What Makes a Strong Startup CEO (Startup Mini-Series)

so over the years I learned the hard way that there is a direct link between the founders leadership skills and the outcome of their startups but the reality is that it's really two different things there are the managerial skills being a good manager and the leadership skills and these are two separate things and the reality is that you've got to excel at both of them if you want to get your startup to the right place so the first part of being a great startup CEO is to be a good manager in over the years I found a way to represent what I think the startup CEO role is as a manager and it includes a very simple cycle so this cycle basically could be painted like this defining your strategy recruiting the team that can execute it setting goals assisting where needed and monitoring progress and basically this is the cycle that includes the CEOs role as a manager and when you look at it defining the strategy is basically the part in which you set the vector in which your company is gonna run this is the first thing you need to do once you define that vector the next thing you need to do is recruit the best team they can execute and run in this direction and build what you're trying to build then you basically set goals these goals are the goals that are going to make sure that the team is running in the right direction and that everything is measurable because if it's not measurable you can't manage it what you then do is the CEO is your job is to continue assisting the team as much as you can on their way so that whenever they run into any kind of trouble or any problem they can come to you or you can come to them and clear the problem for them so that they continue running and then you basically monitor progress when you finish this cycle you arrive to a point of checking on yourself and now saying okay I'll define my strategy now it's time to basically check it and see that the strategy so holds and if I need to now change the vector a little bit that's great I'll change the vector a little bit the next thing I've looking at the team and I'm saying now I need to verify that I still have the best team and as we know as the company evolves and grows and changes maybe not everybody that was great in the team the beginning is still great as you need to verify the team in terms of the goals you set them but now you basically reset them to make sure that they're the right goals and so and then you continue assisting you continue monitoring and this cycle goes on on and on and on and if in the past in large companies I used to think that you need to run this cycle every quarter or so when I think about start-up management today this is something that you need to do almost weekly you need to constantly ask yourself do I have the right strategy do I have the right people are my goals pushing everybody in the right directions and vice versa and so that's the role of the founder CEO as a manager and that's super important right this is what you need to do in order to make your company to run but that's not enough actually if you just do that you're not very likely to succeed because on top of it there is the leadership part and the leadership part is different requires totally different set of skills much softer skills it is less mechanic and it's much tougher to achieve and without it it's going to be very difficult for you to get your people to get your company to where you want it to go and so the way I look at it the leadership part is kind of orbiting the management part that is basically if I need to summit to bring it down to three things it revolves around people vision and culture and just like we can look at this cycle for the managerial part we have a similar cycle for the leadership part and as I said leadership is tougher than just management it is mostly tougher because unlike everything that you do on the management side leadership is tough to pass on by just speaking it mostly depends on how you behave it depends on this example that you set yourself and if you're not going to behave based on the same values that you want your company to be run by it's not gonna work and that's why the beginning of any part of leadership is behaving yourself the way you want your people to behave and so the first thing in leadership is people and when I talk about leading people we can talk about that for hours but there are three things that I would like to stress today the first one is hiring the second one is caring and the third one is listening and when we talk about hiring hiring is maybe the only place where in a start-up I'm willing to sacrifice speed for results and this is because especially the young startup the DNA of the people that you bring in is a critical part of the culture building and if you bring somebody that has a great CV that does all the right things that you need but comes with a toxic DNA you're basically not just gonna lose that person later on but you're going to start inflicting the wrong DNA into your team which will have a horrible effect on your company later on and so hiring is the first thing and making sure that the people that you're recruiting into your company have the right DNA once you bring the right people and you need to lead them maybe the one thing that I've found that is the most important thing in start-up leadership and actually every company leadership is caring this sounds the beauty so tarik what's the what's caring connected to leadership but the reality is that it all starts from caring when you care for your employees they care about their job they care about their employees they care about their colleagues and so by caring by truly caring which is tough to fake you're creating this cycle in which eventually your entire company will be much better and people will care for each other and so once you recruited the best people you care for them and that's where the magic starts and then the third thing is listening what's the point of recruiting the best people and letting them work if you don't listen to them and our listening basically has two parts the first part is simply being there you cannot listen to people if you don't meet them enough you cannot listen to people you don't have meetings with them you cannot listen to people if you don't have face time with them and many times all of us are in such a rush that all these meetings are getting cancelled and so don't cancel them if you don't spend time with your people they're never gonna be able to listen to them but even then when you're with them one of the mistakes I used to do as a CEO years ago I would go into a meeting and say okay the here's our problem this is what I think and guess what how easy is it for people to then challenge what you're saying when you're the CEO and you just say to this so people just not and you basically lost the entire impact of everybody sharing their opinions and so listening is not just about being with them it's also about letting them speak and then even speak before you say what you think and so the first part of leadership is about people hire the right people with the right DNA care about them to ensure that they care about their job and about the rest of the company and listen to them by being with them and by letting them speak and letting them say what they think this is the core and the first part of leadership as a CEO once we have the people in place and they're caring and you're listening to them the next part is the vision of the company and that basically if I need to break it down that comes down to finding your why repeating it and verifying that people know it let's explain that so I think you've all know the concept of finding your companies why why do you do the things you do and there's a founder CEO most of us think about that why in the context of customers right if I find my why my customers will like my products more they will know what we're doing why we're doing it you think about it in the context of investors if I can express my why properly I'm gonna raise a lot of money but the reality is that the place where your why is the most critical is with the people that work with you in your company and this is because working in a start-up is really difficult many hours usually you're not getting paid that much and it's a roller coaster emotionally and the only reason why people stay committed is because they have a wide that they believe in and so when you clarify and crystallizer why it's not just for the outside world it's not just for investors it is predominantly first and foremost for your team for your employees for your managers they need to know and connect to your wine if you don't know your why it's very difficult to wake up in the morning and again and again do it whatever you need to do because it's just emotionally tiring and so you've got to understand your wife so crystallizer why and then you've got to repeat it again and again and again and many people make the mistake of thinking I just said it a month ago we had an O hand meeting and I presented the company's wine strategy everybody knows it it's gotta be that simple right I mean I've showed it people are smart I recruited the best people it can't be that they did not understand well maybe they did but it's very difficult to remember it's very difficult to absorb things change you as the CEO make constantly think that everybody knows everything but not everybody knows everything and as long as people don't know that why you're gonna have leadership issues and so repeat your why a lot more than what you intuitively think you need to repeat it what's the right frequency once a week not too much once every meeting and repeating it also okay in a tough period make sure that you repeat it enough and then once you repeat it enough you've got a verify that people actually know this one of my one of my favorite things to do to CEO sometimes is that I ask them are you sure that everybody knows their strategy of course everybody knows the company's strategy are you sure that everybody knows what's the why of the company of course I just said it last week in the meeting great can we call a bunch of people and check and then when you call people in and you ask them what's the company's why what's the strategy where are we heading or even more than that what are you working on now and could you explain to me how that relates to the why of the company how that relates to what we're trying to achieve you're shocked at what small percent of people can actually explain that never let yourself get in that position because these people that can't explain it these people that don't feel that what they do relates to the companies why they're never gonna contribute the most they can and they're very likely to not stay with you for a long time so always remember crystallizer one for the team repeated as much as you need and verify that everybody knows it and everybody knows how what they're doing relates to that big y and big vision and so the last part after you've got your people and you have your vision that everybody knows is basically setting up the right culture now of course this is the whole topic of its own and we could talk for hours about that but or bring up a few points around culture so the first one is collaboration the second one is transparency the third one is self-awareness and the fourth one is optimism and these are like four cornerstones of what I always try to put into my companies to make sure that we have the right culture now they're there other lists and there's tons of other things to talk about that but these are like four cornerstones and if you got these four rites you're likely to have a good building block for your culture so let's start with collaboration so collaboration basically is all about creating an organization where people work together now clearly that the you know the cliche is that you've got to build an organization well one plus one equals more than two but it really is so any an organization that is collaborative by design where the culture the norm is that you work with others you cooperate you always look at any problem as something that you can contribute to that creates a much stronger organization that go to solve problem much faster and in general be a faster organization and so collaboration is really critical part and the way to deal with it is that whenever you see anybody behaving against that value of collaboration you've really got to act hard on it because people will only believe that that is a core value if they will see that whenever there's no collaboration you're basically coming in and immediately telling everybody look if you're not going to collaborate that's not going to work and so this is really critical collaboration the second thing is transparency and so in order for you to know what's happening in order for you to be able to create the right culture and the right management in the company you need to know what's happening you need to have transparency people need to be able to share with you people need to be able to tell you the truth they need to tell you what they're fearing they need to tell you the problems they need to tell you what's not working well and then the last thing of you do despite all of these things that I said before you've got to be up to this you've got to be optimist because being in a start-up is so difficult emotionally every day a new competitor arises the large companies are doing something you know Google's releasing a product that's close to your product you don't know what's gonna happen fundraising it's tough it is an emotional roller coaster to work in a start-up and so if you're not optimistic and if this optimism is not part of the culture of the company where we believe that we can do it we believe that our when we know that logically many startups fail but we truly believe that we're gonna succeed if you cannot put this into the minds and hearts of your people it's gonna be very difficult for them to wake up every morning and work as harder than seriously as you want them to and so as I said there's tons more to talk about leadership but for me the cores of leadership around these management cycles is to handle the people hiring them caring and listening to make sure they've got your vision your Y and that everybody knows it and everybody constantly hears it again and again and then to create the right culture which includes collaboration transparency and not complacent self-aware organization and an optimist one when I ran companies over the years and this is also what I tell founders that I invest in I kept asking myself almost every day am i just managing or am I also leading am i taking my team to where they ought to be am i leading by example and the days where these answers were yes for a good days and these were the days where I could see the impact I was making as a start-up CEO and the days where several we were knows I knew that I was slowing down my startup and I was slowing down my team instead of helping them and sorry try to be better the next day and so remember to ask yourself these questions am I only managing or also leading am i taking my team to where they oughta be the place where maybe they won't want to go on their own but I can take them and am I really leading by example make sure that you're there and your starter post succeed [Music]

Channel: NFX

Views: 63,788

Keywords: nfx, network, network effects, network effect, venture capital, james currier, pete flint, a16z, y combinator, gigi levy-weiss, gigi, gigi weiss, trulia, vc, defensibility, founders, founder, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs, startups, invest, investment, what are network effects, scale, network theory, yt:cc=on, advice, leadership, managment, startup leadership, become a leader, ceo, startup manager, manager, strong ceo, startup ceo, startup leader, leader, hiring, people, vision, culture, startup culture

Id: A3u67X2fo-g

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020