Waikit Lau has founded 2 machine learning-based companies that were acquired and he helped take one public. He has been on both VC and founding/operating side.
Tim Alison is an entrepreneur who has started and scaled four businesses. At the age of 31 Tim walked away from one of the highest paying sales jobs in the country, moved to a tiny fishing village in Nova Scotia Canada, and started an educational software company. The naysayers laughed. They stopped laughing when his sales topped $10 million.
Rich Razgaitis has been passionate about building brands and teams. Since 2002, he has served in CEO/president-level roles in several venture capital backed start-ups, privately held turnaround and growth companies, and he brings insight from those experiences to his work today at FloWater.
Raz was the CEO of several consumer-tech companies, including DealOn, an e-commerce company that developed the Web’s first deal-commerce exchange, and another, MyTownPerks, which built the first PCI-complaint, cloud-based loyalty program for B2B. (Both companies were subsequently acquired.)
Steve Hoffman. Steve, or Captain Hoff as he’s called in Silicon Valley, is the CEO of Founders Space, one of the world’s leading incubators and accelerators. He’s also an angel investor, limited partner at August Capital, serial entrepreneur, and author of Make Elephants Fly, the award-winning book on radical innovation.
Always innovating on his life, Captain Hoff has tried more professions than cats have lives, including serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, angel investor, studio head, computer engineer, filmmaker, Hollywood TV exec, published author, coder, game designer, manga rewriter, animator and voice actor.
Hoffman was the Founder and Chairman of the Producers Guild Silicon Valley Chapter, Board of Governors of the New Media Council, and founding member of the Academy of Television’s Interactive Media Group.
Shawn Flynn 0:00
Today’s show the Silicon Valley podcast, we cover a topic that Well, to be honest, doesn’t get the attention that it really needs. And that is the mental wellness of startup founders. Yes, there is a little tension here and there. Once in a while you’ll hear an article being spoken about being shared. But to be honest, this is a major issue. On today’s episode, we take some of the highlights from past guests where they brought up this topic, and we compiled it into one amazing episode for you. And with that, I also want to say there is a lot happening with the show. I know I’ve been saying that for the last few weeks, we got some big announcements coming up. All right, now, let’s start this episode, this very important episode of the Silicon Valley podcast. Alright, enjoy.
Announcer 0:48
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host, Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech, learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:06
Can you talk about that? How did you go about finding your manufacturer at the beginning? Were you just flying back and forth? What was that like?
Rich Razgaitis 1:14
In my past, I’ve probably manufactured or overseen or purchased, I’m guessing, I don’t know half a billion dollars’ worth of nutritional products. But primarily those were supplements, dietary supplements, protein powder shakes, some liquids, and that manufacturing was frequently in Asia, sometimes in Mexico, a little bit in the US, and a little bit in Europe. But that was the most minority portion of it. So I had a bit of background in manufacturing. However, I’d never manufactured hardware before. And so the first thing, if you look back, many entrepreneurs have a tendency to believe that their strategy goes and executes according to plan and that they’re brilliant. And we’re all rock stars. And that’s just not the case. I mean, I think the case is that there are many really brilliant entrepreneurs, there are some really important strategies that you put in place. But along the way, I think all of us that have experienced some degree of success, whatever the varying degrees are, have had some really wild strokes of great luck or good fortune that have come our way that have added grace to the equation and also some continuity. And so identifying our manufacturer was one of those. Literally, it started with Google searching. I wish I had a more interesting answer. But I mean, it was Google searching, and then I’d be on Skype. And like all the Chinese I know is Nihao. And so I would you know Skype someone, I would Nihao them in China, and Korea is Anyeongseo. And then I would try to formulate a dialogue with people that were generally not very proficient in English to talk to them about manufacturing and how we might be able to manufacture and if they did OEM or ODM manufacturing. And so weeks and weeks and weeks were spent just doing online recon of Where’s water purification done? Where supply kind of aggregate? Why does it aggregate there, what companies do this on a contract basis. And as I was doing all of that, I came across a trade organization called Aqua tech. And it happened to be in Shanghai in 2013, I believe it was in June of 2013. And this is basically an aggregation of some of the world’s leading suppliers around water purification, water technology and water manufacturing. There are I think there were about 100,000 people that attended this over 1000 different suppliers. And so I went there for three days and was at that convention for about 12 hours a day. And I was only one of the only Americans and white guys that were there. I mean, this is largely specific to Asian kind of region, but particularly Shanghai as well. And I got an MBA in water and water manufacturing water hardware through that experience. And I remember a lot of them, I would show them kind of the designs and ideas and the pricing and the timeline. And they were more than a few of them. There’d be a little bit of translation back and forth. And I could hear the head of like product development laughing and you know, like pointing at me and laughing. And then they’d all start laughing and then I’d be laughing but they were really just laughing at me. So I was laughing at myself as well, that like this was an audacious idea, or we could never get it done in time or the cost was exorbitant, or you know, I talked funny, whatever it was that they were laughing about. It was not a positive affirmation. Through that process, I was able to weed out a lot of non-targets. And then I narrowed it down to about 12 to 15 targets and I actually found our manufacturer at this Aqua tech convention. And one of the things that I learned is that what Silicon Valley kind of was slash is to tack innovation is very much what Korea was and is to water innovation. So if you look at a lot of the development that’s happening water purification, water technology, water manufacture, A lot of it is done in Korea. And I’ve done manufacturing before in Korea and I had some great experiences, extremely reliable, relentless focus on quality, sometimes painfully slow because it’s so methodical, but I ended up narrowing it down to two suppliers in China about four or five different suppliers in Korea. And through all that effort of kind of online searching, a lot of phone calls, a lot of recon I talked to, you know, I’d call up the head of operations for a major Water Company, and I would just pick their brain, I’d say, hey, look, this is what I’m trying to do. I need some advice, are you willing to give it to me, and I would just cultivate from wherever, whatever sources that I could information around water technology, water manufacturing, and the companies that would do that. And from there, I narrowed it down to a great partner that we’ve been working with for over six years, group of 6070 people, they do all their own CAD development, we own all of our IP, we’ve been a long standing partner with them, they’ve done a fantastic job. And we’ll end up getting secondary and tertiary manufacturers as we start to grow and scale domestically as well as internationally. But that was the process that we use. I mean, a lot of it was just figuring it out. And I think this is one of these things that when I bring people into the company, I think one of the dangers in scaling companies is that there’s an ethos within the company that gets potentially lost. And that ethos is figuring difficult out by just like deductive reasoning, critical thinking, and being an absolute relentless pit ball to getting the source of information, and kind of weaving through all of the stuff to get to your pathway. A lot of times, like just humans, we want things to be easy, like, we want someone to dish it up and say, here’s what you need to do. And this is why when you go back to Facebook, after this podcast, you’re gonna see now the ink magazine, I like ink, but you’re gonna see like, here are the 10 things you need to do to be successful here are the three things you need to look for when you hire here are the five things that you need to do to like get an exit. But the reality is, a lot of times there aren’t just three, five or 10 things a lot of it is you don’t know what the things are. And you’ve got to really splice everything apart and then put it back together. And a lot of that just comes through really hard grinding. I think that was one of the things that came out of manufacturing. I mean, it wasn’t, there was luck, there was a huge degree of luck and going into that Aqua tech convention. But also it required a lot of critical thinking. I mean, I had I’ll give you an example of that. I had probably a 10 page kind of RFP request for proposal, but also had like a two to three page operating document of what we wanted in a manufacturer. And so it was privately held 50 to 80, people wanted them to do all their own internal r&d, I wanted them to have 10 plus years in the water experience, I wanted them only doing water. In fact, I remember I had a note and one of my kind of guidance documents was I didn’t want them manufacturing anything that would be contrary to our mission like plastic utensils. And remember one of the finalists, manufacturers that I went to go visit in China, which obviously we did not end up selecting, I saw a bunch of boxes lined up in pallets that were getting ready to be shipped. And it didn’t look like it was water purification equipment. And so I kind of just wandered over outside of the guidance from being escorted around and kind of wandered plant, which it couldn’t find me and I kind of like peek through one of the boxes. And I literally saw plastic forks that they had manufactured, which I did not know that they’d manufactured and I kicked that manufacturer out exactly after that moment as a result of that. But that came from having a really defined operating guidance of what I’m looking for and what was going to be important for the business to be able to scale.
Shawn Flynn 8:34
Do you recommend all founders of companies to have that operating guidance list? And what would be some suggestions to go about creating that for your company.
Rich Razgaitis 8:44
There are so many unknowns in the startup world that what I typically like to do is I try to isolate variables, right? And so I’m really comfortable with dealing with variables for which there’s no known answer. I like it, I actually find it way more interesting. And it’s part of the challenge. And that’s the job. I also do not like trying to figure things out that other people previously have already figured out because I think it’s a waste of time. And so one of the things that I would advise entrepreneurs to do is sounds perhaps a little trite and Pollyanna, but I would start with operating vision and mission of the company. I mean, I would start with fundamental principles around Okay, if you’re developing an RFP, ultimately, what is it that aligns around the mission and the vision of your company? And then I would secondarily, look at what are some of the behaviors and attributes that you believe based on where you are in this moment that are going to be important to your success, right. And so for us, just as an example, kind of pulling it back is having someone that attended 20 years plus of expertise in water manufacturing or water production of water equipment was really important because I wanted them to be able to isolate variables for us and have experiences that could have been learned lessons over a period of time. The third is to put in place as best you can kind of feature and product attributes in a very clear and concise way. So when I was delivering stuff to manufacturers, I was delivering to them. Here’s the problem in the market, here’s what we’re solving for, here’s the use case of this product. And then all of the features and specs that were desired as part of that. So I guess I’d really go back to like vision mission of the company fundamentals, operating principles, some of the behaviors, and then kind of feature specs, use cases intended use applications of that. And then you revise as you go. I mean, I think this is one of the most challenging things about running a company is that, in fact, I was thinking about on the way here, you know, life just doesn’t work for any of us the way that we expect it to. And that’s probably a good thing. In most cases, even though you know, when you’d like to control things, and you’d like things to turn out the way you want them to turn out, doesn’t always feel like that’s the case. But I really fundamentally believe that, you know, one of the things that you have to do is you have to, you have to be fluid with the learnings that happened in the marketplace. And so what I would say to a founder is you can’t go and outsource really critical functions that are strategically important to the company, before you go and do them yourself. An example of that would be manufacturing, I’ll still go today, we’re in the process of looking at alternative manufacturers for secondary products that we’re in the process of developing, I’ve got my head of operations, I just took three trips to Asia in the last 12 weeks to source manufacturers, but I’m going to go visit the top two to three, myself and make sure that you know, I’m pressing flesh and testing it out and, you know, validating what they believe to be true. Same goes for sales, I think a lot of people that are founding CEOs tend to think oh, like, I’m just gonna go hire somebody, and they’re gonna go sell it. Yeah, and maybe they will, but you might also get a false negative, you might be getting potentially a bit of a false positive, but usually, more often than not, you’re gonna get a false negative. And so I think the key is develop the template, but then you got to go battle test that template. And the only way that you can really battle test that template is by getting out into the market, and having the experience and hearing it firsthand, hearing it from manufacturers, hearing from people that have failed at it, hearing it from people that have been successful at it, hearing it from customers, so that you can make real time adjustments, because in this market, like the thing that we bring to the table is the ability to operate with speed. But speed is kind of part and parcel to having know how knowledge, market assessments and kind of validation around all those things.
Shawn Flynn 12:21
Now, it sounds like you’ve done an amazing amount of work with your company, can you talk a little bit about the real story of what some of the sacrifices of person might have to make to be a founder of a company? I mean, most of us just hear these tech startups, these founders making millions. And that’s it. We don’t hear the whole story.
Rich Razgaitis 12:38
We do not, you know, when I talk to entrepreneurs, I kind of answer this in two different ways. I have a general perspective. But then I also have an answer that I give when entrepreneurs call me and they say, Hey, I’m thinking about doing X, Y, and Z. And should I do this, I try to be really careful to never discourage the idea at all, I might give them some things to think about. I think people are very often consumers. And people are just very quick to say what’s a good and a bad idea. And in many cases, we don’t talk about what is a good and a bad idea. I mean, I think probably 90% of innovative ideas would probably have been seen as a bad idea by the majority. So I think battle testing ideas and provide people critical feedback on here’s what I think is good about this idea, here’s some of your risks, or challenges with this idea that you should think about is a really healthy way of trying to help move someone along critical thinking without crushing it. Because you know, really, what do I know about their particular idea and research that they’ve done? I will, however, be pretty vocal with them about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And, you know, I try to offer a healthy enough dose of encouragement that should they desire to do it, they probably can do it and attempt it. But the reality is that for 90, some percent, you know, it’s probably 95 97% of entrepreneurs, they don’t make it. And these are all the stories that you don’t hear about on Facebook, and you hear about all the great outcomes and all the parachutes or liquidity events or the IPO that once the founder gets unlocked from an IPO got 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars. The reality is that that just doesn’t happen. That is the reality, the majority of cases. And the other dose of reality is that you’re going to be putting a huge portion of your life on hold. I mean, I look at my own personal life, actually. I mean, that’s probably one of the things that’s most negligent. And kind of the whole like spectrum of myself is I have tripled down my focus on my two daughters Royce and Zoey, that are teenagers, once a freshman and others a junior in high school. And then I’ve super focused on the company, you know, and being there for the company and operating at my highest capacity as best I can certainly doesn’t mean I’m flawless. I’ve made many mistakes along the way. But my intention right now is all efforts focused on a bit of personal development, my daughter’s and work and that leads very, very little time for other things, this idea of like, you can have it all as little I mean, that just does not like that sounds great in an article that gets posted on Facebook to drive clicks. But that just is not real life real life is you have to make very definitive, tough, tough decisions of what you are willing to sacrifice to go after what it is that you want, that might be that bigger thing. And what people don’t see when I mean, it’s funny people sometimes I mean, they see my social media, they see retries gauges and social media and like, I’m not a celebrity in the valley. But people see retro skaters’ social media that are in my network, and they say, you guys are blowing up, and this must be fantastic. And you’re traveling all over the place. Well, you know, I’m not what I’m not doing is I’m not posting pictures of me inside a manufacturer at 3am. After I’ve been up for like 21 hours, or you know, what I what I’m not doing is posting Instagram Stories of pulling all-nighters to work on a pitch deck or an investor follow up piece or, you know, what I’m not doing is posting pictures where you’re alone on a Friday night, because you don’t really you haven’t developed that many personal relationships or you forsake and unfortunately, a lot of your personal friendships, because you’ve had to make tough decisions. And so you just end up working on Friday night as well, even though there’s plenty of work to always be done. There’s a whole amount of not only sacrifice, but also loneliness that comes with being an entrepreneur. And I think what ends up being a pretty considerable amount of grit, because you’re gonna get the kicked out of you along the way. And it’s not the ways that you expect, you’ll get all the expected ways, but you’re also going to get a healthy dose of unanticipated unexpected kicks. And it’s really difficult. And that’s why I think, you know, my counsel to people that are looking into going into entrepreneurship is it’s not, don’t do it, but it’s do it. But make sure you really know what you’re signing up for. And if, for example, you’re married, make sure that your partner knows what you’re signing up for. And don’t do it if you can’t get buying along what that looks like. Because if you don’t get that buy in, or the kind of things that are in but they’re not really in on it, it’s probably not going to go well. I mean, I think one of the issues that we all have as entrepreneurs is we’re optimists. I mean, I try to have a healthy dose of pragmatism and reality and think through worst case scenarios. But the reality is, I think I can pull everything off, you know, I think I can pull off like doing X, Y, and Z. And let’s throw ABC in there. And I have to really guard against my optimism around what I think I can pull off versus Alright, like, what can you really do? And what are the sacrifices you’re gonna have to make along the way? And for those people that are on that journey with you? Are they also prepared to make it?
Shawn Flynn 17:37
Can you share a couple of stories maybe, or at least a story that impacted you have one of the companies that you invested in?
Waikit Lau 19:45
Again, one that I know business investing in a company called ginkgo bioworks is a synthetic biology company in Boston. And what they do is this, they apply to the bunch of computer scientists from MIT was started by among a few co-founders, it was the main co-founder, the main founder is Tom Knight. Calm was for a long time, Principal Investigator researcher, and the sometime professor at MIT. And Tom’s reputation precedes me Is he has mentored and advise a lot of PhD students. In fact, I have an interesting story to tell about Tom in a second lifetime. But Tom is one of these big brand names that no matter what Tom does, right, whatever he does, it’s going to be really groundbreaking. I didn’t really know Tom well, I was acquainted with Tom but one of my ex co-founders, my first company knows Tom really well. So in 2014, my friend calls me on it says, Hey, you know, I’m thinking of investing in Tom’s new thing. And it’s in biology. And I’m like, what’s Tom doing in biology is I don’t know. Tom has spent the last 10 years you know, he was bored by Computer Science and Electrical Engineering has spent the last 10 years taking all the classes in chemistry and biology at MIT and Harvard. And now, he basically is on a mission to do business of, you know, how do you hack biology? Why can’t you do genetic engineering the way you build software? So he did a lot of seminal work in terms of some of the mechanics of large scale genetics, large scale mechanics of how do you not just not just genetically engineer a yeast cell? For example, let’s say you genetically engineer you sell to produce rose oil. Okay, great. How do you then produce a huge quantity of rose oil, right, so this can be economically viable. So when he started, well, the company’s been around for five years survived on DLD funding. And then they were attracted to become the first biotech company in Y Combinator, 2013 2000. And then they were raising the first round, I talked to my friend, I’m like, if Tom is doing it, I man it doesn’t really matter what it is. I don’t know what synthetic biology is. But I’m in in the last what, six, seven years have grown to become a behemoth. They are at one point, I’m not sure if it still is, it was the highest valued private company in Massachusetts, I think the last round, put them back down at about $5 billion valuation. Now, of course, my check size is tiny. I wish it was not so tiny in hindsight.
Shawn Flynn 20:14
Now, you’d mentioned MIT there, you have a little bit of connection as well with MIT with the boot camps, can you share what you’ve done and some of the takeaways that our listeners could learn from those boot camps that you held?
Waikit Lau 20:28
My last company after going public, you know, 014, I took a little bit of time off, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. I just had my first child and the deal with my wife was I can do any startups for the next n number of years until like, kids a little bit older, right? So no more like 18 hour days. So I said, Great. Okay, you know, I’ll advise I do some angel investing, as I was still hooked into deeply involved in the MIT community, I was mentoring companies and the like, and I got pulled into someone who had donated money to start this Entrepreneurial Center at MIT a number of years before. And so they have this building where it was this cross interdisciplinary department, if you will, of entrepreneurship. And they were doing a lot of seminars, a lot of classes, not full, full credit classes. But these are sort of like, you know, Boot Camps here and there. Professor bill, all that, who was a professor at Sloan School was the one who was doing a lot of these boot camps, in conjunction with a number of folks out of the MIT’s Office of Digital Learning. I got roped in to mentor and to teach a couple of the classes. And they started off basically saying, Hey, can we do a week long two week long boot camp as the capstone in person class, the MIT online learning classes. So MIT, and Harvard has this online learning class for last 10 years called edX example. So in Addax, every season, I think there’s about 10,000 plus 10,000. folks take those online classes. So what they wanted to do was at the end of the two to three month online class, you allow people to apply for an in person class for a week, and you have to pay right and half of them, you know, you apply for scholarships, the other half you have to pay, and then you show up at MIT, you know, we run you through a week long worth of how do you start a company? How do you finance a company? How do you recruit how you grow, how you think about business models and things like that? This is very much startup frameworks one on one, they started that in 2012 2013, when I started helping out it was 2014 2015. And the like, so did it in Boston, and then they start replicating it and a few other countries. They started doing it in Korea, and Australia and Turkey, and the like. So I did it for a couple of years. It was fascinating. It’s probably one of the best gigs I’ve ever had, just from a learning perspective. I do remember this. There was the last session I had, it was in Korea. So they met about 70 to 100 students from around the world to fly there. I remember this distinctly there were one there was one guy from Syria, from Aleppo. I’m like this before it got really bad. This is just the beginning, the rebel forces and then the Syrian government so that he could still leave. I remember having this conversation with him is like I’m like, wow. And I can’t remember your own. I think he owned a number of cell phone repair shops in Aleppo. I was just asking him, wow, how dangerous is it? Now I keep, you know, seeing things escalating. Like, you know, like people accidentally get shelled, like those people will die. And he’s like, Yeah, he’s like, you know, but what can I do? He’s, I’m like, you’re going back? When he’s like, yeah, I’ve got family there. I’ve got extended family there. And most people do. So you know, you just can’t pack up and leave. And I’ve always since that year, thought about him and thought about, you know, sort of his family. And like how he has they’ve done hopefully they’ve been saved Well, this year. Yeah. So you meet all these really interesting people for whom we have our brand of entrepreneurship in the US, right, very tech centric, where, you know, as you talk to folks from other parts of the world, you know, the brand of entrepreneurship can be very different. Like here is all VC funded at other places in the world. And equally as valid man, it could be, you know, someone might own a fleet of taxis and do very well. And it’s a different form of entrepreneurship. And you’re not innovation per se, as we understand it, but innovation on the last that I enjoyed that a lot. That was really cool. I really liked the global perspective on that program. So yeah, so I was doing that until last couple of years until I started my company.
Shawn Flynn 24:35
With all your I’m thinking about all these technologies and your experience, what lessons have you learned in your business career from failing or trying something new?
Steve Hoffman 24:45
I have failed more times than I care to talk about, just like most people, my feeling is that if you try enough things, and they’re crazy enough ideas, you’re going to fail. If you do if you never take any risks, you will probably never fail. But you also never achieve anything. That’s a breakthrough in my life, I’ve had companies fail, totally fail. And I look back on them. And now that I look back on them, it has taught me more about helping entrepreneurs than my companies that have wildly succeeded. So my successes, they’re great. But when I look at my failures, I was really humbled. You know, I believed in the idea, I thought it was the right thing, I kept pushing on it. And you know, what, most entrepreneurs, including myself, when I fail, I didn’t fail, because I gave up. Because I’m the type of person who gives up, I actually failed because I refuse to give up in a wrong way, there are two ways to fail. So one way is to say, right away when something isn’t working, when the data is there, oh, this isn’t working, I’m just going to go on and do the next thing. And you just cut your losses and move on. The other way is to say to yourself, I cannot fail no matter what I’m going to make this work. And sometimes when you say that, you end up practicing what we call self-delusion, right? You end up convincing yourself that, you know, we all filter data, we all have biases, so you end up not looking at the real data. And understanding that no, this is not something you can change. So what I learned through failing was, you should not continue with a project ever because of your ego. Because you feel like it would reflect badly on you. If you fail, you should only continue on a project, when the data supports you to continue on it. If you find out that this product is not taking off, that customers don’t the fundamental core value you are delivering to your customer, they don’t really care about. At that moment, you figure that out, you should kill the product. No matter how many changes you make. If you usually usually in a startup, you can never change the core value you’re offering the customer, you have to start over. So that is one of the things I learned. I developed many games, some of the games were like big hits, some more failures, you know, if that core game mechanics, which is the value you’re offering, the customer aren’t working, you know, no matter how many superficial things you change, that game is dead, it will never go anywhere. With any product, it doesn’t matter if you’re making a gadget for people’s homes or you know, software application, whatever it is, that same thing holds true. The other thing I’ve learned by failing is that it’s okay to fail. And that when you fail, you don’t beat spend time beating yourself up. First of all, be realistic, say I failed, admit it. It’s like going to Alcoholics Anonymous, I am an alcoholic, you have to say I’m a failure, I totally screwed this up, then you have to analyze what you did wrong. So and say, next time, I’m not going to do these things, again, right, I’m going to change how I do them, whether it was hiring the right employee and sticking with them too long, because you didn’t want to hurt their feelings and fire them. And they weren’t very good. Or whether it’s pursuing an idea to an extreme, even when there was no data to back it up whatever it was, or spending too much money on something that didn’t matter. All those things you need to list out. And then you need to move on, you cannot sit there and say I had a choice. So my first startup was very successful, very successful, my second startup failed. And after my second startup, I could have given up, I could have said to myself, and I did say to myself, originally, I should just never do a startup again, it was too painful. It was like brutal, I should never do this again. If I had done that after my failure, then I would have never achieved what I’ve achieved. Now, it would have been a shame. And I would always feel like a failure. Because I would basically have branded myself as a failure. The other thing you need to understand in that I’ve learned is that everybody has different talents. Like some people are really good at organizing other people, some people really good at leading other people, other people are really good at solving hard problems. You know, some people are really good at sales, but nothing else. They’re like an individual seller, you need to know what your skills are. and amplify those put your energy into those. And you need to partner with people with other skill set, who have what you lack. And if you can’t do that, you will not succeed. So part of being successful is strictly knowing what you’re good at. And there are some people out there who cannot handle being an entrepreneur at all, they should not be an entrepreneur, they wouldn’t make a brilliant professor, or a brilliant author, but they should never run a company. And they need to learn that about themselves. So part of failing is a lot of times it teaches you that you thought you wanted to be this, but actually your real talents lie elsewhere. And if you just focused on those, you could be incredibly successful. So that is part of the whole process. I think of anything in life, learning anything, doing anything.
Shawn Flynn 29:39
Speaking of achievements, your book make elephants fly is a huge success. What’s one key takeaway from that book that you’d like to share?
Steve Hoffman 29:48
I came up with the title make elephants fly because of this key thing about the book. So the key thing is the elephant is your big idea. It’s that dream you have but it’s so big you feel like it is impossible to get it off the ground, like you’ll never make an elephant fly. But that’s the goal of an entrepreneur, the goal is to make that elephant fly. So the book, actually, the best thing about the book is that it takes you step by step through a lot of case studies, many who have been successful, but others who have failed, and shows you exactly what they did, right, and what they did wrong. And the biggest idea, and there are many ideas in this because it’s never one thing, it’s a lot of different things. But the biggest idea in make elephant fly, is that you should treat all of your endeavors, whether they’re your job in a company, whether it’s being an entrepreneur, whether it’s your family, or home life, you should treat all of it as experiments, as experiments, a learning process, like, how do you form a good relationship with somebody you love when you’re fighting all the time, you can’t just keep repeating the same problems, right? You’re just going to continue fighting, you need to devise with that partner experiments that you could do, like if we communicate in a different way. So sometimes, like with my wife, we made a rule, right, which worked really well, we found out that we only really were fighting late at night. Like when we were exhausted right before we went to bed, we would both have an idea. And we would start arguing about it. So we made a rule past 9pm no serious discussion, none fighting evaporated, right? no arguments, right? Because we weren’t tired. And we talked about it in the morning when we’re fresh. So even if you feel compelled, don’t do it. In a company. It’s the same way. When you’re running a company, whether it’s managing the book goes into management and employees coming up with ideas, innovating on products, all these different things, how you structure those things, you should take an approach that I don’t know what to do, but I’m going to try many different things. And we’re going to figure out what works best, especially when you’re pushing the limits when you’re innovating.
Shawn Flynn 31:56
That’s really interesting. Because thinking about the funnel and that when I’ve talked to people in the past, they go Okay, let’s break down the demographics of this person. What’s their favorite hobby? What’s their book, how long they spend on social media, their age, all this stuff? They don’t really say, okay, who have you connected with in the past that has a network that you can reach out to and maybe invite all them out for dinner or online pain in through zoom? A shout out to Michael at Insperity who invited me and that was a lot of fun. And we all bonded and I’m gonna feel like yeah, oh, that guy forever.
Tim Alison 32:30
on here today, the day we’re speaking, I was participating in it. Somebody was telling you about the host was talking to someone named Heather Moy so in Canada, she’s a world class athlete. She’s won two gold medals. I mean, she’s just an amazing public speaker. Because I’ve been participating in the summit. I wasn’t on air at that moment. But the other hosts noticed by commented basically having said something about just ignore the naysayers. So Tim being Tim goes into Facebook and comments, screw the naysayers, because that’s my brand they. And then Cory, the co-host comes on and he says, Heather, I want to tell you that I just got a comment here. It said, screw the naysayers. You use the word naysayers three times. I don’t have to look at who it is. Because I know it’s Tim Allison and you’ve got to go on his show. I would have a very hard time getting straight to somebody like that she’s in huge demand and charges really big fees. But there she is on air saying Tim hit me up. I can’t wait. And it happens because of the things you’re talking about. You build relationships. Seth Godin came on my show, Episode 100 of screw the naysayers. Seems like a long time ago, it was just a little over a year ago. I know for sure that journey to get started with my first guest. Because my first guest was a guy named Don Webtrekk. And I knew Even then, that Seth had huge respect for the work that Don was doing in trying to change and radically change the education system for high school kids, and to promote entrepreneurship and coding and building of technology based businesses. It’s not a coincidence that after I earned some other earned the right to make the ass that when I was able to reach back and say, Hey, Don, he has been I know that you’ve been on Don show times when I was my first guest. He did me a big solid. These are the way you build networks because it’s crazy. The people I’m talking to from Nova Scotia and I was thinking about it the other day, Shawn, I’m not lying. I only left my home village for business twice in the last two and a half years. The first time last October I went to the City of Toronto to accept that award I one bit of inspiration conference for the work I’ve done with my podcast and advancing women gender equity. And the second time was in November, I went down to Cambridge because I was invited to speak on a stage at Harvard. And I thought I might want to do that one or the other people. Every other relationship that I’ve made I’ve done from this studio I’m looking at right now is nothing but forest and trees and blue sky in a village of about 300 people that has changed in sales because we can make human connections without always being there in person. If you really look at successful companies, it always comes back to their ability to build their network. The return on relationship I heard the other day I hadn’t heard that phrase before, but ROI or return on relationships, and I thought, that’s a pretty interesting way of looking at it because I can trace just about everything good that’s happened in my business back to, I know where relationships came from. And Shawn introduced me to so and so introduced me to so and so and those kinds of things.
Announcer 35:34
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