YouSaid · the spoken record

Hiten Shah

lines on the record: 50
first: 2019-08-09
most recent: 2019-08-09
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

“Thanks for having me. It was awesome to be here. By the way, Harry, we actually did a show very early on, and it's somewhere in your archives. So I haven't listened to it again, and I barely remember it, but this was a very long time ago. So I wanted to say thank you for having me on again in this show and what you're doing has grown so much since then. It's impressive.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By doing a ton of research. And the problem is simple people have a problem finding documents across all the different products they use.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now we're focused on basically we built a great single player product where people can find their documents in three clicks or less. The thing that we've been aggressively working on internally and determined about is building a product that teams love. And so we're building things for teams. That's really what we're doing at FYI. And we're right now thinking through how do we learn the most we can about teams and how do we build the right features considering we're not a document tool. We're also not just a search product. We're more of a product that helps you discover and find and discover the documents you need, the information you need, the knowledge you need to do your job. And so I believe that there's a focusing on Jeff Bezos one last time. The things that aren't going to change is that people are in organizations are always going to need to find information to do their jobs. And so we're focused on that opportunity. And that's going to take another three, five, ten years. And I feel like I can do it for a very long time and keep working on this massive problem that we found because we found this problem.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stages, and later on you make it based on data. So I think there's a spectrum of like early, early on, you don't have any data and you're writing an early check. And then later on, you start getting tons of data about the business and you better use it in order to make an informed decision. In fact, you should talk to everybody in the market, every business in the market when you're looking to make a decision later stage, but early stage, there really sometimes is no market and things like that. So I think it's really tough to have, I think it would drive people crazy if they had regrets. And I'm sure that there's like 10 others that I could think of of folks I met that I could have invested in that I didn't. And it's not necessarily I passed because I've been a very, I would call a passive angel investor where like I'll just invest when I feel like it and sometimes it feels right sometimes it doesn't these days I probably would capture a lot more of the wins just if I were doing it full time. I'm not doing it full time right now. I used to. And yeah, that's my answer. I love the question, but I have no regrets or I have as little regrets as I can possibly have because I think regrets are definitely something that”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think about my missus, Harry, and I don't have any. I think as an angel investor, a lot of things are a crapshoot. I've definitely met with many different founders and could have invested in the companies. I definitely have an Uber story where I could have invested at one point because Ryan Graves and I, we were having tea at Samavar right before I think he joined the company when Wright, he was going to and he was telling me about it. I'm not sure if I could have invested. I didn't really think about it at that time. I wasn't really investing a lot. I was a little bit. And I'm sure I could have invested if I wanted to. So yeah, there's opportunities that are out there. I don't regret it. I didn't learn anything from it. As an angel investor, especially early stage, who knows, is kind of the biggest thing I can say. So anyone try to say they know. I don't know. You didn't know. That you got lucky. I don't want to say that, but maybe you did, but you don't know. You don't know what's going to turn into like, you know, a $50 billion business. Like, come on. Those things are rare. So, you know, you just do the best you can and you make the investments that you want to and that you feel are right and people you like at those early”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that I don't see as many folks who can just walk over to someone, look over their shoulder, or pair a program with them in the same room and things like that. It's just a different way to work. A lot of things are unwritten and a lot of things are said and things are harder to remember, harder to spread across the team. So the number one key is documentation process and being very deliberate about improving those things.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extreme amounts of process documentation and process improvement, boring stuff. Like at the size we're at, we're at about a dozen people at FYI, my newest company, and we have tons of documents. I mean, we are a product that helps you find your documents. So there's a lot of either irony or we better eat our own dog food. But we make a lot of documents. We do a lot of postmortems. We have baked in all those things and we spend a lot of time on process. We also like integrate into all the other document products that are out there. And that's the only way to use a product. You have to connect another product or ideally more than one to our product. And then you get a lot of value out of it. And as a result of that, we've had to get really great at integration. And that took a lot of documentation. Took a lot of time too and a lot of process in order to be able to connect all these different products that all have different APIs and different kinds of criteria and standardize it. And I don't know if we could have done that as easily and scaled it if we weren't a remote team. We weren't distributed because it forced us to do a lot more.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all companies already have distributed work happening. They just might not be embracing it. So we're all going to have to start embracing it at some point sooner than later.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I think is more accurately called by Matt Mullenweg from Automatic Distributed Work. But at the same time, I think there's just something obvious that's going to happen, which is more companies are going to have more and more team members distributed across the world. That's just a fact. And you're going to see that happening regardless of where a company is located. So it's more about learning to live with that reality and setting your business up so that reality is embraced by your company. That's way more important, I think, than worrying about an office in San Francisco or an office anywhere. Whether you have an office or not, you are already doing distributed work, so you should get good at it. And that would be my angle. I'm not necessarily a proponent of one way or another. I love companies that are in offices. I think investors tend to like companies that are in offices on average right now because they can walk in and see what's going on and like feel like there's something real there while remote teams distributed work isn't something that's the norm yet and the numbers are really small and companies that are fully distributed still so the way I think about it is that this is a trend it's going to continue”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's going to make sense to build an SF for the foreseeable future simply because there is a really large pool of talent here. I think the question really boils down to and a really large pool meaning largest in the world for, especially for tech. And that's a really important piece. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. The bigger question is like, when do you have office here? Do you need one here? Are you able to grow your business without having an office here? The obvious answers are yes. You can grow a business without having an office here. You can grow up as a super fast, without having an office here. At the same time, there's a lot of credibility and association that comes if you have an office here. My companies have all been remote since 2003. We had an office for KISS metrics for a while and it was still hybrid where half the team was remote. Today, like all our companies are all remote. Our team members are all remote. And I've been doing that for 16 years. I'm an advisor to automatic as well as buffer and I get to enjoy and see how they sort of run remote teams. And in some ways you could say I'm a proponent of remote.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's difficult to me to think through what I'm the best in the world at, mainly because I just always want to get better. And so if I were to say what I'm best in the world at, I think is something really either really weird or on the esoteric side. So I'll give you a couple of them that I think about sometimes. One is someone asked me at a dinner or they were going through, it was a dinner with a bunch of founders and folks and investors and they wanted you to share your hobby. So the hobby I shared is my hobby is thinking about other people's businesses. And so I don't know if I'm in the best in the world at that or anything like that, but it's something I enjoy doing. So I think you can be the best in the world at something, one way to think about it is what do you enjoy doing? Somehow I enjoy doing that. I like looking at markets. I like looking at companies and thinking about other people's companies. And I do that. I write about it, tweet about it, et cetera. The second thing is I would like to be one of the best in the world at basically improving and growing anything. Plant a business, myself, you know, self-improvement. I'm really excited about it.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's a few quotes and they'll be quick, but one of them is the courage to be happy also includes a courage to be disliked. When you have gained that courage, that courage to be disliked, your inner personal relationship will all at once change into things of likeness. And that's such a interesting concept when you think about it. And another one is that you are disliked by someone. It is proof that you're exercising your freedom and living in freedom. And a sign that you're living in accordance with your own principles. It's so huge. It's like for me, like I like to be liked. I really do. And this book really shed light on a different way to think about it.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My current book is called The Courage to Be Disliked, and it's about psychology, and it's amazing. And the reason the book is amazing is because it focuses on making you comfortable with literally being disliked. And I don't want to give anything away. It's actually a book that's actually very conversational. It's by a Japanese author, and he is essentially sharing this psychologist theory, this psychologist Alfred Adler, because most of us talk about Freud and Young, but most folks don't know about Adler. And so it's about Adler's theories, and it can be summed up as the courage to be disliked. That's literally what it can be summed up as. And, you know, it's probably been one of the most impactful books I've read.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing and seeing if there's anything that I'm trying to control that I shouldn't be because I can't. Or it's not impactful and I shouldn't bother.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much, and the biggest problem with that for me is sometimes I don't know that I'm trying to get control of things I don't control. I've only been a founder. I've never worked for anyone else. And so I have this fundamental understanding and belief that I can control a lot of things. And I might be wrong about that. So I think the learnings for me that are still happening are around what causes me to get stressed out and can lead to burnout, as many folks call it. Although I just call it stress because like I thought I didn't stress in the past when I realized that I just didn't recognize it as stress. The thing that was happening was I was looking to control things and control things that were out of my control and that I should not be trying to control and that weren't going to have a meaningful impact even if I did get control of them, which is impossible if you really think about it because when you spend your time and your energy controlling something or trying to control something that you just can't, you're basically spinning your wheels. And so it's this awareness and recognition that you're doing that that is really important to me these days. So I'm always evaluating the things I'm looking.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've never been consciously aware of burnout. I think I skip burnout and go to depression or I don't realize I'm stressed. And for me, I agree it's personal. I don't mind talking about it. For me, the things I've learned are that the depression or burnout or whatever other folks would call it is really a result of stress and unrecognized stress based on me trying to get control of things I cannot control. And that's the fundamental thing that really burns me out is when I'm trying to get control of things I cannot control. Instead of finding the things I can control in the situation.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that I had energy for these things and I did them led me to somewhere else or some insight or some value that I couldn't have ever imagined because of what I was doing. So in a way, it's like, how do you go with the flow and truly, truly do the things that you feel are right that are unexplainable? Because I think that's where the biggest opportunities are are the things that you feel are right that are unexplainable. And then you can only explain them looking backward. So I spend a lot more of my time focused on energy instead of focused on time.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't measure the ROI of my time in the same way other folks might. I really focus on whether I have energy for something. And so if I have energy for it, I'll do it. And that's a really important piece for me, which is like I spend so much less energy worrying about time and so much more of my time worrying about do I have the energy for that and when do I have the energy for that? So ROI is a really funny thing in a business because you can be doing things that seem like they have no ROI but all of a sudden some benefit will come out of it that you didn't realize. And so there is a big portion of my life, especially at the co-founder level that I'm at, where I think serendipity plays a big, big part of what works and what doesn't for me. So like, do I have energy for this meeting? And really thinking through the energy, not necessarily the logic. And it has a lot to do with, am I drawn to it? Should I be doing it? Not just like, am I going to see a benefit from it? Because like I said, I see benefit from so many things. As Steve Jobs would say, you can only connect the dots looking backward.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that that's a really good question. And the one I probably have the hardest time with is coordinating because that involves a lot of time thinking about the people and also thinking about the business and figuring out what we should be doing next, taking a lot of inputs from different places. So I think coordinating is the challenge and the one I spend not necessarily more time on, but the one where like I like being more thoughtful about that one than some of the other ones. And I think I have to because it involves things like changing things around in the company who are we going to hire next and things like that because coordinating is really about coordination and an important piece of a business because that's how people work together.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, I'm going to repeat it directing, coordinating, editing, motivating, and co learning. Those are the things that I have decided that I'm going to spend more time on and focus more on within my companies.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To spend my time directing, coordinating, editing, motivating, and co-learning. And these are the five things that I come back to and remind myself of as much as I can, which is that I'm not necessarily the best person to go do something in the company. I am definitely one of the best people, if not the best person the company, to motivate the team, to direct them, to help them coordinate with each other, to edit things, whether it's product things, marketing things, growth things, or just general business things. And again, motivating is a big piece of this. And then the last piece for me is just co-learning. Let's learn together. And that involves everything from things like that I've learned from my co-founder Marie around how to really do great post-mortems and reviews of things that you do all the way to simply like we need to learn something new. Let's figure out how we're going to divide and conquer and learn up on this and get really great at it. And sometimes I involves hiring folks. Sometimes that involves learning from consultants, learning from things that are out there, whether they're books or frameworks and things like that.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I've increased my self awareness about how I impact the team in ways that are negative or ways that are hurting the business. And so I increased my self-awareness over time. I always felt like I was very self-aware and was very conscious about the team. But what I was missing at the time was what's best for the business. And so I went from being self-aware about, oh, how am I treating people? Am I treating them well? And things like that, which I've turned into a pretty good baseline of being able to treat folks really well and extended that now to like, are we doing what's right for the business as a team? Is that person doing what's right for the business? How can I help them basically do what's right for the business? And that was really a fundamental change and shift for me. And then I really figured something out that I haven't shared before and is something that I really spent time with folks on the team that I've worked with for five plus years because I've worked with a few people for five plus years and across multiple companies. And I figured out that like any”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took its toll on the market and eventually somebody was going to come in and change that. And it was unlikely it was going to be a company that's at massive scale, such as Intercom, and it was going to be a newer entrant and drift happens to be that newer entrant that came in and said, we're going to change this up. And we're going to stop charging in a way that's not aligned with the customer anymore. I have to say, I'm a big David Council fanboy, so this makes me very happy to. You and me both. Of things. I've been looking forward to this one. So tell me, multiple companies now many years as a leader of companies. If you would have like sellers,”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once. I'm going to say it again. I think Jeff Bezos really is a master of this by saying focus on things that don't change. So what's not going to change? The customer is going to want a lower and lower price. Like he's right. That's Amazon. That's the consumer. Even the business customer doesn't want to feel in the same way. The business customer doesn't want to feel like as they grow, they have this thing where they just have to keep paying you more and more money and not necessarily get more value from your business. So it's really about your value metric. And in this case, this value metric had just worn out. And it was really causing fatigue in the market. So one real thing that you have to think about your pricing is you go back to the customer and figure out what their frustrations are, and then you solve for them. I'm sure it wasn't easy to give all the contacts away like that and not charge by contact. And I'm sure Drift had to really think about how were they going to make money? Do they have enough ways to make money if they don't charge per contact? And make money, meaning charge more money over time to customers as they added more value. So this value metric of per contact pricing basically”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company in the space to basically get rid of the contact. So they make it so that not get rid of it, but they basically make it so that they're not charging you per contact. So you have unlimited contact in all of their plants. And so they're charging you more for different features and things like that that you want. And I thought that was really impressive because it felt like an obvious move in the market and that once someone did it, eventually a lot of the other companies are going to get a lot of pressure to do the same thing. It's also one of the things that if you look on the internet is the biggest gripe that folks had with intercom and other companies in the space. Now I do have to dive in on that one because the massive question for me always is like actually how do you create a pricing mechanism that doesn't inherently disincentivize usage? How do you think about that? Because really the majority do, be it feature upsell where you don't want to limit features and limit product functionality, but then you don't also want to do it on a contact basis, on a usage basis and prevent them using more of it. How do you think about this usage versus value-based pricing and the thinking around that? Yeah, I don't want to make this the theme, but I've said this.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are quite random and disparate. Let me give one more example on that customer product thing real quick, and then I am happy to do that. Totally. So the other example I want to give, because I don't want to make it just about superhuman because they're just one example and they're recent. And also, I'm not an investor in the company. I still don't use the product, although I did tell Rahul that I'd like to use a product now on one of my email accounts, so we'll see what happens if he onboards me or someone else does. But at the end of the day, I think there's another example that's really impressive. It's from the folks at Drift, which provide a live chat tool for sales and marketing. What they decided to do, which no one had done in the market before them, the market is, there's Intercom, there's Drift, there's OLARC from back in the day, and a number of other products that are out there in the market now, a ton of them. And all of them charge on a per contact basis. The more contacts you have in their system, the more money they charge you. So over time, as you grow, you pay them more money, which sounds reasonable, but what the folks at Drift did was, as far as I know, they were the first”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and just perfectly phrased. I couldn't agree more in terms of that. I do have to ask Hidden, there was quite a few questions here where a lot like unlike any other shows, I just felt like I had to ask them, but there was no clear correlation to the actual schedule. So I wanted to do a final element, which is Kittens AMA. Hittens asked me anything.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alone that can just do something about it and turn it off or anything like that. So there's a lot of privacy folks who have mentioned this. And so I was really impressed by the response and how customer centric it was. And I think and how product centric it was too. So that's one sort of example in my mind, which is superhuman in the latest potential debacle that could have happened where they had a bunch of negative press, if you want to call it that, that they really turned around in a really conscious and smart way focused on customer and focused on the product. That's one example.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sort of make some changes to address some of these concerns. There was a very slight amount of criticism out there that I think was somewhat unfair about the post around like, oh, but they didn't really address the key issue of this kind of tracking. Well, this kind of tracking happens in many other products and is kind of a norm in the market, especially for sales and marketing. And so I think that it was a very measured and metered response, but also very smart. And it really focused on the customer. When you read the response, it is literally all about, well, we had these types of sort of more early adopter customers at the beginning and they really require this feature. They really, really wanted it. So we enabled it. And then now we're getting more customers. We're growing. We're getting different types of customers. And we need to make some changes in order to address this. And this is like a systemic feature that most products have. Even Google will enable you to turn on these receipts, these read receipts, and let you know if someone's reading your emails, but they're based on each individual email. So these features are becoming more and more common across the different tools. And there isn't like one company.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great. You invested in the latest round. Wonderful. So, what happened was when they announced this, they had a pretty large announcement and looked like they did a bunch of PR because they had a bunch of big articles in different places. And there was a few things that were written about email tracking because superhumans and email product. And it was about how they are automatically putting pixels on and letting everyone that uses superhuman know whether other folks are opening their emails or not and things like that. And so this gentleman named Mike who works at Envision wrote this pretty epic post about it. And within about 24 to 48 hours, Rahul from Superhuman had an extremely thoughtful and conscious response to it of basically literally describing the changes that they're going to make as a result where they get to turn this feature off by default for every new customer that comes in. And the customer would have to deliberately turn it on and a whole bunch of other things about why they did it, how they thought about it, and what they're doing now.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a couple examples that really come to mind that are very specific. So recently, very recently to us recording this, the folks at Superhuman decided to announce their fundraising from Andrewson Horwitz. And so they announced around and an email productivity product. I'm assuming, Harry, you use a product?”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, markets are all pretty big now. And I don't really care about market size as much as if this business has a natural path or some, not even natural, but the founders and the team are thinking about how it expands over time and where they see it going. I feel like that's so much more important than you starting with some massive market opportunity that's obvious. Yeah, no idea.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And things change quite a bit. So, your amount of data, information you have at that time is a lot less than, let's say, at a series A, Series B, and onwards. And so there's a big difference between a preceded CED investors and their way to evaluate.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seeing it from the I feel like investing is something that you have to be pretty dedicated to in order to do an amazing job at it beyond like pre-seed or seed rounds. The reason for that is it is a numbers game. You are basically writing enough checks so that some of them work out. And you essentially expect some form of a failure rate, some amount of a failure rate, and tends to be pretty high, and you make the best decision you can. At the same time, it's a little bit of a, not even lonely job, but maybe that's a good way to explain it. But it's a job where you don't know the feedback loop is pretty long and it takes time for you to understand whether you're any good at it. So it's not necessarily for everybody, and it's something where, especially at the earlier stages, preseed seed rounds, you're actually making judgment calls, not necessarily on the business, but on whatever basics you can figure out about the team, the opportunity the market, and that sort of configuration of the business so far and the team's ability to execute. Because sometimes they change markets even after.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many different businesses out there, and the numbers just going up in terms of the amount that are being started, I believe that the best investors are able to evaluate the business and the business opportunity and the potential, and of course, the founder's ability to execute on it and the team's ability to execute on it. But ultimately, it is about the business. And those are the basics. Like we forget those because we're so caught up in hype or we're so caught up in people.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I feel like the business is what matters. The business is what people are investing in. And sure, they're investing in you. You're building the business. Your team's building the business. But really, at the end of the day, it's like the business and it's what matters. And that's what these folks are investing in. And that's it. There's nothing more complicated about it. And I think we try to make it too complicated. Like, oh, you know, we've got this great story or we have these great, great background, you know, and things like that. But it's like, what about the business? Where's it at? What are you doing? What's the opportunity? What about the customers? What about how you go-to-markets going? What about all those types of things? Those are all things that are interesting to me, not necessarily the story behind anything except the fact that there are fundamentals for this business. There's obviously a market you're in. And how well do you know those things as a founder? Like, how well do you know your own business? How well do you know your market? How well do you know your customers? Those are the kinds of things that investors can be evaluating. That's the business. They're not just evaluating you. They're evaluating the business.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this trend is going to permeate everywhere. That's just what it's going to boil down to. And some folks in places are probably a little behind just because of the amount of investors in that area, amount of sophistication in the area. But at the end of the day, this is going to spread everywhere. Everything that we see here in the world that we're in, in the Bay Area, that's where I am, you're going to see across the world eventually. It's just a matter of time. Also, a lot of the folks that are here go and travel to these other places and do their best to find really great deals and really great businesses.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's lots of info about board decks, how to have great board meetings and things like that. Some people even say, hey, you should do a dinner the day before or right after and things like that. Sure, that's what you're into. I think the thing that I want to go after, and I tend to go after a lot on this one, is basically the idea that you need to be comfortable being able to have a beer with that person. That's like the common saying or being able to have a drink with them. Well, I don't drink, so I wouldn't have a drink with the investor. I'd drink my own virgin pina colata or mojita or whatever. But outside of that, I think the big takeaway for me after seeing and helping many founders do this kinds of stuff is that you have to think about the investor. The investor has put in money into your business or is going to put in money into your business and they are looking for an outcome, some kind of outcome. And the simplest outcome on the seed stage is that this business gets the next round. And so you have to understand what the incentive is for the investor, what the incentive is for yourself, which is obviously building a great business.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they're not on your board because you're in early stage round, are they a seed investor that is a lead investor? Those are the things that I would start with because the timeline that you mentioned, yeah, it is being compressed, it seems like. Later stages, it doesn't seem to be compressed as much, frankly speaking. Earlier stages it is because there's a lot of money sloshing around. So let's get a little more contextual. How do you want to think about it? Yeah, let's do seed, lead the round, and take a board seat. Okay, awesome. So seed stage is fascinating because you can go pretty far at a seed stage without having a lead. And you could do what they call, or they used to call a party ramp. So this is a very specific scenario. I wouldn't say all the seed rounds that are happening right now have a lead investor and have a board seat. Or even if they have a lead investor, they don't necessarily have a board seat. But let's take the scenario of a board seat and a lead investor. That person's on your board. You're going to see them every two to three months. You're going to give them an update on your business. Hopefully you have a good way of doing that. You can keep your board decks.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To square one, you're like that beginner, aren't you? Yeah, absolutely, with more cash burned. Yep. Yeah. No, totally. I'm very much with you in that downside of appreciation. Dude, you said the word track record then. I do want to talk about the investor base and especially that relationship between the investor and the founder. If we maybe start at the beginning of this timeline, honestly, Hidden, I'm quite concerned that there's this real compression and fundraising timelines, founders and investors simply don't have the time to build kind of these real human relationships. Do you think it's fair of me to be concerned? And I guess how do you think about founders getting the time to build real relationships with investors in the fundraising process? Well, let's define what a real relationship is between a founder and an investor. I think that's actually really important. See, this is the thing that people don't realize. One important factor is, what stage are you raising money for? And is the person, the investor you're talking about, are they going to be on your board? Because that makes a big difference as to the relationship.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quarter every year that goes by, things change so much in the markets, in business, the consumer changes. The enterprise buyer changes in terms of how they think about things. So things change. And I think this reminds me of Jeff Bezos' quote about, you know, focus on the things that don't change. And what's more important is finding those things in your market, when the opportunities that you're going after that are not changing. And I don't think you have any real big advantage as a serial entrepreneur except that maybe like you have more connection. and you have some form of a track record whether it's good or bad negative or positive depending on people's perspective but there is not as much of an advantage as i think there might have used to be when it comes to a serial entrepreneurship so i'm in full hearted agreement with that statement there are advantages of course because you have some level of experience but you know what sometimes that experience can hurt you because if the things that you did before that made you successful if you try them again and they're not successful they don't work then what are you going to do you're back”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You realize that you don't know, you don't have a clue, you don't know what you're doing. So, the best you can do is find a way to be a lifelong learner in whatever ways that makes sense for you. And don't really sit there and believe that you know anything. Because the more you think you know, the less you actually are able to have an impact and the less you actually know. Listen, I totally agree with you. And this is music to my ears. It does make me think of one comment, though, that I had on the show. And it was from the founder of Joy Mode, Joe Fernandez. And he said, cyril entrepreneurship is overrated. Given that no one knows what they're doing, know what you don't know. Would you agree with this that Cyril Entrepreneurship is overrated for you kind of having learnt and enjoyed successes and bumps in the road on multiple different companies? How do you think about that statement? It's been 16 years and probably like 30, 40 different products that I've tried to build and a few things that have worked and some that are still working and others that are early stage and things like that. And like, yeah, I tend to agree with the fact that it's overrated because every month, every”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, rest assured. Do you think we have enough vulnerability, or do you think actually we need fundamentally more as an ecosystem? So the concept of figure outability, where like you can have faith that someone's going to figure it out. And that's, I think, the best you can do. And for yourself, you should have the faith that you can figure things out. And everyone has their own process of doing that. Some people will go ask a bunch of people when they're trying to learn something. Some people ask a bunch of people, read a bunch of books, look at a bunch of blog posts. But really, what it's really about is us taking action for our own good. And so I think when it comes to vulnerability, we're starting to see today that people are willing to be more vulnerable. That's at least what I'm seeing. I don't think we necessarily have a choice. You know, someone just quoted the other day to me that there's like 40,000 different businesses, startups being created every year now, over 40,000 or something like that. I thought it was 20,000. Now it's 40. So there are literally so many people that don't know what they're doing. And so if you sit here and you think you know what you're doing, you will get hit with something that makes you get a reality check and help.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, be on a board and have someone who's more senior than you that's been on boards before is an investor, and you can just absorb by watching them and learning how they do things, but that is actually more impactful than talking to people and getting advice from them because the key thing is like, we're all trying to be unique. We're not actually trying to be like each other. And when we take this approach of looking for advice and trying to talk to so many different people, we're really just trying to calibrate how should we be, not necessarily how we're they or how are they and how would they do it. It's more about how are you going to do it now that you have, let's say, a better perspective on how others do it. And that's what I mean by like, nobody really knows what they're doing because they're just doing the best they can for themselves and their individual experience, their life experiences, their perspective on things is going to be different than yours. Can I ask, do you think we have enough vulnerability in the industry? And what I mean by that is a willingness to say, you know what, I don't actually know exactly what I'm doing here. And I'm learning as I go along instead of the, yeah, I've got this, this is nailed, boom, you can leave it with.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If no one knows what they're doing, I guess the question for me is how do I seek the truth efficiently on this topic, but also maybe more generally, how do you advise other people to seek the truth in an efficient way, is it crowdsource opinion and then aggregate? Is it just do it and learn along the way? If no one knows, what is the solution? The reason nobody knows is they only know what's right for them. So you could talk to 10 board members. You might find a few patterns. Patterns are going to be really basic, right? One of the patterns you'll find is like, hey, if you're on a board, then you're an investor, you should focus on the business and be able to really have a perspective on the business that's very clear. Not necessarily a perspective on the team or the founders or anything, but it's the business. So the best investors might tell you that and you might find that pattern, but they won't necessarily say it in those words. But at the end of the day, like you're your own individual, you're not going to sit there and imitate the great folks at some of the other firms and really like go imitate them and do what they do and do it exactly how they do it. It's always nice though.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of reflection, a lot of time that I realized is that most people they just want encouragement, they don't really want advice. That was a big switch for me because I got really good at giving people advice. Sometimes I gave even my friends and other folks that I'm close to advice when they didn't ask for it, which wasn't really that productive or good in the longer run. So I just have a whole different perspective on advice and advice giving at this point, which is I want to be encouraging. I don't want to be encouraging like a cheerleader or anything like that, but everything I do now when people are coming to me for advice or my opinion or just to talk to me, I tend to find the things that they need that will encourage them. And I actually give less advice as a result and it tends to work out better. And they tend to be able to sort of be motivated, highly motivated, and go do what they need to do versus when I was just giving them advice.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many lessons. I think the number one lesson there was basically nobody knows what they're doing. And that's not just them, that's also me. And I also met with many investors and many other folks, even folks that work at companies, and nobody really knows what they're doing. And that's why they seek advice. There's also a lot of conflicting advice on the internet. And so half the time I was helping people just deal with a conflicting advice. They were getting on the internet or from other folks. I tend to be really good at being really contextual, which is something I learned in that process. And I've been like that for a long time, which is like ask them questions, learn about what they're going through, even if they try to ask me questions like, hey, when you were starting kiss metrics, how did you raise money? Because usually when someone asked me a question like that, they really want to know how they should raise money. They don't want to know how I did it. They want to know how they should do it. And they think by asking me how I did it, they're going to learn how they should do it, which is not the case. What they really need to think through is how should they do it, what I can help them do is learn how they should do it. One key thing, though, that after a long time.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At time, and this was about three, four years ago when I did this for a decent amount of time, it was a time when lots of folks were sort of showing up in the Bay Area and just wanting to hang out, wanting to find opportunities to get help for what they're working on, raise money, et cetera.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And more recently, I left the company after a CEO took over, and then I went in six months and switched him out to another CEO, and then I left and started investing in advising in companies. I've done about 120 investments or advisory roles. And then after that, I decided once I met my current co-founder, her name's Marie, we decided to start building software. And so we tried building a couple things, and then now we finally landed on the thing that we're very excited about, have been working on for over a year now. And it's called FYI. It's at USFYI.com. And it helps you find your documents in three clicks or less. And somewhere in between there for about four or five years, I decided I was going to meet with, it might have even been longer, I was going to meet with one new entrepreneur every weekday. So that was five days a week. I would meet someone new that I didn't know before. And that was pretty easy because a lot of people were emailing me and things like that. And I decided to meet with these folks. A lot of them were in person because it was.”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll do it even quicker than that because I talk pretty fast. So started in 2003 when I started an internet marketing consulting with my co-founder, who's now my brother-in-law. And I've known him since he was 11 and I was 15. And so my now wife said, hey, he's got one customer paying him $3,500 a month for SEO. He's just going into college. You're just getting out of college. Why don't you two partner up? And so we partnered up and we started making a bunch of money doing marketing consulting services for people. And then we basically started building a bunch of different SaaS products and got really lucky with one called Crazy that creates heat maps for where people are clicking on a page. And that will be launched in 2005 and then fast forward a couple years and we decided to raise money for another business we were building like sort of an offshoot of crazy I call KISME metrics and we raised a bunch of money for that business early on and we just kept going and then”
2019-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source