A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
01:00:02 · Pablo Srugo, Lee Silverstone, Rob Woodbridge
[01:00:02] S0: Hype man. Our mind was in pure hype. Then I fast forward a few years later, I'm in this board meeting with one of our portfolio companies and the other board member is this guy Jeremy Levine, who's still on the board of Shopify. He backed Yelp, Pinterest, really, really big dude. The founder just raised a series A. He’s like, I'm thinking of doing PR. What do you guys think? Should you do PR? I'm not replying here. I'm staying quiet. Jeremy Levine says, listen, you can do what you want. I'll just tell you this. Every single break company that I backed, they didn't announce their series A. I'm just like, alright. [01:00:37] S1: Because if you spend your time doing that, you're spending your time doing the wrong things. I think it's a symptom of a broader issue within a company to spend time talking to reporters that are not industry specific reporters that are going to get you more customers. It's a symptom of broader failures within your organization. [01:01:01] S2: You definitely want it to be – you want any PR to be based on merit, right? Based on accomplishment. You would typically, and it takes a while to learn that because I went through it in my twenties as well. It's about me, right? It is about is this ego. [01:01:21] S1: Also someone should have given us media training. If you are going to go, always bring it back to the product and the company, don't tell stupid stories about your life. That's that.
01:01:21 · Lee Silverstone, Rob Woodbridge, Pablo Srugo
[01:01:21] S1: Also someone should have given us media training. If you are going to go, always bring it back to the product and the company, don't tell stupid stories about your life. That's that. [01:01:30] S2: No, not at all. Make sure that you have control over the callouts. I have a similar story. This was one of these times where I won an award once for next generation CEO. [01:01:43] S0: You won an award, dude? [01:01:45] S2: I did, I did. It was a merit badge. It was a next generation CEO of the year award, right? I remember that I was up against people that were way more deserving, but I'd been a part of the community for much longer. I'm not saying this was nepotism whatsoever, but I do remember winning this award and it was such fraud. That's what you end up feeling like when something goes down, when it goes wrong. [01:02:11] S1: Oh, yeah. Oh, God.
01:02:11 · Lee Silverstone, Rob Woodbridge, Pablo Srugo
[01:02:11] S1: Oh, yeah. Oh, God. [01:02:12] S2: I got up on stage and I knew. I was running a company, a software company at the time, and I was doing layoffs the next day, so 9% layoffs, seven employees. One of them, his wife, was about to have their second child. She wasn't working and I'm about to lay this guy off, right? This is in the back of my head. They don't tell who wins, but you have to show up. I showed up and I didn't bring any of my family, not my wife, nobody at that time. I brought my controller Kim and she started the day before, right? That's who I brought. She's like, what do you mean? I'm like, you're coming with me because I can't. It's a fraud. It's fraudulent what I'm about to do. I'm like, please God for the life. Don't win, don't win, don't win, don't win, please don't, don't call my name. They call my goddamn name, right? I get up on stage and you know this is – because that's what being an entrepreneur is. It's like, you're a fraud until you're something and then you don't believe you're something so you're still a fraud. I got up on stage and I had to accept this award and Paul Lem, who's a well-known guy in Ottawa, was the other guy on the other side who lost to me. Paul Lem lost to me. [01:03:24] S0: Saves lives, yeah. He detects early diseases. He's a scientist.
01:03:24 · Pablo Srugo, Rob Woodbridge, Lee Silverstone
[01:03:24] S0: Saves lives, yeah. He detects early diseases. He's a scientist. [01:03:37] S2: He's this – anyway, he got up and I'll never forget it because the story was the guy who was doing the introduction was the dean of the business school for University of Ottawa. He got up and he had this long rambling opening for Paul. He's like, this guy is this scientist, he's this, he's this, he's done this. By the way, he just wrote a book that he's released on how to be productive, productive book and going on about Paul, I've known this guy my whole life, my whole life, blah blah. It was a nine-minute introduction about Paul. Then he’s like, and the other contender, oh, wait, what? You could see it. He's trying to think of, oh, okay, what can I say? What can I say? What can I say? I have nothing to say about this guy. I have nothing to say. He's like, Rob Woodbridge, I knew his father. Alright, let's go. That's what he said. Then I won. You should have seen, he's like opening it up and he's like, wait, wait. [01:04:28] S1: There's a mistake. [01:04:29] S0: There's a wrong name. You have that moment. It was wrong. It was terrible.
01:04:29 · Pablo Srugo, Lee Silverstone
[01:04:29] S0: There's a wrong name. You have that moment. It was wrong. It was terrible. [01:04:36] S1: You’ve got to stay away from that stuff, those accolades. Again, back to what we talked about in the beginning, this validation from the wrong places. Who cares how many articles are written about you? Who cares how many awards you win? Who cares about any of this? Who even cares how much money you raise? That's not even the end goal. All of it is useless. It's useless. The only thing that matters is the customer and is, are you solving a problem for a customer? Are they willing to pay you to do that? Can you scale? If you're not doing that, the rest of it is just vanity metrics and it's useless and is going to, at the end of the day, come tumbling in. I think that's the takeaway.
01:05:15 · Pablo Srugo
[01:05:15] S0: Full circle right there, isn't it, guys? Let's stop it there. I think, look, if you listened through this whole episode, there's no doubt that we've helped you become a millionaire because either we've helped you with your startup with all the lessons, but even if you get nothing from that, we gave you a full proof way to make money in the stock market. As soon as a company gets PR, pull that stock. If you listened to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact, but whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to Product Market Fit Show and leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me, to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover this show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews. The reality is, if all of you listening right now, left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. Please take literally a minute. Even if you're just writing “great podcast” or “I love this podcast,” whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously the longer the better, the more detailed the better, but write anything, leave five stars and you'll be helping me, but most importantly, many other founders just like you, discover the show. Thank you.