You Need a Village

What has been the single biggest lesson you have learned as an entrepreneur that you would like to pass on to the next generation of leaders?

Relationships matter, relationships matter a lot. And a lot of us think, “Hey, I’ve got this brilliant idea, it’s going to change the world. It’s unstoppable, it’s unstoppable, my ideas are so fantastic.” And we hear it all the time, but at the end of the day, you need a village, you need a village to realize these ideas. And by the way, not all ideas work out, it’s always good to start with somebody who has that passion. Because if you don’t have it, it’s really hard to have other people really buy into it. But even if you have, it takes a village. You need investors, you need advisors, you need employees, you need customers, all sorts of people. And the fastest way for a company to really get great ones of those, is having relationships with them already. At one point in a company 80% of the company have worked for me for 15 plus years, and so…

That’s incredible.

Yeah, you have people opting in, and they know what the culture is, what the environment is. And of course, now we’re significantly broader because we’ve got people from a bunch of really amazing places. But having those relationships really allowed us to accelerate building the company, accelerate building teams, accelerate building our board, our advisors, and our investors. So many of them came through relationships, because then again, they know who you are, they know what you’re trying to do. No one knows the future, but what they bet on is, “Hey, this person is a known entity to me, and I know how they will react and respond if these things happen.”

And really ultimately, in the world of startups, that’s a big deal, it’s a big deal for investors to know who they’re engaging with and how you’re going to respond, And, that, I kind of learned in the first startup I was at, and secondarily to me, is something that’s really important for every person that’s just even starting a career, it doesn’t happen by accident. People think, hey, relationships and networking and all of it, it just happens. It doesn’t just happen.