A founder showed up barefoot to a billionaire's office to prove his unconventional style. The billionaire laughed and walked away. The speaker realizes his rebel pattern, useful as a scrappy startup founder, now costs him deals as his business scales.
One of my deeply ingrained patterns was something I call the rebel pattern. One time I had a meeting with a billionaire and he came to my office about noon and I wanted to show him how cool I was and that I operated in a different way. And I was actually barefoot and I offered him a drink at noon. He was like, "I've got 7 more meetings today," and basically laughed me out of the room. He turned down the deal and walked out. And in that moment, I realized that maybe my rebel pattern was no longer serving me in the way that it had when I was a scrappy startup. I found that by bucking the system and doing things a different way, I would actually get ahead as an entrepreneur because I wasn't stuck to the normal way of operating and I was able to think outside the box and go in different directions than the other companies in my industry. However, as we started to grow from like a small fish to a medium fish, I started to find that my rebel pattern would come out and started costing me deals.
