1/3: Listen
Part of a demo day talk I delivered for StepFWD pre-accelerator years ago.
I want to share with you three stories (1/3 Listen, 2/3 Learn, 3/3 Lead) about the ups and downs of founding a startup, building a team and growing a business. There’s a lesson in each of these stories and my aim is not to provide you with more answers, as is usually the case with this kind of content, but to leave you with deeper questions to reflect on: why you’re doing what you’re doing, who’s it for and what’s it for?
The first story, on listening, is about a charismatic young woman who recently left her well-paid job in a multimillion-dollar corporation to start her own company. She believed the knowledge she had gained in the corporate setting would come in handy when founding a startup. She had always dreamed of controlling her own fate, waking up each morning with no one telling her what to do.
Putting together a small team and cranking out their first MVP came easily. A natural people person with solid sales experience, she felt confident selling their product wouldn’t be an issue, so she financed the first few months out of her own savings.
Six months into the project things started to unfold in a ravaging manner: the MVP was on its third iteration and prospects still weren’t convinced of its value. As a consequence only a handful were willing to take the leap of faith and pay for it. Barely enough to cover another six months. They were in dire needed of more revenue. Worse, one of her teammates had just received an attractive offer from a well-known company and was seriously considering leaving the newly formed startup.
She felt stuck. She didn’t know what to do and summoned all the courage she could muster to call her mentor whom she hadn't spoken to in a while. She felt guilty about the lapse, but desperately needed the advice.
Phone rang, and there it was: the most soothing “Hello dear!” she heard in months.
After bringing him up to speed she almost felt out of breath, yet she pressed on: she described how she wanted to start fundraising immediately, launching a public beta with the few customers they had and hire more people to scale the operations.
The mentor simply listened.
She went on outlining her five-year vision for the company and criticising their better-funded competitors for “doing it wrong”. And then she paused for a moment … about five seconds of awkward silence settled between the two.
“What do you think?” - she finally asked.
The mentor took another few seconds and then replied: “What does your team think about all this?”
“My team!?” - she repeated in a lower, almost shameful tone. “I … haven’t asked them!”
How often have we been in a similar situation where we thought we had things in our control, that our team’s role is merely to execute, believing that just because we’re the founders, the solution must obviously come from us.
Isn’t that the norm, our expectation of ourselves and others’ of us? This is so ingrained in our DNA that we grow myopic, driven by our bias for action and the very hype we eventually succumb to. Instead of always parroting answers left and right, to this and that customer, to this and that investor, we forget to slow down, to stop this maddening rush and become the ones who LISTEN!
Ancient philosopher Epictetus said two thousand years ago: “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” Yet here we are in the 21st century clamouring for attention: talking, posting, always being “on” and feeling the urge to have an opinion just about everything.
What about hitting pause for a moment and asking others for help? And actually listen to what they have to say, not so that we can answer back. Are we afraid that our silence will cause people to not like us? Then let’s speak if we must, but let’s pose questions that create the space to listen even more. How might our worldview change if we shift our attention from chasing approval to not only hearing others, but truly listening?
Continued at 2/3 Learn.