Short panel/interview where speakers give one-word pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. In this chunk Heidi Roizen’s chosen word is “tenacity,” which she links to persistence and the value of bootstrapping (she describes going six years without venture capital as a learning period). The format is concise, conversational advice rather than a deep lecture.
I asked each of you to choose a word or a couple of words for advice. And let's see what you had. I think, Heidi, you've already.
I hinted at this word.
Tell us your word. And just a short explanation why.
Tenacity. I actually wrote this. We wrote these at an event here many months ago. But I really do believe, you know, when people say to me, what is. If there is a word that you can apply to entrepreneurs, what is that word? And the thing I love about this word, anybody can develop this. Right. I don't think you're actually necessarily born with tenacity. Right. I mean, I do believe that anybody can actually teach themself to have tenacity. And so for me, what it really means is what I said earlier, that idea that somebody tells you you're a dumb ass or doesn't want to fund you or doesn't. I can't tell. You had so many meetings with venture capitalists trying to raise money. Part of the reason we went six years without venture capital is because we tried to raise it and nobody gave it to us, which was actually a blessing in disguise, because if they had given us the money, they probably would have fired me in the first year or something for being an inexperienced CEO. But because we bootstrapped the company, I got to learn for six years, and then they actually liked me. But I really believe that you have to learn to just keep getting back up again and getting back up again and getting back up again. And if you do that, one of those times, somebody actually won't keep pushing you down. And so that's my word.
It's a good word.
Good word.
All right.
Yes.
Are you ready for the reveal?
The big reveal. Mine. Sweat the details. So what do I mean by that? So often when you're building a company, you do things that aren't scalable up front so that they can be scalable tomorrow. I remember when we were first trying to get to our first hundred customers. It was so hard and that those I had a board, a cardboard. It looked like this. And I would color it in every day to try. And when we got to 100 people, we were going to take everyone to Vegas. Our team, which there was five of us. And I remember those first hundred people. I did Skype calls every time somebody signed up. What did they learn? Why did they sign up? What did they like about it? And again, obviously, today we're not doing Skype calls with every time a customer signs up. But early on, we did it for a long time because you learn And a survey is not the same as physically talking to somebody. Today our marketing team was trying something figure out and I was like, well, have you looked at the list of customers who have signed up the last week and just gone through? They're like, well, there's 12,000 that signed up yesterday. I was like, 12,000 is not that many. You can go line by line and spot the patterns. And they're like, that's not scalable. I was like, to get to scalable things, you have to sweat the details and do unscalable things at first. And it's these things where you do things that are unprofitable to make them profitable. And again, you can't write programs or abstract unless you get into the details. And so for the long time I did customer support for Cloudflare, I don't anymore, but I still chime into a support channel once in a while just because it's like you want to be there in the details. And again, I think that's actually what I love most about my job. So sweat the details. It matters.
