Why an Empty Chair Represents Your Most Important Stakeholder: Insights from a Seasoned Founder

25 Mar 2023 · 0 min

Watch on YouTube

0:28

In this segment, Dharmesh Shah recounts a practice he instituted at his first startup: placing an empty chair at every management and founder meeting to symbolize the customer. By treating the chair as if a real customer were present, the team forces every strategic decision—such as pricing changes or feature prioritization—to be evaluated through the lens of customer value. Shah explains that this simple visual cue helps cut through lengthy debates among smart team members, often revealing that a proposed action offers no benefit to the customer, and prompting the group to side with the customer’s interests when opinions are split.

So in my first startup, in all of our management meetings and founder meetings, we had an empty chair in the room that was a designated chair for the customer. And we would literally pretend there was a customer in that chair when making decisions because we make these decisions all the time. Do we raise prices? Do we lower prices? Do we do this feature or that feature? And that works because what ends up happening is you can have really, really smart people like debate things for 2 hours and it becomes crystal clear sometimes like, well, yeah, there's nothing in it for the customer. If we're evenly split, let's go with the customer.