Apply Pressure or Feel It

0:00All right. So here is a quote for today's times. Apply pressure or you feel it. And this is from Ben Horowitz. He's one of the co-founders of Andreessen Horowitz, which is a popular venture venture capital firm. and he wrote a great book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. And I think this is a quote that, again, it applies for times like this right now where the economy is not doing that great and could potentially get worse. We hope it doesn't, but we try to be practical people here. And by the way, neither Neil and I are economists here. But I think this makes a lot of sense too, because it's like you think about running a company or you think about running a marketing team, for example, if you're not the one that's applying pressure, let's say you're a leader, If you're not the one that's pushing the pace, pushing new initiatives or pushing people to hit their numbers, then ultimately what's going to happen is you being so accommodating to everyone else, what ends up happening is the pressure all comes back to you and you have to carry the load.

0:54And it becomes an imbalance almost because you weren't willing to apply the pressure necessary to hit the results that you want to hit. right and i actually neil so before you go i think you're actually a good example of this because it's not like you try to hurt anyone's feelings at the end of the day you're just a very direct person right and it's like you do what's necessary so what ben's pretty much saying is apply pressure to your team to get things done or what you to achieve what you need want to achieve and need to achieve or else you're going to feel the pain later on it's so 90 so it's yes you apply pressure to your team, right?

1:33In a kind way. But if you don't apply pressure, you will be the one feeling the pressure, right? So imagine you're running a business. If you're not applying any pressure, everything's going to come back to you. Yeah, that makes sense. And I also think it varies for different kinds of businesses. I think the pressure could be more for venture-backed businesses or private equity-based businesses because they have to hit certain milestones. But a great example of this is I have a buddy who owns a private company. They do around 600 million in revenue, never raised a dollar. It's in the tech industry.

2:08It's boring, ugly. Most people have never heard of the company. And I know for a matter of fact, they do like around 160, 170 million a year in profit, somewhere around there. So for him, the dude lives a really chill life. He has no other shareholders in the company other than him, no outside investors. They have debt lines, but they haven't used any of the debt, but they have debt lines in case they want to make acquisitions. And for him, I know he doesn't apply much pressure, but there also isn't much pressure that gets put on him if it doesn't work out. Because he's like, well, if it goes from 160 to 120 or 100 million, he's like, I don't care.

2:45I'm never going to use the money. I'm going to donate it all. Right. So I think there's different scenarios. But in the Andreessen Horowitz world, you got to apply the pressure. because you got to hit numbers and valuation goals and growth goals, or else your company is not going to end up exiting. But even if you're privately owned, and you have no outside investors, yeah, like even us, I do apply pressure to some extent in a nice way, because I want to grow and I want to hit certain milestones and goals. And it's just for, you know, personal satisfaction. action, but you are right in which if the company, if the people aren't performing, I had to figure out myself and apply the pressure on myself, which is a pain in the butt.

3:28Cause then I had to end up dealing with it, which I'm okay with as well. It's tough, right? So applying pressure means having to deal with the tough situations too. Some, a lot of times, unfortunately, you're going to hire people that aren't a fit. You're lucky if you can even bat 500 on that. So 50%, um, that means you're going to have to rotate people out. But the problem is when you have to let go of people, you, some people don't react well to it. Right. And so there's just a lot to deal with. And here's another example. So our mutual friend does about$300 million a year. You probably know who I'm talking about already.

3:56And he, they recently raised, you know,$200 million. And what ended up happening was they hired a lot of people that they didn't need to hire. And they hired a lot of executives that they didn't need to hire. And now he's back in the business cleaning things up. And, you know, he feels like the business is a one out of 10, But, you know, slowly but surely he'll know he'll bring it back. But it's because they stopped applying pressure. And it's because a lot of the leadership was not necessarily founder led. And, you know, he had to step away from the business for a little bit as well. And so now that he's back, it's just like, you know, I'm done with all the, you know, I'm done with working in, you know, this new style where other people like all about remote.

4:33He's like, my thing is I'm all about an office and he's forcing any new hire he brings on. They got to move to his state. so that's how that's his way of applying pressure dude what's funny is i remember the last time i saw him in person you know he taught me to you know you can use if you can use an ipad and get most of your work done that's great because that means you can assign a lot of the tasks that you shouldn't be doing to someone else and when i saw him he wasn't using his ipad i'm like whoa what happened here he's like my business you know needs a lot of work i can't use the ipad to fix it no there's something funny that it's like my business is not good enough for an ipad right now yeah he said it in a more clever way like eric's mentioned but we're just laughing because i was like where's the ipad he's like i gotta fix stuff i can't use the ipad to fix this stuff yep so look apply pressure or feel it personally like i don't care if you're venture backed or like your bootstrap like at the end of the day if you want the results that you're going to get no pressure no diamond that's another what that's another saying so um you figure out the size of the diamond that you want so that is it for today please don't forget to rate reviews rate review and subscribe and I will see you tomorrow.