YouSaid · the spoken record

Clark Valberg

lines on the record: 22
first: 2019-08-30
most recent: 2019-08-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, I think I try to think in daytime compartments, and if maybe even quarter a year type compartments, I think ultimately there is a”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having kids changes the full stack of your internal value system indefinitely and profoundly in a way that you can never ever couldn't possibly explain to somebody who doesn't have kids. The minute you have your first child, all of your entire value system becomes inverted. I can't explain that anymore than that. It's the kind of thing you'll never be able to convince somebody who doesn't have one that's only abstract. It's something that has to be experienced to understand. It's like being hungry. I don't know whether you're hungry or full right now, but if you were super full, like coming out of a massive feast. And I said, remember what it's like to be hungry? You're like, what? I don't. I don't know what it's like to be hungry, nor do I know what it's like to be full when I'm hungry. This is just one of those visceral experiences that just are all pervasive to an even more profound degree. So yes, it changes everything, part of being remote, obviously, is just, you know, having proximity to these people who you care about more than anything in the entire world. I like the idea of being able to walk downstairs at 4 p.m. when my son comes home from camp. Now he's in summer camp, summer day camp. Go see him, hug him, get connected with family, and then go back to work.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something I don't think about very often, to tell you the honest truth. This goes to my rule of not emphasizing things. Don't emphasize moments in your own life and don't emphasize people. All people are just people. Everyone is oblong. So the successful person is the person who overcomes their own weaknesses. The strong person is the person who can control their own passions and, you know, lead with their head and their heart at the same time, but in the right order. So I don't necessarily don't think about CEOs of companies or other folks as being those to wholesale adopt as a model of success. I think that it's a question of how you realize your own talent through the refinement of the self.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can operate in a semi communal hey, we're all here hanging out by the water cooler, and let's just have frequent chats. But at scale, you need practices, process, and the right people.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it works. There is just an idea. We have these little allegories in our mind of how communication spreads at the water cooler. There's people just milling around. And by milling around and being next to each other, all the information that they have in their brains is kind of just floating through the air and transferring psychically. And that's just obviously not the way it works. If you don't have deliberate systems to ensure that people are aligned to make sure that information is flowing to the right people at the right time and early and often, if you don't have deliberate systems that make that happen, it will not happen, especially in a 900% company. If you imagine what Need will look like in an office, it's not one floor, I can tell you that. And there is no one gigantic wallless office even the size of an airplane hangar that can possibly connect those people together through physical proximity alone. So you have to have systems. You have to have technology systems. You have to have processes in the form of stand-up meetings and update meetings and strategic alignment meetings. You have to do this super deliberately. Every company does, even those that are offline. Now, those that are very small.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“$500 lamps seem like expensive lamps, but we do the same thing, we also give $500. So what we do is, so we realize that people need to get together every now and then. So once a year, we have a massive global all hands. Last year was in Phoenix, Arizona, the year before that we were in LA. All people in the entire company, all in one place, having a good time together, we don't use our in-person time. This is really important, I think, different. We don't use in-person time to get work done. We use in-person time to get rallied around the vision and to connect as people, as humans, as a culture personally, and not for work, right? So people have to kind of tie together just to socialize and build that model of each other in their mind so that when we go back to the internet, they go back to the online space where the real work happens, that model that we have in our brain of the other people that we work with becomes more refined, more personal, more intimate.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fear that you get from candidates about it changing their life for the worse, what I tell people is that, you know, hey, the weirdest thing about being in remote company is how not weird it is. It probably takes four or five days to get used to, and then you click in and you feel really good about your new lifestyle. But convincing people of that is hard. So you have to have a lot of personal references from people who've done it for years inside the company.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely the question of diversity. This is obviously a massive challenge. Not one that I have a ton of great ideas on how to fix fundamentally, but I think that the remote work thing, like being open to building a business that's outside of the closed quarters of the major tech hubs is something that you should definitely consider.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Favorite book, Positioning by Al Reese and Jack Trout. I think that's formative in my thinking and marketing, and I think that there's an entrepreneur that wouldn't benefit from reading that book.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are many SaaS products, by the way, can help you with that. There's a massive industry of SaaS products that can help”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The EUC and the Five Whys of yourself. So those are very deeply personal. But I can tell you one that I think is common to a lot of people, especially folks who are people people. We tend to be people pleasers. And I think that's just a mask for needing to figure out what your flavor of conflict will be. I had this conversation actually with our team recently. If you see yourself as a nice person, here you see yourself as a nice person. And so what does that mean? You don't want to be a jerk. Is that right? Does that make sense? You'd hate to imagine yourself as a jerk. Totally. So there are probably a lot of things that you might do or not do because you don't want to come off as a jerk. The problem is that, let's call it the boundary you've created to jerkdom may also block you from doing a lot of things that are really important that you have to do, but that you've only witnessed other people do in the form of jerkdom. Maybe you have to fire somebody. That's hard. Maybe you have to tell somebody, hey, they're not doing a good job and they need to shape up or ship out, right? You know, maybe you have to tell somebody that you don't like their work, really, really creative work. They've spent a real lot.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned from Joel Spolsky, by the way, many years ago. Five Y's down to the self. That last Y is what is it inside of me that allowed that to happen or didn't stop it from happening or whatever? And it can be a fear of conflict. It can be propensity to distraction. It can be, you get the idea. Some fundamental character weakness that you have to work on. And you'll find, by the way, rather than a wealth of and diversity of character flaws, you often find like the same things happening over and over again. Like three or four. That's like, there's probably a rule. Most of the problems you have in your life are traced back to about three different character flaws that you have that are just being expressed in many different ways. Can I ask, in terms of the character flaw, and I hate this isn't too personal, but when you do like a self-analysis, I think mine would be a constant fear of letting people down, which means then I do too much and then I let people down. Are there commonalities in the character flaw that you see? As you said, there's often three or four. What are the commonalities in those?”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mistake you ever made it. What's the biggest success you've ever had? I tell them when you start epicizing your mistakes or emphasizing your successes, you don't recognize how many of them there are in a given week. I avoid that kind of cognitive model of the big moment where I had this crazy unlock and I realized like enlightenment is a daily task. Awareness is a moment to moment obligation and opportunity. So I think the big change in thinking happened a couple years ago when I recognized kind of a pretty simple idea. The problems you see in the world, especially the world around you, the world that you affect, the outfit of your experience as reflected by the organization that kind of emerges from you as a leader, the problems you see there can often be traced back if you have enough patience, if you're honest and humble enough to some fundamental character flaw that you have. Like, hey, maybe you had somebody in seat longer than you should have. Why? Five whys, you're familiar with five whys? You can Google that, right?”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Full stack appreciation of what that business is and why it matters. No, we're doing with a reptile brains. We're saying, I don't know, I just like this one. I don't know. Last time I used this, this made me feel good. And the difference between things that we use and we love and we tell people about and become a part of our lives and are kind of basically parts of the way we express ourselves in the world, like those products that we live with all day and the ones we used to often comes down to an intuitive flick of the thumb. This is better. Someone told me about this. Everyone's using this now. I like this. I used to like that. I don't even talk about that. Totally. No, I couldn't agree with you more. I do have to ask, because speaking about the centrality of customer experience there, where we are in the crested of the wave and the leadership that's been seen through your guidance of vision, I do have to ask, it's actually a question from Armished first, Mark. And he said, how would you describe your personal growth as a CEO and were there any inflection points in your learnings? Yes, if I were to turn that, by the way, when I get the few opportunities I get to to talk to young people and they say, what's the big...”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This has so much greater an impact than people understand and they don't know how to invest here. And that's our story. Screen is the most important place in the world, has become many ways the most important place in the world with the greatest impact. Every company in the world is basically reimagining itself for a screen first customer, for a screen-centric customer experience. And at the end of the day, and this is like super pedestrian way to think about it, the best customer experience in every category wins. We're all pointing and grunting at the little piece of glass in our pocket with our thumb, and we're voting on the little chads. I kind of think about those little icons on my screen as a chads, right? And I'm voting for Amazon or Walmart, Uber, or Lyft. You get the idea, right? And we're all just voting. The collective consciousness of humans with screens, billions of people on the planet are all voting right now. If we're quiet enough, we can hear them, can hear their thumbs sliding across that glass, and they're crowning the kings and queens of every category. I don't know. And by the way, how are they doing it? Are they doing with a super rationalist?”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of companies or people, you can afford to put a massive amount of capital into a long term strategy. Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. I agree with you there. I guess my question is, and I hope it's not too honest, but it's like when you're a category leader like you are to stay within vision and we have the capital supplies that we have, does one need to think about capital efficiency like they maybe did before? And how do you think about capital efficiency given the crest of the wave and maybe where you think we're at? So you have to understand where you have to put capital efficiency into context, right? When you have a very return market, there are a bunch of different SaaS metrics that you're paying attention to and rules of X, right? And magic numbers, and these things are super duper relevant and important when you're dealing with a developed market because, you know, there's a lot of comps and a lot of data support where you should be and how efficient you should be. When you're dealing, when you're riding the awareness curve where this is really important, but again, this is the important, this is the arbitrage that you're playing. This is so much more important than people recognize or than businesses recognize.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World and see if it could be helpful to other people. Well, the question is how long is this wave going to take to emerge? It's a question of timing and capital and what you're putting the capital into and the bet how big the wave will eventually be. That's the somewhat complex math of message strategy. I mean, we see companies every day. I think I just saw one today, not to be mentioned, but that lose $100 million in a quarter. And you'd be like, wow, that's how could that be? And you'll question whether or not that's a legitimate business, but there are many businesses that are worth many deckabillions that at some point lost $100 million in a quarter. The question is how big of a change are they chasing in the world? That's the difference, right? It's not the change you make in the world. It's the change you chase in the world. You're putting money to try to change a market, to change the world, then I think that's going to ultimately be calories that are difficult to create a return on. If you're harvesting a change that's emerging and you know that emerging change is something that has a very significant economic impact to a very large number and large and very great diversity.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything that people think about being an entrepreneur and creating startups, most of the questions I get have some sort of like from young people who are hoping to become what, you know, are crazy enough to want to do this have a false premise. And I think the fundamental false premise is when did you want to become an entrepreneur? When did you decide you wanted to start a 900 person company? And there is no end to that. At no point did I ever say, I want to be an entrepreneur. Never. I don't know if that's unfashionable to say that. I had an idea that I was excited about seeing real and something that I could actually use and touch and feel and just making something from nothing in the world. Like that's definitely a deep and innate passion for me. Just bringing birth to a thing in the world. I had that. By the way, that's why I ran an agency because I got to do that promiscuously for our clients. I got to do that for a lot of different clients at once. That was fun, right? And beyond that, like I had a desire to put something out into the”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like we did and had the same challenge of applying communications and wanted to focus on user experience first. And maybe there were a few nuts who had this design first desire. And obviously we were wrong about that too. There'd be a lot of nuts out there. Not only agencies, but also the big change in the world. And I think the tide that kind of lifted our ship was this transition from the intellectual and design and creative energy around digital product happening outside organizations to it starting to emerge and grow and develop inside those organizations. The maturity of the digital product infrastructure inside of a business as opposed to just in the agency world. Does that make sense?”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, like any true visionary, of course, someone else had the idea, and I said, sure, why not? In the agency, we had a guy who was just like, I think he was just a developer. And he said, hey, this is a really good thing that we're using. This actually makes my life so much better. What if we turn this into a SaaS product? Now, Harry, I'm going to give you some context. This is like 10 years ago. I had no idea what the heck a SaaS product was. I mean, I kind of sort of knew like, oh, you mean like base camp? It was not a foregone conclusion that any calculator app that you created, you turned into a SaaS product and charge 15 bucks a month for. That world of everything is a SaaS product was still pre-emergent. So the idea of, hey, why don't we take this thing that we're using internally and make this a product that other people could use, it was a leap of faith. And I said, sure. And we took a week or so, put a billing system around it, launched it into its own URL, because before that, it's just been like an internal thing. Took a couple of weeks to kind of build some infrastructure around it, and we launched it. And with the hope that maybe there were other agencies that worked a little bit.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put those things in front of the breadth and diversity of all the different stakeholders and on the client side and be iterative about this entire process. Try to get on their side and build better products.”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I definitely didn't intend to, that's for sure. There is no visionary story where Woke Up in the Middle of the Night in a cold sweat with an idea that I just had to see happen in the world and then through a montage, a fast forward montage, passionately spent all night writing code on a black and white screen. That montage didn't exist. I ran an agency here in New York building digital products for other people, additional kind of digital agency, you know, early digital agency world probably. But the problem we were looking to solve was the problem that we had in the company with no intent whatsoever to turn this into a commercial product. In fact, I'll argue we went as far as to kind of hope that no one would ever find out about this thing called Envision that we used as our unfair advantage, our competitive advantage to the agency. What if we, you know, the basic idea was, hey, what if instead of going through change orders and writing up these requirements documents and going through the gatekeepers of project management on our client side? What if we could just start designing, start creating user experience?”
2019-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source