If you are a startup, I hope one day soon you get to $10,000,000 in gross revenue. If you do, I have some thoughts for you.
A caveat first — there are a great number of exceptions to what I am going to share with you, so do not fall prey to missing the difference of your situation or embracing every word I say, but there are reasons big and small as to why I hold these views.
In addition to mentoring CEOs, I often speak to promising young persons — usually sent my way by their parents — to give them wise counsel as to how to fashion their career or to find the right career.
A good many of them have an entrepreneurial bent — so they think — and a good many of them have just left the armed forces. They are all at the starting line of their career.
I always start with one bit of wisdom: Do not be in a hurry, young person; experiment and try some different things. Continue reading
Mentoring is/was a fashionable topic amongst the venture capital and startup Illuminati for years. I have written about it for a long time. A good mentor can make a mediocre founder into a winner.
Full disclosure: I run a CEO coaching/mentoring business called The Wisdom of the Campfire and have for a dozen years. I take clients only by referral and personal introduction. I do zero marketing and do not even have a website.
Everybody in startup world had to have a celebrity CEO coach. This was caused by two specific conditions:
1. Venture capitalists know next to nothing about actually running a business. More than 75% of their investments fail, so what does that tell you?
2. Young startup founders/CEOs have had zero training in leadership the lingua franca of building even a lemonade stand. Continue reading
I was reading a bit of advice that trotted out the old shibboleth of: “Finding your passion is the key to life.” The presumption was you had to find your passion as a prelude to getting on with your life and that you should not take a step without knowing what that passion truly was.
I thought about that for a long time and decided that is not good advice. Let me explain.
1. Most of the folks giving that advice already found their passion or made a bloody fortune in some other endeavor (like scrap metal or rock quarries) — everybody listens to billionaires even ones who made their dough in scrap metal — and are now in the advice business. Continue reading
A chap asks me, “In your 50 years of CEO-ing and leadership what did you learn that was unexpected?”
I had a couple of weeks to think about it and I answered, “Urgent patience!”
To which the chap replied, “What the Hell is ‘urgent patience’ and why is it important?” Continue reading
On Saturday, the University of North Carolina defeated Georgia Tech in a tightly contested, fierce conference game in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Every ACC game is a vicious fight, in this instance made moreso because Georgia Tech beat the Heels for the last two years, injecting blood into the water.
The final score was 88-65 which qualifies as a “thrashing,” but the score doesn’t really describe how the Tarheels won. They won with their defense. Continue reading
A client of mine a few years ago said, “You always make me think, and I prepare for our meetings.”
That is a good thing and it makes me feel good. Nothing wrong with thinking, but it should be more than that.
At the end of every year, a CEO/founder/entrepreneur should conduct a bit of reflection and musing to consider how they are performing as compared to how they want to perform.
I am not talking solely about objectives accomplished, but the nature with which a CEO undertook her/his duties.
Remember this name: Vishal Garg.
“My name is Vishal Garg and I fired 900 employees on a single Zoom call. Yes, I am that moron.”
Vishal is/was the Chief Executive Officer of a digital mortgage company called Better.com. Continue reading
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