Decision Making Leading Change Risk & Resilience

Break The Mold

David Chun

01.26.22

How many companies have made it work in a sector where nobody else has been able to survive? In this clip, David draws an analogue between restaurants and tech businesses, showing that it's possible to break the mold without throwing your team off a cliff.

Summary:

How many companies have made it work in a sector where nobody else has been able to survive? In this clip, David draws an analogue between restaurants and tech businesses, showing that it’s possible to break the mold without throwing your team off a cliff.

Thuy

What advice can you provide to others for staying positive in the face of adversity?
David_Chun

David Chun

Yeah. There's a fine balance between stubbornness and flexibility. And as we've all read the book or heard about the book Grit, Angela Duckworth. And so, you need to have that determination, just recognize like anybody who's starting a new company even if it's a restaurant down the street somewhere, it's like, okay, there was a restaurant it has never been successful in that location. So why is your restaurant going to be successful?

Well, the same thing goes for any company, like as you pointed out, there was nobody tracking exec comp data, or at least nobody doing it successfully before we got involved. So why would we be successful at doing it? So you need to have a certain amount of determination but you also can't be a death march off a cliff, so you need to kind of also listen to the market and recognize kind of as I point out V1 of Equilar would never have made it. So there was a point where we had to realize, okay, when do we take what limited resources we have, the technology we develop, the expertise that we had and a very small amount of capital we had left in the bank would say, okay, if we move in this direction, can we come out of the storm? And we were fortunate. So, there’s that balance between stubbornness and flexibility that people need to keep in mind.