Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the Enneagram personality test. Enneagram tests are online tests that can help you to determine which personality type you are and those of your team members. Like any personality test, Enneagram tests are not a science, but it can be a useful tool to help you understand yours and your team members’ tendencies in order to anticipate and prevent conflicts, and create a great working environment. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what an Enneagram test is, why it’s one of Hiten’s favorite tests, how they are different from other personality tests and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:31 Why this topic was chosen. 00:50 Where to take an Enneagram test. 01:21 Steli’s thoughts on personality tests in general. 04:04 What an Enneagram test is. 04:17 Why it’s one of Hiten’s favorite tests. 06:49 How Enneagram tests are different from other tests. 07:00 About Hiten’s Enneagram score. 09:17 How to use Enneagram tests at your company. 3 Key Points: There’s a lot of online material about it.I think Enneagram tests are more practical.It can help with diversified thinking at your company. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: and this is Hiten Shah, and today we’re going to talk about something that’s been popping off in startup land a little bit on Twitter and in other places. It’s actually something I’ve been familiar with for the last I want to say like 15 years or something. It’s called any Enneagram, and it’s E-N-N-E-A-G-R-A-M. You can look it up online, and there’s a great site called CrystalKnows.com where they actually have a lot of details about a lot of personality tests, because that’s what Enneagram, is and they let you take it and then they tell you about yourself. And they have a lot … They are sort of a startup that has kind of this, it tells you about people’s personalities and how to interact with them. So it makes sense that they have this, they have a bunch of other tests for other personality tests. But for today we’re going to talk about Enneagram because there’s been a lot of tweets about it, and even friends of mine at many different types of organizations have started talking about it more, and it’s something that I’ve been familiar with for awhile and has been really valuable to me. [0:01:06] Steli Efti: Yeah, that’s how I actually picked up on it. There was a Twitter thread where I think somebody at Clearbit was writing about them using this internally now, and that they’ve seen a lot of value, and then there was a very kind of engaged thread going on with all kinds of either very positive things about it or some critical things about it. And as often times when I go down the rabbit hole of an interesting Twitter thread, somewhere in the middle of there is Hiten Shah saying something insightful. So I saw that you had responded to it or retweeted it or something and, and mentioned that this is one of your favorite personality tests, and that kind of led me down the rabbit hole of playing around with it a little bit and reading a bit more up on it. And here’s my background and then I don’t know this that well, so I want to ask you a bunch of questions about it. But when it comes to personality tests in general, there was a time 15 years ago that I got super into these, and I did a couple of them and I read a bunch of books and I was like super fascinated I think by the topic. And then I did the inevitable mistake of walking around and abusing the knowledge, thinking that I can now just put people into boxes super quickly. [0:02:23] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:02:24] Steli Efti: Like, you are a this, that and that color. You’re a this, that and that number. And then I annoyed others and myself, and then others started knowing me about this stuff. So I was super enthusiastic, and then I think I became kind of cynical thinking, yeah, there’s some value in it, but you really have to know people. You really have to take your time, you really have to observe. It’s just one ingredient out of many to truly try to understand yourself and others better. So I kind of started I think habitually rejecting this and not really paying that much attention to it. And, and now when I saw this, I was thinking about funny enough personality tests have come up and popped up in different discussions in different situations and I was like, huh, maybe I should revisit this topic again and kind of become a bit more open minded around and more playful. And then when I saw you around this topic, I was like, Oh, if Hiten says this is one of his favorites, let me read up on it and try to understand it a little bit better. So, okay. So we can talk about the benefits of doing personality tests. Should that be something that you do within your team and companies? Is this something you do? And then this specific, I still don’t know how to say it, Enneagram, did I say it right? [0:03:30] Hiten Shah: Enneagram. [0:03:30] Steli Efti: Enneagram. [0:03:31] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that’s fine. [0:03:33] Steli Efti: Enneagram. [0:03:33] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:03:34] Steli Efti: Okay. [0:03:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah, there you go. [0:03:35] Steli Efti: I need to practice this. So, the Enneagram, this is one of your favorites. Why so? How did you do it and what do you think is a practical or tactical application that founders could get out of it within their startups? [0:03:53] Hiten Shah: Yeah, there’s nine different types. So they type you into that. And then there’s some things called a wing, which is whether you’re like an adjacent number and what wing you are. So it gets a little, you know, it starts simple, it gets a little complex. The number one reason I like it is there’s a lot of online material about it. There’s a lot of online material that tells you how if you’re a certain type and someone else is a certain type, how you interact with each other, or how you could interact with each other. And it talks about healthy states of yourself, if you’re that type and all kinds of things like that. So to me it’s different than disc or Myers Briggs or any of that type of stuff. So I like it and I think it’s something that’s more practical. [0:04:47] Steli Efti: Hmm. [0:04:47] Hiten Shah: And I know Myers Briggs and other things that people are into, they feel it practical. But for me this a personality test that is focused on basically helping you a see and understand how to work with others very directly based on knowing yourself, not just … So it’s like a lot of these other ones are great, they’re a little different because they focus a lot on what I would call work, and work related things, especially the ones that are work related. Well this one is just helping you understand yourself as a human being, and literally everyone that’s done it that I know of really finds a lot of value from knowing themselves from a sort of Enneagram standpoint. And so the best thing I can do is tell you mine and talk through it a little bit, I think. Before I do that, I haven’t done it with my teams recently, I don’t think we ever did it at KISSmetrics either. It wasn’t something that was accepted like that until recently. And accepted meaning, I just didn’t see people doing it. So something caused, I don’t know what did, caused people to want to do it inside their companies. And then what ends up happening is out of those nine types, you start seeing the pattern of what types are in your company. So it can even help with diversifying thinking inside your company by bringing on folks who might be different, for example, or being able to recognize why you haven’t brought on certain folks because of everyone in your company and who they are from a personality standpoint for as much as we can figure it out. So it’s a really fun one. And I’m going to dig in a little bit. So I an Enneagram type nine according to this personality test. What it says about them is people with the Enneagram type nine personality tend to be accepting, optimistic and adaptive in their behavior. They like peace and tend to avoid conflict. They tend to enjoy time alone or with smaller groups of people. And then their basic fear and their basic desire I’ll share as well, because I think it’s really interesting. So basic fear is nines are somewhat subconsciously afraid of separation and loss. They attempt to prevent this by remaining peaceful and avoiding conflict with others. Often they will unknowingly adapt to others’ preferences rather than state their own. Their basic desire is to have complete internal peace. Nines want to be in harmony with themselves and the world around them. Peacekeepers defend themselves by ignoring pain or numbing their internal conflicts through food, television and other repetitive patterns. They have a tendency to avoid just comfort to the point of apathy, and so that’s it. That’s what they say about it. And then they go into so many different things about strengths, weaknesses, for example, the weaknesses are difficulty facing personal conflict with others. Tendency to minimize problems, avoiding difficult or upsetting situations, being passive aggressive rather than addressing conflict. It gets better, because Crystal Knows, so it’s CrystalKnows.com, that’s what I’m reading from right now. I’ll speak of a few others because I think it’s really convincing when you look at the way they explained this, but they talk about how Enneagram 9 personalities like to work. So communicating with a nine, encourage them to be open about their personal needs and ideas, create an environment in which they feel safe to communicate honestly. Meeting with an Enneagram nine, avoid creating pressure and encourage them to share their opinions or feelings. Emailing an Enneagram nine, communicate the purpose clearly while allowing room for small talk and personal connection. Giving feedback to a nine, avoid being overly negative or critical. Express growth areas of opportunities rather than faults. Resolving conflict, ask them what they need. Remain calm and patient and express yourself gently. SO they literally tell you like, okay, you want to work with me, here’s how you need to think about it. And all these would work with me. [0:08:57] Steli Efti: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So in companies that use this, obviously you wouldn’t use this, and I just did the test yesterday by the way. What’s your best guess? What would you think I am? [0:09:12] Hiten Shah: What would I think you are? Yeah, typing people is interesting. From what I know about Enneagram, because there’s certain numbers I know about better than others. I’d say three or seven. [0:09:26] Steli Efti: Yeah. It says I’m a three. [0:09:28] Hiten Shah: Okay, cool. [0:09:29] Steli Efti: Three with a two wing, so the- [0:09:31] Hiten Shah: Okay my … Go ahead. [0:09:33] Steli Efti: No go ahead. [0:09:35] Hiten Shah: My co founder Neil and my brother-in-law on a lot of stuff, or my co founder on a lot of stuff, but my brother-in-law, he’s a three. So that’s why I know a lot about three. [0:09:46] Steli Efti: Mm. So the things I started reading a little bit up on it, on different sites. There’s actually a … I don’t know if I find this again, but so the couple of things that I started reading up on it, I do agree. I did think that intuitively they seem super insightful. So that’s why my interest kind of increased, well one, you speaking highly of it, and then all the people that I’ve seen that have spoken positively about this are people that I respect. So that kind of made me curious, and as I’ve been starting to read a bit more about it, it’s definitely been something that seemed insightful, even the stuff that I just read about the test that I took. [0:10:37] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:10:37] Steli Efti: But that leads me to the like, how do you use this? Maybe I’m jumping too fast, but I’m sure- [0:10:43] Hiten Shah: No, you’re not. [0:10:43] Steli Efti: Yeah. How do we use this then within a company in in a way that is productive that doesn’t cause these kinds of issues that I see with personality tests. A lot of people are uncomfortable taking them because they don’t want to box and be judged, understandably and they don’t want to be misjudged or miss categorized in some way, which is totally understandable. And then it’s like, okay, once, let’s say we’ve all taken this test, what do we do now with this? Is this now a way to … How do we use this knowledge to really empower people to understand each other better and treat each other better and work with each other better? I know that you said that you aren’t doing this internally, so let me ask, let me right off the bat asked you this. How come that you haven’t made this part of any kind of team that you’ve ever led? That everybody’s taking this test so we can just understand each other better and do work with each other better? [0:11:38] Hiten Shah: Yeah, we did the equivalent to disc test at KISSmetrics. It’s called in color insight, and that was helpful to a great extent. At a Crazy Egg we’ve never done it. And then at FYI, I do know my co founder and her type and she knows mine. I don’t know if she uses it as much as she could, but I definitely do. Especially once I understood it. And I know my wife’s type, and like I said, I know my brother-in-law’s type who I used to work with a lot. So I think it goes back to how do you work together with somebody, and the other people in the company. So one level of it for me is just knowing where the main, what type is the main type in the company, and who are they? And that’s really helpful. So for example, in my friend’s company, he is a six and the people in his company are either, like the majority of them are either threes or sevens, and it’s about a 30 person company. And only one other person has a six like him. And that poses a bunch of interesting questions about the company around like, if there’s a lot of threes and sevens, what does that mean for the organization? How does the organization think? And more importantly, if you’re not a three or seven, how do you interact with somebody that’s not your type? And also how do you interact with each other? And so again, I can’t share this site enough because it’s such a clear and clean kind of site, but the Crystal Knows site will also talk about relationships and how you can work together. So for example, with a three and a nine, the way you would build trust would be threes tend to trust nines who support and encourage their ambitions. Nine should help threes feel validated and appreciated. Nines usually trust threes who who give them room to move at their own pace. Found a typo. Threes should avoid being overly critical of nines. So that’s kind of where it’s at building trust between three and nine, and then they even talked about working together. Threes are usually driven, energetic and charismatic, while nines tend to be more subdued, consistent and patient. Threes tend to bring goal oriented planning and motivation to a work environment. Nines offer open-mindedness and encouragement. Threes can help nines set and accomplish personal goals while nines can help threes feel supported and valued. So it’s really just about understanding these types of things and then knowing how to work with each other. And then they even talk about dealing with change and managing stress. Then all those kinds of things oriented around kind of the two types. And then they even talk about like you could choose like a nine and a nine, so what do you do if you’re a nine and the other person’s a nine too and you are trying to work together, how does that work? So it’s really this information and then how you go figure out how you want to put it into practice in the organization. What I like it is, there’s so much information about this one online that you could just have everyone do it and kind of work with it without a practitioner or anybody like that. I know there’s now a bunch more practitioners that can help you kind of think through this, but this one, there’s so much knowledge about it and so much information, and it’s relatively simple that you could just start working with it, at least yourself to understand yourself and maybe one other person in your company. I would really highly recommend if you’re a founder and you’re on a team that you just have at least all the founders do it to start with and see how you folks like it. [0:15:27] Steli Efti: Beautiful. Well, yeah. The one thing that I really liked about this is that there are free tests out there. There’s I think a link that we’ll share, there’s a site, EclecticEnergies.com, sounds a little bit out there, but it allows you to do this test really quickly, and nicely, and simply. It’s for free, you don’t have to sign up, you don’t have to do anything. And there’s so much free information about this that again, some of these personality tests you have to pay for and license and there’s a whole upselling system afterwards, you know, and if you want to do this year to spend a ton of money, but this seems like it has a lot of, there’s a lot of information out there. There’s a lot of quick, simple ways to play around with it and learn more. And actually before I got on my flight here, I downloaded one of the highest rated books on this topic, and I started reading just for like an hour or so, a couple of pages around this, The Road Back to You and Enneagram, did I say it right? [0:16:25] Hiten Shah: Enneagram. Yeah, it’s fine. [0:16:26] Steli Efti: Enneagram journey to Self-Discovery, and I had to laugh. The book is really well written, and it’s well written. There’s a little bit of a spiritual Christian touch on it, which is not for me, but the actual content and the insights seemed super interesting and it was very, very well written. I had to laugh a couple of times while reading it. So it might be a good read. I’m very much in the beginning, but so far I enjoyed it on my flight to Croatia today. So. All right, so this is it. That’s it for today’s episode on personality tests. I’m actually super interested if anybody that’s listening to us has done this personality test or any other within their teams with their co-founders is using this in some interesting way in the way they manage themselves or others. I want to learn more about this. Again, I want to open my mind up to this and see how it could provide value and how could learn. So please get in touch with us. Steli@Close.come, HNShah@Gmail.com. Share your knowledge, your learnings, your failures and mistakes around on personality tests and managing your startup teams with us. And until next time, we’ll see you very soon. [0:17:39] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:17:39] The post 460: The Enneagram Personality Test appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to build a remote sales team. In today’s startup world, working remotely is more popular than ever. And the popularity of remote work is also spreading to sales teams as well. However, having a remote sales team can be challenging and you need to manage it properly to make it work for your business. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how having a remote sales team is possible, the type of people to hire for your remote sales team, mistakes to avoid when running a remote sales team and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:27 Why this topic was chosen. 02:11 How having a remote sales team is possible. 03:29 One major mistake most companies make when they start to build a remote team. 04:16 How hiring a junior sales person remotely can be a challenge. 05:26 The type of salespeople to hire for remote work. 05:56 The second major mistake most companies make when they start to build a remote team. 06:37 Why you need to think of your sales team as its unique ecosystem. 07:39 How to work with a remote sales team. 09:18 The third major mistake most companies make when they start to build a remote team. 3 Key Points: Remote is happening and can work.It’s very hard to hire junior salespeople and have them be successful.Hire more experienced people on the sales side. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to do a very tactical episode around how to start, run, scale remote sales team. And it’s because we have Steli here. And I’ve got questions, and I know he’s got answers. And it’s something that I’m really curious about. And I’m sure a lot of people are. Because the typical answer is, “Don’t run a remote sales team.” [0:00:29] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:00:29] Hiten Shah: So that’s the typical answer, and that’s because people are used to basically the equivalent of call center, open office, lots of people in the sales room, talking and doing their thing, and selling, and picking up the phone, and blah, blah, blah. So that’s not what a remote sales team is. And remote work is obviously on a lot of people’s minds, pretty much everyone’s now. And so, all right Steli, what do we need to know about how to run a remote sales team really well? [0:00:58] Steli Efti: Well, before I jump into that, because I want to give a shout out to the report that you’ve done. You and Use FYI, the whole FYI team, you guys are publishing more and more stuff around remote work. It’s really, really good. You did a kind of a up to date state of remote work report. What’s the URL that people can get this? For those that haven’t seen this yet, you should check it out definitely. [0:01:19] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s UseFYI.com/remote-work-report. [0:01:26] Steli Efti: Boom. [0:01:26] Hiten Shah: And you’ll get to it. And this was done a little bit ago. Then we have… My co-founder wrote 11 Best Practices for Remote Work. That was a hit. I wrote a post on remote work resources. We have another one coming up that I’m sure we’ll talk about on the episode… On an episode in future. So yeah, remote work’s a thing. People love remote work. So why shouldn’t sales do it? [0:01:48] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that… And this is something that is picking up. I used to get a lot of questions about how to run a remote company, and now, I’m increasingly getting questions around remote sales teams or emails in panic of people that are like, “All right, we’ve been trying for a year. We’ve gone through every mistake and failure. Is this actually possible? So please help.” So let’s talk about it. I think that we going to see… Remote sales is happening and will happen and can work. And there is going to be more and more selling happening in a distributed and remote fashion. So it’s not a question if it works or if it doesn’t. It does work. But it is probably one of the hardest teams to set up for success in a remote environment within your organization, right? And hwy is that? Well, it’s because of a number of reasons, but at the core of it, it’s because sales people are probably some of the least disciplined and most social creatures within a company. So they feed off each other’s energy. They do need as much human contact as possible. For sales people, talking and communicating and interacting socially is what gives them energy. It doesn’t exhaust them. It doesn’t just cost them energy like maybe for many other types of people within the business. And so, it is harder to have a sales person work from their home or some remote location and be happy and effective than it is for some other people within your company. There is three kind of major mistakes that I see remote companies do when they try to start building a remote sales team. So let’s just kind of break down these three things for people here as mistakes to avoid or things to get right. I think number one is that it’s very hard… Very, very hard to… Today at least, to hire very junior sales people in a remote company and have them be successful, right? So if you hire somebody that has very little work experience in general, and you hire somebody that doesn’t have remote work experience whatsoever in any position in your company, it’s going to increase the risk that this hire is not going to work out. But it really amplifies it times 10 if that person is in sales. So I would highly recommend people that are building a remote sales team to err more on the side of hiring a bit more experienced people, people that understand the ABC’s of selling, that have sold successfully, that get it, people that have displayed and have a proven track record of discipline in their life, people that are taking control of their own lives and have shown that they can be consistent, disciplined about the way they structure and design their life and their work, and ideally, people that have either been selling by doing some component of remote. It could be that they’ve just been traveling a lot, a lot of their scheduling calls, follow up, content negotiation, is just happening on the go, or maybe that have been working from their home office for a couple of days a week versus just being in an office, just somebody that showed that they can work from different environments and are kind of super self organized. Those types of people… Those you just have to teach how the culture in a company works. Maybe they have to obviously learn something about your industry and your product and technology. But you don’t have to teach them how to do remote work completely, how to be disciplined, and how to do selling. If you have to teach somebody that junior, it’s going to be very far, if not, almost impossible to do that fully remotely. So hire more experienced people on the sales side. And definitely hire people that have more of a proven track record that they are highly, highly disciplined individuals. That will make a massive difference on the sales side of things if you want to hire remote. That’s one. The second thing is that remote… Sales teams and sales people are more social creatures. And you have to take that into consideration and into account in the way that you run a remote sales team. So don’t just take the process and the meeting cadence and anything else that you do to run your engineering team and to run your product management team and to run your support team and just apply it to the sales team in the same way. You will need… You will fail if you do that. And your sales team will fail. You’ll need to think about the sales team as its unique little ecosystem and totally different team. And you will need to develop very different habits to running that team than the way you run every other team. And some of the things that are most likely going to be the case is that on the sales side of things, you will want to have more video conferencing, more interpersonal contact on a daily basis. You don’t… You’re not going to be able to run a successful remote sales team by just telling everybody what the quarterly goals are, and then telling them, “If you have any problem, just write it in Slack,” and then “best of luck and goodbye,” and “I’ll check in with you in three months again to see if you hit your quota.” It’s not going to work, right? Sales people will get very lonely very quickly. They’ll get demotivated. They will feel disconnected, and that’s going to really affect their performance. So the sales team that’s remote might still have to do a daily videoconferencing kick off. You might want to come up with quirky little ways to make people motivated and excited. There was a time where we had a sales rep send little private Instagram stories… Story videos to each other whenever they closed a deal or whenever somebody just rejected them or they had a very difficult call. They record this little video of themselves going, “Just closed this big deal. This is amazing. Here’s my happy dance in my home office or in this coffee shop.” And then, they would send that private little video to the rest of the sales team, right? And vice versa, to create these little, motivational social moments between each other, which is something that an engineering team would probably find not as fun, maybe more disruptive within their day. But come up with these little ways for the sales team to celebrate their successes, the equivalent of ringing the bell within the office to high five each other, to kind of fuel each other’s motivation. Make sure that you do talk to them regularly, and you do video calls. You don’t just chat with them in Slack. You kind of talk to them in an environment in a way that they enjoy. And just make sure that there’s more social interaction, more daily communication happening in the sales team, and maybe more fun as well. Maybe there’s different themes within the days. Create a little bit of a fun atmosphere and high energy atmosphere within your remote sales team, and prioritize these things much higher than you would in other remote sales teams. I’ll pause here before I go to the third tip and check in with you if all of this makes sense. [0:09:06] Hiten Shah: It all makes sense, yeah. I think these are great things and very, I would say, forward thinking, and something that people need to hear. So I’d love to hear the last one too. [0:09:17] Steli Efti: There you go. So the last tip is another one that’s more kind of a cultural disconnect from probably how you’ve been running the rest of your remote company. So you have to kind of think differently for this specific team, which is that sales people… And the best sales people, the best sales teams are competitive, probably much more competitive than other people in other teams within your company. [0:09:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:09:39] Steli Efti: And you need to encourage that competitiveness, right? It should not be a toxic competitiveness. It should be a… Kind of a… Think about it as a great sports team, athletic team, right? People should be on the same team, but they should thrive in competition and in direct comparison with each other, which is what great sales people do. They need, and they thrive when they’re directly compared with their peers. So instead of doing what you’re probably doing with the rest of your company, which is just being highly positive, encouraging, collaborative environment, kind of shying away from people super directly, right, and ranking people’s performance super directly, in the sales teams you absolutely must do this. You need to have a leader board that shows everybody on the sales team and everybody in the company who, this month, this quarter, this week is doing and is performing the best within the sales team with numbers, right? You need to reward and highlight and encourage praise the people that are at the top, you might want to have competitions, things, sometimes that could just even be fun, where whoever hits a certain number or accomplishes a certain milestone or is number one in the leader board this week or this month gets some kind of a weird gift or some funny thing or some bonus or some appreciation. You need to create a positive but competitive environment within your sales team, even if it’s remote. Because then, people that are naturally good at selling will, A, do much better and perform much better for your business, but also, you will retain these people. Because they’re going to be happy, fulfilled, inspired, motivated, to come to work. The worst thing you can do is to create the same environment that you have maybe in a very uncompetitive team in the sales team as well. Then what will happen, inevitably, is that the best people in sales, they will be more and more disengaged, demotivated, and eventually, they’ll be like, “You know what? This remote selling thing isn’t working. I don’t feel as excited about doing work. I feel kind of alone. It doesn’t seem to matter if I do much better or a little bit worse then everybody else.” And then, they’ll just leave and go somewhere else where their performance, if they’re high performers, is more kind of appreciated, more highlighted, and more rewarded. So it’s super important, especially in a remote company, to create a healthy but competitive environment within the sales team and to allow kind of the best sales people to shine and to get recognition and get rewards that are higher than the rest if they outperform the rest versus, in many remote teams and companies, I think, competitiveness is not really something that’s encouraged and that you want to make part of your culture. But it’s something that you absolutely must do if you want to succeed in building a remote sales team, which is tricky to do. But we see more and more… We have a very successful remote sales team. InVision has a very successful remote team. There’s more and more companies that are building very good, competitive, successful remote sales teams, it’s still at the earliest stage I would say. Out of all the departments that have gone remote, I think sales is the last one to go, but I’m super excited about it. And I think there’s a lot of potential there. [0:13:05] Hiten Shah: Awesome. [0:13:07] Steli Efti: There you have it. If you have more questions about this, if you’re currently hiring sales reps remote and you need more help, you need more feedback, always get in touch with us, we love to hear from you, Steli@close.com, HnShah@gmail.com. Until next time, that’s it from us. [0:13:21] Hiten Shah: Awesome, see you. [0:13:23] The post 459: How to Build a Remote Sales Team appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the heart of your startup. Sometimes trying to make a decision can be quite a challenge and whether you should listen to your heart or not in that situation can be a challenge for most founders. One reason for this is opening up your heart requires courage, and if things go wrong, feelings can get hurt. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why most people can’t speak from their heart, one thing that prevents people from bringing their heart into things, how the truth isn’t in the mind and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 01:03 Why this topic was chosen. 03:28 Why most people can’t speak from their heart. 04:20 One thing that prevents people from bringing their heart into things. 04:54 One thing that helps Hiten come at things from his heart. 05:13 One of the things that makes this podcast valuable to people. 06:06 Why the present moment is an important way to practice bringing your heart into things. 06:04 How the truth isn’t in the mind. 07:17 How Hiten has a hard time speaking his truth sometimes.  3 Key Points: There is heart, there’s mind and there’s soul.The most esoteric of the three is the soul.The truth isn’t in the mind. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this Steli Efti. [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about the place of the heart in a company or in a startup. Does the heart have a place in business and for you as a startup founder? Here’s why I wanted to tackle this weird subject with you, Hiten. This is going to be a funky episode. For all of you that are only interested in the most tactical and practical stuff, this may or may not be useful. But maybe if you don’t want to listen to it, maybe it’s going to be especially useful to you. We’ll see. Here’s the reason why I wanted to talk about this with you, Hiten. Recently, I had a discussion with a couple of friends of mine. Most of them are entrepreneurs themselves, and one of them kept repeating this new mantra in his life of some big realization that he had recently in his life that he wanted to listen to his heart more. He was like, “The mind has been too much of the boss. I just want to listen to my heart, and just follow my heart.” We were discussing this topic as if it was absolutely clear what he meant. Eventually, I went, “Wait a second, guys. When you say ‘follow your heart,’ I kind of think I understand what you’re saying, and we’ve been talking about the heart, quote-unquote, as an entity that we all… We all talk about it as if it’s the most obvious object in this context, but what the fuck do we even mean when we say ‘the heart’? When I say “follow your heart,” what do I mean? What is the heart? Is that your soul? Is that your spirit? Is that your subconscious? What is it?” Then, we had a epic, three-hour philosophical conversation, that made us go in circles at times, that made us all realize that this is a hard question to answer. It’s a big concept, and I realized, “Shit, I’ve never even thought about my heart for more than, I don’t know, a minute at a time in this kind of context.” Obviously, whenever I have a discussion like that that leaves you with more questions than answers, I’m like, “I need to break this down with my main man, Hiten.” [0:02:15] Hiten Shah: Let’s do it. [0:02:16] Steli Efti: So I wanted to ask you, do you ever talk about your heart as like an entity that helps you make decisions or that has a place in your world? Is that something that was weird from us, have you heard other people refer to, like, “Follow your heart, do what your heart is saying. I listen to my heart”? What, do you think, does it mean and how does it work in the world of business and entrepreneurship? [0:02:41] Hiten Shah: Oh man, how much time do we have? Yes, I think that there is heart. There is definitely heart. I will not say that there isn’t. I feel like most people can’t speak from their heart, act from their heart, feel their heart, and live in that sort of space. One of the reasons is we’re so caught up in our brains and use our brains a lot, obviously. We use our mind. There is heart and there’s mind. So, my take on this is there’s heart, there’s mind, and there’s soul, and congruency between the three is what’s really important. It’s probably the most important thing. The most esoteric of them all is soul, because that has to do with your spiritual, religious beliefs or lack of, depending on how you view that. So let’s just ignore that one, because I think it’s not something that can be objectified, for lack of a better word. So, when you think about your heart and your mind, one of the things that prevents people from taking their mind out of these things and bringing their heart into things is the fact that they’re just caught up in whatever’s going on in the world, whatever happened in the past, or whatever the want to do in the future. So the one thing I would say that I’ve experienced in my life that has been really helpful to come from my heart is when I am focused on this moment right now. One of the reasons is podcast, I think, based on what people tell us, is valuable to them is because you and I are focused on the podcast when we’re on the podcast. Right? [0:05:18] Steli Efti: Right? [0:05:18] Hiten Shah: We are focused on this conversation, we’re speaking to each other about a topic that we just want to talk about, just like this one, and we feel like other people should get the benefit of that. I can’t talk to you for however long we talk every week, an hour-plus sometimes, about whatever randomly, because we wouldn’t make the time for it. We make the time for it, we do it, and one of the reasons it’s wonderful, there’s no edits and it’s raw, and I think people give us that feedback, is because we’re in the moment, right now. We both prefer that. We’re not thinking about anything else, we’re not getting caught up in anything else, we’re talking about what we’re talking about right now, and other people can probably feel that when they listen to us. So, to me the present moment is one way to practice coming from your heart or bringing your heart into things. I’ve had, definitely, very profound experiences, that are amazing, when I do that. Another thing I do is if I’m going into something and I really want to speak my truth… I think the truth isn’t in the mind. [0:06:36] Steli Efti: Mm-hmm (affirmative). [0:06:37] Hiten Shah: That’s a big one. Then I will set an intention before I get into that experience, and literally say, “I want this to be the best experience possible and I want to speak my truth, and that’s what I’m going to do.” I did that yesterday for a meeting. It’s an important meeting to me, it’s one relatively regularly but ad hoc, and I wanted to make sure it was a great meeting for me and the other person. So I set the intention myself, and lo and behold it was a great meeting, both parties spoke from their heart, and we accomplished what we wanted to in that meeting. This is one where I do have a hard time speaking my truth. It’s one where I probably have the hardest time speaking my truth, with this person, but it’s someone who I value doing that with. It’s someone who I’ve made lots of mistakes not doing that and it’s ended up with heartache, literal heartache, for me. Coming from your heart means you’re coming from your heart, you’re not letting your mind confuse you, and you’re having that intention. That’s my take on it. [0:07:52] Steli Efti: Yeah, that’s beautiful. There’s a philosophical side to this that I’m not going to get as much into, maybe another time, where I’m even trying to unpack for myself: when I speak about the heart, I speak about a certain center of emotions in my being, and I’m not quite sure what the source of that is. I don’t believe it’s intuition. To me, intuition is something that’s in the gut, in the belly, and that is very much connected to my brain and maybe my subconscious, this massive database that’s giving me a feeling that is sourced from data and information that I can’t quite compute consciously. The heart is a different center of emotion in the body, and I don’t know where those emotions come from. I don’t think they come from the brain, but where do they come from? What is it? That’s a big topic, obviously, and if anybody that listens has a theory or can point to places with theories, I’d love to hear it all and read it all. Shoot us email, steli@close.com and hnshah@gmail.com. When it comes to listening to the heart or using the heart, or even setting the intention, as you said, in the present moment that I’m going to speak my truth, which means I’m going to acknowledge my truth and live it, speaking it means living your truth in that moment and following your heart in that moment in some way, the reason why that’s difficult, or the reason I think it is difficult for me when I resist that, is because there’s always a certain vulnerability that comes with that. Saying something that your mind can put together, that you think sounds right, will get the right response, will be safe to say, or whatever, is something that’s much more disassociated. So, if that works or it doesn’t work, there’s distance to your emotional control center. But if you open up and you say something that’s in your heart, usually that always comes with a certain vulnerability. Because, maybe, it’s so true, so honest and so raw, we’re afraid. Putting our heart out there, we can be hurt in ways that are much more impactful than putting our brain out there, quote-unquote, and getting those ideas rejected or those thoughts that our mind came up with rejected. So I feel like opening up the heart always comes with courage. It requires the courage, maybe, to be in the present moment, to listen to your truth, and then to live your truth in a way that may get you hurt or that may hurt if it’s not fully accepted and fully acknowledged. In some ways I’m getting to the conclusion that living your true self or listening to your heart means being courageous in the moment. Asking myself, “What does my heart tell me?” It’s not always easy for me to answer that question, but another way of asking, I think, the same question is: what is something that would require courage of me to do right now that I want to do, or say that I want to say? What’s something that would require me to have more courage than I currently have in this relationship, in this situation, in my business, in my life, in what I have to deal with in this challenge or problem? Courage to me is a good compass back into the heart. So that’s been the experiment that I’ve been running over the last couple of days, is asking myself what needs courage in my life, because that is where, probably, my heart is speaking out of. But this is such a weird, interesting, compelling topic that doesn’t have a right or wrong… But I found profound to even just contemplate or talk with people I really, really respect, like you. Even try to talk about it, like, “What do you think? What’s your heart? Do you listen to your heart, and how much of a role does your heart play in certain situations?” I had one friend in that conversation say, “The reason Steli can be so loud, his personality can come across so larger-than-life at certain situations and people still really can connect with him is because he doesn’t just have a big personality, he also has a big heart. He’s not just super confident and a sales dude, but he’s also somebody that is,” in his words, “a sweetheart.” I’m not sure if I agree with that. It’s just interesting to see what role does the heart play in business or entrepreneurship. How do we figure out our own hearts and what role do we allow them to play in how we make decisions. I don’t know. This is the type of episode that I don’t know has a natural ending: “Two tips about the heart!” [inaudible]. [0:13:33] Hiten Shah: I think we can end it like this: there are people that are so in their minds that they’re listening to this and probably stopped 30 seconds into it. Then, there’s people that are like, “Oh, I’m curious,” and are all-in on it and wanted to hear what we had to say. Then, there’s people who kind of want to come from their hearts, they want to figure out what that means for them, and they’re probably still listening to this. So the way I would end this is: if this is a topic you want to hear more about, please email us. These are the kind of topics that we can talk from many, multiple facets from, and I think we would enjoy that. So think of the email as a vote. Even if you just said, “Plus one heart,” that’s cool. It’s steli@close.com or hnshah@gmail.com. One day I’ll tell the story of why that’s my username on Twitter and my email. Yeah, one day. So, email me, email Steli, and give us a “plus one heart” if you want to hear more around this topic of heart and, honestly, we didn’t use the L word, but love comes into this pretty quickly. Maybe that’s for another day. [0:14:56] Steli Efti: Beautiful. That’s it from us for this episode. [0:14:59] Hiten Shah: Thanks a lot. [0:14:59] The post 458: The Heart of Your Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about founder distractions. Being distracted from work is something all founders have to deal with and, while some kind of distractions can be a good thing, when distractions start affecting your level of productivity then it may be time to make some changes.  In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what founder distractions are, the most common types of distractions, how you can overcome these distractions and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 01:00 The first thing that comes to mind when meeting other founders. 01:40 Why meeting other founders can be a big distraction. 03:32 How Hiten approaches requests for meeting up. 03:40 How founders get distracted by competition. 05:17 Another major distraction for founders. 06:45 Why you don’t need to read ten books a day to become a successful founder. 09:25 How meetings and getting on calls with people can be a distraction. 10:10 Antidotes for distractions. 3 Key Points: One of the biggest founder distraction is meeting other founders.Founders get distracted by competitionHelping and meeting is not the same thing [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli: And today on the startup chat we’re going to talk about founder distractions, the types of things, maybe the most tempting temptations or the most distracting distractions for founders. Things that founders easily get distracted by or with that founders should avoid if they don’t want to get into trouble. What comes first to mind when you hear a common founder distraction? What is the first thing that pops up in your head? [0:00:35] Hiten: Oddly I think one of the biggest founder distractions is meeting with other founders. I think- [0:00:45] Steli: Tell me more. [0:00:46] Hiten: I think there are a lot of meet with other founders, get feedback on what you’re doing or have sort of a community or a group of you that kind of can talk about work, right, and talk about how, what your dealing with and things like that. There’s a lot of camaraderie that shows up in that way when you have friends that are founders, and one of the biggest things is when founders are just meeting other founders almost like a… How can I put it? Like just for the sake of meeting other founders, “I’m a founder, you’re a founder, let’s meet up.” Or a founders meeting of other founders with the idea of there’s a lot out there that have a lot to do with, “I am meeting other founders, they’re early stage founders. I want to help them.” So I actually even think helping other founders can be a distraction for many people, right? And I know many people would be, that are listening, know me really well and know I help a lot of founders. They probably know you really well, Steli. You help a lot of founders, right? And they’re like, “Well what are you talking about?” But look, I don’t think most founders are actually should go help other founders all the time. And the reason I say that is it’s either something that you know how to do and you can do it because it’s just part of your DNA and also like it helps your businesses somehow or your business, or it’s just not something in your DNA. It’s just not something that you you know how to do, right? So I think there is a lot of distraction I’ve seen with founders trying to help other founders or founders meeting with other founders just because they’re are other founders, and this is easy because what happens is there are so many founders out there now that will email you and want to meet up. Or will email you and be like, “Oh you did X, Y, and Z. I’d love to learn from you.” And you can get caught up in that. I’ve seen founders get caught up in that. Well now it’s even like, it’s not just because you’re venture funded, even a lot of self-funded founders are getting that because they’re successful to some extent. They built something of value and they’re getting hit up. So for me, I think I’ve said this before, I do like to try to help people, but a lot of times I’ll say, “Hey, just send me your questions by email and I’ll respond,” right? And I do that a lot. If you really want to meet with me, even if you get introed to me, I am now always doing a calculation of am I going to learn something from this experience if I meet with this person in person? Is it that I have some obligation because it’s like a good friend of mine or somebody who introed me, right? Who I know that they would want me to meet with this person for a very specific reason? But usually they’re able to tell me why, right, the other person who’s introing is able to tell me why I need to meet the person versus why I need to help the person, because helping and meeting is not the same thing in my mind. So that’s one aspect. And I’ll say another one and I’m sure you have more. And another one I’ve seen is founders getting distracted by competition. That’s probably one of the number one things. And I have a very specific view on competition, which is I really do care about competition, but I care about competition because it impacts my customers. It impacts my prospects. I want to learn about competitors because they are also in market talking to customers or in front of customers. So I only care about the customer’s opinion and the customer’s sentiment, what the customers have to say about the competitors. I do not care that the competitor launched a feature. What I do care about is what does the market think about it, the market of people that are going to buy or use that product and possibly mine. [0:04:50] Steli: I love it. Yeah, good Shit. All right, so let me give you two favorite founder distractions in my recent observation. I think one that’s so big and has been talked about so much that it’s hard to even truly acknowledge how impactful it can be for you and for me and for everybody is I think consuming information that seems or appears or creates a feeling that it could be useful for your venture. So it’s sort of like under the [mangle] Of doing work, right? So that could be listening to podcasts, this could be listening or reading books. This could be, I mean, reading books even less in my opinion or a book is such a different form factor than a podcast. Sometimes podcasts can very much where the lines between entertainment, like very passive entertainment versus really useful practical, tactical information that’s relevant right now. But just consuming information, like following certain people on Twitter and reading everything they write, reading blog posts, articles, listening to podcasts, accessing free courses. There’s just this amazing wealth of information. Reading Hacker News or Product Hunt. I’m checking out a religiously Product Hunt, Hacker News, then listening to your 17 favorite podcasts. Then scrolling through your Twitter timeline to see what’s new, what’s really going on in tech. Then reading… It can feel like somewhat work because you need to stay up to date and you need to know what competitors are doing and what companies are doing and you need to stay creative and you need to keep learning, and these ideas that you could collect from different places or information bits that you could consume in different places could now help you inform your strategy or what you should do next. So it kind of feels like work, but it’s actually just fucking around and it’s just fucking around for a couple of hours and indiscriminately throwing your attention at anything that throws itself at you, right? It’s kind of setting up your day as a founder in a way that feels like you’re educating yourself, but what you’re really doing is distracting yourself, right? You don’t need to read 10 books a day to become a successful founder or whatever the hell the myth is that all important successful founders are reading an immense amount of books. You don’t have to listen to the top 50 entrepreneurship podcasts to be successful. You don’t need to read all the top blogs. You don’t have to be on all the top sites. You don’t need to analyze every single product launch every day because that’s going to teach you something about the thing you may work on next year and may want to launch in three years from now. A lot of founders tell themselves a bullshit story around how much time they spent consuming information that is not absolutely necessary and useful for what they’re doing today. Not saying you should go the other extreme, never consume any information. That’s crazy talk, but I think that founders do get distracted by their love for consumption of data and information and the overwhelming amount that’s available out there and they’re not very disciplined about it. They’re not like, okay, I’m going to spend 30 minutes a day reading, consuming podcast and I’m going to do it very mindfully in these situations. When I go work out, I’ll listen to a podcast, right, that’s a good time, or on my commute and then at night before I go to sleep, I’ll read this book. Like there’s these moments where I’ll do something or when I do research I’ll do research with a time cap and with a very specific outcome and purpose in mind. No, I think what most founders do is they kind of set up this life where eventually half of their day and even more time of their day, they’re mindlessly consuming information and data left and right, and then the information is not really useful and educational. It’s really just a distraction tool, just like how other people sit in front of the television and watch sitcoms all day long. You are reading blog posts all day long that are random and it’s make you feel like you’re learning something, but ultimately are really just preventing you from doing the work and being focused. So I think that that’s a massive destruction. That’s not just for founders. I think this is a general massive life challenge that humanity has to face, the amount of information overflow and distraction that we’re dealing with. But I think founders particularly have like this narrative that makes them feel like they’re doing work when actually they’re just fucking around. So I think that’s a massive, massive distraction. I don’t want to throw a second one. I think competition is a really big one. Meeting with founders or in general, meetings, meeting or getting on calls with people, again not discriminately ill or not being very purposeful. Just saying yes to these, oh here’s another company that wants to partner with us. Let’s just show up at a one hour call. Is this company really big? Do they have a massive audience? Do they have an audience that could be your customer base? Do the companies align? Does this make sense? No, it’s a company that doesn’t have any customers. We don’t have any customers, so zero and zero obviously make sense so, so let’s jump on a two hour call to brainstorm about how to partner and how to integrate our technologies when we both have nothing of an audience or customer base to share with each other and do things that don’t really align together. So meeting with people, it doesn’t matter if it’s founders, potential partners or whatever else in a way that is wasteful is definitely big. Competition is definitely big, investors, data. So many distractions. I think the antidote… I’ll give one antidote that I want to share that maybe you share one and we’ll wrap this episode up. I think to me one of the biggest disciplines to cultivate, one of the muscles that I have to build and work on is the ability or the the space for silence and thinking that you create during your day in life in today’s world. So having half an hour a day of uninterrupted time where I’m not working, I’m not listening to anything, I’m not reading anything, I’m not doing any like super hard activity. I am just thinking, maybe I’ll go on a quick walk and think about a problem or about something I want in life. Maybe I’ll sit somewhere and watch the river or the landscape or whatever and think about something. But like creating these spots in my day where mindfully and thoughtfully, I’m not consuming information and I’m not engaging in any particular activity. I’m just trying to get in touch with my own thoughts and create space and silence to think clearly. I think that’s been a massive help for me and something I’m still struggling with at times, but a big thing that I’m working on that helps me identify distractions more easily and protect myself from them as a founder in a better and better way. [0:11:51] Hiten: Yeah. I think the one thing I’ll say is it’s really important when it comes to the meetings you do, the information you listen to, the things you gathered that are all kind of obviously in the professional realm, that you’re focused on timely and making sure that whatever it is that you’re consuming, it’s very timely for what you’re thinking about now or what you need to execute in your business now or very soon. And I find this really tough to do for most people, for all of us actually, because there’s so much information, like you said, coming at you all the time and it is kind of your job to filter, is this relevant to me now or not? And not really worry about missing out on it or not being able to find it later for when you need it. If you don’t need it now, you probably shouldn’t worry about it. [0:12:39] Steli: I love it. All right, this is it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:12:43] Hiten: Don’t get distracted. [0:12:44] The post 457: Founder Distractions appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the fear of doing something insignificant. It’s very common for people to sometimes feel that their ambitions or what they do is not big enough and then beat themselves over it. This shouldn’t be the case, because of how big a goal or ambition is a very subjective issue. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about why people worry about something insignificant, why you need to define what small means to you, why the idea of being small is very subjective and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:31 Why this topic was chosen. 01:40 Why people worry about something insignificant. 01:50 Why you need to define what small means to you. 05:14 Why the idea of being small is very subjective. 06:00 How people can get stuck in doing something they don’t like. 07:30 How people judge themselves based on other people’s opinions. 08:25 Why you shouldn’t be rigid about who you are. 09:44 Why you always need to access your current situation. 3 Key Points: You have to define it.Just because you’re a founder today, doesn’t mean it should be your identity for life.You can point to some of the largest companies in the world and argue that they started too small. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about, should you as an entrepreneur, worry about what you’re working on being “too small”, or not significant enough. Here’s a few that I’ve seen in a million different forms, a million different times with entrepreneurs and with startups, is this fear of doing something that’s too small, working on something that might not become big enough, that might not be thinking big enough. I’ve always been in conflict with this fear. Recently, I was talking to somebody that was working on something, I don’t know, that sounds like a really, really big idea, but then when I poked why they worked on this, why she decided to focus on this, basically she was just like, “Well, it seems like a really big area. It seems like a trend. I think that this is going to become the future, and so decided to work on this.” Then when I asked her what she is really passionate about, which she told me that she had this other idea that she was much more passionate about that is much closer to her heart, much more personal to her, but she decided not to pursue that idea because she felt it would be too small. Hiten, why do we worry so much about the things that we’re working on as entrepreneurs being big or having big potential? Is the fear of working on something that’s too small and too insignificant, is that a healthy fear, a fear that entrepreneurs should have? I thought we should tackle this and unpack it for the audience. [0:01:37] Hiten Shah: You have to define it. You have to define small and big. You have to really define it. I don’t understand when someone says, “Hey, I’m working on something too small.” I don’t know what that means. That’s the biggest problem I have. Is it too small of a market? Do you think you can’t make enough money? Do you feel like you need to solve a bigger problem in the world because you aspire to solve bigger problems? What is it? What do you mean by too small? I think oftentimes people will have in their heads what they mean by too small and their logic is flawed. It’s funny, you could point to some of the largest companies on the planet and argue that they started too small. You could point to failures that have occurred in business and the point to the fact that they were too ambitious, you know? So it was too big. [0:02:32] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:02:33] Hiten Shah: To me, this is a completely subjective thing. You have to turn it into something where you can actually quantify, “What do I mean by too small?”, and if you can quantify what you mean by too small, then I think you can make a lot more… A much more informed logical decision. [0:02:52] Steli Efti: I love that. The other thing that I noticed over the years, kind of the entrepreneurial communities that, there’s this kind of myth that we have or the story or narrative that is being told, of these people that live inauthentic lives, that work in a cubicle or work in a job they hate, and what they really would need to do is to start their own business, to be entrepreneurs, to create something new, but their fear is holding them back, society’s holding them back, their family’s holding them back. So they’re not living their true selves and their confined in this employee mentality framework that is robbing them of their authenticity. Here we are, amazing entrepreneurs. We broke through that. We broke through the resistance of our parents, of our coworkers, of our boss of society and we left this amazing job. We took all this risk on and we’re starting this company. Look at us, aren’t we fucking amazing and awesome, right? In some cases or many cases, that might’ve been a true story that somebody lived through and I applaud those people, but I’ve seen the exact same story play out a million times within the entrepreneurial community where somebody started a company, it was a founder and CEO in title, had raised some money, had created this identity around being an entrepreneur and then realized, “I actually fucking hate this,” right? “This isn’t fun for me. What I’d really like to do is, I’d like to be a teacher in a school and teach fourth graders”, or, “What I’d really like to do is being an author and writing fiction books”, or, “What I’d really like to do is try to be an actor.” When they try to make that step, how then it is hard for them to make that transition as it was for somebody else to go from employee to entrepreneur because… Exactly the same dynamics. “What are all my founder and CEO friends are going to think about me trying to be an actor now.” “What? You’re trying to build a technology company and change the world and now you’re going to be just a dumb actor.” It’s the same fucking thing or like self identity issues. “I had CEO on my business card, but now what? I’m going to write aspiring author, fiction writer?” People get stuck in the entrepreneurial world. They’ll get stuck being entrepreneurs and founders that aren’t really happy with being founders and entrepreneurs, that aren’t really… Once they made that choice, that realized they made a choice for the wrong reasons. Maybe because they thought that that would give them significance, maybe because they thought they would enjoy it, maybe because they thought that that would make them rich, whatever it was, and they realized at some point, “This isn’t really my thing,” but now they’re stuck in this new identity and because being an entrepreneurial founder is now even more celebrated than ever before, especially in the startup world, the tech world and the tech world has got a lot more popularity because of all the success and all the influence around the world, being a tech founder, CEO, or entrepreneur is such a cool identity today that letting that go or leaving that behind to start a new life in an area that might not be as prestigious… I know all these entrepreneurs that have become, I don’t know, authors or life coaches or something like that, and I know that secretly, other entrepreneurs are actually pointing fingers and them going, “I don’t understand this decision. How can you become a life coach? This seems like a weird job. You were a fucking CEO of a tech company. You had raised $10 million and now you’re like a life coach? This is weird.” To me, I know I went a little bit on a rant, but to me, it’s just this one narrative that I think growing up I believed in and once I spend enough time in this community and this industry, I realized how full of shit it is, right? I see all these people that chose to be entrepreneurs for as many bad reasons as any other human being chooses to be in any other career path and how they get stuck in it and they’re afraid of leaving or they’re afraid of following their true passion, even within entrepreneurship and working on an idea or something they really love, but they think other people wouldn’t admire or wouldn’t believe in or wouldn’t think is big enough. All right, I’ll pause my rent here to get your response in it. [0:07:10] Hiten Shah: I think you’re right. I think the thing I hear underneath all of this is judgment. You’re just making a judgment and you’re making a judgment that, in a lot of the cases that you described, are about other people, not you. [0:07:25] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:07:27] Hiten Shah: So yourself based on what you think other people are going to think of you. That’s just being unfair to yourself. If you really want to do something, there is no, “It’s too big or it’s too small.” Just figure out if you really want to do it. Don’t worry about what other people think, like Grizzly, it’s something you want to do, you want to realize it, you want to do it, you think it’s relevant to you, we want to see it out in the world. Just do it. Don’t make it that big of a deal where you don’t do it because of what you think other people are going to think of you. [0:08:01] Steli Efti: I love that. I think this is maybe an important message, even if it’s not a popular one to hear. Just because you we’re an entrepreneur in the past or you are an entrepreneur today, you’re a founder today, doesn’t mean this has to be your identity for the rest of your life. It doesn’t. It’s not some kind of a better place that there’s no turning back on or stepping back away from. You might be a founder today and tomorrow, maybe what’s better for you, what’s a more authentic path for you, would be to join another company or join somebody else’s vision and help them. Once you go from employee to founder, it’s not some kind of a thing that you never want to leave because founder by definition is always better than employee. It isn’t. There’ve been many, many founders that are a lot more broke then employees. There’s employees that got… People that work for other people that got a lot richer than founders of failed startups. There’s people that have a lot higher quality of life, so it’s not just rich and financial outcomes. There’s a lot of people that live a lot happier lives than a lot of founders. There’s a lot of people that have a lot more impact than founders. For whatever reason, we think that a founder is of the most impactful things we could do, one of the most fulfilling things we could do, one of the most financially rewarding things we could do, and those things can be true, but they’re not universal truths, they’re not gravity of the planet entrepreneurship, right? Not everybody’s going to experience these things. If you’re a founder and you’re working on an idea that you don’t love and then you’re not passionate about, that you don’t care about, but you think is big? Stop. Take a break and really ask yourself if you want to devote your life and your time on those things. Remember, what Hiten said in the beginning. How many of the biggest companies started off as these weird little hobby looking like companies, right? Computers were a hobby for these weird people. I remember, I give a talk once… They wanted me to give a talk about how Silicon Valley helped me think big. It was somewhere in Europe. Europeans always have this fear that they’re thinking too small and Americans think really big, so that was their base assumptions, “Steli was thinking small and then went to America and learned how to think big”. My whole talk was the exact opposite, how I learned to think smaller in Silicon Valley. I mentioned the story of, I met the founders of Airbnb and Dropbox in the first five, six weeks of being in the US, and I remember judging both of these founders thinking their ideas are dumb and small, right? I wanted to change the world of education. That was my first idea when I came to the valley, and I was like, “What? Air mattresses in people’s apartments and then cooking breakfast for them. What the fuck is this? This is such a dumb, weird idea”, or Dropbox file sharing. I’m like, “Is file sharing a problem that needs to be fixed?”, just to give you an idea of how dumb I was and how great of an investor I would be choosing billion dollar unicorns. A lot of massive companies started out looking like little hobbies and weird little companies. As you said in the beginning, the opposite is also true. A lot of these overly ambitious, obviously big ideas fail when they start off like that. Life is too short to worry about, “Is what I do significant or small,” or, “What will other people judge me if I do this or if I stopped doing this?” Life is too pressure for this shit. Just ask yourself who you want to be, what kind of a life you want to live today and tomorrow, and go chase those dreams, your authentic, true dreams, and don’t worry about anything else. Everything else will fall into place on its own. [0:11:32] Hiten Shah: I love that. That’s it. [0:11:36] Steli Efti: That’s it from us. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:11:39] Hiten Shah: Yeah. [0:11:39] The post 456: The Fear of Doing Something Insignificant appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about doing what scares you. When trying to accomplish something, the fear of the unknown can prevent you from taking action and completing your goals. Whatever it is that scares you, overcoming that fear and completing your goal can only be beneficial to you. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how doing things that scare you can help you grow, situations where being scared can be a good thing, some business situations that scared them in the past and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:27 Why this topic was chosen. 01:50 How doing things that scare you can help you grow. 02:01 How doing something that you’re scared usually leads to something valuable. 03:06 Situations where being scared can be a good thing. 04:02 How listing out things that scare you can be beneficial. 05:23 Why you should feed the fear in a positive way. 06:39 How everyone, including founders, has something that scares them. 07:21 How a lot of founders are driven by fear. 09:09 Business situations that scared Steli and Hiten.  3 Key Points: We grow by doing things that we’re not comfortable with.There’s something valuable at the end of fear.I would like to see more people list out the things that scare them. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about doing what scares you. The reason I want to talk about this is because recently my FYI co-founder Marie decided to go on a camping trip alone, but not quite alone because she was with her dog, which is probably even more scary in some ways. And in a bunch of private chats she was talking about bears and being scared of bears, and we’re in California and apparently there’s bears. And then on Twitter she was talking about how she was doing it. And what was really cool is a lot of other people chimed in about going on solo camping trips and dealing with the fears and things like that, making a fire and all that good stuff. So yeah, just wanted to talk about doing what scares you because it can extend to anything, personal life or work or whatever. Really just, I think something that we tend to sort of as humans, we grow by doing things that we’re not comfortable with, doing things that might scare us. And at the same time we also kind of don’t do them. So we lose out on growth and on opportunities like that. And personally I think there are things that I’m thinking through right now myself that probably scare me a little bit and but yet I know that they’re going to help me grow. And I know that I want that and I want that experience. So yeah, just wanted to chat with you about this because I think it’s a very common thing and something that a lot of people can get a bunch of value from. [0:01:41] Steli Efti: I love it. So I think that, I’ve said this many, many times that I do think that fear is the compass, fear points usually to a direction … There’s something valuable at the end of fear. There’s something, either it’s outside your comfort or … It’s always outside of your comfort if it’s associated with fear, I guess. But doing something that you’re afraid of usually will lead to something valuable, a valuable experience, a valuable skill or quite a valuable thing that you accomplish. But because there’s fear in between you and that thing or that experience, it’s what’s holding most of us back. But I wonder, I recently wondered if that’s always good advice. First, maybe and this is funky, I don’t know if this is going to lead to any place worthwhile going or exploring, but are there exceptions to this? When is it right to let your fear hold you back or to let what scares you define what you do or you don’t do? Are there situations where fear is … I mean, of course life and death. Don’t maybe jump into the lion’s den, whatever. The zoo, maybe don’t go near or into areas of wild animals. Like there’s survival situations where fear is probably a good instinct to follow or to listen to. But in more day-to-day life, in more life decisions than aren’t life and death, is there ever a place where we need to listen to our fear or where what scares us is something we should not move towards to? [0:03:28] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean I think if something scares you and there’s some level of life and death associated with it, around whether you do it you might die. Like in die without appropriate measures, so it’s really risky. So I think one of the things that comes into play when it comes to doing what scares you, it has a lot to do with risk and how risky is it. Is it a life or death situation, things like that. Those are one kind of aspect. I think another one is when it comes to what scares you, if I were to be very prescriptive, I would love to see more people do an exercise of actually listing out the things that scare them. Whether it’s something they’re about to do or something that in general would scare them. Like my girlfriend, [Anna-Marie 00:04:20], she’d probably list down going camping alone would scare her. She also has probably a lot of things that might scare her besides that as well. Not to blow up her spot, but like, yeah. And in my case, I think a lot of things that scare me … Like going camping alone to me is not even scary because I just wouldn’t do it. It’s not a desire. [0:04:43] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:04:43] Hiten Shah: So there’s this whole idea of do you desire it? Does it scare you, what parts of it scare you? Because you don’t desire it and it’s something scary for you, you’re not going to do it, it doesn’t matter. There are a lot of things that I don’t desire so I don’t even think about them. Well in her case, she desires that, she’s gone camping with other people before. She went camping when she was a kid. So this is a big … It was probably I think actually a big milestone. I’ve seen her after that and I think that was a big milestone. There’s possibly even something that’s changed in her as a result of this experience, frankly speaking. And so a part of me is like when you think through things that scare you, things that you desire that scare you, or things you gravitate towards but they still scare you. It’s almost like you want to feed the fear in a positive way. And yeah, I’m sure there are things that scare you that you shouldn’t do. Like go, I don’t know, go hang out with a snake, a poisonous snake. Maybe you shouldn’t do that. So yeah, I find it a fascinating topic because the things that scare people are very different. Like there’s things in business that scare me and I definitely do them. And there are things in business that probably scare other people that would never scare me, whether it’s because I’ve done them before or I am just comfortable. Like just general most business stuff. I think another way to think about it that I know some people would throw back and be like, “Oh, nothing scares me.” I would say that then you probably might not be able to really grok and understand the definition of the word. Because as a founder or as somebody who’s sort of done a lot of things in their lives or is trying something new like starting a company or something like that, you might already have this idea in your head where founders have no fear. [0:06:36] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:06:37] Hiten Shah: I don’t know how true that is. I don’t believe that. [0:06:39] Steli Efti: It’s total bullshit. [0:06:41] Hiten Shah: There you go. [0:06:41] Steli Efti: That is absolute and total bullshit. I think in general a lot of the things that we say about founders is bullshit. A lot of self-beliefs, anything that really makes, that distinct a group and makes it better in some way from other groups, in most cases it’s probably has a lot of BS in there. I think that founders are just as scared as other people are. They’re just scared about different things. You could appear to be incredibly brave because you do all these crazy things, but what really drives you is fear, and the fear of being insignificant maybe. The panic and fear not being admired and loved might push you to do these crazy stunts that are physically very dangerous because you’re not afraid to die or not afraid to get injured, but you’re really afraid to be alone or being insignificant or whatever. And you don’t know what drives people, and a lot of founders are driven by fear. They’re not just driven by whatever, they’re vision to change the world and by their bravado and … Yeah, that’s a cool story but I have met a ton of founders, I’ve been a founder almost my entire life, adult life. Very similar to your story. We’ve been exposed to a lot of founders and I wouldn’t be able to say that I’ve observed less fear in the founder or entrepreneur community even than in other communities. And let me ask you, you said that maybe something that will be useful to people listening to us is to share a … You shared you’re co-founder doing something. It’s kind of outside of the business world that was out of the startup world that was something she was scared of, which is dope. Like going camping alone or something she was afraid of, and I think I can totally relate to her feeling empowered by overcoming that fear and going, “Hey, I’m strong. I did it. I overcame my fear, I survived. I can be in slightly more dangerous situations that I’m used to and I can do well. And it’s fine.” Those are always awesome moments. But I’m wondering, maybe we should also share more recent moments where we were afraid or were scared of something, or wanted to do something we were scared of that relates to the startup world in one way or another. And I’ll go first. You can ponder what example you want to share and you can go second. But I always feel like when people like us that some people might admire and look up to, when we go deep and share something that’s current, it makes it much more alive than when we just talk about the topic. [0:09:31] Hiten Shah: Yeah, so far [inaudible 00:09:34]. [0:09:34] Steli Efti: So now I’m thinking like, “What the fuck am I going to say?” [0:09:37] Hiten Shah: I know. [0:09:37] Steli Efti: This is part of why this podcast is so popular and a lot of people get a lot from it, is that it’s not scripted. We don’t really spend a lot of time thinking through what we’re going to say. I did a bunch of podcast recordings in the last three weeks because I want to promote the new book that we brought out at Close and all that. Most times when I do a podcast recording I’m like, “Wow, all these people do this completely differently from how we are doing it.” [0:10:04] Hiten Shah: That’s right. That’s right. [0:10:06] Steli Efti: We don’t do second takes. We don’t have a script. So, okay. So something that I recently did in business that that scared me. So the biggest thing that I can think of is actually the … Well there’s two things. One, we did a very big pricing project, it closed at the beginning of the year. I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast before for sure. That was against kind of one of the beliefs that I have for a very long time and I was scared to change things. I always loved simple pricing models and I always loved that we offer people three simple pricing tiers and you could have all you wanted. And one of them is kind of like … Especially the telephony piece that we do, that we allow people to make calls and receive calls, send text messages and all that. I always hated the idea of having a usage-based pricing. I always wanted to give people a package because that to me was simple, that’s how I want to buy things. So I always resisted that and then eventually I convinced myself that I was wrong and that we needed to switch our pricing model. And when we started working on that pricing project and changing completely how our pricing infrastructure works, I had a a couple of moments where I looked at the math and I said, “If this doesn’t work out, it might really get get us in big trouble.” And it was interesting to see how I got scared a few times, just that that emotion came up. I was surprised about it myself and I was like, “Wow, I haven’t felt this in a while.” But last times I placed really big bets, I placed bets where the team was much smaller, the business was much smaller. And it seemed like if those bets didn’t work out, nothing really bad would happen. But now it’s a much bigger team. There’s a lot of people here that pay their mortgages, have children, have their families, I’m responsible for a lot of people. And this business is quite big. And so making this big of a bet, making this radical of a change for us and having the worst case scenario would be one where we lose a ton of revenue, that was quite scary. And I was both surprised by that. I had these moments literally hit me where I would go, “Shit, I haven’t felt this in years. This is a weird feeling. What do I do with this?” [0:12:31] Hiten Shah: That’s pretty awesome. [0:12:32] Steli Efti: It’s like, “Ah, I haven’t felt scared. This is so weird.” And then I had moments where I went back to this I think deep belief that you and I shared that’s like, “Well, if I’m scared at least we’re doing some real shit here.” We’re changing something, we’re really … “And does my rationale makes sense, why are we making this decision?” I would go through the rationale again to make sure that we thought this out carefully through and I still believe it’s the right decision. And then it was just about embracing that fear and thinking about it, reframing it as excitement and going, “You know what, maybe I’m just going to think about this feeling as excitement. Maybe I’m just excited about this. Maybe something real is happening.” So that’s one example. [0:13:11] Hiten Shah: I like that. [0:13:13] Steli Efti: I thought of another quick example in there, because it feels closer, the kind of more intimate. This is, I don’t even know if it fits in terms of doing what scares you. Well, in some ways it does, but I think what I recognized this year is that for the past 20 years of hiring people, employing people, I’ve learned to deal with conflict and I’ve always been very frank with people. But the underlying working principle that I have when it comes to people is that I am a seeker of harmony. This is hard to believe for some people that know me, but I do like harmony and I want people to be happy and I want things to be aligned, and everybody to be in a good place. I’m not necessarily somebody that enjoys conflict. And a tax conflict was like a passion, an excitement. Like I try to avoid conflict or I try to eliminate conflict whenever I can. That’s kind of my operating principle. And I remember a couple of months ago, two or three months ago, there was a situation with somebody on our team where I had to have a conversation with this person about something that was quite a difficult topic to discuss. And there were very high chances that it wouldn’t go down well, I it would create kind of a bad situation between the two of us. And I remember that back in the day I would have gone pregnant with that task for awhile, I would have thought about it a lot. I would have constantly tried to optimize for the conversation on like, “How can I have this conversation to make sure it doesn’t lead to conflict? How can I break this news and talk about this topic with this person in a way that’s going to make this feel as good as it can?” That was kind of the thing that guided my game plan in the past. And this time around for the first time, I kind of left that behind me and I was like, “Well, this is not a good way of thinking. Of course I don’t want to upset anybody, I don’t want to have an argument. But that can’t be my number one goal. My number one goal is X. So I need to optimize this conversation to accomplish X and I’m going to do it in a humane, fair and transparent way. But if the person gets upset that’s beyond my control and it’s going to pass.” Like I shouldn’t like overly optimized for that. And that was the first time that I went into a conversation where I didn’t care how the person would react. I was like, “I know this is the right thing to do. I know that I’m going to focus on the right way. And if this person gets upset, they get upset, we’ll deal with it then. I’m not going to spend all my energy and time on trying to cockup some way or some strategy that makes me feel safe, because I think I can get into this conversation and have a high chance of of talking about this in a way that will feel good to this person.” And I don’t know, that was a big shift for me and it changed the way I feel about the people I work with from a … I still deeply care about them, I want all of them to be happy and fulfilled. But I’m not as scared as I used to be to confront people or to have very difficult conversations earlier, and with a different focus than in the past where I think I oftentimes over optimized for harmony than anything else. So that was kind of a … It was a conversation where I didn’t have that fear anymore that I used to always have in those situations. [0:16:25] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I can relate. I think one that I’ll share that’s quite similar and a little bit different is I always had the fear of somebody not liking me. And in business I think it can be really a harmful thing when you have that fear and you have to make good business decisions, I mean great business decisions. Because if you’re fearful of somebody not liking you, then you might not do the right thing. You actually probably won’t do the right thing. I’d even go further and say that. [0:17:01] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:17:01] Hiten Shah: And all I’m trying to do is I’m trying to do the right thing. And it’s really tough to do if I have this fear that they’re not going to like me. Because it’ll stop me from figuring out, it stops me from figuring out what is the right thing to do, and how can I do that right thing in this moment regardless, and the right thing for the business. The right thing for the people on the team, not necessarily driven by what I think is the right thing that’s going to keep my psyche happy. Where it’s like, this person likes me or doesn’t like me. And the funny thing about this is I’ve just been aware now of this and that’s all I really needed to do. Once I became aware of this, everything I did got converted over to being more so about doing the right thing versus doing the thing that prevents people from not liking me. Because that’s also a very subjective thing. And more importantly, I don’t control whether someone likes me or not. Realistically, it’s not even my problem. I know that sounds weird, but whether someone likes me or not, I can just do the best I can. I should not be trying to optimize my life around somebody else liking me. And so I used to have, and probably there’s still parts of this that exists for me, but have this fear of that. It’s basically this fear that, “Oh, they’re not going to like me.” Or this fear that I’m going to say something or do something that’s good that I need to do,, but in that process, they’re not going to like me or they’re not going to like what I have to say. So I stopped worrying about that and it’s really been transformative for me. And this is almost like a daily fear of mine that I’ve had to work on, very similar to what you were saying where I kind of want to be liked. And I even overthink it, I overthink the message. I overthink saying something. I overthink how I’m going to say it with honestly the wrong attitude. And I think the wrong attitude is overthinking it with the idea that whatever I say they should like me. It’s actually more important that whatever I say, it should be true to what I want to communicate, and what I need to be saying in that moment in order to achieve whatever goal or outcome I’m looking to achieve. That’s now more important to me than saying things that someone else is going to feel okay about. Because I can’t even predict that in a lot of cases too. I can’t predict whether I’m going to say something and someone else’s going to be okay or not okay with it. And this doesn’t mean I’m not compassionate or I don’t try to be compassionate, I think all those things are important. But I should not be driven by this fear that someone else is not going to like what I have to say or what I’m doing. [0:19:48] Steli Efti: Fucking love it. All right, this is it from us. Do what scares you. [0:19:53] Hiten Shah: There you go. [0:19:54] Steli Efti: And what is scaring you? That might be a good question to end the episode with. If you feel like sharing, send us an email steli@close.com, hnshah@gmail.com. Let us know what scares you and what you’re going to do about it, and we’ll hear you very, very soon. [0:20:13] Hiten Shah: later. [0:20:13] The post 455: Doing What Scares You appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the various things they do to relax. It’s no secret that running a startup can be super stressful, and being stressed out can affect your performance as a founder and that of your team. So it’s important that you allow yourself to relax when you can. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why it’s important to relax, ways in which they relax and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:35 Why this topic was chosen. 01:00 Why it’s important to relax. 01:56 One way Hiten relaxes. 03:15 Another way Hiten relaxes. 04:13 A third way Hiten relaxes. 05:06 Why relaxing is a good thing. 06:04 One of the most relaxing things for Steli. 07:25 Another way Steli relaxes.  3 Key Points: For some startup founders, Relaxing sounds like the opposite of what they need.For me driving is relaxing.Tension breeds more tension. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:05] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about the ways that we relax and I think this is going to be one where we’re just going to talk about the things we do to relax. But maybe before we jump into sharing kind of some personal stories and ideas. Let’s talk about why is it even important to relax? Relaxing sounds like a bad idea for many. I would imagine for many kind of early founders of fathers that are doing this for the very first time. Entrepreneurs that are doing this for the first time. Relaxing sounds like the opposite of what they need. [0:00:42] Hiten Shah: Yeah, On my end. This is something I have a lot of trouble with. [0:00:45] Steli Efti: Mm. [0:00:46] Hiten Shah: I think if you asked people that either work with me, probably people that work with me, because my family tends to be similar to me. So I wouldn’t count them in this bucket. But people who work with me would probably say that like, he never takes a vacation because that is true. Objectively. That is true. Factually. That is true. And I don’t have a good reason why I don’t take a vacation. It’s not that I don’t like them, I probably just don’t understand them the way other people do for many different reasons. And so vacations are not how I relax. So even if I took one, I don’t think I would call that relaxing, which I know might sound really weird to most people. And that’s what I mean by like people in my companies don’t necessarily understand this and we don’t talk about a lot because they obviously just assume, whatever about me. And so for me, relaxing is more about how do I … The most relaxing thing I do is driving my car. [0:01:56] Steli Efti: Mm. [0:01:57] Hiten Shah: And it’s because I generally drive my car alone the majority of the time. I wouldn’t say it’s relaxing driving when someone else is in the car for me. And I do that typically like multiple times a week, at least three to five times a week. And when I do it, I’m driving for 30 minutes at least and then 30 minutes back to my house. So that’s a whole hour where I kind of get it to myself. Sometimes I do calls in the car, which is another form of relaxation because I’m driving and I grew up in Southern California where driving was a thing. You needed a car to get around. I had one right when I was 16 and so for me driving is relaxing, believe it or not. Speeding is also relaxing, just like driving is. So it’s a little more nuanced than just driving and I really enjoy it quite frankly. And if you asked me what do you do to relax, it’s that. [0:02:54] Steli Efti: I love that. [0:02:54] Hiten Shah: The only other thing I can think of is, I will basically use my time with my kids as much as possible to relax. So the new thing we’re doing right now is that game UNO. I don’t know if you played it. [0:03:12] Steli Efti: Yeah. [0:03:12] Hiten Shah: My son is nine years old and my daughter is five and they’re both very good at that game and can win and they love it. Both of them. It’s fantastic. And so I actually have been playing that game with them sometimes for like an hour, hour and a half straight. And it’s been really relaxing. And the grandparents play it with them. My wife plays it with them sometimes we all play with them. There’s like five of us playing it and it’s very relaxing. Some of it’s stressful for the kids because like they get really anxious about winning or losing or UNO and this and that. But man, those two things are most relaxing things and the UNO, one’s a little bit newer last few months, but it’s something that I really am finding really enjoyable and relaxing for me. So those are the two things I wish I had more. You know what? That’s all I got. I got one more. [0:04:06] Steli Efti: Okay. [0:04:06] Hiten Shah: Got one more. There are some people who I will go spend time with that I know it will be really relaxing regardless of if we’re talking about something really stressful or not. It’s just a relaxing conversation or just the person like just puts me in that state and I’m probably doing the same for them. [0:04:26] Steli Efti: I love that. Yeah. All right. I’ll give you my list. But before that, I absolutely believe that if you cannot relax, if you cannot find moments to let go, and to unplug mentally, physically. It’s going to affect the way you work. That’s going to … Usually leads to an increasing amount of tension, right? That never gets any release. And the more and more tense you get, the more rigid your thinking gets, the more rigid the way you act gets. And I think also tension breeds more tension. So usually people that never relax, they bring a certain level of tension to others, which is really what you don’t want. Attention can be super useful, like not that it’s a bad thing in and of itself, but tension at all times. If anytime you work with people they feel super tense, you’re not going to usually get the best work out of them. They usually are not going to feel most inspired, most creative around you. And so it can be really, really taxing for yourself and for your environment. So I think no matter what you do at the highest level, and taking athletes for this, if you take an athlete at the very highest level of what they do, if they had to be super tense and focused all the time, all day, all night, all week, all month long, they would not perform at their best and they would … Their performance would drop drastically. They have peak moments of high intensity and they have a lot of rest and relaxation to really fill up their battery. So I think it’s super crucial, especially for somebody that’s in a creative endeavor like an entrepreneur. For the things that relax me, it’s not that many things either, to be honest. Like funny enough, one of the most relaxing things for me is a reading a good book. And also reading a book … Like a physical book to me … I don’t know. Something about the physical sensation of reading a book, smelling it can put me in a really relaxed state, so I love doing that. I think good company does it for me a lot. There’s just some people that are so relaxed that are so fun to be around. I can completely unplug. I don’t think about work. I don’t think about anything really I’m just having a good time. I have stimulating conversations, just have fun being around these people. The most powerful relaxation I ever feel is actually being close to the ocean. That’s why I love sailing. I love being on a boat, being close to the ocean. Nothing gets me that deep of a state of relaxation faster and for longer periods of time. I love gazing at the ocean when I’m on a boat. That’s kind of the most powerful internal peace that I can feel. And then the last thing that comes to mind is one thing that is not relaxing. It doesn’t sound relaxing at all, but it relaxes me an incredible amount, which is … We’re Thai training, martial arts training in general. So when I go to kickboxing with Thai training although it’s very … It can be very tense and can be very intense. It is exhausting. It is for my mind, it is incredibly relaxing because I don’t think about anything other than performing whatever the task at hand is and I physically completely red line and completely exhaust myself and there’s just incredible amount of rush of endorphins at the end of a good training session that makes me incredibly happy, balances me out and it relaxes me. Like I’ll be much more relaxed after a very hard training session. So those are the things that I can think of that have been kind of the most relaxing endeavors that I have for sure. Before we wrap up this episode- [0:08:27] Hiten Shah: Pretty cool. [0:08:28] Steli Efti: There’s one more thing that can bring relaxation to people’s lives. There’s a sponsor that we have and a service that both Hiten and I, are customers of, brain.fm. You should go to brain.fm/startupchat to get 20% off of that service. So what is brain.fm? Super simple it’s a music player, and it’s music that actually helps you focus, relax, or even sleep. It’s a product that uses science spec music, and it works. Hiten and I, our customers, we love it and we use it all the time. I actually don’t use it that much too … I know that you’ve tried … You’ve played with a relaxed playlist. I’ve mostly been using … A bit obsessing over the focus music that they have because it’s just such a great hack to get me into like a productive focus zone. But they have music that focuses you, music that relaxes you, music that helps you fall asleep. If that’s something that is challenging to you. We love the service. We want you to give it a try. If we recommend something, we want you to do it, we believe it’s going to create a lot of value for you. So please go to brain.fm/startupchat. You can try out the music, listen to it, see it’s impact, feel the difference. And then you can sign up for 20% off. It’s less than six bucks a month, or like 40 bucks for an entire year of … Basically in a click of a button, within 10, 15 minutes, I get into a focus zone that is worth so much more money than what I’m paying for the service. Check it out both Hiten and I stand behind it and recommended highly to anybody that’s listening to the startup chat. And this is it for this episode. We’ll hear you very, very soon. [0:10:11] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:10:11] The post 454: The Ways We Relax appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about making exceptions for employees. There might come a time in your startup when a team member might ask you to make an exception for them either due to their performance or due to unforeseen circumstances. Deciding whether to give such exceptions to a team member can be tricky as you’ve got to consider how it will affect your workforce. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why you should always prioritize the group instead of a person, the mindset of an employer’s mind when they let go of a person, why exceptions are not the new normal and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 04:33 Why you should always prioritize the group instead of the person. 05:08 The mindset of an employer’s when they let go of a person. 05:00 How companies can over-index on an individual’s needs versus the group. 05:35 How to approach a situation when a team member wants to be treated differently. 06:31 Questions to ask yourself before giving a team member special treatment. 06:39 Why exceptions are not the new normal. 08:44 The different way ways to make an exception for team members. 09:54 How to judge a team member’s performance. 3 Key Points: When you let go of someone, there’s a lot of people who spend a lot of energy on the person being let go instead of the team that’s still there.You’re over-indexing on the people leaving.Ask yourself, if you’d do this for anyone else on the team if they were in the same situation. [0:00:00] 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’re going to talk about making exceptions for employees. Is this a good idea, bad idea. How to approach this topic? Here’s why I want to talk about this with you, Hiten. So recently I was talking to a manager and she was describing to me kind of her team and team set up and some of the challenges that she has and she went through a list of like certain things that were challenging on one team member and challenging on another team member. Most stuff sounded kind of pretty normal. And then she talked about one of her direct reports who is this amazing human being. Great personality and person. Is bringing a lot of value to the plate but has this like very difficult life situation and all these things going on in her life and like it’s just very, very messy, very complicated stuff that leads this manager to make all kinds of exceptions for her. Right? There’s like, she might work less at times than her coworkers. She might get a whole weeks, where she does almost nothing. She might get special projects to work on versus the work that she was really hired for because she liked those special projects more and she needs something to support her emotional needs because she’s going through trauma in her life and other areas. And as we were talking about that, like I was very much reminded of the sales teams of the past. This is a very different example. If I could share the details, it will be very hard not to feel an insane amount of like empathy for that person that’s getting all these exceptions, but it reminded me very much of the sales teams of the past that will be built with these incredible assholes in them that would be crushing it when it came to their quota and just bringing in revenue and customers and just destroying it in terms of the amount of money that would bring in for the company, but just be terrible to their coworkers. Just crush morale, be terrible to new sales reps. Just be super toxic employees. Right. And I would always tell sales managers that they need to cut them loose. Like nobody is important enough, no matter how much value they bring in. For them to be basically, fucking up the entire culture of your whole team and for them to stop you from being able to scale and grow because all the new great people leave again because they don’t get the oxygen to grow because these people with all the exceptions you make for them are really ruining the foundation of your company and your team. And I talked to her about like how … I didn’t want to presume that that was the case. So I started asking questions. How are these exceptions affecting other people? How are these exceptions making you feel? And a whole massive bag opened up with all kinds of problems. And that made me go, you know what, this is not that uncommon and might be a really interesting topic, messy, interesting topic for the two of us to quickly unpack and explore for the founders and entrepreneurs that are listening to our podcast. That either have already been in a situation like this, are in a situation like this right now or if they are not, they will be at some point where you’re wondering if you should make exceptions for an employee. What’s reasonable, what’s not? When should you do them? When shouldn’t you do them? Let’s talk about that. I’m dying to hear your opinion on this. [0:03:54] Hiten Shah: Yeah. So to me it’s related to this one other thing that I find really interesting, which is when you let go of someone on the team. There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of energy on the person being let go instead of the team that’s still there. [0:04:16] Steli Efti: This is so good. Say it again. [0:04:18] Hiten Shah: Right? There’s a lot of energy being put on the person being let go and so the team that’s still there. [0:04:24] Steli Efti: Yes. [0:04:25] Hiten Shah: And my recommendation is make sure you think of both parties. In fact, I would overemphasize the group versus the individual. And that’s what doesn’t happen. Like I hear this so much. I’m like, “Oh, we want to take care of this person. They’re going, they’re leaving or we need to let them go. Like, yeah, sure.” But what about those like, double digit or more number of people who are still there and what’s in their heads and what’s going to happen to them? How are they going to think when we let go of this person? And that is not what most people think about when they’re letting go of somebody. They index on the negative essentially, right? Which is a person that’s leaving. En other cases, they’re like, “Oh, this person’s leaving. What’s everyone going to think?” Right. I’ve seen that too. When it’s like a really important person and they feel weird about it because this person wants to move on or whatever, but they’re a really good culture fit. This, that and other, and you’re not necessarily letting them go. And then there’s an over-indexing on that side sometimes. But really the common one when I see as you over index and the people leaving, so in this case it’s really tough because it’s likely that the companies that find themselves in this position to provide special treatment to a specific individual are over indexing on that individual and that individual’s need, versus their needs versus the group’s needs. And I think that there is a way to talk to someone if they’re requesting special treatment, to explain to them that like, look, “If we treat you in a certain way when someone else has a situation like you’re in, in your life or whatever, we’re going to have to treat them the same way.” And most of these kinds of treatment things are usually in smaller companies where there’s no policies. Right? [0:06:22] Steli Efti: Hmm. [0:06:23] Hiten Shah: So you start having to think through what’s our policy for this and not even policy. Would we do this for anybody on the team if they were in this situation. That’s the key. If the answer is yes, then go ahead and do it. If the answer is I don’t know or no, be careful what you do for that person. Find the answer where it’s yes, we would do this for anyone else on the team, if they were in the same situation. Then you can sit there and honestly speak with your team about it. So to me it has a lot to do with can you honestly speak with your team about it and say, “No matter what this aligns with our values or you know, this is so important to us that no matter who you are, if you find yourself in this similar situation, we’re going to treat you in a similar way that we’re treating this person cause that’s who we are. That’s how we do things here.” That’s what it boils down to for me. I don’t think people think about that. They think a lot about solving a problem with that person right now. Instead of worrying about what are we going to do next time? Are we treating people equally? If not, can we explain it to the team? Why we’re not treating this person the same way we would treat someone else if they were in the same situation? Because if not like you’re going to … There will be problems. I can almost guarantee you. So it’s really about can you explain this to the team? Will they understand, will they feel like they will be treated the same in a similar situation or not? And if not, like you really need to think hard about what you’re about to do or what you’re doing. [0:07:52] Steli Efti: I fucking love this. So this is so important. So valuable. I’ll just add one more thing to this, which is, exceptions by definition or an exception by definition is not a recurring thing. It’s not the new normal. It’s not an exception. If there’s a big-[crosstalk] [0:08:17] Hiten Shah: You’re right. [0:08:17] Steli Efti: If there’s a big life event, and, and we talked about this on this podcast and I’ve actually had just recently a conversation with somebody who applied for job at Lowe’s. That said, “Part of why I applied was this one episode on the Startup Chat where Hiten and you talked about somebody on your team that had a parent die and how you treated that person. Because that made me really feel like, wow, you know, whatever, this is a company, this is somebody I would want to work for.” When some big life event happens, there’s going to be exceptions. Once in a while you’re going to have to give somebody a break or support somebody in an unusual way, because they deserve it, right? And because life is messy sometimes, but there’s a difference between making an exception within reasonable boundaries and then going back to the normal. And there’s a difference between creating an exception that’s now the new normal. That’s not an exception anymore, right? You’ve now created this new type of work relationship and job position and job responsibilities that you would never hire people for with those kind of exceptions build in as new normal. So it’s one thing if this person had like some kind of life challenges that were like a one time thing for a week or two, you needed to cut them a break. That’s fine. I think that, that’s not that crazy, but this was much more of a … This is the new normal, this person is dealing with so many things for the last whatever year or so. They’re just doing their own rules, right? They just work sometimes. Sometimes they don’t and sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes we change what work we give this person that’s not an exception and it creates so many, so many problems. It creates a problem for you because you are now going to have to … You cannot really say if they’re doing well or not because their performance is up and down because you’re giving them all these new things and all these like … There’s these new rules. So how do you judge their performance if they only work for one week, that month. Do you just judge what they did in that week? Yeah, one of the things that that manager told me is like, “Yeah, you know what’s crazy is for a month this person only worked for a week, but that week they really crushed it for the company. Well, okay.” Right, but how do you judge that overall four week period? Like it makes it really impossible for you to manage. You’re going to have to spend so much more time and energy to now, babysit that employee and come up with new rules every time and work around their issues that’s going to drain you and take away all your energy. It’s creating issues for their coworkers because their coworkers will see this and ask themselves, “Well, why am I not getting these exceptions? Can I really a trust my team member? Why am I carrying more weight than this person?” Right? It’s going to create issues within the team. It’s going to create issues with new people, right? To hire a new employee. That employee will orient around the existing employees in terms of what excellence looks like. What is accepted and what is, what is behavior that is tolerated. And so they see this employee that comes and goes and does whatever the hell they want and they’re like, “This is totally cool. I can- [0:11:23] Hiten Shah: This is okay. [0:11:24] Steli Efti: This is okay here. Right? And it’s also bad for the employee you’re making exceptions for because that employee has now this idea that this is okay. The way I behave is okay, and the way this entire company or entire team works around my personal needs is fair. So now you’re creating a new expectation that’s totally wrong in their mind on how life should work and work should work, right? Which, is also not cool. It’s bad for everybody. It is bad for everybody. If you make exceptions, make sure it’s one time events that’s short lived and that are as reasonable as possible. And that are investing in people that have earned, to get an exception once in a while. But it’s like, in five years this happened once. Not every quarter this happens once or every month this happens once. It’s not and exception anymore. It’s a new rule, and it’s a rule that needs to then apply to everybody, and everybody you hire, everybody that’s in that team. For them, for you, and if you’re honest, in most of these cases, people would be like, “Hell no, this is the new rule. This can’t be the new rule. If this was the rule. The business would collapse. Well, if everybody did this, the business would collapse.” You cannot have one person do this because if one person does it, it’s going to affect other people. It’s going to be two at some point, four at some point, eight. It’s going to create issues. And it’s also not fair to allow one person to do something that you would like fire other people over. That won’t work. So make an exception for people is something that I think is part of life. But I think way too often we get tricked into a situation where we make these exceptions that become the new rule and then things start to unwind and to collapse. And we create all these problems and issues just to help one person or to make one person’s life easier. Now we’re creating all these unintended consequences. So be very, very wary of this because this is a very common mistake. [0:13:27] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean that’s what we got. [0:13:29] Steli Efti: That’s what we got. All right. If you’ve made any exception for anybody that you are now like freaked out about and you want to talk about it, you can always get in touch with us, Steli@Close.com, hnshah@gmail.com. Just let us know and until next time we’ll hear you very soon. [0:13:45] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:13:46] The post 453: Should You Make Exceptions for Employees? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the need for speed versus the need for focus at a startup. Deciding whether to prioritize speed versus focus at your startup can be crucial to how successful you’re going to be. Overall, prioritizing focus will always trump speed. However, in order to prioritize focus on you need to know what to focus on. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about why focus and speed are really important, how focusing can affect your speed, how to tell when you should focus and when you shouldn’t and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 01:20 Why focus and speed are really important. 01:48 How focusing can affect your speed. 02:14 How to tell when you should focus and when you shouldn’t. 03:54 An example of what to focus on. 07:55 How some founders tend to prioritize speed over focus in the early days. 05:42 How focus always trumps speed. 06:42 How focusing has helped Close succeed. 3 Key Points: Speed and focus are still an important aspect of your job.A lot of times when you’re very thoughtful, speed isn’t your biggest consideration.Most founders in the early days prioritize speed over focus. [0:00:02] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to be talking about speed versus focus and this is one of those topics where one of us kind of knows what we want to talk about and the other one of us doesn’t. And in this case I know what we want to talk them about it a little bit and Steli is going to be surprised and then we’re going to get into a discussion about this just because it’s a super fascinating topic and it’s one that really is inspired, not necessarily fully sponsored, but inspired by this. A partner of ours that we brought on to basically talk about something, give us a some inspiration to, and it’s a brain.fm/startupchat is where you need to go and they are a product that it provides science backed music to help you focus, relax, and sleep. So you can guess why I was inspired on this topic. Now this is a topic I’ve talked about before a lot, so I’m going to jump right into it and say, Steli, this is the deal. I think that when you’re working on a business, regardless of what size or where you are in it, there’s two things that are really important: focus and speed, and you can say, “Oh, I’m in a larger organization. Speed is something that I don’t control or whatever,” but still speed is still an important aspect to your job regardless. And focus is also an important aspect of your job. And you can imagine that sometimes both of those things can be contradictory. And the reason I put those two things together is because I think the way I look at it is focus can either bring you a lot of speed and can make you quicker at executing or focus can actually distract you from going fast because you’re spending so much time or going so deep into something and you don’t need to. So how can you tell the difference between when you should focus and when you shouldn’t on something about your business or in your business? And then how do you decide whether it’s something you need to go fast on or something actually that you should go slower on because it requires more depth or requires more focus and that focus will ultimately speed you up. And one example I’ll throw out is engineering. So when I think about engineering and I think about wonderful things like technical debt, which is this idea that you are accruing debt that you’re going to have to pay down later on as you’re writing code because the code gets old, for lack of a better word, or the code. As you pile on more code into your software, you end up having all these, all this code and that code can be on top of each other. And if you don’t have the best practices around [inaudible] and ways that consistency around how the code should be written and how comments be made in the code and how certain things should be structured, you can end up having a very messy code base. This is going to even happen when there’s just one engineer working on it. I’ve had that happen. And this could definitely happen when there’s 10 engineers working on something or more. And so the part there that I really think about is we tend to really identify on engineering the things that we need to focus on and get right. Usually those are things related to the core parts of the product. So for example, in your CRM product at Closed.com, you folks are building something, in my opinion, on top of a pretty large contact database and that contact database is something that you’re probably pulling in and using in lots of different places in the product. And if you don’t focus on that part of your product and you’re stacking a lot of features on top of your product, you’re going to end up making it so that certain parts of your interface start loading slow because you didn’t spend enough time knowing and orienting yourself, orienting the software and the code around being able to pull up contacts really fast because every time a record is updated, it’s hitting the contact database most likely, right? And again, that’s a little bit of a basic way to explain it. And I see this happening and I know that triggered you because you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is has happened. Guaranteed this has happened” and in a lot of products it’s like that. So on engineering we focus on what’s the core of the product and and what do we have to get right and that might not be something that can happen fast. That’s something that has to happen really thoughtfully, and a lot of times when you’re very thoughtful, speed isn’t your biggest consideration, but you’re focused and you’re focusing in on something that’s a deep part of the product. [0:04:46] Steli Efti: I love that. I think that most founders or most startups in the early days, they focus on speed over … Well they prioritize speed over focus. And I think that’s, it should be the exact opposite way, right? They’re just try to get a lot done and get it done really, really fast, but they’re not always spending as much time being thoughtful on what is really, what really needs to get done, and what are all the distractions, all the things that are nice to have that we really shouldn’t be doing right now, right? So they get, they work on a lot of things. They say yes to a ton of areas. They go super broad, super early and obviously, if you have a massively broad vehicle, it needs so much power to get something really on the road. This is when you’re hyper-focus much easier to enter our market. So to me, focus always trumps speed. If you don’t know where you’re going, doesn’t matter what your speed is, right? I can go very slow if I know where I’m going and I’m like consistent, I’ll win the race, whatever that … What’s the story with the rabbit and the … What is really slow? The turtle or something. Wasn’t there a story? [0:06:02] Hiten Shah: There is a story. Yeah. [0:06:03] Steli Efti: There’s a story somewhere. Somebody knows what we’re talking about. [0:06:05] Hiten Shah: That’s right. Yeah. [0:06:06] Steli Efti: So I feel like if I am hyper-focused and I go super slow and you, like all kinds of focused, but you’re super fast, I’ll still crush you. [0:06:14] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:06:14] Steli Efti: But the challenge is that you’re going to have a competitor out there that’s going to have both. You can have a competitive out there that is hyper-focused and has urgency and has speed, knows how to put, how to execute with speed, and when you have both things you have magic, like that’s when you’re crushing it in your execution. Now I’ll tell you, I’ll admit that I think the reason why we’ve been so successful at Close is that we’ve always been way more focused than a lot of other companies in our space. We’re very good at saying no to things. We’re very clear on who we are, what we need to do, and that focus has been our super power. When it comes to speed, we’ve been on on and off. We’ve had times where we executed fast and at times where we actually did it way too slow. And so for us, as a priority, as an organization, as a company, as we’re growing, is to add to that expertise and cultural experience that we have with being hyper-focused is adding a culture of more urgency and more speed to the projects and to the things that we tackle. So I think if you can get both, you’re killing it, but if I have to prioritize, always start with focus and then as a secret kind of power ingredient, add execution speed to it. [0:07:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah, I really liked that way of thinking about it. I think you have to know what to focus on before you can go after it and speed is really about how you go after it. Oftentimes, too, you have to get started on something before you know where the bottlenecks are so you can speed it up and get it done faster. And a lot of this for me is things that you, are oriented around things you want to accomplish. And that’s why I started out with like, Hey, in a business context, there’s a lot of things you want to accomplish and if you want to really accomplish those things extremely well, then you do have to figure out what those things are before you can go figure out how you know how to do them really fast.” Then there’s also the sequence of things, which is what order do you do things in? And they’ll … That sequence isn’t always obvious, but there is a natural sequence to the things that you might want to accomplish, especially in a business because you’re not going to go be able to charge people for something without actually it being something of value, right, and you understanding what the value prop is at the very least. So I would add in the sequence as another aspect of how things get done. [0:08:38] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that. Right, so we have some more recommendations for you if you’re like, “All right, cool. I get it. I’m inspired to become better at being focused and then adding speed to my execution. How do I do that now?” Well number one, listen to these two episodes that we recorded, the Startup Chat. Episode one is episode number 206, 2-0-6, How to Move Faster and Make More Things Happen in your Startup and then episode number 357, 3-5-7, It’s Not the Big that Eat the Smallest, It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow. These are two killer episodes that we recorded. Listen to both of them. It’ll give you a ton of ideas on how to be more focused to move faster. And then as the last thing, if you haven’t done this yet, you know we have a new sponsor brain.fm. Do us a favor, check out brain.fm/startupchat. Sign up for free, for free trial. Brain.fm is music that actually helps you focus, relax, or sleep better. This product is using science based back music that actually help you get into a flow state. The brain waves, it literally changes your brain waves and helps you hyper-focus. I’m using it. Hiten is using it. We’re both customers. I use it all the time as I have to get into a focus state of flow mind. It works. It’s killer and if you go to brain.fm/startupchat, you get 20% off. They’ll know that we’ve given them a shout out and that our audience loves the service as well. That’s good for us. Good for them. It will be good for you. We guarantee it. If you ever have any questions or any problems with the service, you don’t have to email them for support. You email, ask for support, right? The Steli and Hiten premium support for this. Just email us at hhi@gmail.com was steli@close.Com if you have any questions or challenges, but I’ve been using it for a good amount of time. You even longer than me, Hiten, and there’s no problems for you. You sign up for this thing, you tried a couple of times. [0:10:35] Hiten Shah: Right. [0:10:35] Steli Efti: To me, the very first time I used it within 16 minutes, I got into such a deep state of focused flow that I was like, “All right, this is it. I’m going to be using this all the time. This shit works. This is awesome.” [0:10:51] Hiten Shah: That’s awesome. [0:10:52] Steli Efti: All right, so that’s our shout out for the end of the episode and the big question, as always, with this type of stuff, if you have any questions and challenges and problems, don’t just email us for premium support for our sponsors, you could always email us, reach out, share your stories, or share your questions with us. We love to hear from you, hhi@gmail.com, steli@close.com. This is it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:11:18] Hiten Shah: See ya! [0:11:19] The post 452: The Need for Speed vs. the Need for Focus at a Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how what perks and benefits should you offer your employees at an early stage startup. Offering your employees perks and benefits can lead to a happy workforce, however, deciding what types of perks and benefits to offer can be challenging. In this episode, Steli and Hiten why founders struggle with deciding what types of perks and benefits to offer, how Hiten typically approaches this issue at his businesses and the importance of establishing why you want people to work for your company much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 01:20 Why this topic was chosen. 01:50 Why people struggle with this. 02:37 How Hiten typically approaches this. 03:50 How Google handled perks initially. 04:22 The main types of benefits you can offer. 04:46 The importance of establishing why you want people to work for your company. 06:23 Questions to ask around benefits when you’re hiring. 07:21 The difference between benefits and perks. 08:46 Why it’s important to think about what types of benefits to offer your employees.  3 Key Points: People definitely struggle with this because they just don’t know what to offer and at what stage.I do the best I can in terms of benefits until I can do better.Benefits grow as the business becomes more successful. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:07] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about perks and benefits. Just in general, how should you think about what you offer to potential employees in an early-stage startup to be competitive or to attract the right kind of talent? And so here’s the setup. Right? We’re talking about early-stage startups. You’re trying to hire. Maybe you’re less than 10 people. You try to hire an initial 10, 15 people on your team, and when you are negotiating with these potential hires, there’s other companies that will compete for these people with you and make competitive offers. The main focus is salary and equity. It might be the main things that you are putting as an offer on the table that a potential employee could compare. But then there’s also benefits and perks, and benefits and perks might be, especially for kind of first-time founders and less-experienced entrepreneurs, a more difficult to navigate world of like, how much should I care about benefits and perks? How important are those? Is this kind of a luxury thing that I do once I’ve raised $20 million? Is it something I do once we’re profitable? Is this something I never do? I think it might make sense to unpack this a little bit and give especially earlier stage founders a bunch of ways of thinking about creating perks and putting benefit packages together for their company and their teams. What are your thoughts, and what are your experiences with that? [0:01:52] Hiten Shah: Yeah, people definitely struggle a lot with this, and the reason is they just don’t know what to offer at what stage, and I think at the earliest stages, it’s really tough to offer a lot. There’s things like health insurance that most people require. There’s even like you can bring people on, on contracts. So there’s a whole concept here for me which is like, the people who are joining really early-stage, they’re taking a lot of risk. And so my experience has always been just do the best I can in terms of benefits until I can do better and then do better. And better means the businesses is profitable, or the business is making money, or there’s a significant amount of capital that we’ve raised, or something like that. I actually think that benefits grow in a business as the business becomes more successful, and that’s my philosophy with it. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can think about that, and I know that some companies like tout these various benefits and things like that. It’s like back in the day when Google was very special. Not that they’re not special now, but they were definitely special as a earlier stage startupee-type company. They definitely offered a lot of perks in the sort of office, and they were known for that. Whether it’s free food in the cafeterias for any team member, anybody coming into visit, to I’ve heard they do laundry over there. That they have haircuts. They have massages. They have all these things that are free for you as a perk, as a benefit. And that used to be a big thing. And now I would say that there’s just a philosophy in general that it’s like, “We’re kind of getting tired of that.” And one of the reasons is people would go to work at those places like Google because of that. Is that the reason you want people to work at your company is kind of the big question in my mind when we talk about the sort of extreme end of benefit. So again, there’s basic benefits. Sometimes it’s things like health insurance, etc., and then there’s benefits that are more oriented around some of these extra perks that people sort of sometimes go overboard with and try to provide, and it’s a recruitment tactic. But I think it’s tried now, and it’s old, and it doesn’t matter as much. [0:04:44] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that at the end of the day when you hire somebody, you need to know, at a given stage that you’re in, why do you want people to want to join you? Right? And if you’re losing people because when you’re making them an offer, they’re telling you, “Well, I like both companies. I like both offers, but they are offering me… I don’t know… Two extra free haircuts a month, and you don’t have a barber at your office. What can you add on your offer to match the free haircuts I’m getting over there?” If it gets to that level of negotiation, you really have to wonder, do you want… And this is nothing against that person… But do you really want somebody that comes to you mainly because you paid them… You’re making an offer that has like a $100 bucks more worth in perks than a competing offer. But if the main reason they’re coming to you is because it’s a few pennies more in perks or benefits, then the moment they’re getting offered a few pennies more than what you are paying them or giving them in perks and benefits, they’re going to leave again. Right? These are kind of complete hired guns that are only looking for the highest possible offer and the most personal benefit they can abstract out of the current market value. And I would say, especially for a early-stage startup, but really at any point in any business that I will ever run, when we make offers to people, I often ask them, “Hey, before I make an offer, if I give you a good and competitive offer, how are you going to decide between us and maybe some other companies that are at the table? Like what’s your decision-making matrix in how you arrive at what offer to pick?” Because I want to understand how they make decisions, and what they value, and what their priorities are in life. And if somebody is like, “The salary is number one, and number two are the perks; number three are the benefits, and number four are the days off and vacation days, and number five is whatever,” then I’ll don’t even bother giving an offer because I know our values aren’t aligned. Right? I want somebody that cares about the same thing that anybody else in this company cares about mostly. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to give great offers, but I don’t want somebody that just optimizes for the numbers. Who doesn’t really care about the business, the culture, the product, the people, just wants the most money. Because I also know that on that level, I can’t really compete effectively. I cannot pay people more than any other business on this planet can pay them, and I don’t want to. Right? So I think that being aware of that makes a ton of sense. And to me, there’s a difference between benefits that… I think both benefits and perks… I think when Google first started with the whole like, “You never have to leave our campus again.” Right? “You could have your entire life transpire here.” Part of that was like, “We want to take great care of you.” But part of that I think later on was… I don’t know. I think it started as like, “Wow, look at how awesome my employer is.” And then it ended up with like, “Wow, my employer wants me to just work at all times and never leave work. They want me to work on the way to work.” Right? [0:08:05] Hiten Shah: Yep. [0:08:05] Steli Efti: “They give me this bus with free Wi-Fi and a desk, so I can work and lots of coffee on the way to work, and then they want me to just stay at fucking work forever and never have an excuse. Oh, I need to go to the dentist.” “There’s a dentist at the campus.” “Oh, I need to go workout.” “Well, there’s a gym here.” “Oh, I need a haircut and laundry.” “Oh, I need to eat. I need to sleep.” “All the things you need to do, you just stay right here, keep working. You can do them around the corner here.” And so people kind of switched the way they felt about it from, “Wow, our company’s so awesome. They want to treat us so well,” to, “Wow our company’s really trying to squeeze every bit of life out of us and not have a life outside of work.” So the sentiment has changed quite a bit. But I do think that thinking about what types of things do you want to reward, and what kind of investments do you want to make in people. Right? So when we think about benefits, like paying for good healthcare for people, makes so much sense. Again, it all depends on your company, and the structure, and the stage of it. But when you can afford it, for us, it’s really important for our company to invest in amazing healthcare because we want our people to be healthy and taken care of when they don’t feel well. Health is so important, so we want to make investments in the health of our people. 401(k), right? We’re very aggressive with that because we want people to be building up for their retirement, and we want people to be taking care of themselves financially and think long-term financially, and we want to invest in that and take good care of them in that way. There’s other perks when it comes to team retreats that we make, when it comes to coworking space. There’s certain things that we do where we’re like this is an investment in our people that makes sense, and that will benefit their health, their lives, their growth, and their work, so it makes sense on all levels for us as a business to offer these perks or offer these benefits and invest in our people in this way. But then there are perks that make no fucking sense. Right? That are just like cool to have. Things that we could put in an offer or promote in a job posting that sounds sexy, or cool, or fun. But if you actually think about it, what is it really promoting? What is it really rewarding? How is this going to benefit the business long-term and this person long-term? There’s really not much to it. And so I think it’s important when you think about benefits and perks, a) to understand what is the stage that you’re in, and what can and cannot the business afford. Right? When you’re two co-founders, and you’re trying to hire your first employee. You’re losing money, and you put all your savings in there, and it’s a bootstrap business. Obviously, you won’t be able to give people amazing benefits and perks because the business cannot finance these things, so you need to be able to hire somebody that can take a lot more risk when it comes to their salary and these benefits and perks and get rewarded maybe with equity, maybe with something else. Maybe it’s the kind of experience or the ownership over the product, or whatever they get, the exposure. But you’re looking for a different type of person at that stage. You’re not going to hire maybe somebody that is in their mid-50s, that has a large family, that has a mortgage, and that has financial pressures and needs a high salary, and safety, and security, and all that. You’ll have to attract different type of talent and offer them some different type of things. But as your business grows, and as you hire more and more mature employees, and as you scale the business, you’re probably going to start to think more about the benefits and perks that are part of the overall package that you offer to people that work for you. But I think that it’s important to separate the bullshit and the hype from the real and understand that there’s certain things you can do that are real investments and things that are good for your people and good for the business, and those are the investments the business should be making versus things that just sound cool, or other companies do. “Oh, all these cool companies do X. Let’s also do X.” No. Just pump the brakes and ask yourself, “Why? What is X promoting? How would it really benefit our people? How would it benefit the business long-term? Why is this in the best interest of our shareholders, of our customers, of our employees? Why is this smart? And why would we do it, other than everybody else is doing it? That’s not a good enough reason.” So, yeah, it’s a fascinating topic. But the most important tip, I think, that I have for this episode is don’t just create certain perks or benefits because other companies do it, or because you’ve ever lost a candidate that told you, “Oh, they’re offering me this amazing package with X, Y, and Z in there, and that’s why I’m going with this other company versus you.” And then you feel the pressure to just offer X, Y, and Z to the next candidate, not to lose. Just think about if these perks and benefits of this… These things make sense to your business and the type of people you want to attract as employees and as teammates. [0:13:11] Hiten Shah: Couldn’t have said it better myself. I think you’ve thought about this a lot, and so have I from just looking at different companies. At the end of the day, these perks and benefits, there’s not much to it. I think people make it really complicated, and they come up with reasons why they should offer certain things in order to attract certain types of folks. If that’s the case, and you know that certain benefits are going to attract the type of people you want and represent your culture, do it. Talk about those perks, talk about those benefits. If you’re just making them up because you think you need to do it because some other company’s doing it, I would definitely think twice, if not three times, before you consider perks and benefits like that. [0:13:54] Steli Efti: Awesome. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon. [0:13:57] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:13:57] The post 451: What Perks and Benefits Should You Offer Your Employees? appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.