Going Off the Rails

Theresia Gouw

12.22.20

How do you help an entrepreneur who is steering their company off the rails? The best contribution that Theresia and her team can give is the gift of perspective.

Summary:

How do you help an entrepreneur who is steering their company off the rails? The best contribution that Theresia and her team can give is the gift of perspective.

Thuy

Over the course of your investing career, you've probably seen some leaders go off the rails a little bit. Did you try to help them course correct?
Theresia_Gouw

Theresia Gouw

So I think, you know, absolutely. I think our job as board members, as venture capitalists and investors is really to try to be a good partner or in a sports analogy, sort of general manager/coach. The founders, the CEOs, those are the players, they're leading. So I think one of the things that we can do that's helpful, right. Because we have perspective. We are typically on five, six, seven, eight boards at a time. And then as we were saying before, over the course of time, 50, 60 of those. So I think the biggest times when we can be helpful is to just give that perspective to somebody. So usually when you say, like, they're going off the rails, like when they're struggling, usually it's because of one of two things. One is it's not something that they've personally encountered in terms of that particular challenge, whether that's hiring or a business model or technology challenge before. So if we've seen that before, the best thing we can do is share that experience and maybe connect them with an entrepreneur who has successfully navigated a parallel type of challenge in the past. Sometimes they don't even need the connection. Sometimes it's just like knowing that this is relatively common, that it's happened many times before. And here's some examples of people who've gone through it that that's enough inspiration for a lot of great entrepreneurs are like, OK, I'm good. I don't even like I got it. I can picture in my mind now how to get through this. Right. I think that's, you know, oftentimes one of the biggest things you can do. And then sometimes when it is truly unusual, I think just you know, I often say I think being a startup CEO is both one of the most potentially gratifying, but also one of the loneliest jobs out there, because there are certain things that, like they feel they have to figure out. And so as a board member if you're really that trusted, you know, first phone call, we used to say, I guess now first text, we can be that person just to have someone as a sounding board. A lot of times, I mean, these are amazing leaders. I learn so much from them. So the one thing that I can do sometimes is not even so much learning for me is like knowing that there's someone that they can talk to and brainstorm with and be completely honest with me. And they, 90 percent of the time they have the answers. They just need to talk it out with somebody.