Why Technical Founders Should Stop Answering Questions

0:00Once you got that, then you can show that you can sell it not just once but twice, maybe a hundred times. So each of these things is where you're at in the cycle. And by the way, when I say this is why you have to present this to any investor, you yourself are also an investor. You're investing your life, your time, your energy and opportunity cost, frankly, right, into building this stuff. So you have to convince yourself, okay, do I really understand this? Have I put this down that, yes, people really have an economically interesting problem to solve? Do I think I have a way to solve it? Can I make that in a way that I can sell repeatedly?

0:30Can I actually go and sell it? So that's the ladder of disbelief.

0:36Peter Wang: Peter Wang is co-founder and chief AI and innovation officer at Anaconda, the company he helped start in 2012 after years of working as a software developer and consultant. In this conversation, we get into how technical people make that transition, learning to ask better questions, recognizing the limits of what they know, talking to customers without immediately trying to sell them something and figuring out whether their idea is actually worth investing their own time and energy into. We also talked about Anaconda's Bootstrap early years, and Peter shares a simple exercise for anyone who wants to find out whether they're ready to start something of their own.

1:11Peter Wang: I'm Walter Thompson. This is Fund, Build, Scale. Are you building something that's hard to explain? It can be a sign you're working on something interesting, but it also raises the risk that you're missing out on fundraising, sales, hiring, and media opportunities. I help early stage founders sharpen the narrative. What matters, why now, who needs to care, and why they're the right team to make it happen. If you're preparing for a raise, a product launch, an important customer meeting, a panel discussion, or even a hiring push, I can help you pressure test your story before the stakes get higher.

1:46Peter Wang: Visit the the FundBuildScale website to learn more or email fundbuildscale at gmail.com. Peter, thanks very much for joining me today. I really appreciate the time. Thank you, Walter. I'm excited to be here. It's a scrappy startup story as far as the bootstrapping. Rolling the clock back, like what did those first six months look like after raising that small friends and family around? Like what were the first things you spent money on, I guess? We got a little bit of office space subletted, you know, some cheap, cheap space somewhere. We got some furniture and we put together a little conference around Python and data science.

2:26We hired sales guy and we started working our network to try to get some more to get some consulting contracts in the door that would then, you know, feed just, you know, feed us basically sort of eat what we catch. And, you know, training was a little bit higher, more predictable and somewhat higher margin so we were able to well not higher margin but it was predictable revenue it was fairly simple to commit to that um so we were just doing everything we could on the just to get some revenue in the door we also managed to stumble across a darpa opportunity and we put it we put a bunch of time into building that out trying to build some partnerships and and and pitching all that um and uh and then we won like a five million dollar contract from DARPA, which then funded a lot of the open source development that we did in the first like four years of the company.

3:18So it was a very, very, you know, there wasn't a particular rhyme and reason. It was extremely tactical, extremely like, it was hustle. You know, it was definitely hustle time.

3:29Peter Wang: I mean, which sounds like by definition reactive, right? Like how do you maintain your true north for all of that and kind of keep on? Well, it's not by definition reactive, but it is very much trying to do a lot of small things that kind of get you towards your bigger goals, right? One of the fundamental goals is keep the doors open, keep the lights on. Another one of the goals is find places where we can do larger and larger, more strategic kind of work. And then the other one was, you know, as we started getting some adoption of actually one of the first things within the first six months is we started building the Anaconda distribution, which was it emerged out of a need as we were doing training as we're doing workshops you know we found our product essentially right by the virtue of doing these things so you just have to sort of say yes to more of these things and you have to keep your mind and your ears open as you're doing it to look for wait where are some common pain points I'm seeing across multiple different places and can I turn that into a product you know we put together you said for six months, but by nine months, and we had put together a hosted online web notebook system, just as the Jupyter notebook was starting to come out.

4:42So we were very early on some of these things, and we tried that, had a hosted service for lots of people. That never really made us any money, but these are the kinds of product, kinds of things that we were building. So we're doing a lot of experimentation the whole time.

4:54Peter Wang: It reminds me of the way, there's this concept in improv comedy, yes and. Yes and, right. You know, you just kind of, nothing throws, you just kind of keep adding to whatever the person said in front of you and kind of keeping on track that way. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But you do have to at some point also have boundaries on there's only so much time and there's only so many ways you can split each of these individual people. And when you're hiring that first team, you do want to solve for generalists. But even the generalists have a limited set of skills in their tool belt. Right. So you're blocked on who can be an account rep, who can be a sale, who can be a solutions architect, who can, who, you know, who really loves to code but can't manage people to save their lives etc etc so there's all these things that are needed um and you only have so many people how do you keep cohesion though because it's like i get that you're all working for the same goal but it's not a linear path and so like one or two people do taking a zigzaggy path where it's something is one thing but getting a large group to stay on track uh and you know confident even in the goal um was that a challenge oh yeah Yeah, absolutely.

5:58That was a huge challenge. We had a number, you know, we actually hired our first project manager about two years in, I think, something like this, because we just had too many things happening. And the ad hoc Brownian motion of coordinating on the group chats and email was not getting it done. And we were starting to break in, not break in, we're starting to get and win larger and larger contracts. So the deals were getting bigger and we need real project management resources to track that keep those things on track but overall you know we have at the senior leadership level we'd be keeping a very very tight loop all the time so we generally had eyes on you know what was happening who's doing what if there was a big like convention or conference we're going to all right what's our plan for that how are we tracking towards that program like there's there's just it's a lot of operational stuff you got to hold in your head.

6:51But I think we did that okay for the most part. The problem was really when we would be doing all these projects and these consulting projects, and this kind of comes back to your earlier question, if you do them well, you actually do end up having more and more and more opportunities. If you're any good, you start scaling this consulting business. Like I said, in three years, we had hit 90 people and we're break even on a two and a half million dollar initial investment. 90 people is a lot of mouths to feed. Yeah, that's a lot of mouths to feed. And to get to break even on the consulting and still have some margin left over to pay for some product development was no mean feat, right?

7:26And that's having built a nonprofit, built community meetups and doing all these things, kind of giving money and time back. There's a lot of stuff we were doing. It was starting to really kind of come apart at the seams at that point. So we had to raise money and really like hire some additional executives who had structured and ordered some things, put some sanity into the structure. But yeah, the cohesion was really actually a huge problem by that time.

7:50Peter Wang: So hiring that project manager, was that an easy choice or did it kind of go against like the culture you'd created up to that point? No, no. I think people were quite hungry for more cohesive and consistent direction. Okay. I think that was fine. I think the issue from a culture, well, it's a good question about culture, right? Because if you are startup kind of oriented, it's a little bit like you're a generalist, you're a bit of a hustler, you're doing the improv, yes and, let me explore this, let me try that. You don't want to tell people, no, just sit there and take orders. You don't want spec-driven people because they're not going to get it done in a startup.

8:28Everyone is running around trying to catch balls before they hit the ground. right? So, so you say, well, this is my area. I'm gonna catch these balls. But if I know something and I can see some, a ball there is about to get dropped, I'm gonna run over there and try to catch that before it hits the floor, right? So there's a lot of this kind of like juggling going on. And when you bring in a project manager and they start putting in some swim lanes, they start telling people, no, you can't do that. You should not do that. Let me know. And I'll go coordinate to make that happen. There does tend to be a clash of personalities.

8:54And so if you are the person overseeing this as the sort of chief executive or president or whatever, you just need to sort of help people through the project, through the change management of this. They say, here's why we're doing this. And, you know, you know, what can happen in those situations is the project managers, if they're coming into this, especially if it's a technical set of endeavors you're doing, you know what? They're going to drop some balls. They're going to call some shots wrong, right? And when that happens, you have to keep the nerds from like ripping these people, you know, apart because they look we understand there are gonna be some missteps but this is the only way we scale is by not having every single person to be an n-squared connect to every other person right right so so as long as you get ahead of that and reinforce and repeatedly communicate these things then you can get through that that phase of change but you know there are well-known breakpoints in terms of people and how you can scale coordination and communication patterns that you know a small team when you get to five six seven like there's oh six seven but when you get to that point there's a um there's there's there's sort of like uh okay we had a we can't just everyone be peeing everyone else all the time by the time you get to 15 a dozen to 15 okay now you have to actually have some explicit cadences when you hit 20 or 25 there's another kind of thing there and then 50 to 60 there's another one and then 100 150 these are kind of well-known points where you have to sort of um clump people more and more and have more explicit communication pathways and feedback pathways

10:20Peter Wang: So the deck you shared with me that you offer to students at Cornell, it seems like the core lesson there is basically how technical people rewire their thinking from engineer towards entrepreneurship. Is that kind of the basic through line there? Yeah, yeah. And I want to be very clear. And I do this when I go to Cornell and give these kind of lectures about this. I'm very clear. I am not trying to proclaim things in all generality for everyone. I'm just sharing my own field notes on what I had to learn and the things that were maybe most counterintuitive to me. Got it. Okay. I mean, so one of the things you tell students is that like they got there, Cornell, by having the right answers, but founders need to ask the right questions.

10:59Peter Wang: And so like if we're talking to like the senior engineer who might be listening to this on their lunch break at Google, by the way, please subscribe, tell your friends. Like how do they, What does that look like? They're sitting there having lunch, they're thinking of themselves, asking the right questions. They want to do something different and get out of the hive and do their own thing. What are some of those questions? Where should they be introspective or existential? Yeah, you know, my point on some of that stuff was to encourage people to not focus on giving the, you know, being the fastest to come up with, like, the best answer all the time.

11:37Because some of the most interesting and most important questions don't have a perfect answer. They're going to be asked by people as they're assessing you or assessing the opportunity. It could be from a customer. It could be from an investor who, by the way, investors are also customers, right? They're customers of your equity. So when they are asking you questions, if you're in a very academic mindset, especially if you're somewhat younger in your career, you're going to really be like you get locked into the paradigm of, oh, I'm being asked a question. Let me let me come up with the best answer.

12:06And what I'm trying to break people out of is hold on a second. Take a take a beat. Take a breath and think about why did they ask me that question? And and and you know what? What question didn't they ask me and what questions should they have asked me? Because if you understand why they asked you the question, then you're starting to model a theory of mind about what maybe they don't understand or what they're trying to get to. Think about what's the next question they might ask with my answer, right? And then, you know, then you think about, oh, oh, if they don't understand this, they should have asked it this way.

12:40And you can only presume so much about the other person, but it is useful to take a beat and not immediately jump like an engineer or a science person. I'm just like, oh, I know the answer to that question. Actually take a beat and think about, well, they asked me about revenues or they asked me about this and then the other. And I suppose to ask the question, I think what they're trying to do is get a sense of am I thinking about the go to market? Am I thinking about how to partner? Am I thinking with actual competitors? Right. And specifically on this particular aspect of a product, you know, maybe they're thinking about is this company eventually just going to be tucked in as a part of some other larger companies and platforms thing?

13:17or do we have a viability as a long-term independent play? Like all of these kinds of things should be swirling in your head that when people ask you a question, you should think about the question they should have asked you and answer that one instead, right? That's the thing. So for the person who's at lunch break at Google who's listening to this and who has just clicked subscribe, for that particular listener, you know, she or he, I would encourage them to think about in their meetings or in their course of the day so far, has there been a situation where they were asked a question, they answered the question, but might have behoove them to take a beat and think about, well, why did they ask that question?

13:51And what was that question, that line of questioning, what was it building towards? You know, even if you stay within a corporate structure, having, developing this intuition and this sort of like second nature is really, really important for your own political career and growth.

14:06Peter Wang: Another one of the quotes that really jumped out at me from your deck was, know your epistemic limits as a founder. Epistemic knowledge, basically. Like, understand like the the limitations of know what you don't know, I guess, or have a sense of what you don't know, or how do you, I don't want to characterize it. How would you, how would you recharacterize that basically? Well, so, so epistemology is a big word, but it's, it's getting more popular nowadays. But epistemology is the study of how we know things, right? And so when I say epistemic limit, knowing your own epistemic limit means having a bit of a self-awareness about how you come to know things and then knowing what the limits of that approach might be and to make it concrete for instance if you are again you know this is this is a lecture i give to the scientists and engineers who are interested in entrepreneurship right and if you're a scientist or engineer you're pretty good at doing things like using math to try to model something right or setting up a series of experiments to try to understand something or if two people have a disagreement Okay, well, let's talk to each one of them and like get to the objective facts and do this and the other.

15:13But that's actually just one way of knowing, right? Whenever you run into situations, there's always a human element to it that you should always keep in mind. So if you're someone who's maybe not so good at the social stuff and the socialization, who doesn't particularly enjoy small talk and schmoozing and all these things. I've run a lot of engineers who have this kind of, you know, who will admit this. Journalists too. Journalists too, probably, right. I mean you know you want to talk about the real stuff what's the substance of it like let's get to the brass tacks on what is our policy disagreement or what is our perspective on the facts of the matter so the thing is though let's have a little epistemic humility and recognize that is only one way of knowing about the world and there are plenty of people out there with money with power who might be your investors who might be your customers who'd have imperfect knowledge and yet have to make decisions based on imperfect knowledge so what is their way of knowing it's a very social way of knowing sometimes right when you have a disagreement between teach I've run of this so many times two very very good very well meaning team members can be at utter absolute just like either they be at each other's throats and when you get to the bottom of it it's actually not anything about the code or about a particular choice and design architecture it's actually because one didn't actually one felt not acknowledged by the other or one felt like they're losing their value to the business if this other person comes in and starts contributing over here.

16:34And it actually is a very, you know, it's a very ego, but psychologically grounded conflict. So you're not, if you are a person who doesn't like, you're not a people person, you don't like reasoning about these kinds of dynamics and social dynamics, recognize that that is one of your limits and you need to actually go and find someone with complimentary skills who does pay attention to, oh, you know, in that meeting, so-and-so, she knows a lot about this topic. She did not say a word. Why is that? Oh, well, because the other guys all talked over her and made her feel not not really particularly welcome in the conversation.

17:06And they actually end up in a worse with the worst decision. Right. You know, these are the kinds of awarenesses that people have. And that's what makes a team powerful. So if you're a leader, if you're a founder, whatever it is, you're always going to be working on a team and with team members. So your way of knowing is always going to be limited. Your map will never cover the entire territory. So understand that your ways of knowing things, your ways of learning things. Maybe you're an entrepreneur who loves to listen to podcasts and loves to listen to perspectives. You know, podcasts like this about entrepreneurship.

17:40Okay, that's one way of knowing about the world, right? There are people who are career, never want to do startups who are career builders in large organizations. They know things you don't know. They know very, very important things that you need to know, right? So recognize that just because you never worked with a big company, worked for the man and did a ladder climbing thing, that means there's a whole aspect of human experience you don't know and you need to understand if you're going to effectively sell to these large enterprises and you have an enterprise software product, let's say. So the whole thing about just know thyself and know the limits of your epistemic approach, that's what that all means.

18:17Peter Wang: That ties directly into another concept, this whole ladder of doubt you talk about, because it's kind of because you have to basically embrace this fact that the uncertainty of all the things you don't know. Lead me to that. Like as far as how does this ladder of doubt concept apply to somebody who's trying to validate a concept for a business on nights and weekends after they've done like, you know, 10 hours on the Google campus and gone home on the bus and everything. Not a lot of gas left in the tank there. So like how do they do this? Yeah. Well, one thing I would say is, well, I mean, directly from my own experience, right?

18:52I actually left my consulting job, not particularly because I wanted to. I want to take a, well, actually, back up a little bit. I realized I needed more time. I just had a kid. I wasn't getting very much sleep. My son, who I adore, was not a very good sleeper. and uh and so i was out of gas but i was i felt so called to the opportunities around what python could be and what this community could build and if we took this really to the world at large uh you know how popular this could be um so i was out of gas and so i asked my employer i asked my employer for a sabbatical i said look can i take like a six month sabbatical i'm gonna leave these projects in a good shape i'm not leaving anyone all you know not leaving anyone on the lurch, but I would like to talk about taking some time so I can go and do some of this investigation on my own of this like new technical area.

19:45Um, and, and those conversations actually ended up falling apart. So I ended up just leaving period. Um, and, uh, and so that's, I did exactly that. I would, I had the self-awareness to realize I was out of gas and I couldn't get it done on my own. Uh, just, you know, just on nights and weekends here and there, my nights were trash with my son was asleep. The weekends got a little bit of recovery on the sleep but then like you basically were out of gas so um so that was that was kind of the thing so first of all first of all i would just ask people to be honest with themselves like if you're if your employer if your place of work has this kind of program to allow you to take even even just you know three or four weeks off as a little somatical mini somatical they could do wonders you know uh you know probably six weeks is really kind of the minimum useful amount but you know you take a week to kind of decompress then you lock in for a month like four solid weeks or you know whatever and then you get a week to sort of like transition back wow that would be amazing right and maybe that's what you need in order to really strike out on your own but whatever you're doing back to your question about the the the ladder of doubt I think if you have an idea or something that you want to pursue if you want to do a you know a company around something, the questions actually end up being pretty similar, different, slightly different, different scales.

21:04But there is this stack, right? The stack is, the first question is like, you know, I think of it as sort of the five parts you need in a pitch deck. Arguably, these are the only five slides you need in a pitch deck, right? Number one, you need to convince the investor that there's a real problem, a real and interesting economically viable problem. Number two, you then need to convince the investor that you have unique differentiated technology IP something that can solve this problem a moat three well motus modus somewhat different modus modus actually tied into a bunch of things on product architecture go-to-market distribution to the others okay various ways to build a mode the first thing is is there interesting hilltop you want to capture.

21:50Peter Wang: Got it. Okay. And then like, is there an interesting thing on that hilltop that you build a castle around, right? And so, so, so, so, you know, is there a problem that's interesting to solve? And then do you actually have a way of solving that problem? And then, and then that's the technology thing. The next one is product. Okay. Well then build the thing that solves that problem, right? And then show me that you can sell it. So how do you take that product to market and show me how you sell it. If it takes two years and 15 people to sell even the basic version of it, that's different than if a person tries it and five minutes later, they're on for 15 bucks a month on a subscription plan.

22:29You gotta show me how you can, is there a tech that is there a solution? Can you productize the solution? Can you sell it? And then can you scale that, right? Like, what do you need in order to then scale that thing going to market? And that could be funding, that could be team, that could be partnerships with manufacturers, whatever it is just about any kind of business you sure you need to understand that to work to be viable you have to answer you have to have a good answer for all of these five questions and wherever you're at you can say well I need more money to get to the next part oh that's great right you can say well I've got it I've you know as a researcher on my nights and weekends I've done this cool thing I built this open source tech people clearly love to use it it's not a product yet okay but I think that these things should be product areas I can make this particular with a feature or I could give away the razors and sell the razor blades.

23:19Whatever it is, you got to think about the product and the go-to-market kind of in conjunction with each other, right? But once you've got that, then you can show that you can sell it not just once but twice, maybe a hundred times. So each of these things is where, you know, where you add in the cycle. And by the way, when I say this is why you got to present this to any investor, you yourself are also an investor. You're investing your life, your time, your energy and opportunity cost, frankly, right, into building this stuff. So you have to convince yourself, okay, do I really understand this?

23:46Have I put this down that, yes, people really have an economically interesting problem to solve? Do I think I have a way to solve it? Can I make that in a way that I can sell it repeatedly? Can I actually go and sell it, right? So that's the ladder of disbelief.

23:59Peter Wang: Do you think your experience in consulting helped you with customer discovery and salesmanship or like, you know, sales motion? Because I think a lot of technical engineers, you know, they don't, if they're not exposed to that, if they're kind of just working heads down in a technical environment, and they don't have any pre-sales training, then the idea of talking to people they don't know, and just asking them questions about what would you like this, or what are your main problems, or how much time do you spend doing this? I think that's kind of, it's like learning a new language, basically, and a new social way to interact with people.

24:32Peter Wang: So what are some frameworks, I guess, that other than consulting and working with customers on a regular basis, what are some other ways that a technical person can kind of quickly dive in and kind of take on that framework of I'm talking to people I don't know and asking them probing questions and trying to get their time and all those kind of the asking?

24:54So the consulting definitely helped. No question. It helped on multiple levels. It helped all the deals I won and all the deals I lost were all very, very helpful. I moved from being merely a technical developer kind of person into someone who could architect solutions. And we're a very small kind of consultancy. So I had to be part sales engineer, part solutions architect. And then I had to go and deliver the project as the tech lead on the project. so the the main thing you have to learn to do is really be be a good listener and be empathetic to other people's needs and and I was somewhat bad at this pretty bad at this early on because I was very excited about the pieces I was excited about and I think maybe every engineer ends up in this phase a little bit you know you go you hear someone they seem like they have a problem that you could solve and you're like well I got the widget for you let me tell you about my widget it's awesome right and then you could just really shout down the customer and it turns out actually maybe they do need your widget maybe they really really need your widget or maybe they don't but the thing you have to learn is developing that ability to hold some call sort of a negative capacity you have to hold space to hear a problem out and receive the other person's needs and their desires without jumping immediately to solution.

26:28Especially for men, I think this is something that's oftentimes stated, right? Like, why is it always just listen to what I'm trying to tell you? Listen to my problems. I need someone to listen. I don't need to solve my problems for me, right? And I think in sales, it's a very similar kind of thing. It's very unlikely, even if you're a mature product in market for a long time, it's unlikely that your thing is exactly the solution that the customer needs but but they will need a whole set of things and if you're if you're good at listening then you can you know get all of that and then when you reflect back to them well here's how my thing fits into this piece of what you're trying to do there's other pieces we don't do and here's some ideas we'd love to work with you on how to get those things we really think this is what the whole solution looks like for you that is deeply appreciated versus just trying to be like oh yeah yeah heard it you know what you need you need my widget here by the widget right and done like that's not that's not great no um no this actually

27:21Peter Wang: what you just described sounds a lot like there's a concept um in interpersonal like i think therapy people call it non-violent communication where basically you're fighting with someone and instead of fighting back you say it sounds like you're saying you're unhappy because i didn't wash the dishes and that's something you rely me to do and i don't do it all the time and kind of if you repeat the thing that if you repeat the thing back to the person that they're saying to you So it's an easy way to kind of short circuit the whole anchor loop and kind of get back to the conversation of what's really going on, basically.

27:50Peter Wang: It kind of sounds very similar to that, basically. Yeah, yeah. And I think the concept is, I mean, yeah, there's one phrase I like to, that I really liked is listen, validate, explore, right? And that's good for conflict kinds of stuff, but in the sales process as well. it's if you cannot actually express what the other person's pain point is in their own words and from their perspective this again gets that epistemology thing right um if you can't if you can't explain that then you really can't sell anything to them and that's good i mean wolf wall street selling this pen right whatever it is it's the thing you need to understand what the other person's need is and then you can have a conversation with them uh there's a classic classic book on sales um by harvey mackie uh called swim with the sharks without being eaten alive that talks about a lot of this kind of stuff.

28:40It's a very well-known book at this point. It's got some kind of some 101 level stuff in it, but for engineers and technical folks who have not ever had to be in that first contact scenario with customers and potential prospects and all that, it's a great book to go through because he really, you know, put some fundamentals in place about listening, about empathy and all these things.

29:00Peter Wang: I'll put it in the show notes. Thanks. Let's talk more about, I guess, leadership and communication and mindfulness, perhaps. Like one of the things you said is that it's really about like dispelling disbelief leadership. How do you do that when you're when you're pre-product and pre-revenue and maybe even pre-customer? How do you like keep that flame from blowing out when you're running around?

29:29Well, I mean, the question is like, what is your own personal fountainhead of conviction? right I think you ultimately have to draw upon that and this is the difference of credible leadership and someone who's just like blowing smoke up people's butts right if you actually understand and you actually have seen these things and the ladder of disbelief is the same for all investors your employees are also investors they're working for you probably getting paid less than market probably a bit of equity and options they're investing they're also investors so why should they give you their time away from their family right so you have to work that stack of disbelief are they all convinced there's a problem okay well then you don't have to work that problem are they convinced that we actually our stuff actually a solution for these problems oh good let's say they're technical and they actually get it great then what where's the product piece you know are we convinced we actually build this into some kind of form factor that we can then equip a sales team to go and take to market right so you just got to work that stack for all those folks as well.

30:27And ultimately, you can be pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-whatever, but there's a reason why you're doing it. And are you good at telling the story about why you're doing it? And by the way, it's fine to say you're not. As long as you recognize the limits of what you can and can't do, then you need to find someone who can be your body double, who is good at this kind of thing. And you have to be very, very tight with them to make sure they have all the context and they believe as well. But I think all credible leadership and credible sales and all these things ultimately are rooted in that conviction.

31:02Peter Wang: What's something you wish more technical founders understood about the credibility issue right there? As far as just being, is it about, is it just transparency? Is it vulnerability? Like what kind of, how much of yourself can you actually bring into the room when you're doing this as a new entrepreneur, new founder?

31:24Well, I really, I hesitate to tell anyone else what they should do, but I can certainly say what I feel has worked for me given just my personality and my, you know, who I am, right? And sort of whatever, whatever character sheets, whatever numbers I have in various things in my character sheet, and this has worked for me. And you put a really, you put the, you phrased this very very well you said put themselves out of bring their self bring their whole selves in or something like this and I loved the insight I just learned last year or so is that you know the word courage comes from the French word for heart and and wholehearted so courage is actually being wholehearted it's it's baked into our language so when you actually show up an environment as a leader or as a founder who wants to dispel this belief, people, they pay attention to every little thing.

32:19So if you bring your full heart, if you can be wholehearted when you show up and talk about why you're doing it and why you care and what's in it for the users and the customers, people get that and they resonate with the, if it's genuine and credible, they resonate with that in a much deeper level than if it's like, oh, you're some whatever management consultant reading off some slides. People don't believe that has a lot of integrity. So anyway, I think that's the, I don't know if that answers the question because I think the question is more of how, but I would say at least that's the what, that is the job to be done.

33:00And vulnerability, you know uh it's hard to be vulnerable in front of a lot of people you don't know if it's your team well the more that you incrementally open up to them and the more situations that you create uh or that that you encounter and you show up in the way that builds trust and that you show a little bit of vulnerability that that is minting trust as a coin essentially for you, right? And this is maybe a piece of advice for folks who maybe this doesn't come naturally. Again, they're not people, people, they're not super charismatic. They maybe have like, you know, interpersonal relationship kind of issues or whatever, and they know this about themselves.

33:43Then it's really important that you partner up with somebody on your team who is the human interface, because your team is going to assist with actual humans, and humans want the full spectrum leadership experience and and people will forgive you in fact they will appreciate the transparency and the candor when you say look I think I'm just not that much of a people person like I really thank all of you for your contributions I'm grateful that you're part of the team I just know I'm not good at showing up in this way but here's you know here's my bunny and here is my co-founder here's whoever and and and and they can then you know they'll know, oh, well, you know, so-and-so, Walter is like the genius co-founder in the basement.

34:24And that's a trope that people can accept. That's not unfamiliar to people, right? So, you know, there's a bit of this that you can tactically deploy, I think. But again, it's about knowing yourself and knowing your limits.

34:35Peter Wang: When you're working with young founders, how do you help them connect like the why, the why are they doing this to like real world trade-offs, like fundraising, hiring, the pressure, you know, that investors put on you to keep growing? I mean, what are the – is that something people are actually starting with right now? Because I talk to a lot of founders, and they're excited about the products they're working on and the problem they're trying to solve. But when I ask them, why are you doing this, I don't always get an answer that seems satisfactory as far as the thing that's getting them out of bed in the morning.

35:10Peter Wang: What's your sense of this? Is that something that you need to have, or is that something that comes to you after you've been working at it for a while?

35:20Well, I don't think I talked to nearly as many entrepreneurs as you do, so I'm going to defer to your anecdote and a data, I guess, about this. I think I have met folks who are, you know, in the business of creating businesses or helping other businesses scale and grow and whatnot, and that's kind of their profession, and that's great. Right. I always I feel like, you know, even among veteran entrepreneurs and operators, they need to know the why. You know, I have yet to see a startup whose value proposition is we go around stomping on bunnies and puppies like, you know, that's not, you know, like other things you can do with your life than to be the CFO for a business that runs around killing puppies.

36:06right so there's just people do want to connect to the why people need to they do want to understand that um and if people don't or they don't find it super compelling i mean they'll still show up for a job but it's just a job you know and if you're the founder and if you're just showing up for the job because it's just a job well then no one else will be more motivated than you are so like you've now set the high water mark for the motivation of anyone in your team um and every business goes through rough spots. Every business has hard times. Even when you're successful, you go through moments of change and moments of chaos and all these kinds of things.

36:43You need people to want to believe and want to follow your leadership. And at those moments, it's really incredibly important that the vision is compelling for people, the why and the purpose is compelling for people. So, you know, that's what I would say just in general. Now, for founders who are looking at building a business or whatever, you know, it's, it's, I think it's valid to say, I want to do this business because I'm trying to learn how to build a business. And, you know, I want to make some money and there's an opportunity here. I would much rather people just be honest that they're in it for the money than to spend a bunch of time spinning a bunch of bullshit about stuff that's not real.

37:23Because that's just, that's actually just very awkward and cringey, right? So just be honest. But in general, the thing I would actually say for young people is there are many ways you can try your hand at entrepreneurship. There's many things you can spend your time really trying to figure out. If you are a person of some cleverness, if you're a person with a certain amount of industriousness, why put your life energy into something you don't care about? you know and again if you're honest with yourself like well i'm just gonna try some stuff and see what happens i'm gonna learn some skills business skills fine rock on but you know in general we should all try to be devoting our time to things we care about i mean you you you know do this podcast and do these kinds of conversations um i have to think that you're doing it not just for the glory but also because you actually care about helping people um you know build great businesses right and learn from each other and that's a fantastic thing so i think all of us you know, especially in these times, these days when there's so much is changing and there's a lot of stuff happening in the world, we do need to be intentional, I think, about where we put our life energy.

38:33So I think it would be remiss if I didn't encourage you at least to take a moment to be intentional about that.

38:38Peter Wang: My second to last question for you is, can you share an experiment actually that someone could try, like someone who's on the cusp, they're on the bubble, thinking about making that leap into doing their own thing? What's one experiment, or maybe they're already doing it. What's one experiment they could do in the next week that doesn't require 10 people,$100 ,000, something they could just do to kind of move forward just a little bit, one path on the journey?

39:05One fun little exercise. So I play violin, and one of the things that you do in any kind of musical instrument is you have these things called etudes, which are studies. And they don't sound particularly great. They're not masterpieces of music, but you do them to just you know practice and get muscle memory so sort of a toots for entrepreneurship fun cute things are like you know can you build something and figure out you know you've certainly read you know people are reading things all the time people cry about stuff they wish some things work this way work that way can you build a little product that someone will pay you ten bucks for you know can you build something that someone will pay you a hundred dollars for right so one person ten dollars one person hundred dollars or can you build something that 100 people will pay you$1 for.

39:49What would that look like if you just sat down right now and said, okay, tonight, I have a business plan for something. I'm never going to scale it more than$100 of revenue, maybe monthly revenue, maybe one time revenue, but I want to build a thing that I want to find one person who'll pay me 100 bucks for it. Right? And you know, there's, it's things like it's all sorts of it can be any any random kinds of things like in the software world, it's like, Oh, is it a photoshopping service where you need to photoshop someone out of a picture. And of course, you could do this with prompting all this stuff.

40:15But people have to learn how to prompt stuff with ai and lms you could maybe build a little thing where people drop in a picture and people just replace something and they you know maybe they do it with their phone right literally scan a qr code upload a photo boom you give them a photo that is that person removed you know you start then really really really fixating on the issue of what is valuable for people how do i transact it the mechanics of getting that transaction smooth and you're not then fixated on like oh i've got this really cool deck to build this amazing widget you know you're really focused on solving people's problems, finding a probably a pretty mundane or sort of,

40:51Peter Wang: you know, prosaic sort of a need, but you're really now putting yourself in a service mentality, which is the fundamental thing you have to do if you're going to be an entrepreneur. You have to be good at being in a service mentality. You have to be a service to your employees. You have to be a service to your customers, to your investors. Get good at doing that, right? So yeah, just can you build one thing that you sell for a hundred bucks? Can you build something that you sell a hundred things of for one dollar you know think about that i like that that is that's very that is very simple very tangible peter my last question for you if you were interviewing for a job with an early stage startup uh sitting across from the ceo what's one question they'd have to answer for you before you could take the offer yeah i i'd uh for me it's really about um i had this great quote once uh everyone has a last day everyone has last day somewhere everywhere right so I've asked CEO okay what is your last day you know either the company or as CEO right what is your plan for where this goes right and a plan sounds very specific I don't need a specific plan but just a vision for what is what does the future look like but especially for early stage thing and if it's a younger sort of entrepreneur I'd want to see that they can think outside of their own ego and that they're beyond the egoic limit I have a whole litany of questions, obviously, but that would be one of the questions I would ask for sure.

42:15Peter Wang: Peter Wang, thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. I hope a lot of engineers will recognize themselves in some of these questions and the answers you offered. Thanks for the time today. Thank you, Walter. This was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. The fun build scale theme was written by Michael Tritter and performed by Michael and Carlos Chárez. Michael also composed Ocean, the track he heard at the top. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and leave a rating. It helps more people find the show. You can get the Fund Build Scale newsletter on Beehive, follow along on Instagram, and if you have a guest suggestion or a question, reach me at fundbuildscale at gmail.com.

42:53Peter Wang: Thanks for listening. Fund Build Scale is a production of Truth and Soul Media, LLC.