Lifeselfmastery's podcast I Startups I Venture Capital
00:23:00 · S2, S3
[00:23:00] S2: Got it. And, you you know, you... You've been an experienced founder. How... What role do you think, you know, timing plays in startup success? [00:23:12] S3: Well, the answer on that question right now... Like, if you would ask me, say, five years ago, I would tell you that no matter what the timing is, the... Yeah. Your success is based on the amount of effort you put into venture. But having been in the in the... Having built the the kind of the venture business before and after my Uber experience, Currently, I feel and I understand that timing makes a critical and kind of makes super... Plays super critical role in success of your business, and it's as critical as when you're catching waves when surfing. Because, I mean, big systems have their own laws, and they evolve kind of There are certain trends, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And despite all the efforts that you put into your business, if you do not leverage these movements, these trends, you wouldn't be successful. So timing is super critical. And, yeah, I mean, if I would be asked five years ago, I would answer you completely differently, but that's where experience basically helps you. [00:24:29] S2: Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. And when it comes to, you know, product development, do you think simplicity is always better when it comes to product design?
00:24:41 · S3
[00:24:41] S3: I think the answer to the question would be quite different in different parts of the world. Because if you take a look on any, say, Chinese website or any kind of successful company in Chinese... In China, you would be surprised how opposite their product design from our understanding what the simple product is. But to to kind of assess the simplicity, you need to understand all the cultural aspects. Because, for example, China is very high context culture, and they need, like, all that content to basically make decisions. So you cannot persuade a customer to do something if you just provide just one line as people tend to do in The US. So to answer that, you need to understand for whom you are building the product first. And that's why kind of the answer is rather no kind of... It shouldn't be simplistic always. But at the same time, I mean, if you want kind of... If you if you if you want to remain as simple as possible, you need to focus on kind of your core customer need. That would potentially prevent you from earning as much money as possible because when you try to earn as much money as possible, you try to build all these additional features to drive your additional revenue streams. And that's where you actually lose simplicity and gets into quite a complex product. If you go to the Apple website, well, you might be lost already. Right? Because they need to kind of pursue all these additional revenue streams, but the core product is different. So, like, I mean, you always have to find the balance. And Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:22 · S2, S3
[00:26:22] S2: Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, Steve Jobs would have been here. He would have said that, you know, you should not listen to your customers, but but most of us are not. But when it comes to product building, you know, when should data be used over intuition, and how do you how do you balance that? [00:26:40] S3: Being myself, personally, a very, you know, very data oriented person because my... I started physics as my bachelor's, and I was studying maths basically in school for around ten years. I'm super biased towards data driven decision... Decisions. So my answer would be whenever data is available and is reliable, you should use the data to make decisions. The only the only disadvantage of that and the only potential kind of trap that you have is that if you completely, you know, disregard your intuition, where you might find yourself is in optimizing kind of on local, like, extremes pretty much and optimizing local wins instead of seeing the the the kind of the big picture and using your intuition drive your company to a significantly different place where your dataset is not applicable at all. But pretty much you need to be... You need to base your decisions on data as much as possible anyway. [00:27:55] S2: Got it. Got it. And, you know, especially during this time, I think the last two years have been difficult for a lot of founders, but it's very normal for founders to attach their net worth and their happiness to the company's outcome. What advice do you give to founders on detaching the person happiness from the company's performance?
00:28:20 · S3
[00:28:20] S3: When I was thinking about kind of my own attachment to the company and even even when I was working when I was working at Uber, I was still attached to the company, and I felt kind of quite a great disappointment when things were not going according to the plan. The same happened in the second company, and the same happens right now. The only difference is my attitude towards that because you cannot completely detach yourself from the company performance and your, basically, level of happiness because it's similar potentially to parenthood. If your child is... Like, feels sick, you cannot be happy at the same time. That's natural to be unhappy. But what you can really disattach is understanding that your company is not you. Yes. I mean, you care about the company. And if you care too much, you wouldn't be happy if company is not performing. But your company is not yourself. And even if you fail the company, it doesn't mean that you failed your life. But, I mean, being happy when you fail your business would be quite strange anyway for any human being. So I think, you know, it's it's the right balance. And if you do not detach yourself understanding that you are not your own company, that's gonna be a crisis. Not just a sadness, not just regret. It's gonna be kind of a huge crisis that I've went through multiple times before realizing that company is separate to me. But Yeah. I'm I'm still sad when it's not going well. Yeah. Definitely.
00:30:00 · S2
[00:30:00] S2: Totally. And, you know, what's the most common leadership mistake, you know, a lot a lot of early stage founders make?
00:30:10 · S3
[00:30:10] S3: I think potentially VCs are definitely in a way much better position to assess that question. However, from the limited observation that I have, I think enough two core mistakes that I observed, and one is by far the most critical. They try to scale before finding the product market fit. They get they try to get really big. They hire sales team. They kind of grow to 50, a 100 employees, still not finding the the product market fit. And, eventually, that prevents you from being as agile as needed when the product market fit is not found. And you spend too much time on managing the team, etcetera, etcetera, and eventually, you basically end up kind of in a bankruptcy. And the second mistake, even if you kind of do not try to scale too fast, the second mistake that I have observed is that startup founders thinking that, okay, we have a startup budget. We don't have budget to hire senior employees, experienced employees. Let's hire juniors and make them do a job of a senior employee. That's simply not possible. I think the only person to do a really senior job in the early stage startup is a founder. You cannot expect from a junior employee to do a senior level job. It's a simple mistake. The results are not gonna be great. And which is more important, these team members are gonna be stressed. The experience for them is gonna be a disaster. So it's it's a it's a kind of mistake from both perspectives, from the business perspective and from the human perspective as well.