#326 The Growth Gamechanger: Insights on Marketing, GTM, and Leadership with Robin Daniels

But then within that, you have to understand if you're going to lead people, what drives people, what motivates people? Some people do their work because they want to look after their family. Some do it because they want to. They're proud of the work they do. So some people get rich. And that's a fine thing too. You know, everyone is different. Until you understand the true motivation, it's very hard to actually motivate people to do the great job. Especially when you're putting teams together, right? So when you're intrinsically putting teams together, whether a five person team or ten person team around a special project, if everybody's coming at it from different motivations and it's very hard to have actually great outcomes. So you got to dig into that.

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Hello and welcome to this new episode of Bootstrapping your dreams show. I'm your host Manuj Agarwal and today we are going to have a very interesting conversation with Robin Daniels. And the list of accomplishments that Robin has is huge. So I'll try to summarize it as much as I can and then we'll dive in. Robin worked at Matterport and we worked as a CMO chief marketing officer. Prior to that he worked at LinkedIn as the global head of product partner Transformation marketing. Before that he worked at Vera and Sonata. Both of those companies got acquired. And from 2011 to 2014 Robin worked at Box as a global head of enterprise, product partner and industry and at Salesforce, the director of Product marketing. He has spent his career at industry defining tech companies in the United States and Europe and has over 20 years of business leadership marketing experience building high growth brands. And Robin is currently working with Sequoia Capital, one of the largest venture capital companies in the world, helping them scout next generation of companies and talent. And he's also the founding member advisor investor at by founders since 2017. So by founders is an early stage venture capital fund actively investing in tech startups across the Nordics and Baltics. And this is just scratching the surface of what Robin has done. So let's dive in. Welcome Robin. I'm so excited to have this conversation.

Thanks Manush. It's great to be here. And I think you and I have been trying to plan this for years now, and I'm glad we're finally making it happen across the world, as we say. But thanks for having me.

Yeah, I think. Absolutely. Yeah. We met about two. Two and a half years ago. I think Hollywood has released multiple more movies in the time frame that we have been trying to schedule this. This podcast. So, so great. So let's get to know you even better. Like, you have done so much, you have accomplished so much. So many like, two, two and a half IPOs, so we'll dive into that. But such a broad range of experience and success. How did it all get started? What is your story? You know, how did you get to where you are today?

Well, I'm definitely where I am because a lot of people along the way took a chance on me. You know, I didn't come from illustrious background. You know, I don't really have much of an education. I grew up kind of poor in Copenhagen, Denmark, to bohemian hippie parents and. But I learned very early on that, you know, I kind of had to fight for everything that I wanted to succeed in life. If everything I wanted to accomplish, I had to fight for. Nothing was kind of given to me. So I always had this kind of innate hunger to go out and forge my own way. And very early on in my life, I got interested in technology, and I always. I could just see the impact technology had on people's lives, and I loved tinkering around with it. I was kind of a nerd, you know, sitting and putting together my first, like, desktop computer, the memory and the motherboard and all that kind of stuff. And then learning how to program was super fun. And so I always knew my future lied in technology somehow. And then I started seeing the rise of what was happening in Silicon Valley in the 90s. I was reading articles in Time magazine and Businessweek and Newsweek online, whatever I could find. Just like, it seemed like this magical place to me that you could go. And it doesn't matter who you were, what background you had, doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, what education you had, as long as you had a good idea and you worked hard and you were good person, you could succeed. So it always kind of just attracted me a lot. And I thought, this is like the peak of what I want to be a part of. It feels like this is what it's calling to me. And so I ended up, you know, after school in Denmark, I ended up working at a tech company in Denmark, and it was so boring. It was definitely not what I'd read about in all these stories. It was like, felt like factory work. Even though I was working in a high tech company as a, as a Java programmer, it felt like factory work. If you were coming at 8:00 in the morning, 12:00 exactly, they would stop for lunch and then 4:00', clock, ah, doesn't matter what you're doing, the day's over. Leaving, like it feels like I'm in a factory. What the hell? I'm like, this is not what I thought my life was going to be. I thought it was going to be this intense journey and exciting adventure with peers who are just so excited about doing great work. So I ended up quitting my job and I bought a one way ticket to California. And I'd never been, I didn't have a job, I didn't know a single person. But I always felt like I didn't want to look back on my life when I was older and regret not having the courage to go there, living through this magical time that we were living in. So February 1, 2000, I moved over there to California. I landed in San Francisco. I had rented a room at a shitty hotel in San Jose because there's the only thing I could afford. I had enough money, I figured to last me like two months before I had to throw in the towel and go back to Denmark. But I applied to every job I could find on Craigslist and anybody who would talk to me. I figured, what? I have nothing to lose. I just want to talk to as many people as I can. So in the first two weeks or so, I had about 15, maybe 20 job interviews all over Silicon Valley. I had no idea how big the area was. I feel like I was just kind of like constantly stressed about running late for meetings. But after those two weeks, I ended up getting two job offers. I'm like, oh, great. So I ended up joining a small startup company in Los Gatos in Silicon Valley in February 2000. A month after I took the job, the whole market crashed and that company did not end up making it. And then I went to another company and that did not end up making it. But eventually I got to a bigger company in 2001 that was more stable and growing. And that's when I really feel like I got my start. But I really got my start in the first company. I ended up getting hired by the VP of marketing, this woman named Elise Simmerman. And she really had no experience, but she just took a chance on Me. And she saw something in me and she nurtured me and said, hey, even though I'm hiring you to be the web master web designer, as it was called back then, I think you'll be better than, like, product marketing. And I'm like, I have no idea what that is. And she kind of took me under her wing and showed me what that was. And I've always taken that mentality with me in every job I've had, because whenever I see young, hungry talent who just. Just need somebody to believe in them, those people usually go above and beyond. And so whether you look at my time at Salesforce or at LinkedIn or We Work, I've tried to hire people who just have that aptitude and grit and hunger. But anyway, so over the last span of like 20 years, even though not everything has worked out, luckily, I've ended up choosing some companies that became iconic companies in the last 20 years. Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn, WeWork. You know, even though that had some troubles, it's still around and I think still very beloved in my last company, Matterport, which we took public in July of 2021. But I ended up leaving that company at the end of last year, end of 2021. And since then I've been, as you very well mentioned in your intro, I've been advising companies, working with just as many companies as I can find to pay forward the experience that I have. I'm very much in the mindset of how can I help the next generation of people who are hungry for success and just don't know what that looks like? How can I mentor and guide them and help them think bigger about what's possible out there? Because that's what I did in my life. So that's the journey I've been on for the last couple of years.

That's an amazing journey. I think a few takeaways that I can, I can reiterate is like, you know, that, that first of all, thinking that it is possible for you, that hunger that you have to have because most people don't even believe in themselves, let alone, you know, others believing in them. And then as you said, like, finding those people, finding those mentors and coaches who can see something, because once again, like, even if we believe ourselves, it's like, you know, a rough slab of marble that needs to be chipped away and, you know, that David needs to come out of that. So it's great that you found it and now you are, you know, repeating the cycle and helping others. So that's amazing. Now what kind of, you know, because I know a little bit of your history as well. Like you talk about a lot of mistakes that, that are made in this, in this, you know, high pressure environment of startups. So what are some of the mistakes that you have made and learned important lessons from them?

Yeah, and one of the reasons I talk so much about mistakes is one, I want to normalize that it's normal to have mistakes. You're going to screw up a lot. I've screwed up a lot. And I think when you're in the mistake, it feels like the world is falling apart. Right. But it's not. You're going to get be fine, trust me. You know, so, so that's one thing. The second reason I do it is I love LinkedIn as a platform, but it also is a very polished linear platform. Makes it seem like everything for everybody is always up and to the right for you, for everybody else, like, oh, your career is just up and to the right. Your career is really like this in reality and it goes up and goes down. You have failures and you have successes and so trying to share some of that hopefully gives people some insight that this is not an always up into the right situation. It's never going to be, it's not going to be for you. You're going to have challenges. Whether or not that's working for a bad manager. You have a team issue, a program that you're putting out there that's not working out, there's going to be so many things. So that's the second reason I do it. But in terms of actual, I would say failures, the things that always have, I have most regrets about is usually about people when I haven't done the right thing for the people. Like sometimes marketing programs haven't worked out or a campaign hasn't worked out. And yeah, it sucks because it doesn't yield the result I want, but it's not the thing that keeps me up at night as much. It's more about if I have tension in the team and we're not executing really well and I want to solve that, or I have some assholes in the team and I need to deal with that, or I have somebody who's really good and I can tell they're on their verge of leaving because they're not, I'm not able to give them what they want. I had a great example at, at LinkedIn. That's somebody who worked for me. She was amazing. Everybody loved working with her and she, she went above and beyond and she Delivered really well. And she came to me and she said, you know, I'll. My results are great, I want to get promoted, what can I do? And we said, okay, here's what you need to do. And then I kind of like pushed it forward a little bit, but I was so busy with other things that I didn't really do enough about it. And then she came again, I think a few months later and said, hey, look at my results now. They're even better. I should get promoted. But LinkedIn was a big company. It's a very structured process about when you get promoted and so on. But the net result was I didn't move fast enough, I didn't fight hard enough for her. And she ended up leaving. It was just like, it took a toll on the culture because everybody liked her, took a toll on the performance. She was one of our rock stars and I could have done more, you know, yes, I'm in the confines and restrictions of a bigger company, but, you know, that's the job of a manager of a leader, is to fight for your team. You know, if that's not what you do, then what else? You're not just there to like move things around. So you see the people aspects of that. I regret, you know, people might look at my, my experience with we work and say, well, do you regret that? Well, not really, because I did everything I could. I always think of it. I write about this a lot on, on LinkedIn right now. You know, if you can control the inputs, you know, I, when I, if, if I can give it my all every day. And I'm proud of the work that I do and I'm proud of how I try to pull things together. It's the best I can do. Like, I'm not proud if I know that I'm kind of half assing it, but that's not my style. The outcome then is something I can't control. Like all the stuff around me. Of course I'm trying to affect the outcome by my actions, but at the end of the day, anybody who tells you they can control the outcome completely is delusional. It's just, it's just not. If you can have a better shot at a better outcome by the input, meaning your mindset, your actions, the way you treat people, the creativity you put into something, the energy you put into something. So it's a lot to be said for it. So when I look at the rework experience, yes, it was a failure when I was there from an outside perspective, but it was more a Failure. Because I think we as a team couldn't rally enough around, like, some of the things that we had to do. It wasn't so much around that the IPO didn't happen. Yeah, it kind of sucked. But that's not what I regret. It was more around some of the people stuff that we were kind of getting in each other's way. And so it's just, I think, to me, failures is much more around the people than the actual programs or outcomes of some of the stuff that we're doing. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, as a leader, I realize that, you know, we only have, like, one or two skills, like, which we are really, really good at, and the rest is the team. And if we don't take care of the team and they are not gelling well, nothing. The outcome, as you said, is not the best outcome. We can only put the odds in our favor, and those odds are not 100% ever. Completely.

Completely.

So now you bring up many interesting points here. You know, and because you have such a unique position that you have worked in Europe and you worked in us, you have sort of exposure to multicultural sort of, you know, multicultural environments. And I come, you know, I've had the same experience in multiple countries, but a lot of people, a lot of founders, they have not traveled as much. They have not had exposure, you know, to multiple cultures. So can you shed some light on how your travel or your exposure to multiple cultures has helped you to look at these sort of, you know, very detailed aspects of people management, of team management of being a leader? How does that affect you?

Yeah, it's a fantastic question, because it definitely shapes you as a leader, because, I mean, once you get into the cultural understanding of how you communicate, a lot of times around communication, like, every culture has a different way of communicating. In some cultures, you get into a meeting and it's straight to business, and you're like, wow, there's no small talk. And others are like, you have to warm up for 30 minutes. And you're like, let me get into business. Like, we're talking about something. You have to kind of learn the rhythms of that, because you can easily offend people or get off on the wrong foot. You know, it's happening. I had this experience actually, where I was a company called Veritas pretty early in my career, in 2001-2005, and because I was in product marketing, so I was actually spending a lot of time with customers around the world. I went to Asia and Australia and Europe, and so on. They sent me on an etiquette course and to, like, learn how to, like, interact and deal with. With different cultures. It was super fun. But I. I learned a lot from that about how do you connect with somebody, you know, and. And. And understanding again, you know, different cultures. Like, in certain parts of the world, like, you go to Southern Europe that you. Oftentimes you warm up a little bit. First you go to Germany or Northern Europe, where I'm from, it's pretty much straight business. Right. In the US There's a lot of small talk and. And so on, you know, and then there are other places that are a little bit more hierarchical. You have to talk to certain people. And it's. I think it's changing. I mean, with the beauty of, like, the Internet and, you know, global society, I think it's. It's a little bit more acceptable that you don't have to be perfect in all those instances anymore. Right. Of course you have to be mindful as a leader, because if you. If you're not mindful and you end up trampling on people's, like, I would say, cultural heritage or the way that they think about things, you can easily get into trouble. I'm sure when I look back on my life that I've said insensitive things, even though I didn't mean to, or maybe, you know, been too hasty in a meeting or like, okay. You know, sometimes you can definitely tell afterwards, like, okay, this. This was a little different than what we're used to. Yeah. And so. So it's. It's definitely happened a lot. I would say the biggest culture shock for me was when I honestly went to Japan, and I love Japan. I'm like, it's one of those places I'm absolutely in love with. But it was the first country I ever went to many, many years ago where I truly felt like a foreigner. Wow. It was just like. It was. The culture was so different. It was so beautiful. But the way they were in meetings and the way they spoke to each other and the signage and the language, it was like, I truly felt for the first time, like, wow, you know, because I. When you're traveling in kind of Western Europe and so on, you kind of assume everybody speaks English. That was just not true there. Right. And it was much more of a culture where you feel like you're on a away game, in some ways, you're like, okay, wow. I really have to step up my understanding and. And appreciation of this. So that was the first time I would say. But it's Just been many times since then, honestly. But as a leader, to your point, I think at the end of the day, leadership is really about understanding human psychology. And so there's of course a high level understanding, like cultures and so on. But then within that, you have to understand if you're gonna lead people, what drives people, what motivates people. Some people do their work because they want to look after their families. Some do it because they're proud of the work. They, some people get rich. And that's a fine thing too. You know, everyone is different. Until you understand the true motivation, it's very hard to actually motivate people to do the great job. Especially when you're putting teams together. Right. So when you're intrinsically putting teams together, whether a five person team or ten person team around a special project, if everybody's coming at it from different motivations, it's very hard to have actually great outcomes. So you got to dig into that pretty early on. Like, if somebody's like, is an overachiever and gets joy out of that aspect of achievement and the other person is like, you know, I'm doing it because I just want to like get a paycheck. You're fundamentally at odds. They're going to be conflict. You can tell already because one person is going to like be, hey, you're not delivering enough. And the other person like, hey. So I think there's a lot to that as well. Understanding that and driving the right outcomes.

Yeah. And especially now, as you know, with the, with the advent of remote work, hybrid work, everybody's sort of coming together. The world is getting smaller and smaller by the day. So you really find yourself talking to people from multiple continents and multiple countries on the same team usually, isn't it?

Yeah, I would say, I mean the productivity and efficiency has gone up so much because of remote work. It's great, but there's a lot of things that's really hard about it. Like leadership, I think is very hard, especially around people leadership. You know, I'll give you an example. I, a couple of years ago I had, I was a leader of a fairly large team and there were two factions that were just not getting along at all. So I got the leaders of the two factions together in a room and we're like, we spent like two hours talking about things and like what's really going on and how can we kind of get to a better place so we can really like motivate our teams to work better together and so on. At the end of the meeting, we're like, everyone's like agreeing, you know. But the body language of both the leaders was like this, right? And I could tell that even though they were saying, yeah, we agree, the body language is not there. So I stopped and said, we're not leaving this room until we actually get to a point where we fundamentally can figure out how to work together. But my point is over Zoom or Google. That's very hard if you're just seeing people from the face up. Because so much of leadership, I think is about reading people's energy, body language and so on. And when people are seeing like this, you can tell they're kind of pissed off, right? They don't really want to be there, they don't agree with anything and so on, on. And so I think there's certain things Zoom or remote culture has been great for. Again, like productivity is amazing. But, but, but decision making. I think reading people's like motivations body language, I think it's just harder, it's not impossible. But you really as a leader have to lean into it and spend more time digging into people to get to know them. Because until you get so you're oftentimes going to get, I think, more conflict.

You are listening to Bootstrapping your Dreams show with Manu Jagarwal. Businesses face numerous challenges like finding the right product market fit, determining the market size, implementing a winning go to market strategy, crafting customer centric USP competitive analysis, looking for funding, building up cash flow and profitability. We have made a lot of free resources available to the entrepreneurial community, including this podcast. We invite you to check out our websites and follow us on social channels. The links are in the show notes. We hope you find the resources useful and utilize them to grow your business. We also have some programs for entrepreneurs. If you find our content useful, then you will definitely find the programs outstanding. So do check them out now. You know, I'll ask you a question about what makes companies successful, but I think that's a question what I really ask you to answer is like, what are the common misconceptions about success? Because you know, for example, I'll share one thing like, you know, I talk to a lot of founders, they say I need a unique idea, I need a greenfield idea to be successful. But as we know, that's not true. Another thing is about venture capital. You know, a lot of founders say, oh, I can change the world, you know, but I all I need is a million dollars and then I'm off to the races. So what are some of the misconceptions that you have seen around, which are totally not true for success in this industry.

Yeah, I mean, I think you hit on some good ones, but, I mean, execution is everything. It's definitely not about the ideas. You know, the ideas, of course, are great. I mean, I think I always talk about you can execute at a lot of different levels. And to make it simple, I usually break it up into three levels. You can do tactical work, which is like incremental work, basically. You can do strategic work, which is more like linear growth. Meaning if we do this, the whole team pulls together, we're going to see 2x outcome. And then I say you can do kind of epic work or exponential work, which is like the 10x things. Right? Meaning if you do some of those things, it can change the trajectory and outcome for your company in a way that creates one of these legendary companies out there. But it's very hard to do for Most leaders, most CEOs, most business leaders, because it's uncomfortable. The reason it's uncomfortable because if you're just operating in the tactical realm, you have a lot of data to guide you, so it feels safe. If you're operating in the strategic realm, I think you have some data, you know, you have some thesis, you have some data, you have a. You have some ideas about what's going to happen. You probably have something as a guide, but there's also a lot of unknowns. So just you're like a little bit. But your work is going to like, this is what we think is going to happen if we do this program, this product, this marketing campaign, the sales strategy, whatever it is. When you get to the epic realm, it's not much data to guide you, because if there was, everybody would have done it already. So you're basically a lot of times taking a chance on something that you have a thesis on is going to, like, change the world. Right. You know, and. And I think of it, you know, two. Two examples that come to mind for me is, you know, Airbnb is a good example of a company that found something that was so broken. And they said, you know, we can do this 10 times better. That's one way, I think, to do epic things. You can either do something that's 10 times better or you do something that's never been done before. Both are risky, very risky. So Airbnb, for example, said, okay, you could rent a home before Airbnb existed. It was just a shitty experience. Yeah, super. Like, oh, you have to, like, figure out, is this a trusted source? The pictures Were not good. How do I pay this person? How do we exchange details? You know, you didn't know if they were legit. They didn't know if you were legit. This is a horrible experience. But you could do it. It was possible. Airbnb came along and said we could do it ten times better. What? The other way you should do something that's never been done before. You know, like Tesla, SpaceX, kind of like Elon Musk level stuff. Yeah. You know, even Uber, I would put in that category. I mean, before the advent of mobile phones and the idea of people using their own vehicles, like move people around, that is a brand new, bold idea. That was no guarantee it was going to work. Right. But obviously they had a thesis around this. And so my point is, I see too many companies play it too safe all the time. And so they get, they, they. And then they wonder, why are we only getting, you know, incremental or maybe linear growth? We're not seeing the exponential growth. Well, you're doing something that is kind of predictable and everybody else can also do as well. And so this model has been effective for me in both thinking about the business level, but also at the more programmatic level, like in programs you want to put out there. You want to put out something, let's just say a marketing example that is so different that nobody else is doing it. And I usually say to my teams when we're thinking about big new ideas, if you come to me with an idea and unless it makes me feel a little uncomfortable, it's probably not big enough. It doesn't mean, because I don't have to agree with everything, that's not my job as a leader. But it has to kind of push the boundaries and be different. It has to make me go, can we do this? Is it possible? Should we do this? Is it stupid? You know, when I ask those questions, it's usually a sign that, oh, we're triggering some uncomfortable feelings. But it means that you're entering that territory of like, a little bit more gut feel. Because if it's too safe, you know, if sometimes I look at stuff that comes out, I'm like, I could put a competitor logo on this. It could kind of like, you know, it's good. But is it that different? Not really. So, so there's, there's a. There's. There's a couple of different executions, everything. But there's also the level of thinking. And my point about this framework is you have to give yourself permission to get into a mindset of epic Thinking because it's so easy. Just every day goes by with tactical stuff, sometimes some strategic stuff. The worst weeks for me is when I had a. When I, when I'm Friday night looking back on the week and I'm like, wow, it's a really busy week. I was so busy, like 80 hours. I worked my ass off. But I don't really know if I made a difference. I don't know if I made a difference on any big, big things. It was all like firefighting. And so you have to find the space and the time to get yourself in that mindset to do something really bold. I think that's, that's what. Because once you do it, what happens is it'll change the outcome and trajectory of your company, but more importantly, it will change the outcome and trajectory for your life.

Yeah.

That becomes your calling card. It will create so much momentum around you, either internally in your company that you'll get promoted or it'll create a vibe around you in the industry. After I leaned all in on chatter with Salesforce, that was my moment, why I did that, that created enough momentum in my life where other companies started coming to me after that, honestly, I never had to go apply for a job. I still have to, of course, go through the process of like interviewing and so on. But companies started finding me because they, I created enough of a momentum around me and they said, hey, whatever you did for Salesforce, come do it for us, you know?

Yeah.

And so, so leaning in, doing something bold has a tremendous impact on your life as well and hopefully also for the company.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it's a very interesting contrast as well. Like, you know, entrepreneurship and startup are all about taking risk. And as soon as we get a little bit of success, we draw boundary. Like, you know, okay, we don't want to lose it now. Right. So that's very interesting. And coming back to your people skills, you know, obviously you've developed this growth mindset and risk taking appetite, but how do you make other people do that? Like, you know, one of the mentors that I have, the first entrepreneurship lesson he taught me was get comfortable with discomfort. You know, that's your zone. Right. Like, if you're not uncomfortable and, and you are not okay with it, there is something wrong. And that's what you said as well. But how do you transfer that into other people's mind?

Well, first of all, you have to let people know that this is the way you're thinking and you don't have to use those words and so on but you people won't guess right. So the first thing I do when I come into a new company, I shared the Robin Daniels instruction manual about how to work with me and how I think. Because it's just like, you know, you've gotten a new boss before, probably I have, many times. And you're always like, in the first couple of months, like, what are they thinking? How do they think about? How do they see the world? What do they care about? I just tried to take the guesswork out of it. So I put together an instruction manual about what I'm passionate about, what I dislike, how I think about things, you know, things I've been involved in and so on. A little bit about my life and family instantly, like, just takes the pressure out of it. But it also gives people a mental model of how I think about marketing and leadership and so on, because that's the first step. Then the second step, I think, is you have to then go and actually train people on how to do this. And that can take time. It's not going to happen overnight. If you come into an organization who's very set in their way of thinking, then it takes time to kind of undo a little bit of that thinking. And you have to push them in gently in a new direction to kind of, like, open up their mindset. And as a leader, you have to give them space to do so, because it's so easy, again, like I just said, to get bogged down with, okay, we got to do this now. This program needs to go live and this campaign, and we need to launch this product, and this event is coming up. And then you know that the epic stuff always gets kind of pushed to the side because we're so busy, right? So you have to figure out, like, how do I shield my team? I've always tried as much as I can to shield my team from all the stuff around them so they can focus. You could argue whether or not I've been successful. Sometimes I have, and sometimes I'm sure I haven't. But you have to, as a leader, like, figure out, because these magical moments do not happen in a vacuum. And then you got to then force it a little bit. Like, let's go in once a month and spend two hours on brainstorming together things that we could do that might push, and you might come out of that tomorrow meeting with nothing. Because, again, I think in your lifetime, you might do two or three epic things. Like trying to do it every month or every quarter, every year even, is tough. But at least you're trying to work towards it and you're kind of giving yourself in the mindset of doing something like that. So getting into a space where you can do that and kind of getting the team around you. And over time, if you do that enough times, the team starts realizing what it is that you're trying to do. You're trying to like open up new avenues of thinking that it's a little bit more about trusting their instinct and their intuitive nature that they might have. Because, you know, there's, I think this fallacy that some people are naturally more creative than others. I don't know if that's really true. I think everybody's pretty creative. They just might get put in a box where they're. The creativity is kind of enforced out of them. Most people actually have pretty creative ideas, but creativity can take so many forms. And when I say creativity, it doesn't mean like, wow, you know, it's so weird and different. It could be a creative way to solve a business problem, could be a creative way to enter a new market. It could be lots of different ways to be creative. I think most people, they, they, oh, I'm not creative. I've heard that many times. I don't know, I'm not great. I'm, I'm the graphic. This. Oh, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the data driven, you know, ABM person.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

You have more creativity in you. So it's also about like nurturing that side. And what you find is, what I found a lot is people love that. They love like exploring new, new kind of ways and size of themselves. And sometimes you get some magic to happen that way. But it takes time. It's not, it's definitely not a process that come in and you're like, here the culture has been changed instantly. I've never seen that happen.

I think I'm getting like a sort of well rounded sense of how you operate. Like a lot of leaders, they don't even take the time to like recognize that hidden quality and when you call it out and give them the permission to fail and sort of nurture that, you know, that sort of, that is a really, really good formula. So thanks for sharing that. Now we are at a point now, you know, where things are all over the place. You know, generally people are talking about recession and venture capital drying up and all that. And we go through these cycles on regular basis. The industry noise has gone up significantly. You know, a lot of crypto debacles are happening. So people are a Little bit confused around, you know, what the hell is happening? What do you see in your crystal ball, like where is the startup industry going over the next couple of years? What should we be aware of? What should we be focused on as founders, as leaders, so that we can get the best outcome for ourselves, for the companies that we are heading and the economy itself.

There's a lot of aspects. First of all, I think it pains me. A lot of people are being laid off. I've been laid off myself and it's, it's painful to go through and I, my heart goes out to all the people who are being affected right now. It's not an easy time, but I'm at the same time not completely freaked out because just the benefit of being a little older is I've seen cycles before. You know, in 2000 with the dot com crash, it felt like the world was ending and in 2008 felt like the world was kind of ending. And then even with, if you give back two and a half years, like in March 2020, it felt like the world was kind of ending. And so we, we are more resilient than we think. It's certainly not fun to go through and I wish that we weren't going through this time, but it, but we'll, we'll get through it. I'm very positive about that. So what would I do? I think the critical thing for startups is that they build in some organizational resilience and they actually are very honest and transparent and they over communicate with their team. A lot of leaders because they're also struggling, they tend to hide away. You know, it's the worst thing you can do. You got to be in front of your team more, you got to be seen by them, you got to be communicating with them, you got to be leading them. And I actually think at these times and you know, happy to be proven wrong, I think, you know, and when things are going super well and everything is just like up into the right, I think you can afford to have a culture that takes a little bit longer to like collaborate on things, like more bottoms up culture in some ways. And I'm not saying I'm advocating a top down culture, but I also think in times like this when you have a lot of uncertainty, you got to move fast and you got to listen to the right voices and then, and then get the team to rally around those decisions. You can't spend three months making a decision which you can sometimes do when things are like, like you have a little bit more time to Execute and so on. So you also have to like start, I think, training people and that or your organization on, you know, we're going to, you know, get as much input, but we're also not going to overdo it. I mean I've been in companies where it's like took six months to make a decision. Like in times like this, I can guarantee you you don't have six months to make decisions. You gotta, you gotta be agile, you gotta move fast. And so, so you gotta train the company that, you know, we're gonna make decisions. Some of them hopefully, you'll hopefully agree with all of them. But sometimes there might be decisions you don't agree with and, and, but we have to at least do something. The worst is not making a decision and just kind of in times like this, I think it shows poor leadership when that happens. And so leaders have to be, I think, much more in front of their teams. I think they have to communicate, they have to provide a vision that they can rally behind. But you also have to get to the bare bones of what you have to execute on whether you're in product and sales and marketing and customer success. Get to the bare bones of what is really essential. I bet you most companies now are going through annual planning. They have probably a list of 10 things they need to do. And they all sound important. I get, I can guarantee you they're not equally important. They're just not. There's no way. So what is really the most important? Two, three, four things. And then rally around them because you're also going to burn out people. It's already stressful enough. You know, people are reading the news every day. There's a lot of like bad news out there. Get people to focus so they can actually, you know, not burn out. Do, do do less things, but better that, that would be my advice. And that's true for startup scale up and so on even, even larger companies. So, so that's kind of what, you know, when I go around advising companies and spending time with them, like, definitely do more. Show me the list of stuff that you have planned to do. Okay, here's what, here's what I would cut out. And then it gets down to a level below that, you know, when I spend time with a marketing team or sales team. And so like, well, tell me. Really, like, oh, you know, we had plans on expanding here. Maybe you should wait, like focus on the core right now. But we have plans on doing these five campaigns. Maybe you do two instead. Right. You know, again, being mindful of the resources you have, not burning your team out, being hyper focused. So those are things. But, but really for, for startups in a time like this, the most important is probably that you figure out a way to become essential. If you're nice to have in a downturn or a recession, you'll probably see your pipeline might be kind of good, but decisions keep getting punted, you know, deals are slipping and so on. And I hear about this all the time. So what does that mean? Your job then as a team is to figure out, well, how do we become more central? And you really kind of have, I think, four levers to do so you can do it through marketing. Great marketing. I mean, I'm very passionate about marketing, of course, like, and there you really have to kind of answer the question of why your product and why now? So you have to really get to the essence of that. So you got, you can do better marketing, you can do better sales. Like how your sales actually encouraging customers and not just. And making your product essential. You can do it through product. Meaning are you building in enough hooks in your product that it becomes a must have, not a nice to have. And then you can do it, I think through customer success. The way you kind of treat your customers and the way you give them more value than they expect out of your product. But, but it's probably, honestly not one of the four. It's probably all of the four. Yeah, right. But, but it really, you have to get to the point where you become essential and you. So, so, so I think that's, that's critical as well. But I'll also be lying if I said there was an easy answer. I think a lot of people are looking for easy answers. When I talk, just telling me the magic bullet or what I should do, I'm like, you got to move fast, you got to line and you got to like trust each other, support each other, because I bet you everybody in your company is going through stress. You know, your head of sales, your cfo, your marketing leader, they're. You gotta trust and support each other, you know, doesn't mean you can't disagree, but man, that's the best. When you get that camaraderie and focus, amazing things happen.

Awesome. That's great advice. Now you've already talked about your mentors and how people have helped you, but now you are in a different position. You're actually looking for talent, you're looking for founders. So what are some of the common traits that you look for in the future? Sort of, you know, unicorn founders it.

Depends on, I would say, the stage of their life that they're in. If they're like, you know, very young, then I look for grit and aptitude and hunger and kind of smarts. You know, I invested in this double dating app. I met the founder, he was like a 23 year old guy called Dennis. His app was called double with two Bs. And I just love the vision of like creating an environment where it's not just about hooking up, but it's like, like actually creating friends. You go on a date, two people and they had two people, it becomes more of a friendship thing. And I've always been attracted to things that bring people together in a very positive way with my experience from LinkedIn and chatter and Box and so on. But I met him, I'm like, I love this vision and I love how passionate he is about it. I mean he's straight out of school, he has no experience, but it's like the grit, the aptitude, the hunger, the smarts. I'm like, okay, good guy. I would so. And I can coach and mentor him. So, so I love that if he's a little older then I look for like a little bit of pattern recognition. Like, how are they as a leader? They had some successes in the past. Have they gone from success to success to success or have they have some failures along the way? Actually a couple of failures is good because you learn actually I think more failures than your successes because that teaches you how to grit, right? Because you're going on a startup journey, you gotta have a lot of grid, man. It's, it's not an easy. So people who have just had success their whole life and they say, I'm going to be a startup founder, I'm like, do you know what you're in for? Like, but if you've had some success, some failures like I, I think you're, you probably have a good shot at actually succeeding because you know what it takes to get there. So it's different what I look for, but I mean a lot of it's, it's like. But those three qualities I think stays the same. Great aptitude and hunger. You have to really want it because it's not easy. And then of course I look for the idea. Like it's just, is it a different idea? Is it unique enough? Is it differentiated enough? You know, coming back to my framework, I'm not looking for things that are just incrementally different. I'm looking for something that's kind of something I haven't seen before when I saw that double app, I'm like, I haven't seen that. Maybe other people have because I'm not used these apps because I've been married.

For a long time. But I'm like.

And when I see some of these apps I'm like, if it's something that I can totally get behind, you know, and I think the world needs it, then I'll either like introduce him to Sequoia or other VCS I'm involved with or I might even try to mentor or coach these, the, the founders as well. But, but yeah, there's another one. For example, I, I'm an advisor to a company called Radius and I love Amina. She is a founder. She, I think she's up in Oregon and she's basically created a, an idea where, you know, all these people have homes. Sometimes they're sitting, sitting empty or maybe you have a extra space because your kids have moved out or you have a in law unit. And now with people working remotely, why can't you go rent them for a day instead of. People are so tired of sitting at home working, right. So they want to get out. Maybe they want to meet new people, maybe they want to get a new environment. Maybe you want to be traveling on the road, but you don't want to. You don't have a place to work. You don't want to sit in Starbucks all day. So she's created a awesome apps, kind of like an Airbnb in some ways but for renting office space. But the office space is not office space. It's going, you know, verified places. It might be a camper van that's like high speed Internet coffee maker and you can sit there and watch a waterfall. It's like love this idea. You know, it's like bringing people together and bringing new experience. I hadn't seen it before, so I'm like, I'm in. You know, those are the kind of things where I look for like just something that's a little bit different.

That's great. That's great. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation as I anticipated. Thank you so much. And you know, all that weight has paid off the delays that we had. So thank you so much for spending time sharing your knowledge and experience. Now before I let you go, if people want to connect with you, what is the best way they can do that?

Definitely on LinkedIn. I mean I'm very active on LinkedIn. I write a lot there. You can find me Robin Daniels and just send me a chat if you saw this and you'd love to hear from you. And yeah, I hope you connect.

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