Dave Kashen on why founders should invest in inner work. He spent $10k-$20k yearly on coaching and therapy, and saw his company's five-year retention jump from 20% to over 50%. The work won't fix your product, but it changes how you lead.
everything you're dealing with, whether it's a strategic challenge of where to take the company or it's a personnel challenge of having like consistently bad like CEOs that you hire, or whether it's like dealing with a partner who doesn't want to partner with you, but you're frustrated and you're dealing with it. Like all of these challenges can be improved through inner game work. This is like the more you understand yourself, the more you can regulate your emotions, the more you can make decisions from a, you know, without lack, as you say, and sort of some of the language that you use, like the more you can do that, the better you're going to perform and the happier you'll be. And so in my mind, you know, the reason I went from, you know, whatever, 20% retention, you know, 5-year retention of my team at Udemy or at Sprig to like 50+% at Maven. You know, the reason why I'd say like Maven is, is probably I think it has a chance to be the most stable and successful company of the three. You know, it's still too early to say for sure, but it has the chance. And the reason why I'm enjoying myself so much more this time than I did in previous times, I think all of those are because I have invested in personal growth. And it's not always— it's not a direct thing. You do the personal growth, you're not going to feel better the next week. You know, you just sort of invest in it loosely over a very long period of time. It's like practicing a sport. Like, you know, I play soccer and I practice, I practice, I practice, and very often the week I have a great practice, I don't have a great game. Or the week I have a great game, I I come back to practice and I screw it up. But now I've been doing this like practice game rotation for 3 years now. And like, if you compare myself 3 years later to where I was when I started, it is unrecognizable growth. And I no longer— my dips today in my game don't come anywhere close to where my game was when I started. And I think that same thing is true for entrepreneurship. And the way you practice is you go and you spend, I don't know, $10,000 to $20,000 a year, roughly, you know, and obviously it scales up as you get more successful, $10,000 to $20,000 a year and like 4 to 10 days worth of accumulated effort per year, every year into just bettering yourself. And if you do that, like over the course of a long period of time, like you will see a night and day difference between how you show up and what your outcomes are across the board. Um, it doesn't give you that much of a better chance at product-market fit, but it does give you a much better chance at execution and strategy success.
