Why Entrepreneurs Need Humility: Learning from Google, Facebook, and Silicon Valley's Evolution

Bookmark this. Bringing adults into the room isn't always loved, but this is a partnership. It's not replacing the founder or the CEO or the entrepreneur. In this situation, you are partnering with someone who has expertise that will help you see your own blind spots so that your business can keep scaling. So having the humility to accept this is critical for founders. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Today we're going to talk about one of the key traits that every founder and entrepreneur needs to have on their journey to be extremely successful. And that personality trait is humility. In the world of startups, many times, first time founders and CEOs find themselves at a crossroads between success, achieving all the goals that they want to get to, and stagnation. Well, many people have technical brilliance or product brilliance and they can get the vision and the business off the ground. The next critical phase is scaling, and that often requires external expertise. And having humility to acknowledge the limitations that you have is a massive difference between success and failure. One of my favorite mentors, I never got to meet him, but I've read all of his books, was Peter Drucker. And he said every organization needed to have performance in three different areas and that was achieving direct results, building values and reaffirming those values, and then building and developing the people of tomorrow. And oftentimes first time founders need to have no one likes this term but adults in the room or external expertise or management and operations added into their business as they begin to scale. And it can be very difficult to bring in these knowledgeable, experienced and often expensive talent into your company and integrate them into the culture. The first example I want to give you of this is of Google, one of my favorite businesses that has ever existed. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially got together, they were graduates. They had wrote an incredible algorithm about SEO and search ranking and how to build the first search engine that really existed. And these guys epitomized this humility and this exact story. So they had exceptional technical prowess, but they had no experience in managing a growing team, hiring enough people for that, and then eventually taking the company public. And one of the first investors in Google was John Dewar. If you've seen anything in Everyday entrepreneur, John Dewar wrote the book Measure what Matters and was kind of the godfather of OKRs. I love OKRs. It's what allowed us to scale our business. They taught us it in techstars and it was one of the greatest frameworks that allowed us to achieve the results that we promised and then eventually get acquired for eight figures. And John Dewar, writing one of the first checks into Google, had told Larry and Sergey that they should hire this guy named Eric Schmidt. And this is humility. It's bringing an adult into the room with experience and savvy business expertise to scale your business to the heights that it can go. And so while it took a little bit of time for Larry and Sergey to except Eric Schmidt, once he won them over, Google went crazy. He was a natural fit to lead Google through the next phase. And this trio was a formidable leadership triangle that allowed them to scale massively and become Google what it is today. And so I think that them showing this humility is such a good example of why founders need to have this character trait. My example is when we went through techstars, estated was only an idea. I didn't know what I was doing. We didn't have okrs, but I all I knew was we had a product and we had a demand in the market for it. And we started to get a little bit of traction, a little bit more traction, and I think we had 30 or $40,000 in revenue. Nothing. At that time. When Foundry came in and gave us their playbook and introduced us to tons of experienced CEOs and gave us advice on how to scale the business, it was the first time I kind of stepped back and accepted that my way wasn't always the right way. And I learned so much from Foundry, especially Brad Feld and Jason Mendelsohn. Jason was the CEO of Foundry at the time. He's moved on since. And Brad Feld is an absolute legend in the venture capital world. But when they came in, I kind of had stepped back and realized that these guys have built multiple multibillion dollar companies and that I should listen to everything that they have to say at all times and then take their opinions in and form the path forward myself in. The next story of my personal experience with having this humility was there was a time when we had done our first product launch. It was an MVP with estated. And I had a blowout with my engineering department because we put a product into market that wasn't adequate for what our customers needed. And I was frustrated and I blew up some relationships. I burned some bridges, and I knew that to repair our business and get us on the right path going forward, I was going to need some experienced management and operations within our business to ensure that this never happened again. This led to us hiring an extremely experienced vet. His name was Larry. He had over 35 years worth of experience in scaling companies from 5 million to 100 million. A few companies that he worked with had went public, and I got along with this guy and I knew it was the right fit, albeit it was very difficult to work with him for the first year. He saved our business, and I don't think we would have had the success that we had without having him at that period of time. And so another example of this is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, when he was creating Facebook, was only a kid in his dorm room. You all know the story, but he was a young visionary founder. And when he brought in Sheryl Sandberg to run Facebook's leadership team, because he was just a kid in the room and this company was growing like mad. And he needed that experience to not only raise all the money that they needed to keep scaling, but also to be trusted and eventually go public. And so Sandberg brought in this operational efficiency and deep understanding of how to monetize the platform and to continue scaling the company. Whereas Zuckerberg's goal was to just help billions and billions of people and give them a platform to communicate on, Sandberg knew how to monetize that and create it into revenue. And so Zuckerberg shows this trade as well. And if that doesn't tell you enough, these two examples are some of the biggest companies that we use every single day today. And I think it's just critical to realize how many founders have this skill, skill and how important it is. And the phrase like bringing adults into the room isn't always loved, but at the end of the day, at some point along your journey, you're gonna have to hire seasoned professionals who can guide the organization through this scaling process. This week I was listening to the all in podcast with Chamath and David Freeberg, were talking about this as well. There are times when you absolutely need these people to break through the wall or the challenge that, that you as the founder, can't seem to break through. I'm actually about to maybe do one of my first ever consulting jobs. And I actually feel like for the first time, maybe I'm the adult being brought into the room. And it feels completely awkward. I can see it from both sides. As I've matured and grown up, I can see how founders have a challenge of letting these people into their business. It's a big risk, it's a big time dedication, and you have to trust this person. And, you know, things can go wrong. I've seen it happen before, but it's necessary to test this theory out. And so going from like a scrappy startup to an industry leader. It requires a degree of experience and operational know how that often isn't intuitive to first time founders and entrepreneurs who are just starting out like Schmidt and like Sandberg. They can help you set up the right frameworks for sustainable and exponential growth beyond your initial success. They can help scale and execute the vision with precision. They can introduce mature organizational practices, they can foster a culture of growth and adaptability. And then they can manage or help manage the founders and the CEOs of the growing complexities that are going to exist within your business. I want the key takeaways for this video to be that humility is actually a strength. Even though it can be extremely difficult in the beginning. First time founders that are humble, humble enough to recognize your own limitations, you're going to set yourself up for long term success. Professional management enables scaling. Bringing in external experienced managers will allow the business to handle organizational and operational complexities as you're scaling. And here's a very important point. Bookmark this. This is a partnership. It's not replacing the founder or the CEO or the entrepreneur in this situation. You are partnering with someone who has expertise that will help you see your own blind spots so that your business can keep scaling. So having the humility to accept this is critical for founders. And then the last thing is I really believe that when you bring these adults into the room, they have to be learning machines. And then that's going to foster within the culture of your company to have Kaizen to constantly be learning, to constantly be growing. Because there's no way that going through these phases of growth is possible unless you are a learning machine. So in conclusion, I just want to encourage all entrepreneurs, all you everyday entrepreneurs, all you happy healthy humans and all founders out there to really dive into this trait of humility. I think it's critical for your success. If you like this video, please jump into our community of happy healthy humans at the Everyday Entrepreneur below and I look forward to to seeing you in the next one. Take care.