The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to instill a sense of urgency in your business.

In the startup world, the most successful CEOs tend to be the ones that maintain a sense of urgency in order in their business. They react quickly to market changes, develop new products all the time or add new features to existing ones. And having this sense of urgency is key to the success of their startup.

In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the meaning of a sense of urgency, how to react in times of crisis, what makes a CEO good at maintaining intensity at all times and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic.

00:45 Why this topic was chosen.

01:52 Why Steli knows how to act during a crisis.

02:35 What Steli does during a crisis.

03:22 What Steli struggles with.

04:05 What makes a CEO good at maintaining intensity at all times.

05:06 The meaning of a sense of urgency.

06:25 How to react in times of crisis.

06:55 Why the sales department is an area of most businesses with the most sense of urgency.

08:36 What a sense of urgency means to Steli.

3 Key Points:

• There’s a very different mindset and leadership style as a CEO during wartime versus during peacetime.
• A lot of companies are under some level of threat at the moment.
• I don’t think there’s such a thing as a peacetime CEO.

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:02]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah and today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about this idea of having a sense of urgency in your business and instilling it across your business. The definition of this is basically people in the organization, you as an organization, thinking of urgency of execution, urgency as like a sort of either a framework, a mantra, a way of being, that I think is necessary in business and it’s something that I strive towards in my own companies. And there’s usually no better time than like when there’s a pandemic or a crisis to really think through how you can have a greater sense of urgency because you’re kind of forced to at this time. But how can you do that more regularly in your company, in your business, and why is it important? It’s kind of like, I think what we can unpack.

[0:00:58]

Steli Efti: I love it. I just had to think, what a weird statement that’s totally normal to be like, “There’s no better time to think about urgency than during a pandemic.” And it’s like, “Yeah, of course this is [inaudible 00:01:12].”

[0:01:12]

Hiten Shah: Sounds about right, right?

[0:01:13]

Steli Efti: There’s an old business saying that, thy shall move fast during a pandemic. I get it.

[0:01:20]

Hiten Shah: Yeah. I mean, come on. Okay, go on.

[0:01:28]

Steli Efti: So I’ll challenge this, because this episode is actually inspired by our last episode around being a wartime CEO, and I think I know how to act with urgency during crisis. I had been told that I’m particularly effective when things are tough and-

[0:01:49]

Hiten Shah: You know why, right?

[0:01:50]

Steli Efti: Tell me.

[0:01:51]

Hiten Shah: You’re steady, that’s why.

[0:01:53]

Steli Efti: That is true.

[0:01:54]

Hiten Shah: You’re steady. That’s it. You’re just steady, and when you’re steady and everyone else might not be steady or needs that steadiness, you’re there. That’s just who you are. And I think that that’s different. Different in the sense of like, that would be you being able to be calm under pressure. That would be my read on it.

[0:02:19]

Steli Efti: Yeah. So, so there’s some truth to that. I think there’s also something to be said that during a crisis, I know how to make decisions under fire and had creed clarity and execute, not freeze when there’s uncertainty, not freeze when the stakes are really high. I know how to kind of keep moving when the stakes are high, making decisions, making adjustments at focusing people and I’m calm. I’m not somebody that panics in a way, that would ever panic in a way that screams at people or loses mind or acts funny. I have high intensity but I’m pretty calm. But the thing I am struggling with is when there isn’t a crisis or a global pandemic or things aren’t, there isn’t a threat of some kind that ...

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to be a good wartime CEO.

In times of crisis, companies need strong leadership to make some tough decisions that will help them get through this crisis. However, there is a tendency for some CEOs to use the crisis as an excuse to behave badly towards employees and everyone around them.

In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what the concept of a wartime CEO means, why there’s no such thing as a peacetime CEO, the right way to think about this concept and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic.

00:40 Why this topic was chosen.

01:13 The concept of a wartime CEO.

02:55 Why there’s no such thing as a peacetime CEO.

03:57 How people think about wartime or peacetime in business.

05:07 How your business is always under attack.

05:23 The idea of wartime versus peacetime really means.

06:30 Why context really matters when deciding how to lead.

09:05 The right way to think about this concept.

10:09 How speed is the most important thing during wartime.

3 Key Points:

• There’s a very different mindset and leadership style as a CEO during wartime versus during peacetime.
• A lot of companies are under some level of threat at the moment.
• I don’t think there’s such a thing as a peacetime CEO.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:04]

Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat we’re going to talk about being a good wartime CEO. What does it take? What does it look like? What is it? How could it be useful to know more about this? You use this framework potentially during these difficult times. So first maybe we’ll break down for the listener the concept of peacetime CEO and wartime CEO. First time I heard about this was Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I think he’s the first one to use this metaphor. I’m not sure if he stole it from somebody else. I haven’t read that book in many years, but something tells me maybe not a bad book to read right now.

[0:00:44]

Hiten Shah: Definitely not.

[0:00:45]

Steli Efti: For some people, it just describes very difficult times, very difficult decisions for a CEO. But the way I remember his breakdown on wartime and peacetime, and then I want to focus on the wartime metaphor is that he basically describes, hey, there’s different phases a company can go through, and during the peacetime for a company, it means the company is not under any direct threat by a competitor, by industry, by markets, by whatever. And it is growing and it’s prospering. And so, it’s a time where you as a CEO, you have to manage that growth, that prosperity, you have to stimulate creativity. And it was describing how for a long time Google was in peacetime, right, not on the really aggressive attack of competition and all that. And there’s a very different mindset and leadership style that’s required during peacetime as a CEO versus wartime. And wartime is the exact opposite. Your company is under direct threat either by a competitor, by an innovation technology industry market economy, or like we are probably right now, the entire world is on fire, we’re in a global pandemic and that might create a ton of economic attacks to the lifeblood of your business. So a lot of companies are under some level of a threat right now. Will we survive this time? How will we survive this time? And wartime CEOs have to be very different in the way they think and manage and they lead their troops during this time. So, I die to hear your thoughts on this, even on this peacetime, wartime framework. Do you like it, do you hate it? And then, let’s maybe unpack a little bit about what it takes to be an effective CEO during these times that maybe is different from others.

[0:02:33]

Hiten Shah: I am actually a big fan of the framework. I have a build on it. I have a build on it, and it’s kind of interesting. So, I don’t think there’s such a thing as peacetime CEO.

[0:02:56]

Steli Efti: Okay.

[0:02:57]

Hiten Shah: I think that’s the conclusion I have come to when I think about that analogy and that content and that way of thinking about it. The reason I would say that is because, if you think about tech tack, which I’m sure a bunch of people who listen are in. Maybe not, just kidding. Definitely so. And some people might not be in. And you think about it, and this analogy applies if there is any peace to ...

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about whether you should be the face of your company.

Being the “face” of a startup can be very intimidating for some founders, which is why a lot of prefer to not approach marketing this way. However, being a public CEO or founder can be a very effective way to market a startup.

In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what made them become the face of their companies, examples of companies whose founders are the face of the brands, how to approach this if you’re starting a business today and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic

00:12 Why this topic was chosen.

01:55 What made Hiten be the face of his brands.

04:37 How Steli became the face of his brands.

06:11 How Steli created videos in the early days of Close.

06:31 How Steli stumbled in public speaking.

07:01 Example of companies with public faces.

08:17 How to approach this if you’re starting a business today.

08:33 Why you shouldn’t make it complicated.

09:33 Why you do what’s right for your customers.

3 Key Points:

• It started out with me wanting to do the best job with the businesses that we had.
• There’s ego involved in everything.
• Once I discovered that creating videos was super easy for me, I just started creating a lot of them

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:05]

Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about humanizing your brand and being the public persona behind your company. Hiten, both you and I are pretty public people and are very closely associated with being kind of the humanized version of our companies, right? A lot of people but no closed in connection with Steli, right? Or Steli Efti.

[0:00:33]

Hiten Shah: Yeah.

[0:00:33]

Steli Efti: And same with FYI and Hiten Shah, right? It’s inseparable. And I had an interesting conversation recently with somebody that was asking me lots of questions on how I strategically decided to go down that route. What are the pros and cons? Who should do it? Who shouldn’t do it? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it just an ego trip? And I thought this is actually fascinating topic and I thought it’d be fun for the two of us to kind of quickly unpack this for people. So let me first ask you, you know, FYI is not the first company and product that you launched, that you have been very closely as a human associated with versus just being a brand where people don’t know who the people are behind the company. Pretty much every company that you’ve been involved with, you’ve been a very kind of public face off and you’ve been building kind of your personal brand in conjunction with the companies that you’ve been building. Was that a strategic move? Did you ever do research and then decide this is the best way to make a company successful, hence I’m going to go down that path? Was this kind of more random? How do you think about that, kind of looking back? Why did you in particular ended up doing this and building kind of a pretty public profile and brand on your own?

[0:01:52]

Hiten Shah: Yeah. For me, it started out particularly with like wanting to do the best job I could with the businesses that we had and kind of fell into it naturally. I actually fell into it by doing a ton of customer support for Crazy Egg back in 2005 and I was mentioned as a line item by people when they talked about our product versus like alternatives to our product. And a line item meaning like Hiten will respond to you really fast, if do you have a question? And I was just, I just knew that, particularly for that business, we helped you, we basically helped you see what’s happening on your web pages by creating a heat map and so it was a very visual representation of analytics data. And at the beginning, there were a lot of compatibility issues with your website. So people would like write in and be like, yo, it doesn’t work with my website or this thing’s off. Then I’d be like, yeah, we’re looking into it. And then, you know, I’d have an engineers work on it and then follow up, etcetera. And so anything that came up, I was handling. So for the first two years of that business, I was in frontline of customer support and you’d hear from me. So that’s really how I fell into it. And then once Twitter came along, I happened to have an early account. I was under the first 5,000. I was one of the first 5,000 users. And my following just grew because I was early and people were just trying to find people to fol...

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to give presentations to your team.

Internal presentations are very common in the startup world. And while these presentations can be very boring and packed with data, it doesn’t have to be. Learning how to make your presentations exciting will help a long way in communicating your message to your team.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about some mistakes people make when they give internal presentations, examples of good presentations, how to improve your presentations and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About the topic of today’s episode

00:29 Why this topic was chosen.

01:23 A big trend in internal communications.

03:20 How to present your data.

03:56 Why your presentations should have context.

04:27 How internal presentations are similar to speaking at conferences.

05:00 An example of how to create good presentations.

07:14 How to improve your presentations.

07:45 How the best presentations have stories in them.

09:10 What teams need from presentations.

3 Key Points:

• Internal communication is a very big topic.
• People are not used to presenting.
• People are overwhelmed by with too much information.

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about something that plagues every company at some point. And Steli had an experience that I haven’t heard yet, or some experiences, so I’m dying to hear them and talk about this. But it’s basically the idea of how do you communicate internally inside your company? Steli, take it from here. Lead out.

[0:00:26]

Steli Efti: Yeah. There’s obviously the internal communication is such a big topic. The one thing that I’d like to zero in on, because we are going through this and I’ve just personally had to go through this a couple of times and I’m currently working with leadership at close on this, is when people who are leading teams are giving presentations either for those teams or company-wide. And this could be a monthly report, hey, let’s a summary of what happened last month and what we are projecting or our goals for next month. It could be a big project that was concluded or that is planned. Any kind of communication where somebody that is responsible for a project is sharing the learnings, pros and cons, or what has happened, or what is about to happen with people. One big trend that I see, one thing that I’ve seen again and again and again, is that people will go through the, this is a general communication challenge, they’ll go through the simple work of just collecting information. So let’s say I’m running a sales team. February concluded, so I’m doing a summary of what happened in February and it’s a slide, and let’s say there’s six bullet points and it goes, we had a, whatever, 20% conversion rate, we closed this amount of customer, our goal was this revenue, but we only had that hit that revenue, with this one audit that affected closing two deals. Just reporting on a bunch of information, a bunch of numbers, a bunch of random events that happened. Just [crosstalk 00:02:12]. Yeah, go ahead.

[0:02:14]

Hiten Shah: No story.

[0:02:15]

Steli Efti: No story whatsoever.

[0:02:17]

Hiten Shah: That’s what you’re trying to get at, right? No story.

[0:02:19]

Steli Efti: Yes. You’ve instantly got it.

[0:02:21]

Hiten Shah: I was like, wait, I’ve heard this before.

[0:02:23]

Steli Efti: So you look at this and basically as an audience, as the sales team, or let’s say the company that is getting this presentation about the sales results of last month, as a team member, or as an employee of the business, I look at that slide and now I am burdened with doing all the hard work. You were just lazy. You plastered the slide with a shit ton of random numbers and information and now I have to look at it and ask myself, what does this mean? What does it all mean? What of all of this is important? Did we do a good job or not? If we learned something, what was it? What are we changing? I have to do all the interpretation. You’re giving me no story. You’ve given me 10 random facts and characters and you think I’m going to be entertained by that. Just sitting there and putting these characters and events together in some kind of a story that would entertain me as much as watching a movie. People ar...

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about introverts that learned to talk.

It’s common to assume we know the difference between extroverts and introverts. One might be forgiven in believing that extroverts are talkative and outgoing people, while introverts are quiet and tend to be very private. However, this is not always the case.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the history of the startup chat, the idea of being introverted versus extroverted, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert, why categorizing people isn’t helpful and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About the topic of today’s episode

00:41 Why this topic was chosen.

01:00 The idea of being introverted versus extroverted.

02:11 The difference between an introvert and an extrovert.

03:20 Examples of introverts being extroverted.

04:05 Why categorising people isn’t helpful.

05:00 Why this might be more of an activity.

06:12 How one can use their fears as excuses.

06:44 How personality is a spectrum.

08:07 How it’s about stories you tell yourself.

3 Key Points:

• Everybody has people they could be extroverted with even if they consider themselves introverts
• I’m not sure there’s a difference between an introvert and an extrovert.
• It’s not that helpful to think in absolute categories.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey, everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today, on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about a very fascinating topic. The topic is about introverts that learn to talk. That’s the title. I find it fascinating, I find it really fascinating, this whole idea of introvert versus extrovert. I’m going to sort of start it now that you’ve given me the topic, Steli, right before this, by saying, “Is there really a difference between an introvert and an extrovert?” That might be a really controversial statement. I think, my take, is that there are ... That everybody has people who they can be extroverted with, even if they consider themselves an introvert. So I want to start there,-

[0:00:57]

Steli Efti: Beautiful.

[0:00:57]

Hiten Shah: ... Because I know some self-proclaimed introverts, multiple ones.

[0:01:02]

Steli Efti: You live in Silicon Valley, how would you not? How would you not?

[0:01:07]

Hiten Shah: They tell me things like, “I don’t get energy from people.” But, these are the same people that I can talk to them, at least one of these two that I have in mind. I know that they’ll talk to me all day. They don’t have a problem talking to me. It’s just interesting to me to experience that, and yet, that person say, “I’m an introvert.” Sometimes, I think this is the whole point that we wanted to get to was, there are people who either consider themselves introverts, or very introverted, or have those qualities, that actually get out there and do things in the real world, and around people, and go speak like you and I do. It’s something definitely worthy of talking about, because, first of all, I’m not sure if there’s a difference. I’m not actually sure if I agree with the fact that there are people who are introverts and then there are people who are extroverts. I think there are just people. We tend to make up our own stories about what we like and what we don’t like, and who we are and who we aren’t.

[0:02:15]

Steli Efti: I love that. This is one of my favorite things about the podcast, is I’ll throw a premise at you, then you’ll step back and be like, “Is this premise even real?” And reframing it. So that’s part of the fun of this. There’s a part that I agree with and a part that I don’t. So what I like and agree with, is that it is mostly, most circumstances, not that useful to think in absolute categories. Label, introvert, extrovert, pick your label and then act accordingly, or pick a label that will then excuse your behavior, or create a box that you can now use as your limitations. I don’t like that, and I think that that’s bullshit, and you hit that point really hard and really, I think, powerfully. I completely agree with that. I also agree, I also love the kind of reframing it in a way where you go, “Hey, even if you think you’re an introvert, there are people you love to talk to. There’s people that you might be really loud, extroverted person towards.” So being extroverted or introverted might be much more of an activity versus a DNA personality thing that’s unchangeable. It maybe just means there are a certain type of people y...