better or how you influence the situation. And one thing that I noticed really early on in our friendship, we’ve been now friends for what, five years? We’ve been recording this podcast for close to five years now, right? [0:07:37] Hiten Shah: Yeah. Wow. [0:07:38] Steli Efti: On an ongoing basis. I was just talking to a bunch of people, a bunch of CEOs at a conference that were all telling me that how our podcasts have influenced them, and they were all amazed that we’re still like… They’re like, “I was listening to this four years ago, and I’m amazed that you guys are still so consistent with it and pushing out episodes.” One thing that I noticed very early in our friendship, and in our podcasting relationship up until now, is that, this is a thing where we’re very, very, similar, where through all the highs and lows of our lives, through all the problems that we’ve privately discussed, we are very much aligned that… I’ve never heard you describe a problem or situation in your life with your companies, no matter how much somebody could have explained it being something outside your control or somebody else would be to blame, I’ve never heard you describe a problem or challenge without assuming responsibility for it in one way or another. [0:08:39] Hiten Shah: Likewise, likewise. That’s right. Yeah. [0:08:42] Steli Efti: And so, this is just the type of thing, we never have to sit down and talk about it, but it’s the type of thing where I’m like, you’re one of the very few people and you are exactly like me. And this is maybe a part, or probably a part, of why I appreciate you so much, you just take an incredible amount of responsibility in your life and for so many other people’s lives. And I don’t know if you know when you did that, if that was always the case. I’m not even sure how this has happened to me, but I do know that it’s very rare that I see that. I do know that most of the time when I interact with people, I am in a situation where I’m trying to coach and encourage people to spend less time with explanations and less time with excuses and more time and energy in owning it, whatever it- [0:09:37] Hiten Shah: This is so difficult to get people to do sometimes because you’re bumping up against their psychology. You’re literally bumping up against someone’s psychology. Literally, it’s like, and I watch for this, it’s like when they’re under a little bit of pressure or they think they made a mistake, how do they react? Right? And I’ve seen this with co-founders, I’ve seen this with managers, I’ve seen this with individuals where it’s like when they’re pushed just a little bit on ownership, what’s the reaction? So, there’s a person I work with, and their reaction is, basically, immediately trying to figure out how to deflect the blame but not necessarily blame someone else, but trying to figure out what went wrong but not exactly taking ownership over it fully. And there was a scenario recently where that person, there was something small in a meeting, and that person slipped up by, basically, deflecting it to me and right away, trying not to find fault in what they did. Or it’s almost weird because this person does have extreme ownership, but when they get in a certain stressful situation where they feel like they’re responsible, which is with everything almost to an extreme, not almost to an extreme, but it is to an extreme, they try to figure out what went wrong. And if it’s not them, they won’t… It’s not like they won’t think about what they did wrong, but they’ll just try to figure out what went wrong, and if it’s somebody else, they will point the blame right away. And this time, it was pointed to me, and in the past I was like, “Why is it pointed to me?” But with this time I was like, “I don’t even care. It doesn’t even matter.” It doesn’t matter who is being blamed because, one, this is not that big of a deal. Two, in this specific scenario, I got to be mediator. I was just watching two people go after it, and it was just fun to watch. I got an apology after that. I don’t think I needed one because I don’t really care about this stuff with most people. But what was interesting is this realization that even if you have extreme ownership, there are behavioral patterns that you’ll fall back on that it’s almost automatic, and it’s self-awareness that can help you catch it. And the self-awareness isn’t about extreme ownership, it’s actually about something else. So, if this person was self-aware, their ability to be self-aware was what was key, because then they can see that, “Oh I didn’t need to do that. I just didn’t need to behave in that way. I didn’t need to throw Hiten under a bus.” It was the line that I got back to me, which is… Which is try to figure out what went wrong and then just identify it. And then, if their normal stance on this stuff is basically, how can I… Look at it this way. They hate doing something wrong. They hate making a mistake so much that when they feel like they made it, they’re going to find a way to not be their mistake. All I want is people to be aware of things like that about themselves. All I want for everyone is to be aware of that kind of stuff. Because, again, I would say that the people around me, they have extreme ownership because I do, and I never think of it like that because I’m just like, “Yeah, shit, anything that happens, I better be responsible if I have anything to do with it. Because who else is going to be responsible?” That’s my attitude, right? Almost to a fault. Where, even if something happens to someone else’s life and it’s bad, I’m like, “Okay, how can I help?” Right? Right away, my instinct is, “How can I help? What can I do? Let me help them fix this.” And that’s that. That’s not necessarily a good thing. I put that in the bad category because I don’t need to be fixing other people’s problems even if they ask me, right? That’s their problem. They need to fix those problems. They need to develop the skills to do that. So, in this case, by me just not reacting and not even caring that I was thrown under a bus, I think in some ways, over time, it’s helped this person see what they’re doing. Because I’m not telling them, “Hey, you did this, you did…” I don’t care. You could do that all day. I love working with you. You can do that all day because I know why you’re doing it. You’re not doing it to hurt anybody else, you’re just doing it because that’s your default. So, we have these defaults that take us away from this extreme ownership. Those are the things that I think are really important to try to figure out for yourself. And someone else I work with, right away, it’s very similar. If they did something wrong, and I pointed it out, they’re just trying to figure out, basically, what went wrong. And then, they’re spending so much energy and effort trying to figure it out and trying to talk to me about it. It’s like, “Hey, I don’t care. I actually don’t care why this happened. It’s not my problem. All I can tell you is this happened, and you should not do it again or you should fix it.” I don’t really care why you did this. This is not my task. It’s not my responsibility to do your job or even figure out for you why this mistake was made, because if a mistake was made and you have ownership over it, it’s your problem not mine. And that’s where I think the responsibility and who it falls on [inaudible 00:15:33]. Their default is trying to align with, in this case I was the manager, but trying to align with the manager on what the mistake was and why it happened. And me as the manager in this specific case, I didn’t give a shit about why the mistake happened. I just wanted the person to own it, and owning it literally meant that the person was just like, “Yeah, made a mistake. Cool. That won’t happen again.” Because this was such a menial, small task, that it didn’t matter to me why the mistake happened. I actually don’t care. I’m not here to fix the problem for you next time. It’s your responsibility because this is a full ownership task. It’s not something where I need to get involved in the mistake. It was something really trivial. Right? But it [inaudible] trivial so is that you take care of it and it doesn’t happen again because I feel like it’s a mistake that doesn’t need to happen again now that we know. [0:16:29] Steli Efti: Brilliant. Yeah. My man. I would say that, for anybody that’s listening to this episode, just ask yourself, “When was the last time that something went wrong, a project didn’t work out, you failed at hitting a goal or accomplishing something you wanted?” And then, ask yourself, “Did I give myself and others an explanation or an excuse?” I think a lot of times people confuse the two, so to me, they’re equally bad. If you had an explanation, it was an excuse, right? If you’re like, “Well, yeah, we didn’t reach it, but it was because Google changed the algorithm and our organic results were…” Well, who gives a shit that you didn’t meet your goal. If you spend time explaining and excusing things away, there’s an opportunity for you to grow in terms of the amount of ownership you take over situations. How much time you spend trying to protect your feelings and your ego when you make mistakes and when there’s failures, versus using those failures and mistakes to instantly turn them into lessons learned, insights gained, and a new plan of attack formulated. [0:17:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah. And the thing is, ownership is objective. It’s not subjective. [0:17:44] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:17:45] Hiten Shah: So, that’s, I think, the mistake people make, which is you’re trying to explain something away or try to tell you why it happened, but honestly, I don’t really care. If it’s your mistake, and it’s your ownership over it, I don’t need to hear why it happened or anything unless I can help you. So, if you want me to help you, and it’s my job to help you, then you can just lay it out. Tell me what happened, what exactly led up to this mistake happening, why it happened, and what you’re going to do to prevent it from happening next time. And if you want me to read it, great, but I’ll read it, but it’s your job. Extreme ownership also means you have ownership over the mistake and it not happening again if it’s something that could happen again, and that has a lot to do with yourself, not to do with me or anybody else that you need to interact with. So, it’s almost this idea that I don’t need an explanation, I need a solution, and I don’t even need the solution [inaudible 00:18:42]. [0:18:53] Steli Efti: Beautiful. All right. I think this is it for us for this episode. We will hear you very, very soon. [0:19:00] The post 462: Extreme Ownership appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the messy middle. As your startup grows, new challenges arise. Processes and strategies that you used in the early stages are not the same pones you’ll use at the middle stages. Adapting to new changes is something you want to get right, as getting this wrong can have a negative effect on your startup. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how every company you work on now is uniquely different, why the middle is messy, what a messy middle looks like for a real company and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 02:58 How every company you work on now is uniquely different. 03:40 Why the middle is messy. 04:42 How tech debt is one of the messiest things you can have. 05:00 What a messy middle looks like for a real company. 07:09 How marketing can be one of the messiest things about a company. 08:24 Steli’s experience with messy middles. 09:00 One of the biggest challenges about running a startup at the early stages. 10:10 Why things you did in the early days isn’t what you’ll use at the later stages. 3 Key Points: It’s really crazy how whatever company you’re working on now is totally different from past ones.The reason its a messy middle is that what got you in the middle usually means you’ve created a mess.Tech debt is one of the messiest things you can have [0:00:00] 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 the messy middle. Or what I like to call it, the awkward teenage years of your business. So we’ve talked a ton about the super early stage days like how to come up with an idea, how to validate an idea, how to build an MVP, how to get your first customer, your first 10 customers, how to hire your first couple of team members. Like we’ve talked a ton about kind of the super early days as founders in your startup. And a lot of the topics that we discussed kind of touch all stages and phases of the business. But today I wanted to talk to you about what the most awkward time, and probably the the largest phase, or maybe not the largest, but it’d be a kind of significant phase, which is the phase in your company where your business is up and running. You have customers, you have customer growth, you have a bunch of team members. And kind of you’re not in the hyper early pre product market fit. We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know who’s our buyer. We don’t know if we’re going to ever generate any money or how to market and sell and grow this thing. You’re not in those early days. You’ve passed through that stage of your startup, but you’re not quite yet at a place where you just add hyper scale and hyper growth or where you’re now a super mature, super stable business. You’re kind of in the awkward middle phase. And I wanted to chat with you a little bit about kind of, we’ve both gone through these phases with multiple businesses. What do founders need to know about the messy middle? How do they need to prepare for it? What mistakes to avoid? I thought it’d be fun for us to unpack kind of the most awkward phase of your business basically. [0:02:04] Hiten Shah: Yeah, so Scott Belsky and his now I think Chief Product Officer at Adobe, he wrote a whole book with the title, The Messy Middle. So we should definitely give him a shout out. Bumped into him somewhere the other day in the morning and I didn’t recognize him. He’s looking a little different these days. Looking good though. And so yeah, wanted to shout out. Great book, you should read it. That being said, we’ve got our own thoughts on this, so we should share our thoughts that have probably very little to do with what’s in the book, even though the books great. And so we’re going to focus on that. But I really like the naming, The Messy Middle, the teenage years like you said. It’s really crazy how even if you’ve done it before, whatever company you’re working on now, looks different than the one that you worked on in the past. Even if you’re in the same market building similar product, just looks different. And you might be literally, have spent a lot of time creating a mess to be honest. The reason it’s a messy middle is not because the middle is messy, it’s because what got you to the middle usually means you created a mess. And so the state of the business, and you can be self funded, you could be venture backed, doesn’t really matter. You tend to have scrambled, if you want to call it hustled, you want to call it been really scrappy, to get to [inaudible] profitable or to get to product market fit or to get to some, I wouldn’t even say getting to product market fit is as important as having some resemblance of a business. Something that people want to use, pay for, whatever what you’re looking for to hit that milestone. It was just messy. And from personal experience, it’s usually you’re really just scrambling to figure out what is going to work. And one of the things that I’ll throw out and say is one of the messiest that I’ve seen more recently is your tech gets really messy. And you produce a lot of tech debt. Even if you’re conscious of tech debt. Sometimes the bigger issue is the people who are helping you from an engineering standpoint, even if you’re the engineer early on, you’re literally just scrambling and tweaking things and changing things on a weekly basis. And some of it’s based on actual customer information and data and things like that. Some of it is just literally your intuition and where you think things should go. So it’s a lot messier time than when you have even more customers and you’re able to actually take more signal from them or figure out kind of where the market is because you actually already know what market you’re in and who the customer is you’re serving. So it’s really messy. You’re either changing your customer a lot, you’re changing your product a lot, you’re doing different types of things in the company that have no structure and aren’t formalized or repeatable yet, but they might be working. So I’ll give a few examples from my business. So at my current business, FYI, we’ve accrued a lot of tech debt. Some of it on purpose, some of it not. And as we’re going from what I call a single player product where you can sign up and get a lot of use of it without sharing what it is because you can go look at it, it’s at usefyi.com. But that’s not the point. You can get use out of it as a single player, as a single person inside of a company or even personal use cases. As we’ve been developing and learning from those use cases what teams need, what companies need, which are a little different than teams, we’ve had to reevaluate all of our code and the things we’re doing because there are things that we need to do going forward to support the team and the company use case that the current tech just wasn’t able to do. And it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just we had a scramble to get to this thing that was useful for individuals. And now we’re not even scrambling. We’re a lot more structured, lot more thoughtful, we have a lot more methodology on how we’re iterating, but we’ve had to rewrite pretty much most of the product. And it’s because what got us to this point isn’t what’s going to get us to the next milestones. So I think that’s a big one on tech debt. I’ll say one more on my business today. So we’ve been doing a lot of marketing in terms of like learning how to produce content, learning how to sort of use social, specifically LinkedIn and Twitter, as like ways to get traffic and ways to kind of get in on different conversations is the way I like to say it. And a lot of that for the longest time, until maybe six months ago, maybe a little longer, we were just not very structured about it. And we were just basically doing what we know how to do, which is we know how to write, we know how to communicate, we know how to like put things on a blog and stuff like that. It wasn’t very structured and it wasn’t like the systematic and we didn’t have like a process for the content. We were just writing a bunch, coming up with topics, more ad hoc, posting on social and we’ve gotten so much more systematic about it. It’s gotten a lot more cleaned up. We’ve actually structured some of the help that we’re getting on it, whether it’s contractors or the images that we produced for it. Everything’s just gotten better. Even launching on product for us has gotten much more systematic, much more better as we’ve done it more. Even the way that we do certain, we build certain tools and launched them on product as a part of our marketing, part of our sort of inbound marketing strategy. And even that’s gotten better. But it’s been really messy. And so it’s almost like you’re picking off messes and basically picking and knowing, I wish I was more conscious about this in the past. But really now I’m like okay, I look back and I’m like, okay, what’s a mess? Does it need to be cleaned up right now or not? If yes, clean it up, if not, wait and let it be messy. [0:08:20] Steli Efti: Yeah. All right. I love all of this. So here’s some of the experiences that we have gone through and some of the lessons learned that I think could be valuable to share. So I couldn’t agree more with kind of the debt that you accrue. One way that I think about it is that, I mean all of life is a balancing act. Of business, very much so as well. And I feel like one of the biggest challenges that you have is in the early days, you have to make very distinct and specific choices to start getting movement and progress and eventually momentum going, right? It’s very hard to kind of start something from nothing and build up momentum for that thing. And you’ll have to make very kind of shrewd decisions that at times will be best for the short term but not so good for the long term. And then as you build more momentum, you hopefully start shifting from being 80% short term focused and 20% longterm to like 60 40, 50 50. And eventually at some point that ratio has to switch where almost most of the things that you do have very longterm investments and just a few little things are short term investments or mid term investments. And like tipping the balance from being hyper focused on short term results to midterm to getting really hyper focused on longterm. It’s a gradual thing and it’s very hard to get the timing perfectly right for this. So a lot of times what will happen is that as your company is succeeding, one of the curses of success, or doing anything that works, is that you’re going to develop a bias to want to just keep doing the thing that works. And you are also going to develop a bias to not be doing the things that weren’t good to be done in the early days. But that’s the biggest trap, right? So you know a bunch of stuff that was working in the early days when you had zero customers, well now you have 500 customers, you have a thousand customers, and those same strategies will vary. It’s very unlikely that the same strategies that got you to your first 10 will be the best ones to keep hyper-focusing on to get from a thousand to 10,000. You’re probably going to have to expand what you do or change what you do significantly. Getting that balancing act right between what are the things that we want to hold onto versus what are the things that we need to let go of and what are the new things we need to get good at? I think that kind of a balancing act, those choices are really the tricky choices that you have to make. In the metaphor that I use oftentimes when I talk about this with my team is the kind of awkward teenage years. And to me that’s such a great metaphor because when you’re a teenager, you’re neither an adult nor a child anymore. Right? And that’s what sucks about it. That’s the tricky part about it because most teenagers, most of us when we went through our teenage years, we wanted to act like children when convenient, but be treated like adults in many areas. And I think that that’s what I see in a lot of businesses that go through the messy middle is they still want to act exactly the way they acted when there were three co-founders in a dorm room or in a garage or in a small apartment. They want to keep whatever was beautiful about that kind of light, early days when everything was possible. You were brainstorming, you didn’t have to have any process, any meetings or anything really. It was just a bunch of friends building something cool. They want to keep the same processes going and kind of the same reality going, but you’re not a baby startup anymore. You’re not a child, you’re not three friends building something. Now you have employees, you have customers, you have technical debt, you have infrastructure, you have scale, you have revenue, you have losses, you have profits, you have bank accounts, you have taxes to pay. You’re just not in that phase anymore. So you can’t act like that. But you don’t want to act too adult either. Now just because you went from a three person team to a ten person team, it’s probably still not the right time to hire a 20 person accounting, finances, and tax team, right? Like you don’t want to act too adult and be ahead of the curve and kill things with acting like you’re IBM or Microsoft and building the same processes and the same infrastructure because that’s going to kill you, the weight of that, because it’s way too far ahead of where you are. So finding that balance of like growing up a bit and acting more adult and asking yourself what is right for the phase team and stage that we’re at right now and where do we need to step up our game versus what are the areas that we want to still hold onto when it comes to our energy, our creativity, how casual we are. How do we make sure that we don’t grow up too much or pretend we’re too adult too much but we do step up our game. I think that’s really the tricky part. And for us to give a very specific example, I mean we went through all the same stuff and this is a never ending road of building up technical debt versus paying it. Again, even still today, there’s a never ending negotiation, a healthy negotiation that’s going on on like how much of the technical debt that we’re accruing do we want to pay off monthly? How much would we want to invest in infrastructure and in speed? How much do we want to invest in fixing some of the older parts of our code, so how much do we want to invest in going back to all the parts of the product and re imagining it or improving it, making incremental improvements versus how much do we want to invest in innovation, new products, new features, new things that we do that could be revenue drivers or growth drivers. It’s a never ending negotiation. And we went through some of the same and similar challenges that you have. I think one big more mental or philosophical challenge that we went through when we hit the kind of messy middle was being dogmatic about not wanting to play the playbook. I’ll call it that, right? Which is there are a bunch of things that companies have done once they hit our level of scale to get to the next level of scale. A lot of these are kind of very much … There’s a playbook when it comes to growing a company, scaling a company. And there’s ways to break some of those rules. But there are some common rules that a lot of companies applied. And they applied it for good reason. And they work for good reasons. And I think that we were for too long, kind of too dogmatic about not wanting to play the playbook, not wanting to go through some of the things that companies do that were at our stage to get to the next stage. Because I don’t know, to some degree, we just didn’t like some of these activities. It was just being childish again. Like not doing what you’re supposed to do but wanting to do what you want to do. Like a little child. Just being like, but that stuff is no fun, but we never had to do that stuff. Why do we have to do it now? Or even worse, everybody’s doing that stuff. We don’t want to do what everybody does. And I think that that’s very kind of a very immature stance that we took for too long. And it really slowed us down until we kind of snapped out of it and went okay, like we need to hold onto what makes us unique. But there are certain things that just make sense. So let’s just go and do them. Let’s not be little children about it. And it’s just like grow up and tackle these things that will make this business better and that will help our customers and help us grow. So I think that that was a really big kind of mental block that we had going through it. And one last thing I’ll say before we wrap up the episode. One thing that we also, that I kind of learned, is that the way you build a team and the type of people you want to attract to your team need to also kind of fit the state that you’re in. And so the early days you might want to hire a lot more kind of hype entrepreneurial or hyper, you know just people that have massive motivation, very productive, get shit done, generalists. People that can jump on different problems and figure them out even if they’ve never tackled it before. There’s a certain type of person that will do super well as a team member of yours in the hyper early days. And then there’s people that will do really well hiring them when you are very late stage and kind of a scaled business. The messy middle part, one of the biggest things that we’re looking for and that I think you need to look for is for people that are really resilient. Like for those kinds of really people that have had some experience and have done some early things, some late stage things, some middle stage things. And love coming into a mess. That where they seize opportunity, opportunity to really have impact without being in the early stage where everything is unclear and we might work on this for two or three years and not accomplished anything versus the super late stages where your impact will be really minimal. They want to come into a stage where there is something that is ready to be scaled. If you can just help clean up the mess and kind of focus and utilize the opportunities and the foundation that has been built and that are excited about that, but that are shrewd about understanding that it’s going to be kind of a tough phase to through that’s not going to be that glamorous internally. And the way that I described that to people oftentimes is talking about like the middle part of a marathon. At the beginning you’re probably full of excitement when you start running a marathon. It’s finally there, the day you’ve trained for, dreamed of. And now you’re starting off, you have all the energy, all the passion, your dreams, the excitement, the adrenaline. That’s an awesome phase. The final phase might be painful, but you know you’ve basically done it and all you have to do is keep going. You can see the finish line. And seeing the finish line or knowing, sensing that the finish line is around the corner, that’s super motivating. Even if you are kind of exhausted and everything, you just have to keep going. You’ll hit it. But the middle part is probably emotionally, mentally the toughest to break through because in the middle part of the marathon, you’ve already run a lot. You’re probably now in pain, you probably have gotten some small injury. It’s probably raining. There’s like all these magical reasons show up for you to want to quit. And that’s probably where you’re in a dialogue that’s the strongest telling you this sucks. I should try another day. I might get hurt. I have this injury, it might get worse, my legs, this, that, and the other. You have all these good excuses and good reasons to quit and you’re so far from the … You only hit the middle. So you know you have to do it all over again. So it’s just mentally really, really draining and that’s kind of a perfect spot to want to quit or to go overly negative in your head and just see everything that sucks and just be overly critical of everything. And I think that that’s a very good metaphor for that stage in a business. Certain people will get really crushed by the messiness of things and they will get overly negative and just complain every day about everything that’s messed. All the copays is messed up and these customers complain about this feature we don’t have and this marketing channel isn’t working, we don’t see growth in this. And we have a difficult time hiring that person. And they’ll see all the problems because there are going to be many. And they’re going to lose the sense of purpose and they’ll lose the excitement and motivation that they had in the early days. And so you need people that are really committed and resilient and want to go through the pain. Expect some of the messiness and the pain and have the discipline to push through it and accomplish kind of the finish line together. And so being careful in who you hire during that phase I think is really, really important because if you hire too many people that will drown during this phase and be overly negative and be kind of crushed by the messiness of everything, it’s going to really, really impact your success or your failures during that phase. [0:20:25] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I think it’s just a huge thing. It’s not talked about enough. There’s a whole book on it though. It’s so weird that everybody hits this. Everybody. And it’s just not talked about this real weird phase of the business. There’s so many aspects of the business that could be different. I think you hit on a whole bunch of them. I hit on a bunch of different ones and gave some examples of what we’re dealing with right now at one of my companies. I think that’s it. Watch the messy middle. Grow up appropriately. Just get through puberty really quickly. Recognize what you’re going through and it’s okay if it’s a little messy, like this is unfortunately normal. [0:21:18] Steli Efti: Yeah, you’re not alone. And as always, if any of what we discussed today resonated strongly with you and you want to share your story, your struggles, get any more specific advice, just send us an email. We always love to hear from you. Hnshah@gmail.com, steli@close.com. That’s it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon later. [0:21:40] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:21:41] The post 461: The Messy Middle appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.