E265: What the Coach to Sequoia, A16Z and Benchmark Learned About Power and People

27:26I was actually thinking about this the other day when I stopped by a local cafe here. They use Square and everything just works. Checkout is fast, receipts are instant, sometimes I even get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are in store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups and everything stays synced in real time. You could track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in the shop or on the go.

27:59And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing to your best customers keep coming back. And right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash how I invest. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Well, that's the wrong attitude, right?

28:34Like what shouldn't some, well, okay, so fair enough. What are the principles for being highly effective? yeah yeah no no no i mean the the the reason i said that never delegate the wrong question wrong attitude is you should think of delegating everything and then look at what is maybe not wise to delegate versus that but the problem is most for for most of our listeners today david their problem is that they actually don't delegate enough right and so and that they struggle with with letting go and um and uh and and and aren't willing to push the envelope because they work in a framework that says this is my world my office and i'm supposed to do it kind of thing so that's that's where my reaction came to is it's like no like you should push people to delegate almost everything but if i were to be forced to answer your questions is anything that puts you at risk of coming across as inauthentic or not genuine right like like for example going to the beach and and having somebody answer all of your emails in your inbox but also send them is is is a recipe for disaster at one point.

29:38But having said that, you know, to get to another playbook, one of the most powerful ways in which we can actually free up 12 hours a week. You know, the one thing that I didn't mention in this notion of leverage, if you have an EA, we have ways of almost, you know, like in most cases can get people to free up 12 hours of stuff they're doing that they don't need to be doing. Right. So imagine somebody comes to you, David, and says, hey, I can give you back a day a week. You know, wouldn't you at least have to talk to that person and say, wait a minute, is this vaporware or is this real? And what I hope I'd be able to present to you and your audience today is that what we do is absolutely not vaporware, but it works because it's founded of years of years of practicing and refining small little best practices.

30:24We call them playbooks to basically, you know, free up 12 hours a week. and one of those playbooks is this concept of inbox shadowing. So the idea is very simple. It is using your EA to do the inbox for you, right? And there are several levels of how far you can push it, but at the end of the day, what they do is they look at the email and then they decide, can I answer it or not? If they can't answer it, they will answer it and they will put it into your draft folder. They will never send it, right? if they can't answer. And that's about 80 % of the email that needs answering. They will be able to figure out, depending on how long they worked with you and how much context they have about you and how much they've worked with you to understand how your brain is operating, they'll be able to answer 80 % of your email.

31:11And then there are 20 % of the emails that they don't know how to answer. They're typically decisions or they're requests for advice. Let's say something like, hey, I'm a founder of a SaaS company. Do you know anything about SaaS pricing? And you might happen to know a lot about it because you've helped a lot of SaaS companies because that's what you invest into. That's something that your EA might be struggling with answering, right? And so they move that into Please Handle. It's a folder called Please Handle, right? And then everything else that doesn't need answering, they will be able to figure that out and put it into FYI, a folder, right?

31:44Like I would argue anybody who's listening and hasn't, they could start doing that today to a certain degree, although it's a little bit more complex than just starting it, right? And then the beauty of this, and I'll let you ask the question in a moment, but the beauty of this is that when you now go to your inbox, you have a fundamentally changed relationship. Most people feel enslaved to it in some form or the other, right? Like if I don't look there regularly, I'm going to fall behind. Imagine, like I have clients that basically use the first two hours for thinking time. We call it white space time, another playbook, where they commit two hours of the day to just thinking about strategic things and so on and so forth, and they do not look at the inbox until 10 a.m.

32:24Why? Because they have somebody else looking into it. And if there is something red hot, a founder sends you a message that says, I'm going to have to divorce my other founder. You know, that's all hands on deck moment. You will get a text message saying you have to pay attention to that. But as long as there's no news, no news is good news. And your mind can focus on something that actually moves the needle more than answering emails. Right. So you have a fundamental change of it. And then the second thing is what we've seen is that basically if you do this and let's say the average listener today spends probably an hour and a half to two hours in inboxes every day, you know, that basically can be reduced by 50 to 60%.

33:05So think about it. That's like an hour to an hour and a half of time back every day. Right. So it's one of the examples we have of why we can claim 12 hours easy. right because now somebody else is doing the triaging is answering the operational type of emails and then basically you just have to answer the please handle ones and even there we can give a tremendous amount of power because very often the the email that they can answer are the most important ones for people that are emailing you because you know they're emotional or their request for advice but what you do at that point in time but they're also often not urgent meaning that they don't have to be handled right away.

33:43And so what you can do is instead of actually answering the email and writing a 50-minute essay to give them the advice they want, you talk it, you dictate it, and basically the answer gets produced by your assistant. And if you're really smart, now we're dipping into another playbook, we call it the value payload database. If this isn't answer SaaS pricing and you basically write three, four paragraphs about SaaS pricing And you know you're going to get that question over and over again. You ask your EA to put it into a value database of templates that you already use over and over again. Next time around, all you have to do is saying, hey, you know, here's some personal comments on that email that is specific to this situation.

34:24But please integrate these comments into our standard value payload on SaaS pricing. Right. So you see how everything is a little bit interconnected. connected but you know if you just envision rolling that out over 50 payloads the amount of efficiency you can get is powerful very powerful and are you just using the iphone recorder app do you have a separate recorder we have a off-the-shelf app that we use for it um it's look the one thing that we felt is like we should never become a technology house because there are other people building software faster than we could ever because our business is coaching best practices to people, right?

35:04And so we always look for off-the-shelf solutions and we constantly are revising what we think is, you know, standard of care, if you will, of, you know, like what is best practices. So right now I could give you two different ways you can do this. One, the most proven way is using a tool called Audio Memos. You can find it on the app stores. And then what you have to set up is basically it literally lets you press one button to record and then press one to say done. And then you're done because it then drops it into something like Dropbox. And then basically we use tools like make.org or Zapier to grab that recording, send it through, whisper to translate it, you know, and to even, you know, we've been quite successful on using AI.

35:50And this is also something we do. We help you set up and AI-ify your suite, your office suite. We try to make the email be in your tone, right? So taking the content of what you dictated that has been transcribed, then basically sending it through a specific, you-specific prompt to then basically drop that into a task management solution for your EA. Now, a lot of people would ask, well, why are you not just dropping that into my draft folder right away? And I'm saying that is the reason I'm hesitant to doing this. we will end up doing this when AI is good enough, but AI's paradigm right now is you get as much as you can offload it to it, but you have to validate, validate, validate, and verify, right?

36:32And I don't want you to be doing that if you have an EA, because it doesn't make sense. But for example, one of the things that I'm personally very excited about is that I have to say no to a lot of people that I can't work with because they don't have an EA. But now we can, because we can show them all of those things and sure they have to take on the role of that EA when it comes to validating validating what they get but it's still way faster you know way faster for them to operate that way than if they do it the traditional way and here's the real secret benefit that my clients tell me over and over again if I just by having a draft sitting there and even if that draft is not quite perfect it's not ready to ship I slip first and foremost more into a role of an editor and therefore I make the email better.

37:18But because it's sitting in my draft order, I end up sending it, right? So it's binary. It's a different. And then there's a subtle thing. Your ego is not attached to it. Somebody else wrote it and now you could correct it with your ego and it's much less frictionless than being judged for a unique piece of art. Yeah, fair enough. Exactly. That is true. Although remember, you'd still dictate the email. So this is your content. So you never wrote it, but it is still your content. You could blame the problems on the AI and take off the AI deals with that better than humans. Well, the AI would maybe smoothen it out, but it is still your content, you know, and, you know, sometimes you realize what the AI came very often, regularly.

37:59I would say when the AI comes up with something, it doesn't feel right to you and you end up using what you actually dictated. And frankly, if you are good at dictating, if you're good at verbally expressing yourself in the way you would write something, you don't need AI because, you know, it's just an extra step of something you have to read and verify. But if it's the words you chose that show up at the back end when you want to click send, it's, you know, it's ready to go then because you know what you said. So I want to double click something that you implicitly said, but you didn't explicitly say this.

38:31your EA could use rule-based decision making 80 % of your emails on a weekly basis are highly predictable now most people don't want to think that they want to think that every week their email is extremely dysyncratic and they've never had these kind of emails but what you're essentially saying and correct me if I'm wrong is that 80 % of your emails your response is predictable and the 20 % is really where you should put your effort is that what you're saying it's a question nobody's ever 15 years of doing this nobody's ever posted to me but i would say this i don't like the word predictable i would say or maybe yes maybe it is predictable i mean like the the point is you need to have somebody not only be able to predict it but also predict within the context of the environment they're working in your environment your attitude your approach your style so predictable by somebody that understands you very well and has been shadowing you not generally predictable.

39:25Yes. And I would argue anybody, you know, I would challenge everybody to look into it because it's actually like, you know, it's emails like, hey, a good example, right? A founder of yours reaches out to you with sort of an emergency email. It's like, hey, I do need to talk to you in the next 24 hours. Isn't that predictable that you would say yes, even though this is an important email and it's an important relationship? Of course you will do, right? And here's the beauty of inbox shadowing, in my view. When that email hits you, right? This is one of the very fine benefits or fine grade things that you can look into when you do inbox shadowing.

40:02When that email hits you, this particular example of an emergency request from one of your founders, you are most likely in a meeting. Maybe you're even in back-to-back meetings for two, three hours, right? Now you have somebody looking at that, sees that this is red hot and can actually act on it. For example, your EA could go to his or her own inbox and write to that founder, hey, David has asked me to get him on the calendar today. Does 6.45 work for you? He has 50 minutes there and he can do it. Think about the SLA you're delivering now as an investor and how you make those people, again, back to Maya Angelou, how you make those people feel.

40:48you make them feel that you are living up to the promise that you would roll up your in your sleeve like every single gm on the platform in the world is offering but you actually but most people aren't if we're really honest right like they can't because then back-to-back meetings in the today world they will hear from you maybe in five hours right or four hours but here they hear through your office that they have time with you within 10 minutes right and we all know how powerful fast responses are right and especially in these important things and that's what i'm saying is like this that's yes that is predictable and it's interesting because although you've institutionalized this in thousands of organizations venture capital firms startups etc this has been around for centuries if not millennia's if you think about what the president gets every day they he gets a military briefing yes which condenses from 20 different kind of management chains down to we have this issue with Iran.

41:50Here are three options. Yes, I think the Simpsons has done like a funny episode on that. It's like option. They're like three pictures you could do. Essentially, that's that's this like hyper streamlined process. And why does he have that hyper streamlined process? Because it's one person trying to manage an entire country. He must be focused. He can't react individually on emails. I think, you know, President Trump doesn't do emails. I think he literally signs letters and faxes them. I don't even think he has an email. But neither here nor there, it's the systems that work at the highest level and they also work on an individual organization level, obviously, because they could work in the most complex systems.

42:29David, I think you nailed it. You could argue that Mind Maven is in the business of democratizing the office of the president and making it available for anybody who can afford an EA. If you want to operate in the way a J.F. Kennedy operated, or maybe even whoever is the person that you look forward, J.F. Kennedy was known to know everybody's meaning and had backgrounds on it. There's some presidents that had this feeling. I think there's a story around Bill Clinton too, that he had this weird thing of making people always heard. and listened to in some form or the other, right? But if you really look at it, he just knew about who he knew enough about the people that he's meeting with.

43:19And basically, we're able to deliver this exceptionally powerful experience to everybody he touched. And creating these legends, and that created these legends around his presidency. And if anybody's interested in doing this, that's sort of the business that we're in. And, you know, always looking at how to make people feel good because it just turns into legends. It turns into very good outcomes. You're reminding me of this article that I read probably a decade ago. And I just remember that every president had their own managerial style. I'm going to use two examples. We're going to use a Democrat and a Republican so that nobody gets triggered.

43:56Yeah, exactly. Two of the biggest micromanagers presidentially in the last hundred years, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. probably not the two most highly popular or effective residents the last hundred years so there there does seem to be something about if you try to micromanage at some level other other parts of your performance may suffer as a result is applies to businesses it applies to the chief executive of the country yes and i would add to that isn't it true that the higher you build your organization up, let's take the example of a portfolio CEO of yours or of anybody who's listening.

44:36At one point, the company becomes big enough that they fill out their first team, right? They have a VP of marketing, product, a CTO, whatever you need. Everything is there because they scaled the organization successfully to that level. At that point in time, one could argue that the only job left for the CEO, if we simplify it dramatically, is managing relationships. That's all they do. They have to continue to find the best people possible for the organization and then convince those people to join. And then once they join, convince them to stay around and stick around by making them successful.

45:11All of that is no IC work. It's all about relationships, right? And some of the most effective leaders were able to get the best people to follow them through hell and back. And you do that, again, by a very simple formula of making sure people feel good about interacting with you in some form or the other. So no big leadership frameworks, but basically what do I do tactically on a day-to-day basis in the way I interact with the people around me to make them feel good, by making them successful, by supporting them, whatever works in that sense. And that's probably true with the presidents too.

45:48It's become such truism that's become so trite that recruiting and business development, but specifically recruiting Steve Jobs. Ken Griffin talks about, who has one of the most largest capital constrained pools of capital in the world, one of the top managers, even though he has all these different quant traders and all these really smart people doing really smart strategies and constantly generating alpha. He says that his only sustainable advantage is recruiting. And the people that I've talked to around him say that that's not a joke. It's not some bumper sticker. This is one of his main kind of operating principles is that you must be able to recruit the very top people.

46:25And that's one of the things that he really takes the reins on. Should we make this pragmatic? Can I throw a playbook again? Right. So, for example, this is one of our playbooks. And it's so basic, David, that you're like, he comes to my show or talks about this. It is simply so basic. Like you would argue with me that everybody you know who is building a business or running a fund comes across people from time to time, sometimes even more regularly, where you look at that person and say, one day I want to hire that person or one day I want to work with this person. Isn't that something that people think consistently, right?

47:01The funny thing is 99 % of the people out there are doing nothing with that thought. And that's a shame, right? So what I think people should do is the moment you recognize that you have that thought, you need to basically in the debrief after the meeting, this thing that you basically mentioned, the meeting debrief, you dictate to the EA to put this person into your talent pool. Right. So you create a, you know, everybody should have a CRM. We help with that as well. But, you know, in that CRM, you have a bucket of people that at one point you want to hire. I think there's this particular point for startup CEOs because they meet a lot of people, especially in the early days, where they cannot hire the person they would like to hire, but at one point they will be.

47:43And that's also the right timing for that person to join you because the person operates at that level, right? So imagine building out a 30 to 50 people talent pool for any kind of spot you have in a scaling organization, right? And then basically you make sure that with the help of your EA, you stay top of mind with these people. What that means is maybe a message every six weeks, you know, as you grow, updating what's going on, checking in on their families, whatever it is, right? Maybe having the EA look up what's happening in the person's world by going to LinkedIn, by going to Twitter or by going to Instagram or whatever it is to seeing what's happening and then writing them an email based on, hey, I noticed that you spent the weekend camping.

48:26What tent do you use? Or, you know, especially if you are also into camping, that's really important. That's a common ground and so forth, right? And so now you run this pretty regularly. At one point, your company is going to be ready to hire that person. And then you basically ping them. The other thing that will happen is when you basically add them to the talent pool, you will let them know that, hey, if you ever are wondering about your career and the next steps you want to do, feel free to use me as a resource. Right? So to who do they turn first? You, which gives you first dip to saying, you know what?

48:59It's a little early for us, but I think this is the time to do it. and isn't it true that every single gp well not every single most gps are looking for the holy grail of the founder and the holy grail of the founder is the founder has been able to do something with nothing somehow they were able to use very little resources to pull something valuable out of thin air we call them the resource effective founder and a resource effective founder is managing relationships that's the only differentiator you will ever find between them and others. They are the ones who basically stay in touch with these talent people because they, instead of paying$120 ,000 to recruiters, they're getting these people for free.

49:38And very often, these people come along with similar high quality people, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how you end up scaling. So this work that we're talking about right now, and for many people listening today is not optional. This is not a conversation about like, oh, here's something I could do, delegate. It's like if you are on the mission of reaching the top, the fullest potential you can have within your vision, within the mission you're pursuing, investing time into relationships and learning how to do that well is not an optional choice. It is a must-have because otherwise you can't get there.

50:10A common theme among all these things that you're saying, these are all long-term games, whether it's getting the next lead for your fund or for your startup, whether it's recruiting CXOs and top level talent. And they are definitionally non-urgent. Why? If it doesn't take, if it takes two to three years, it cannot be urgent. You can both be highly urgent and take three years. Yeah, these are the number one things that suffer when you focus all your time on urgency, the most important strategic things. Which leads me to my final question. Thinking time. You mentioned these two hours a day. Some people maybe could only afford two hours a week.

50:47And I ask you a paradoxical question. what are the best practices for unstructured thinking time and how do the very best leaders make sure that they're focusing on the right things during their thinking time oh easy look we call this white space time just just sort of like imagine yourself locking yourself into a room that has only white walls and nothing in and you can just focus on this one thing that you really want to focus on right and the way you do this or the way most people attempt to do this by I'm just doing calendar blocking, right? They're saying, I need two hours of thinking time.

51:19I'm putting it on the calendar. But anybody who's attempted, the majority of people will end up finding out that they get meetings written over it or they end up not using it in some form or the other, right? And it becomes very, very challenging to be successful with it. We just call it the calendar blocking. And that's why we call it white space time because what we do in addition to that is that we build really strong, fat retaining walls around that time. And what I mean with that is that you use your EA, who basically is supposed to have control of your calendar, and explain the difference between important and urgent and saying that there's nothing more important than my white space time for our success.

51:59So nothing in the world can ever move this. Period. Right? Then you have to build in exceptions to, you know, because the world spins and things come up and you sometimes have to move it. So you say, if you have to move this wide space time, you're only allowed to move it if you can find another place in the same week on the calendar. And if that means you have to cancel something not important and non-urgent, do so. And so that helps with basically maintaining this. Another thing you should do is use your EA as an accountability partner. So we like an EA to send you a weekly performance email.

52:42that says, how many meetings did you have enough? How many did you follow up with an email? You know, like what's your percentage? We want them to say how many hours of the hours you want to do every week did you spend in thinking time or white space time? Four out of six. Frankly, anybody who comes to me with four out of six is like, congratulations, you won because it's more than zero, right? So that makes a difference, right? And so forth. And then you asked me about how to make sure that you use that time really well. I'm sure you've heard about Paul Graham's famous blog post about maker's time versus manager's time, right?

53:20So white space time is traditionally in the maker's time paradigm, right? The problem, for those that don't know this concept, it's very simple. It's like a lot of people say they struggle because they have a dichotomy of responsibilities. At one point, they're managers, but they're also making, they have to build, they have to create, right? And what often happens is that basically the manager's time is easy to maintain because it's driven by you have to show up for meetings and manage or listen. And the meetings have the tendency of just being there and all you have to do is show up. You don't have to activate or self-activate to do anything for them.

53:56And so what happens is that very often the manager's time crowds out the maker's time and the maker's time gets too little. right and so that's one thing and the second thing about it is that it requires a completely different mindset when you are in managers time you're often just reacting when you're answering emails that is managers time when you're sitting in a meeting and people talk to you it's managers time and so one of the most powerful things is to come up with a checklist before you step into white space time of how to restructure your brain for proactive thinking right this number one using principles out of mindfulness to calm it down.

54:35When it's very reactive, it's looking for new signals and wants to do things, right? But that's not helpful for the process of proactive thinking. So you want to calm it down, right? Then you want to switch your mind into a positive mood, into a positive, into happy space. You want to be happy. Why? Because a happy brain is way more creative than a defensive brain or reactive brain. Numerous studies have proven that. I'm sure you're nodding because you've heard about this before, right? And then you want to, and you do that by just thinking about funny moments. Make yourself laugh in some form or other, you know, like you might think to yourself, I'm like a crazy lunatic in a room laughing, but it's actually really good for you to do the best work.

55:17Then be very clear what you want to work on, even before you go into it, right? And then the last thing, the most powerful thing is just get started. What I mean with this is figure out what is the very first step or the very first thing you want to do take away ambiguity because there's the ambiguity and effect a psychological construct that is real and makes us be paralyzed when we have too many options we end up not choosing a single option it's sort of the summary of it right and so just say the first thing i need to do is write open up a notion document google document whatever it is that you're working on and write a bullet point list of certain items and go start because a lot of people struggle switching and so they end up like i'm going to answer a quick few emails and all of a sudden those two out that you set aside are sent are used for emails right and you want to not make that happen you don't want that and so you have to just get started in the thinking time i would argue most people listening today would say yes once i get started i don't stop right so once you get into flow right once you start and it's often just a little hump but often that hump is too high for most people to actually get into it because it is a proactive way of working and some people really struggle i'm one of them especially those that have adhd struggling more for example sometimes that environment a different environment different i like to literally use a whiteboard if not sometimes even taking a walk elon musk has talked a lot about this he kind of deprives his he doesn't literally go in a sensory deprivation tank although some people have taken to that extreme it goes where there's no distractions he just sits and he calls it thinking from first principles like what comes up and and the thoughts will come up to your point if you silence the mind the important things will spring up and you just have to be there to capture them yes that's exactly it patrick this has been absolute master class i want to write this down for myself if if somebody wants to work with you how do they go about working with you and what are the next steps well the first thing i would recommend is check out my book i'm very very proud of it it took me four years to to write it and so it's not one of those like phone together not a single word has been written by ai in this it's like i have read it and it's extremely good and that's okay that's how i reached out to you okay fantastic well that's good to know um my my co-author um connor will be very happy to hear that this is a consequence of writing this book we put a lot went into it.

57:46The way we work is very simple. It's a coaching process. If you think anything that you listen to is interesting, I would recommend people reach out to us. My email is patrickatmindmaiden.com or you can come through us through the website. We have a very unique sales approach and it's that we actually don't sell. It's because of the business model we're in. We're coaches, right? And our coaching is habit-based. If you're not really ready for it, we will not sell you because we wouldn't be successful and we have a 95 % success rate. and so but what we do do is get to know people right and so even if you don't think this is right for you right now reach out to us and have half an hour call usually what we do is what you and i did today in this call is is we listen to some of the channels they have and then we try to match playbooks to it like the the talent pool playbook was just an example where you described a challenge that people have.

58:41And I was like, this is how we would try to solve it with the people that we work with. And so at a minimum, people that talk to us walk away inspired. And the only thing we want in return is goodwill. You know, talk well about us. And, you know, that's how I've been building a business. And so far, I feel like I've been quite successful. Well, Patrick, thanks so much for your time. I know it's your most scarce resource and I appreciate you sharing it with me and the audience and looking forward to doing this again. Can I say something to you? As a host, I've had many hosts of you done an exceptional job of getting deep stuff out of me and really being a good partner in this call.

59:20I really enjoyed this so much because your examples allowed me to dig deeper. And it was an absolute pleasure to work with you today. Thank you, Patrick. Very much appreciate it. That's it for today's episode of How to Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.