Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kareem Amin, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, right now I feel pretty clear about what the vision is, within the scope of what we’re doing. We’re helping every company in the world find who their best customer is, find more of them, and accelerate that. [00:00:00] S0: What about the notion of wealth? In these two chapters, you’ve also had this interesting experience where now, because of success, you’ve achieved a level of wealth that by any measure is extraordinary. What has that process been like, and what has it taught you? [00:00:00] S1: It’s a very taboo topic. [00:00:00] S0: I know, that’s why it’s interesting.
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: My experience is, the initial thing I’d thought was true is if you’re not feeling whole in yourself, there’s no amount of wealth that fills that. It doesn’t change that, because it’s a continuous competitive game. It’s a loop. I was telling someone, if you want to raise $100 million, you need to first feel like you don’t need that. Paradoxically, also that you already have that. In order to raise money, you need to be like, I have $100 million in my bank account. How does that feel? Act accordingly. Because you need to act like you don’t need it, and you have the confidence. Maybe my own core wounding is, I have this super heightened self-reliance where I feel like I don’t need other people and I can do everything myself, which is partially why I think it’s helpful to be an entrepreneur. And what I’ve been doing is dialing that down, to be like, no, I’m interconnected with people. I do need people. In fact, I need help. I need support. I also rely on so many things. But I think what material abundance gives you is the reality of your time back. And I’m choosing, for example, to build this company. I don’t have to. I don’t need anything. I don’t need it to succeed more. I don’t need to make more money or whatever it is. I’m choosing what I want to be doing with my time. And that goes back to that truth part, which is really empowering. I can make my own choices and I can test things out in the world and see if they work or not. I’m not scared or worried about what happens, but I also needed to have that point of view in order to get here. Having the opportunity to choose what I do with my time, and to take bigger swings — that feels really important. And then it’s like, what responsibility do I owe back to society?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: You also once said to me that all problems are communication problems. I’m curious how you’ve gotten better, or what you’ve learned about not falling into that trap.
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: It’s not that all problems are communication problems. It’s that we might have a disagreement, or different needs, but often we can’t resolve it because we’re making assumptions about each other, or we're doing all kinds of game-theory things about what would happen if you did this, if I did that — rather than being able to just explain clearly. And even within that — it’s kind of like negotiations, where you might have different strategies — my strategy is to be as clear as possible about what I want, what I think you want, and then what the possible options are, assuming you’re really intelligent, can read, and have access to the same information as me. I need to know what you want. And what are the options available? And then we might still disagree, but at least we are disagreeing from a place of clarity rather than from a place of misunderstanding. That’s very, very difficult to do. Let’s say we’re asking someone to leave Clay, which I think is a difficult thing. You can do it in a way — in most cases, as long as the person is in a shared reality with us — based on clear communication. Do you think it’s working here? I don’t, for these reasons. What do you think? And maybe you’re like, no, it is working. And I was just like, okay, let’s bridge the gap, because we can get to a place where it’s like, I don’t want to be giving you negative feedback every single day. That’s not fun for me. I can’t imagine that it’s fun for you. So then why do you want to be here? And here are the gaps between us. At one point I told someone, hey, listen, I’ve lost faith in the ability for you to bridge the gap. I’m the CEO, so it’s not a good situation for you. It doesn’t make sense. And even if you think you can get there, I’m taking responsibility for that. I’m not saying that this is rational, even. It’s just, I can’t do it. And that’s it. In that case, it doesn’t really make sense for you to continue working here. And I want to share that with you because I want to be direct and clear about it, and also own up that this is my call. Like any relationship, there’s no compulsion. A lot of people actually really appreciate that and are just like, okay, I get it. I wish that it was different, but it’s not, so I’m going to do something else. Most times if someone’s leaving, what are they worried about?
· Kareem Amin
They’re worried about what you’re going to say in the future to other people. So I tell them, hey, if someone calls me up, I’m going to say, it didn’t work in these ways, but I think these are their strengths, and here are the gaps that we have in our organization that didn’t support them. How do you not think about that? When I call up a reference, it’s like, can you tell me what was wrong with your company at the time? Because it wasn’t perfect. It’s always about someone else. It’s obviously not true. There are times when my management skills weren’t there to handle this particular person, or the company itself was not working. And so it creates a really bad vibe for everybody inside. When things are working, things are working. When things are hard, only a few people can handle that. The reason I’m saying these things, by the way, is that these are the things I think are actually interesting. Part of my experience of building a company was that I just wanted to know, through building it and being given the hard choices — how to relate to people, or a quick profit versus a long profit — what would I do? And what’s the experience that other people making these choices are facing? And I think we’re not talking about these things because the risk is too high, right? Like, if I talk about what I’m doing in a company and how I’m treating people, maybe someone will sue you, or customers will lose faith in you. I really feel like companies are built through rules of thumb, where I’m like, hey, how do you scale from 100 to 300? And then I talk to five people who’ve done it and they tell me. And by the way, I’ve done things that are completely the opposite of that and it’s worked. And the reality is — back to the risk — when you’re going from 150 to 300 people, you don’t want to take the risk of doing something new. You’re like, these people did it, but then you’re going to get the same problems that they had. So many people told me there would be all these weird problems scaling 50 to 300 people. None of them happened. We have some other things that happened, but I didn’t have the typical problems because I didn’t do it the typical way.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: As we approach the end, I have one more question about endings. I’m realizing I take a lot of notes after our various meetings over the years. The first time we met, the idea I remember writing down was — you told me something like, you wish there was something like a death doula for companies. And then earlier today we were talking about this idea that scaling isn’t just some universal good. So these are related in my mind, and I’d love you to end by just riffing on this death doula and scaling concept.