A founder's job is connecting dots between ideas, people, and products. Surround yourself with smarter people and become an "awesome people collector" building a network of advisors. During crises, learn voraciously from how other companies respond and listen hard to what customers actually need.
Chapters
a really great entrepreneur is ultimately a great connector of dots, right? The connector of dots to create your idea for your company, your idea for your product, and ultimately the relationships through your lives that you should really treasure. Surround yourself by really strong people, people smarter than yourselves, and you'll find that really good things start to happen. So as you, as you, uh, kind of roll out, as we looked at the impact that, that COVID-19 was happening, was having on our customer base and really the market in general and who we were speaking to, you know, we, we looked at what were other companies doing. So be a voracious learner, like just consume as much content of how to react in crises, what are other companies doing, what are the best-in-class responses for these kinds of scenarios. And it really informed our decision about really everything that Tori mentioned, which is You know, keep the team motivated, communicate with them, make sure that everybody feels safe. But end of the day, you know, bringing those themes together, every good startup is an APC, right? They're awesome people collectors. And the network of people that you bring together and seek advice from them, those that say, hey, I've been down this road before, what you guys should do is this, And, you know, F5 was, you know, was really instrumental in kind of taking all of that, providing incredible content, giving us guidance as to what we should and what we shouldn't do. And it informed our positioning, right? We reached out to every one of our customers. We spoke to the marketplace with empathy and understanding. So it's about giving back, absolutely, providing, you know, new payment terms, But to be a successful entrepreneur, yes, be an APC, an awesome people collector. But you really have to have empathy in this world to connect human to human.