410 Founders, Keepers: Rich Hagberg & Tien Tzuo on the Data-Backed Truth About Entrepreneurship

Thanks for pressing play. If you love the serendipitous magic that can only occur in a real conversation, you're in the right place. This is Christopher Lockhead Follow youw Different the number one real dialogue oddcast for business leaders, entrepreneurs and category designers with a different mind, Our guests today are the legendary Rich Hagberg and Tien Tsuo. Rich Hagberg, a renowned psychologist and founder, has dedicated his career to understanding the unique characteristics of successful leaders. He has an extensive background in leadership development, having coached over 200 founders since 2009. His groundbreaking work, which began in 1986, involves studying the best leaders and analyzing vast amounts of personality and 360 degree feedback data to identify clear patterns and differentiating factors in leadership. Tien Tzuo, an accomplished entrepreneur himself, brings a wealth of experience from the startup and tech community, having founded his first company in 2008 and having worked closely with Rich on this profound research. Together, Rich and Tien have co authored a transformative book, Founders Keepers, why Founders Are Built to Fail and what It Takes to Succeed that delves into the fascinating world of, you guessed it, founders. They explore the idea that while founders are the engines of innovation and progress, they also face inherent challenges which are described as a double edged sword. Their work goes beyond mere opinion, applying a data science oriented perspective to unveil critical insights into why some founders succeed while others blow up. They aim to help founders overcome these ticking time bombs by providing a framework based on decades of accumulated data and experience. Rich and Tien delve into numerous crucial topics for aspiring and current founders. They emphasize the paramount importance of self awareness, highlighting that successful founders are notably more reflective and actively seek feedback, learning from past successes and failures. We explore three key clusters of the visionary evangelist, the relationship builder and the manager of execution, and how founders often excel in vision but struggle with execution and relationships and so much more. Get ready to challenge your assumptions about leadership and discover what it truly takes to build a thriving enterprise. But first, are you ready to unlock the ultimate superpower in business Category Design Enter the world of the Category Pirates. Discover how to create transformative futures and dominate markets with the premier newsletter crafted by and for Pirates. Head to CategoryPirates.com and set your business on the path to greatness. But wait, there's more. Newsletter subscribers now get access to free audio mini books and while you're there, explore all our books and new courses. It's the motherload of category design treasure. Join the Category Pirates today@categorypirates.com now. Hey ho, let's Go.

Well, hello gentlemen. It sure is a pleasure to see both of you.

Good to see you.

Good to see you, Chris.

I've been very much looking forward to this conversation. And so is there anywhere particular that you'd like to start? I have a lot of questions for you, but is there anywhere special you'd like to start?

Well, I think Rich and I were inspired to write this book because we're a big, big believer that founders create a lot of the innovation and progress in the world. But they're also a double edged sword for every founder that's successful. A lot of founders blow up. And so Rich has spent the better part of a couple decades, or better part of decades with a model, if you will, about how leaders are successful that he's apply to founders. And we got some amazing insights by pouring through his data that we put in this book. And so we're inspired by founders. We want to help founders be successful. That's why we wrote the book and we're eager to, to talk to your listeners.

Well, and the interesting thing about your work is, I mean obviously you're an incredibly accomplished entrepreneur yourself and you guys have brought a data, data science oriented point of view and perspective and a set of research to this as opposed to a bunch of people who are successful in business and write a book about their opinion about what it takes to be successful without much data.

Yeah, Starting in about 1986, I started studying best leaders and I had personality data and 360 data and I saw some really clear patterns and there was a lot of differentiation. I'm a founder myself as well as a psychologist. And so I started a company in 1984 that I sold 22 years later to Accenture. And I recognized as I started studying founders that we shared a lot of characteristics. In fact, my profile overlays with the average founder profile almost exactly. After I sold my company, I decided that if I was going to continue coaching leaders that I wanted to focus on startups. So between 2009 and today I've coached around 200 founders. But the data, we had data where we could get multiple of invested capital so we could see financial success of about 122 founders. And we had a lot of data on personality. We measured over 50 elements of personality. So you know, Myers Briggs measures four and we had about 46 different competencies. On a 360 the average person was being rated by about 12 raters. So when we started to crunch it and take a look at what came out, absolutely crystal clear profile of founders and what we could also see is that some of the traits that made founders founders also got in the way of their success at a certain point. And so we call that the ticking time bomb. And the more fascinating piece even beyond that was when we looked at the difference between successful founders and unsuccessful founders, and we could see absolutely the reason that the successful founders blew up. So founders in general have certain issues, but unsuccessful founders seem to have very clear issues that get in their way.

Chris, I see you smiling, right? You've been around the startup and tech community for a long, long time, so probably this is resonate, like, you know, you're very much a founder yourself. So imagine when you read the personalities in the book, you're like, oh, my God, this is. This is me. And so this is the experience we get.

Very much so. Consuming your work, listening to you guys on a few other podcasts, I just. Some waves feel like putting me in front of a mirror or putting me on a scale or something like that. I started my first company at 18, when I got thrown out of high school and had nothing, you know, better to do in life. And so I'm curious, guys, if I came to you today, let's say I was a new founder, and I was starting my first venture, and I said, I want to be the greatest founder that I'm capable of being. What might you advise me to do?

Gosh, I mean, that is the story, maybe as Rich is thinking about this. So I was the second founder that Rich has worked with. He started doing in 2009. I think we started working with Rich in 2010 or so. And I started my company in 2008, and, you know, two years in, we were about 100, 150 employees. And, you know, the company rocketed to where it was really quickly, but it was falling apart. You know, my. My employees were grumbling. They were saying, we have no values. We've. We used to have a great culture, and it's gone away, and management isn't an ivory tower and, you know, all sorts of issues. And it just felt like as a founder, it used to be everything I go in and fix gets fixed, and now everything I get involved with falls apart. And so, you know, so Peter.

Peter Fenton, it must be you.

Well, look, you know, as a founder, you kind of deny that for a while, right? So. So Peter Fenton said, look, there's this guy, Richard Hagberg. I just worked with him, with this guy Lyle Fong, and you got to go meet him.

I know Lyle, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

So Yeah, I met him back in those days. Yeah, back in those, the Fenton days. Yeah, that's right. What's the name of his company?

Lithium EC now, I guess, in, in London.

Oh, good for him. I always liked him.

He just got married. If Casey's listening.

Oh, well, congratulations to him. And yeah, we never ended up doing much together, but I really did like Lyle and of course Fenton's. Fenton.

So. So, yeah, and Fenton wrote the preview of our book. And it's because of this, right? Because look, I, I hit a wall. I was a ticking time bomb and it was counting down to zero. And Rich really started working with me and helped me conquer, you know, what I was going through. Then around, you know, hey, look, you got to build a team. You got to be clear about priorities. You got to value systems. And, you know, these are all the things that out of those 46 competencies, these are the four to five that bubbled up for, for me. But what I loved about this was, was Rich had a framework. And that framework is something I've used for the last, you know, 15 plus years. I actually asked my executives to go through Rich's framework so I can actually have an X ray into their leadership style. Right. Which is very different than a founder. But I understand that the components that they bring to, to, to, to the company. And so, you know, Rich, I, I'll let you answer about what would you advise a brand new founder. But hopefully, hopefully one of the things is you got to read the book.

First of all, I'd say that you've got to recognize what your superpower is and also recognize that you can't do it all. When I started studying leadership, these three clusters of skills showed up. We call that the visionary evangelist, the relationship builder, the manager of execution. And Tina and I are both classic visionary evangelists. We're like Steve Jobs people, the big picture guys, the creative people, good at inspiring people, good at taking charge. In fact, we can't help but do that, fall in love with our, with our creation.

The category pirates.

Yeah, and I know, I know you are, Tina. I saw you present, I can't remember which conference it was, but it was a Wall street analyst type conference. It was before you guys were public, obviously, before the acquisition. And you got, you were fairly early on, I don't know, maybe three or four years in. And as a category designer, I remember sitting there watching, going, this guy is running the exact how to design and dominate a category playbook.

Right.

It was incredible watching you build that company.

I appreciate it, but that's I didn't

mean to interrupt you, Rich.

No, no, like that's just got excited. That's what visionary leaders do, right? That's what. No.

And that's what you did. I remember the presentation like it was yesterday. I don't remember all the details, but the subscription economy and this is the future and you know, and this was long before sort of subscribing on Amazon became a common practice. And, and certainly streaming was happening, but nowhere the level that it is now.

And so right before Netflix with Spotify just came on the scene.

But yeah. When would you have been in the early days have been sort of speaking at investor type conferences. When might that have been? Tien?

It was a little weird because I was doing a lot of the conferences at Salesforce, the ones that Benioff didn't want to do. So I wound up knowing a lot of the Wall street folks. So we started talking at conferences before we even had revenue, which is a little odd.

Okay, that would make sense because the speech I saw you give was a classic visionary category. Designer, new way of thinking about business, new problem, new opportunity, subscriptions of the future, et cetera, et cetera.

That's right. So the advice is probably, look, as a founder, you're going to have some innate skills to do that. But let's talk about the other side of the equation.

Yeah. So there are a couple of things missing. I mean, the second category is relationship builder. And founders as a group are at best on mean. The unsuccessful founders are a little bit low. The successful founders are like, you know, one point above the mean on emotional intelligence. And you know, but all of them, there are rare exceptions, are lousy when it comes to managing execution, making the trains run on time, putting in place systems and processes, being disciplined, running a decision process and a strategy process to get around your biases and all of that stuff. The implementation is not a natural act for most founders. Now a few of them it is. I mean Bezos is probably high vision and high execution. He was probably medium low to low on relationship, but improved. Yeah, probably low jobs was. He didn't even register until. Until he got fired and came back. And he went through a transition in a. But then he was probably still below average. So that's the ticking time bomb. And you have to recognize that at some point you're either going to have to bring in a coo, you're going to have to put managers of execution in the key functions, but somehow you're going to have to address that or else you're destined to take the company down or at least limit its growth. And you're probably going to get pushed out by the board. And I'll say one last thing. Founders all the time say to me, well, I'm going to be the exception and good luck. Divergent thinkers, creative divergent thinkers are not good, convergent thinkers.

Well, just to give you a feel, right. Rich's process has you take this, this, this really long self assessment questionnaire that he basically dissects your personality and then what he does and you know, it's modern data science, right. But, but he was, he's been doing this for decades. He takes your personality profile and he predicts what your leaders, he predicts what people will say about you in your leadership style. And he predicts it with enormous accuracy. So why is that important? Because, yeah, I did the same thing. I looked at the leaders like, oh, it's not me, it's supposed to be other people. Right. I'm the exception. And Rich says, no, no, like, let me. Your personality is completely connected to this. And so, you know, this is who you are. And then, you know, the story I always hear is you run back home and you know, you talk to your, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your spouse, and they say, well, look, this is exactly who you are. And so you get confirmation back at home. And then there's no denying it, Right. At that point, you either, you know, if you're going to continue to deny it, you're never going to embrace it.

Isn't it always fascinating TN that we're experts on what's wrong and how all others can improve?

That's right.

But we, we see ourselves as we're perfect. And your spouse and your colleagues say remarkably similar things now, don't they?

Yeah.

When they get together and they, they start comparing notes, you're like, oh, this is exactly who you are.

And did they have to plan an intervention with you via Rich or something?

We call ourselves recovering founders.

Yeah, intervention.

But Rich needed an intervention. Right, Rich? Rich also needed very much so.

I've often thought that for founders and really executives of any kind, but founders especially, being self actualized is really important. That is to say, knowing oneself and living as one's true self and focusing on one's biggest areas of strength and leverage. And that also comes with an acute understanding of one's weaknesses. And one of the things that seems to come through in your work to me is sort of this assessment of self and brutal honesty around strengths and weaknesses and therefore how you amplify the strengths and sort of compensate or ameliorate the weaknesses. But I'd love for you to unpack all that for me.

Okay. First of all, I want to agree with you that self awareness is important. And in fact, when we looked at what the differentiating factors were, the successful founders had received a lot of feedback. They'd learned from it. And really interestingly, on a personality item and a personality scale that measures reflectiveness, the successful founders were more reflective than the unsuccessful founders. And there's an item that just is mind blowing. The successful founders said, strongly agree to a statement, I frequently reflect upon my past successes and failures. The unsuccessful founders disagreed with that statement. So the successful founders seek feedback out. They're learners. They want to get better, and they recognize that what got us here won't get us there. Right? That's a theme from the book. As my mother said, you can only be nicer than you really are for just so long. And it's true of all of us. And we have to recognize what we're good at and what we're good at.

I love your mother, Rich. Yeah, love her.

She told me that at the wedding reception, Our first wedding reception, anyway.

Was it in reference to you or your spouse?

It was her philosophy of life. It was basically, she was saying, you got to be who you are. What happens to that self awareness is that you then can hire people who compliment you, you can hire people who are different, but then you've got to be able to listen to them. The single biggest difference between the successful and unsuccessful was adaptability. I mean, you never have permanent product market fit. And if you're going to ignore the feedback your customers are giving you on your product and not make adjustments, you're going to have problems. It's Darwin at work. The survival of the fittest. And it looks like the successful founders are more willing to adapt. And the unsuccessful founders are stubborn. They reject the feedback. They create a reality distortion field, because nobody will tell the emperor he's got no clothes, right? So this adaptability and willingness to learn is a real key.

So when I saw that in your work, that sounded right to me. But it also popped up a question in my mind. So you guys probably know my buddy Mike Maples from floodgate, and he says an interesting thing about this. He says the most visionary founders are visitors from the future telling us how it's going to be. And another way I think about it is as category designing. Founders in particular, they're creating different futures and, and the delta between the present, that is to say, the status quo. And the different future makes them absolutely batshit. And that's maybe a big part of why they're irascible, because they see this giant gap and they can't live in a world where the future that they see isn't coming to pass quickly enough.

It's true. But, but, but the few people don't don't. It doesn't equate with the 122 that we looked at where the people with 10x returns were more adaptable and more willing to listen to feedback. They were still creative.

But how do you walk that line between the famous jobs line, Our customers don't know what we want until we tell them. So there's a part of this that is about being visionary. Tian going out there talking about the subscription economy, that everything was moving to services and that we had to have the enterprise applications to support the new business model. That's a visionary set of statements. And so in the beginning, it's easy to get, quote, feedback that says, hey, yeah, Sienna, that sounds really interesting and everything, but I don't think anybody's gonna buy that.

This is a total mystery to us. I mean, just to give you a flavor, right, we had all this data and so we separated our founders into successful and unsuccessful. And we try to bring this down in the book, right? We're almost like archaeologists sifting through a bunch of data and try to reconstruct what's going on. But that was the mystery. Where aren't all founders adaptable? And what we found is, well, they might be, but the company gets really complex really fast. So when you're coming up the initial idea, the initial product market fit, maybe you're under 30 people, right? Yeah, you can go with your instincts, but at some point you just don't have all the data. And so to continue to do what you do, you have to learn how to really listen, right to, to, to the people around you. What is sales saying? What is product saying, what is marketing saying? And then once you sort of see the answer, you've got to convince them that of what it is. And so your ability to be openness to input, your ability to be able to get buy in, these are all actually components of adaptability that turns out to be important. So it's not that you are adaptable, but you actually can build an adaptable organization.

Well, let me add one thing into this, and that is that the average score for all founders is above average on adaptability. But the unsuccessful ones are stubborn muleheads and they fall in love with their product. And they don't listen to input at all, whether it's from customers or whether it's from their team. And it's their stubbornness and their ego. They need to be right. Their need to be right prevents them from looking at the facts. And ultimately the facts are going to win.

Rich, I love this part of the conversation. This is not my idea, but I once heard it said that most people would rather be right than successful.

Yeah, yeah, that is.

That is. You can see it in the data. That is the kiss of death. That's one of the things that causes the bomb to.

And it comes right out in the work, does it not?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The other thing is it comes out in decision making, because what happens is founders are strong personalities and they can be intimidating. And the unsuccessful ones are less emotional and more intimidating. And so what happens is the unsuccessful ones. Unsuccessful ones are more intimidating.

Right. More intimidating, more quote, unquote, scary.

They're scary. And so they don't. Nobody tells. It tells them, nobody disagrees with them. And so their biases. And there's been lots of research on decision making bias. They have strong biases that nobody is able to challenge. So rather than saying, if we followed my point, my idea, what could go wrong? What have I not thought about? What assumptions am I making that probably need to be challenged? Nobody's willing to do that. They don't create an environment that's safe. Right. So people can't disagree.

Can I ask you a little specific kind of drill down on this? So one of the things, you know, I like, I would imagine you two get invited to meetings with new founding teams and so forth on a somewhat regular basis. And one of the things I like to do in that those initial meetings is watch to see where the founder or founders, in what order they speak on a certain topic.

It's true. That's a good. It's definitely a good point.

And I'm always. I'm always looking for the founder that speaks last as opposed to.

That's right.

And I'm always surprised, even today that many founders speak first or early. And I grew up at a time I was taught this, that you, as the senior person or one of the senior people in the room, founder or no founder, you're the last person to talk. Because whatever you say to the Emperor's New Clothes comment you made earlier, Rich, is you're gonna. You're gonna taint the room when you go, oh, that's a great idea, or that's a stupid idea, as opposed to Shutting up and letting everybody else be free and synthesizing what they're saying and considering what you might say. So I'm curious, is it. Am I overreacting to a hotel like that?

There's a whole. There's a whole chapter in the book when we talk about the top 10 skills that. That investors are looking for founders to have, one of them is team building. And, you know, that was my story. That was one of the things when I met Rich is I got consistent feedback that I was not building, I was not taking my executive team. I hired these great folks, and I wasn't weaving them together as a team. And then I saw that I was part of the problem. Because you're absolutely right. I would speak first because I had some idea in my head, right, that I want to make sure that I'm communicating.

And you're the founder, you're the mayor, you're the man.

That's right. And everybody. Everybody just shuts up. And so I had to teach myself, like. Like, don't do that. So for a while, I was like, speak last. I did another thing where, like, I just asked questions. I'm only allowed to ask questions. And that changes the whole dynamic. And I'll share a Benioff story, right? This is, you know, we're small, we're 300 people or maybe a hundred people. And it's a classic, you know, back then, Benioff texts you at 9pm and says he'll call me. And then, you know, there's some issue. And then he goes, so what else is going on? So I blurt out something, and he goes, okay, that's interesting. What else is going on? And by the third time he's asking you what else is going on, like, you're running out of ideas. And so then, like, poof, something comes out of your mouth. And I forget what it was, right? Back then, it was like, well, I'm a little worried about how many, like, Team Edition licenses we're selling. And he goes, got it. And the next morning, I come to the office and like, it's one of these classic things is Benioff is on the warpath because we're not selling enough Team Edition licenses. And I was like, oh, well, I better lay low so people don't realize it was me.

I created a monster overnight and didn't know it.

But he loved to solicit information, right? So how do you create structures around to let people to talk? And how do you draw it out of people and doing a consistent basis? And it doesn't necessarily come natural to founders, but it's one of the things that is good for them to learn.

Yeah. It's called sunflower bias. And you're the sun. And as you move about the sky, all the little flowers turn and face you. That's what happens in meetings. I love that you have to ask disconfirming questions. What could go wrong? What have I ignored? It's the only way.

And you guys talk about this. So I'm wondering if we could maybe pop the hood on a curious mindset.

Yeah.

Like when somebody disagrees with you or disagrees with you very strongly rather than do what is my natural inclination, which is to pound them into the ground up, say, huh, that's interesting. Tell me more about why you think that or why you feel that. And so maybe pop the hood for me a little bit, guys, on the connection between curiosity and these other skills that we're talking about.

Well, if you think you have the answer, then you aren't going to be curious if you think you. Well, the unsuccessful founders think they're more capable than other people. One of the items on the test is about, I feel I'm more capable than my coworkers. So there's this level of arrogance in the unsuccessful founders. I mean, all founders are overconfident, and overconfidence bias can kill you. But. But the level of arrogance in unsuccessful founders tells us that the reason they don't listen and want to learn is they don't think they have anything to learn. Right.

That's probably a key lesson in the book. Right. All founders are visionaries. All founders like to work out the problem. They work incredibly hard. Right. You know, most of them know how to deal with stress. They are naturally curious. They want to break the status quo. But what happens when those things catches up to them and it trips them, it trips them up. Right. And that's why we have this, this, this landmine or ticking time bond mentality. And so part of the journey is to understand those things and then try to find ways to compensate it. But also ultimately, and you know, this is the key theme of the book, to realize that you will be at best mediocre in the things that you're just naturally weak at because, you know, your personality. It's not like you had 30 years at GE or HP to hone your skills in a big company. Right. You know, a lot of these founders are in their 20s. They've never worked in a large company. And so the idea that you're going to become great in something that you were naturally weak at. It's just not realistic. And so, like, for me, that meant for a while, you know, because I was a high vision, low relationship, medium execution with Rich's framework and, you know, for like two weeks, like, what does that mean? I'm a low relationship. Right. Like, I've got good relationships, my family, my friends and. But you.

Somebody gave you a bunch of money to start the company and build the company, and a bunch of people left their jobs and joined you. So how can you not be good at relationships?

That's right. That's right. So although Rich wants to. Yeah, like, tell it. What was I like? Rich?

Well, one of the other differentiators is working through others, and a big piece of that is not just being persuasive and a good storyteller, which is what founders are, but it's really understanding your team and the people around you, reading the signals, increasing your probably unnatural emotional intelligence to make it at least average and not treating people in a transactional way. You know, you've got to build a team of people who feel bonded and hopefully bonded with you. And if they feel that you're just using them as a piece of machinery, then they're not going to feel much attachment to you.

Yeah.

And what's really interesting is the unsuccessful ones believe that sort of it's a survival of the fittest world. They had that assumption. It's kind of a. It's a, it's a. It's a world where you got to look out for yourself.

Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that we wind up putting the book because, you know, Paul Graham, it wrote the, the founder mode post, and we had strong opinions about, you know, what Jobs is, what really made Jobs successful and what really made, you know, Elon Musk successful. And it's not all the stuff that you hear in the press about how, how rude he was, how he's throwing things at people. Right. And we wanted to debunk that myth because we were worried that that founder mode was giving. And this wasn't Paul's intention. Right. But it was giving a bunch of founders license to be assholes. And that just doesn't work. And so what you find is, is actually, you know, these founders are successful because they overcame those limitations. Right. Jobs had to be humbled when he tried to start next, right. When he thought he could start a new company to take on Apple. So by the time he came back, you can see he really, really valued. Right. Skills that Tim Cook brought Johnny Ize brought and he did a much better job harnessing a team. And the fact that the company is still thriving, what is it, close to 10 years since job passed, means that he installed a really, really good team and the team was able to take the company, to continue to take the company to the next level.

Well, it's interesting you say that because while I didn't know Steve Jobs, I did know Bill Campbell and I did know Mike Homer and a bunch of other people who worked with and around and so forth Jobs. And it strikes me in my conversations with Bill in particular, that that's very much what happened over time, that there was some acknowledgment of my our success only comes through others. Other people make you successful. You can't sit in a room by yourself and bark orders and have things happen. Yeah. And so there was something about, you know, Bill being so famously a coach and so forth that some of that rubbed off. But I'm curious as to your reaction.

Oh, I've heard the same thing about him, that he came back, he got married, later he got sick. When he was at Pixar, he was exposed to, I guess, one of the co founders of Pixar, and he taught him about empathy. But look, you gotta be able to work through others. That's one of the other characteristics of successful they build teams, they build relationships, but they are willing to delegate and let go. Now, that doesn't mean abdicate. We've got a chapter where we look together at delegation and empowerment and holding people accountable. And if you delegate but you don't hold people accountable, you're just tossing it over the wall and hoping it happens. So you have to trust, but verify. And then you have to coach them. Then you have to coach them.

And I think that was Brian's core message. Right. If you look at Brian's core messages, he spent a lot of time in the detail with his executives. He wasn't undermining them, but he got into the detail. He worked side by side with them, and then he used his powers as a founder to align the whole organization so that the whole organization can move fast.

Yep.

So one of our favorite sayings around here is, the more you love your work, the more you're going to fall in love with the people you work with.

Right.

And you know, many of us grew up at a time where we were told, oh, you got to keep business and personal separate and all this kind of stuff. And in my life, many of the people I love the most in the world that I spend the most time with that I cherish the most are people I met first in business, some of whom I still work with and some of whom have just become friends. And maybe we don't work together anymore. And so maybe talk to me about that about sort of the old school notion of, oh no, it's just business, Jim, versus allowing yourself to. On one hand, we're going to hold each other accountable. And at the same time, you know, if we love the work, we're kind of going to fall in love with each other because we're doing something that's important to you and me. And hopefully one plus one equals 10, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm just curious as to both your reactions.

Let me tell you a story. In the mid-80s, I was working for a guy who for the first 15 years I coached. His nickname was Bottom Line Bob. He was the best leader that I had worked with. And bottom Line Bob had the ability to challenge the hell out of you, but then be there to support you. So that combination of challenge and support was the key. He was first team all American basketball player. He shot 91% free throws through a four year career in college. But what I saw in him was that his natural tendency was to be the star. But what he'd learned from all the great coaches that he'd worked with, who had, who had coached him over the years, that okay, I gotta challenge these people, but I need to be there to support them. So I gotta be clear about what I expect and what my standard of excellence is. But I need to be there to help them see that I've got their back. There are a couple of other differentiators. One of them is scaling. And as companies get bigger and more complex, systems and processes and structure become important. And founders as a group are allergic to structure. And as a result, of course we are. Yeah. And as a re. Because puts up boundaries. Right. They don't like, don't hold me back,

brother, don't hold me back.

Don't fence me in. But, but it'll be chaos if you don't start scaling up the processes. And, and that's where the managers of execution come in. But f. Founders may hire a manager of execution, but if they, they frustrate them and don't let them do their job, or the person suggests that maybe you have a job description and you say that's bureaucracy. Only big companies do that, that's going to be a problem. And one of the most interesting things that Tina and I didn't discover until we published the book in June, but last November or something. I was looking at the data on why the unsuccessful ones were bad at re engineering processes and it jumped right out of. We've got hundreds of thousands of pages of comments too. Not just data, not just quantitative data. And it just popped out at me. The unsuccessful founders were. Waited for things to break. The successful founders got ahead of it. So that's the scaling and it's necessary in order for the company to thrive, especially in fast growth, that things will be chaos if you don't put that in place. And then the last is personal grounding. And personal grounding is. Well, startups are a killing field. They're super stressful. You end up working ridiculous hours and getting stressed. And a lot of founders don't deal with that well. They deal with it with drugs and alcohol and all kinds of other unhealthy ways of dealing with it. And it affects them at work. They get irritable, their emotions cloud their decision making.

They can gain a lot of weight, a lot of them eat terribly. I've been through that myself.

Well, I just talked to a founder, he said he got five hours of sleep and he said, you know, I'll get some sleep in six months. I was like, no, you're not. Like once you're on this journey, it never ends. So you can't think like that. You gotta.

Bad idea, right?

Yeah.

You know, whether it's exercise or yoga or I meditate twice a day. That's, that's a piece of personal grounding. The other piece, which is really important or I published an article this morning in a fast company on all the founders that get indicted. The successful founders got higher ratings on the 360 on model of values. They have higher integrity. The unsuccessful founders are more likely to be narcissistic and cross the ethical line. Not all of them.

So I know you guys also touch on the impact of this data and these insights on VCs. If I was a VC investing in FTX, could I help use your framework to uncover.

That's pretty fascinating. I mean we started writing this book for founders because those are richest clients and that's the pattern. But the real interest, definitely the VCs were super interested because you know how it is, right. They're putting all these dollars behind a founder and they have this portfolio model either go big or it blows up. And they want to know, they want to know that the founder of their backing is. When is that going to go all the way?

Yeah. So am I dealing with a Sam Bankman, Fried. Am I dealing with an Elizabeth Holmes?

If you really believe that results are everything and it doesn't matter whether or not how you get those results, fake it to your make till you make it. You know that that's, that that's part of the, the culture of Silicon Valley.

Yeah. So we do have VCs now that want to put all their founders through.

Sure.

Well, you've created the. If this is unfair, Rich, you tell me, but the sort of the maximized Myers Briggs for startup founders.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good way of thinking about it.

Yeah. We use machine learning to actually do the predictions.

Well, of course.

Right.

I mean, I know you guys are far from dumb and when you start to pump the data that you've been amassing for quite some time now and you start to put this thing into AI and you start to look for trends and I mean, we all understand because we're living in, in the tech world and deeply I assume as, as, as I am, you guys are in AI and building custom LLMs and this kind of stuff, I gotta believe this kind of insight dumped into a tuned AI is incredibly valuable for the individual being evaluated and of course for everybody else.

There's a story I gotta tell you. I plugged in the machine learning and I had a client who I sent it to and he says, oh, this is all wrong. And I said, really? Let's take a look and put it side by side with your real 360. And almost, I mean, it's 46 competencies. The bottom 10, there was about a 9 out of 10 overlap and they were almost in order, same thing at the top.

And it's like, oh, oh, EI doesn't get it wrong.

Right.

It's quite fascinating, isn't it? It's predicting diseases much more effectively than doctors. So we shouldn't be surprised to hear that. Teen. I know you gotta go, right? Is there anything else, gentlemen, before we wrap?

You know, we're both part, you know, we're all three of us part of this Silicon Valley innovation, founder driven ecosystem. And so we all know, you know, what it's like culturally and why Combinator is producing more and more of these, you know, every single year, as well as all the other incubators and accelerators. And so this is a big, big part of the future. We quote statistics that say, hey, countries that invest, invest in innovation in tech, you know, like US and China, have an outsized performance against countries that have not. And so this is the future.

I'm terrified about Europe, Dean.

Yeah, Terrified. It's true. It's true. And you see, you know, the VC's trying to invest there and be successful and there's some successes, but the infrastructure is just not.

Many of them have packed up and come home.

They come here. They do, they move.

They come back. Yeah. Well, gentlemen, I can't thank you enough for the time and for writing this book. It's so useful and it's so far beyond the arm waving, opinionated bullshit that is omnipresent in the world as it relates to personal growth and business growth. And deeply, what you're doing is a wonderful combination of personal experience. With data.

That's right.

With research.

Yeah, that's right.

It's incredibly valuable.

We didn't write it to be autobiographical, but it was. We realized it was therapeutic.

Of course you're going to do your own self, you know, we only teach what we most need to know. Right. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much for this time. I deeply appreciate it and you're both welcome back anytime.

Okay? Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Take care.

That was the legendary Rich Hagberg and Tien suo. To learn more about Rich and Tien and their incredible must read new book, Founders Keepers, why Founders Are Built to Fail and what It Takes to Succeed. Please see the show notes on your podcast player or visit lockhead.com don't forget, podcasts make great gifts. Share two podcasts you love with two people you love and make sure you follow us today on your podcast player of choice. We'd like to thank you. We appreciate you investing part of your life with us. Before you go, ask yourself, are you building your dream or someone else's? Discover the secrets to shaping transformative future futures and conquering markets with the premier newsletter designed by Pirates for Pirates. Navigate your business towards greatness by heading to categorypirates.com and here's the treasure you've been waiting for. Newsletter subscribers now get exclusive access to free audio mini books. While you're there, dive into our treasure chest of books and brand new courses. This isn't just a resource, it's the motherlode of category design gold. Don't wait. Claim your place among the Pirates today@categorypirates.com. are you drowning in to DOS? Is your time too valuable to waste on busy work? Well, reclaim your day with a dedicated, distant assistant from Bottleneck Online. No more late nights or endless task lists. Just smart, efficient support from a remote pro who gets it done. From admin to analysis, Bottleneck's assistants deliver precision, speed, and peace of mind. Less stress, more results. Total game changer. Hire your dedicated distant assistant today at Bottleneck Online and finally, work on your business and not in it. What if your best salesperson could pitch every customer every time? Well now they can with a website by atrainet Atre Net isn't your average web design shop. They're the category killer. The agency B2B tech companies have trusted for over 2026 years to build brands that lead, last and dominate. Every atrainet site is purpose built, a bespoke digital flagship that captures your culture, sharpens your story and sets a new bar in your space. Not templates, not trends, just handcrafted strategy, design and execution that moves the needle more than a vendor, atrainet becomes part of your team. They bring the speed, smart and strategic firepower you'd expect from an in house crew minus the overhead. From Silicon Valley giants to scrappy startups, the best in B2B trust Atreenet to own the category and tell their story like no one else can. Visit ATRE.net and make your website your unfair advantage. That's ATRE.net today's information is provided to you solely for informational purposes. This oddcast is the sole property of the Lockette Oddcast Network and it contains content known to the State of California to cause radically non obvious thinking, new categories and exponential results. All oddcasts contain nuts. All rights disturbed. Please contact your doctor, lawyer, accountant, yoga instructor, shaman and category designer before doing anything about anything you hear here today. Everything is the way that it is because somebody legendary changed the way that it was Produced in The edited by me Jason DeFilippo, Sarah Knox and Jamie J handle the website and technical execution. Show notes by GM Simon RJ and Ex Bobas do our web development. Cedric Biros does our graphic and web design. Our law firm is Weed and Jack, our accountants are three balance sheets to the wind. We record on SquadCast FM. Jello Biafra was right. Listen to the wonder stuff. Thanks Candy, Dandy and hey Gollin. This outcast really ties the room together. Our deepest apologies go out to Andrew Tate. Sorry Andy, we just ran out of time for you. Till next time, stay safe, stay legendary and follow your different.