Dave Kashen discusses what founders can actually control when building startups. He covers the macro risks of chasing billion-dollar outcomes, venture capital dynamics, and the Conscious Leadership Group's "sorting the files" exercise for separating what's in your control from what isn't.
If you want to build, you can build a multimillion-dollar business in freaking Q-tips. You can, you know, you can build a multimillion-dollar business in, you know, car sales, in restaurants, whatever it is, it is doable. And you cannot blame the macro environment at all. Once you get into hundreds of millions or billions of revenue and your goal is to go from zero to that over, you know, 5, 10, 20 years, the macro risks are really high. And you have to predict the future and ride waves that you— that are impossible for anyone to know. Because if they were possible, then VCs would be more accurate, right? But even the best VCs bat like a baseball player at .300. And that's, that's unheard of. Like, that's—
but the good news is their grand slam home runs are worth, uh, 1,000, uh, you know, 1,000 runs versus just, you know, 4. Um, go on, you want to finish that?
Yeah, so, you know, typical VC, if they bought 10%, they're killing it, right? Because it's better than zero. As long as you're better than zero as a VC, you're pretty much doing well. Um, and so, uh, in startup land, you do have a lot of macro risk. And there's just no way around it. Um, there's very— there's, there's, there's not a startup out there that has the potential to get to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that doesn't have macro risk, especially on a 10-year horizon. And as a result, you kind of have to accept that when you start a startup.
Yeah, there's this, uh, really simple exercise I learned, um, from the Conscious Leadership Group that I love, uh, called sorting the files. And the idea is you have two, two, you know, manila file folders for those who remember what those are. And one file folder is entitled Things I Can Control, and the other file folder is entitled Things I Can't Control. And the real issue with control is confusing which things go in which folder, right? Because I see so many, especially founders, try to control things that they can't control, even with firing people. Like how the person's gonna feel, right? I had a conversation this morning with a client who's like trying to figure out, you know, what to say to get the person to feel the thing they want them to feel, right? That's an example of trying to control something that's not in your control versus just speaking your truth and they'll have the experience they have. Um, and similarly, or, you know, letting someone go and letting them have their experience. And they might be sad, they might be angry, they might be scared, you know, and not trying to control that. Or like you're saying, like these macro, you know, environment tariffs, governmental, you know, there's, you know, and we could, we could maybe just call it luck at some level, right? Is this the humility to recognize there's a certain, well, we could just say there are, there's things that are within your control and things that are not.
