I'm driving this like huge rig like, you know, 35 feet long over highways and bumpy roads.
That's Cheryl Kellen entrepreneur and amateur trucker last December. She rented a 3/4 ton pickup truck and an Airstream trailer picture a massive Chrome Twinkie on wheels.
Then she drove some 1,000 miles across Colorado to meet her customers face-to-face.
Show run the scrappy little Healthcare company called ' Inc. They have a great tagline. We make Healthcare sockless how by helping employees at small to medium sized businesses avoid staggering medical bills. Cheryl couldn't understand why so many diabetic patients wound up in the emergency room.
A simple visit to the doctor would have saved them a
fortune. Well, like why aren't they going so we're like, you know, we just need to get out in the field. And so it seemed like a great idea were like, oh I know what we'll do we'll rent this Airstream trailer and we'll do about you know, a lightweight mobile clinic for a week. We'll invite people in for free biometric testing and quick health check-ups. And while they're there, you know, we'll talk to him. We're sort of figure out what's going
on roughly 45 minutes into the road trip. Cheryl had an answer patients were hit so hard by
Bill's they avoided doctors entirely. She calls inside soon as road trip and valuable, but they came at a steep price
the trailer disconnected from the truck because the bolt fell out and then I had to reattach it and there's an electronic hydraulic lift and the wire had fraid so it starts sparking and smoking and this small electrical fire breaks out on the hitch, like right next to the propane take I'm freaking out there Sparks everywhere.
I run away from it like the whole thing was ridiculous.
There's Sparks and flames shooting out of this electric motor right next to the propane
take this is going to sound crazy but I'll say it. Anyway, Cheryl had it easy. I'm not talking about a road trip that was grueling but her decision to put out that fire. It's a no-brainer. She see Sparks and a propane tank. It's like two plus two equals. If only every decision could be so simple short of your office actually catching on fire. You're almost never going to face it.
Asian like this as an entrepreneur instead, you'll face figure to fires a lot of them more than you can handle and you often won't know which one to stamp out first. I believe you try to put out every fire you only burn yourself out the best entrepreneurs. They let fires burn you got to have incredible Talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going home.
This is totally going to be amazing.
So many easy
ways. So so it's do I have no idea what
to do. Sorry. I made a mistake.
Would you have to time it right?
This is masters of scale.
We'll start the show in a moment after a word from our sponsor Capital One business.
If you've driven through the Bay Area recently you may have noticed some bright and conspicuous trucks parked in parking lots. You'd see cars driving through and what they're doing is contact list pick up of Staples that have been difficult to find during the pandemic.
That's dengar Bach Capital one's head of business brand and marketing and those orange trucks belong to cheetah the brainchild of Nama more on an entrepreneur who grew up on a turkey farm and Israel.
Cheetahs like an insta cart for restaurants. They source and deliver everything that a restaurant may need from tomatoes to toilet paper. It's focused on transparency of pricing and flexibility for restaurant owners,
but when covid came many of cheetahs customers shut their doors Nama had to find another market and
fast early in the pandemic. She saw these stories about Baron grocery stores in New York, and she knew that that was going to make its way out.
Out to the West Coast. She was sitting with a huge Warehouse full of perishable Goods that were at risk of going to
waste as fast as the company's namesake cheetah pivoted business to serve a hungry Newmarket. How did they do it? We'll find out later in the show. It's all part of Capital One businesses. Look at entrepreneurs who are leading through this crisis with courage and innovation.
I'm Reid Hoffman co founder of LinkedIn and investor Greylock and your host. I believe smart entrepreneurs. Don't try to fight every fire. They have to let some fires burn and sometimes very large fires.
When you have a fast scaling company that will always be metaphorical fires some of them flare up Suddenly demanding your attention others build slowly in the background threatening the spread of they aren't extinguished. If you spend all of your time fighting fires, you may miss critical opportunities to build your business. You'll be all reaction and no action. But if you let fires go on too long, you'll get burned deciding which fires you let burn and how long you let them burn for can make the difference.
Prince between success and failure
the fundamental rule of customer service has long been the customer's always right but in a fast growing business you often have to make a choice between serving your existing customers or reaching new customers. And if you're growing exponentially it's a no-brainer for scale companies. The rule is provide whatever service you can as long as it doesn't slow us down and that may mean no service think I'm exaggerating back in PayPal's early days. We neglected.
Customer complaints even as users grew exponentially and because we had a customer service department of three people. We quickly started going in the hole around 10,000 emails a month and customers got very frustrated with this first a few phone calls started trickling in with customers who had discovered our corporate phone number and were dialing extensions at random to try to reach somebody and then very quickly it became all of the phones were ringing and then very quickly
After that probably hours, all of the phones were ringing 24 hours 7 days a week. So what did we do? We turned off all the ringers on our desk phones and started using our cell phones for business because as Paradox because that might sound where you would say, we are supposed to be customer focused. We are listening to our customers. The problem is is we have to treat the future customers not just the current ones and of all we did was the current ones we'd never get to the Future customers.
Remember there was this one guy who felt that he wasn't getting his payments and needed the payments. He literally drove from Las Vegas to Palo Alto to come to our front door office. He asked for customer service so that met Lori went out to go see this rather Tivoli tall bulky gentleman came back in and went. Oh my God, there's an angry customer here. And so I want what do we do? Because we don't have security don't have any plans for this first guy who showed up right in the world.
Is and so I went okay, Jamie Templeton is another six foot tall guy. So Jamie and I will go out with Lori to go talk to this guy. It wasn't my phone number but who are people showing up at the front door? And at that point we put a badge on the front door and we let those complaints continue until one day we were position to solve the problem all at once. We flew out to Omaha setup call center within two months a 200-person customer service department was up and running problem solved and I wouldn't have solved it.
It a moment sooner at its core. This is a question of triage a smart prioritization and so one place to start is to think about how you might normally approach your to-do list. It can be a tidy logical satisfying process Brian chesky the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb loves it. I have this kind of interesting way. I do to list. I make a list of like long task on try to be exhaust as possible and then I try to group them and I say it's like a game of Leverage.
What one action can take her to those three and then I do it again and I do it again. If you do that enough times if you have a list of 20 things to do you end up realizing I don't need to do 20 things. If I do these three big things the other 20 things will kind of happen as outcomes for outputs of it. So it's just like doing fewer bigger things. That's a great way to solve their own problem on a normal day. But what about the great unknowns the problems that flare up unexpectedly and on a daily basis good luck stack ranking that mess.
I guarantee you in a fast growing company at any stage, but especially in the early stages a list will give you know, Peace of Mind yesterday's wisp of smoke might be today's five-alarm fire to really Master The Art of Letting a fire burn you need nerves vigilance and practice lots of practice Selena. Tobacco Allah is his battle tested as they come. She's a Serial entrepreneur who's been disrupting Industries ever since she started coding in her dorm room in the 1990s. She's now the co-founder of
New fitness app called Kik so before that as co-founder of Evite and president of SurveyMonkey, she wrote to to punishing and exhilarating waves of demand. She can tell you what the blazes behind the scenes of those massive successes. Some fires are big some are enormous and one you might call the tech equivalent of Chernobyl. We'll be back in a moment after a word from our sponsor Capital One business.
We had a warehouse filled with Rosary supplies. What are we going to do with all these products? And that's when I basically determined that we have to make a pivot and open up our platform to
Consumers. That's now I'm a moron co-founder and CEO of cheetah a restaurant supply company that shifted to supplying consumers when restaurants closed during the
pandemic. What we did was adding another signup flow. You're driving to a location where you
And find one of our refrigerated trucks and when you show your confirmation number, we take the order of and put it into your trunk. So it's completely content for you don't have to step out of your car.
How's it going so far? Ask Nama? She's not just the CEO. She's also a
client. One of the greatest things that happened was this pivot is that all of a sudden myself and my executive team members and our employees could become customers of cheetah for the first time in product development you call
It eating your own dog food, but now imma hasn't forgotten
her restaurant customers. She's producing a video series documenting their responses to the
pandemic making sure that small independent restaurants stay alive is so important. These are your neighbors and sometimes they're your family members. These are immigrants that can you know cook their national food and that's how you get exposed to new flavors. If we don't keep our small businesses alive our entire sense of community and culture will change.
As restaurants reopen what will happen to cheetahs new business model Capital one's jengar Bach wonders this herself.
A lot of business owners are reflecting on the changes during the pandemic and thinking about which of those are going to endure we've seen a huge uptick in businesses adapting to either move to be to be models or direct to Consumer. So I think the question for Nama will be will she continue to operate in this direct to Consumer space going forward or was this a moment in time
during
it will Nama continue to serve her new customers as a rolled customers reopen their doors will find out later in the show. It's all part of Capital One businesses dialogue with business owners reaching out to their communities and a crisis.
So, how did Selena Master the art of fighting fires? You have to go back to the early days of the.com boom where she was an undergraduate student at Stanford Selena co-founded Evite with her college friend Ali Bob Evite. You may recall became the dominant platform for online invitations in the late 90s. It was only one of three business ideas that Selena now we're hatching in their dorm room simultaneously. Those are the Breezy experimental days of a start-up when you can spit ball ideas without
Bring much blowback from users Selena now might have continued working on three ideas at once until one day Selena stumble on their priorities quite
literally. I am very clumsy as you know, and I tripped over the cord of our $200 fries computer that was beneath our desk and I'll never forget because then our phone rang and somebody said what happened to Evite and we immediately plugged it back in we looked at the database and we were just surprised.
About how naturally the product had grown because it was a built-in viral coefficient into the product that we hadn't really realized did you know the term viral coefficient? Absolutely not.
At the time it was more just the fact that oh, well, if people have to invite other people other people will see it.
Now. This is the day every founder dreams of customers complaining about a loss of service. They like you they really liked you before you gosh. Like you've won the lottery. You have to consider the flip side of passion the users who love you are also liable to turn on you. Think about how Selena got a call from that angry.
Customer in an instant. She's being held accountable like any other executive she can't say look, I'm barely drinking age and my dorm room was a mess. As soon as your users Can't Live Without Your Service, you're a mature business and that's a heavy responsibility few startup Founders truly grasp. What happens after users really like
you we did not at that time being, you know, 22 years old barely graduating from college that we were thinking about. Is this something that could scare
Kale, is this a business that could scale is this a product that could scale and so a lot of what we realized is suddenly, you know, we didn't actually hadn't thought that much about how do you create Hardware redundancy? How do you create database redundancy? And so we had multiple times where the site would just go down which was more normal in 1999-2000, but it was still something that we had to learn very very quickly as entrepreneurs. And just how do you create operational excellence is
That you know, you were learning on the job versus coming into experience with
you'd be surprised how many successful startups the celebrated overnight successes flirt with disaster the following morning.
Selena's experience is hardly unique take for instance. My friend Hadi partovi the co-founder of the educational nonprofit co.org back in 2007 hot in his twin brother Ali launched. I like a music Discovery app. It went live as an early app on Facebook back when the social network had 20 million monthly active users and it just exploded in popularity the way how he describes it. You'd think 20 million active users turn their heads all at once and shouted more.
We plan to have two servers running this to judge interest and basically within 30 minutes. We
realized two servers wasn't going to be enough so immediately doubled it and then we doubled it again and then we double it again until our
entire server Farm if I think 32 servers we could see that by the end of the weekend. We'd run out of servers and it was Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, so it's kind of crazy and we literally rented a U-Haul truck and called up people just basically asking can we come to your data center and
Borrow machines will buy them from you will borrow them from you. We just need them immediately and there was a whole bunch of us busy spending our weekend literally unpacking and racking these machines to get it up and running
the funny thing about this messy rollout is that it's a recurring story across Silicon Valley.
Product goes viral the team is caught flat-footed and they go into a wildly inefficient scrub. You might be wondering what's the deal with these entrepreneurs hasn't anyone in Silicon Valley heard of a contingency plan. I assure you have and I can only reply who has time for contingency plan. This isn't a quirk of Silicon Valley. It's a competitive strategy. You don't just want to be the first mover into a new market. You want to be the first scalar. You have to seize every last.
Opportunity for growth even if it means serving customers on a delusional scale.
So I sometimes talk about Founders who have this like delusional version of reality.
That's Lisa Curtis co-founder and CEO of and energy and snack drink company called coolie coolie. Their secret ingredient is a nutrient-rich leave called Moringa. It's all the rage in West Africa and the US not too much though. I've been steeping Moringa leaves and hot water lately and I have to say it's
Raising stuff Lisa saw the opportunity to scale the marina Market here in the US Whole Foods wanted to partner with her and develop a new energy drink.
So we said, yes, let's do it. And then Whole Foods said and we want to launch a Nationwide in January. And this was June and you know, I looked at my co-founder and she does our operations and she just started shaking her head and I distinctly remember being on the phone and saying yep.
We'll do it. We'll get it. We'll make it happen.
So what happened those super Hardy Moringa leaves clog the machines on the factory floor Lisa's teams scramble to find a new Factory a snow storm delayed their first shipment tempers flared buyers got upset then at last the big day
arrives at the same time. We're sending out to 435 stores across the country. We also had a batch of samples shipped to us and we did sort of like a cheers we did.
Did it and then we all kind of like me this face of like oh, no, this is not what we
thought the taste was fine, but the texture gritty Q another few months of panic, they discovered another magic ingredient xanthan gum to smooth out the texture and voila. They had a product that was ready to scale after a massively botched launch. So what's Lisa's take on this whole perfectly avoidable
mess. I think it was still
Right answer to stay. Yes, obviously hindsight is 20/20 and if I you know, if I could have maybe spent more time on the factory floor and bend their to really make sure that this is the product we were getting was the product we had expected that might have solved it but I don't think I would have changed saying yes and seizing the opportunity
Huli Huli is now available in 3,000 stores quadrupling its footprint in a year. Thanks to that Whole Foods launch what's important about
The story is that it's full of unforced errors. And I would argue that those errors are fine. So long as you're pursuing a massive growth opportunity when you're moving fast, you can't say, oh we're going to study this for six months. We're going to be perfectly wise and avoid a lot of basic problems because then you're six months behind and that's what's on wise to rather than prepare for every possible fire. You have to embrace the wisdom of intelligent triage.
When I ask Selena how she acquired this uncommon wisdom at such a young age. She explained that all fires look the same when you're young but one terrible Blaze can give you a healthy perspective on the rest. You are college student back them is the way you fight fire is now substantially different than the way you fight fires
that so I would say the biggest difference is probably that I get less Panic Tavella fires when they happen because you fought so many of them and you a much better perspective of
Of where to start versus you know, the oh my God, people are depending on me the site is down and I don't know what to do here. And so, you know, I think that's that's probably the biggest change is understanding that and also I think not feeling so bad about the fact that you are going to have to throw some resources away in the short term. And as long as you explain that to people as they're doing the work, they also will understand versus feeling like you're always trying to find that
perfect solution.
When you're letting a fire burn, it's not simply up to you to wage a lonely battle with your own nerves your team may start to get the sense that like the band on the Titanic you're fiddling while the ship sinks. You have to show them that yes, you see the problem. And yes, your neglect is deliberate Selena learn to Telegraph calm after she left Evite in 2001. She moved to London where she served as senior vice president of product and Technology to the company Ticketmaster, so
And
throughout my career and most of my you know reviews that the feedback I would generally get is you need to be more patient and I actually think the thing that Tommy the most patients was becoming a mom realizing that it doesn't really help to snap a child or an employee obviously, but I think that in a sense of the patient side was how do you actually calm down a situation especially when things are going crazy or going wrong?
And how do you get people communicating? Well, because the thing that starts to happen when things are broken is communication as the first thing to break down. And so that was the thing that I realized it was as simple as like, you know, it was back in the day before slack. It was like get everybody on a conference call make sure everybody has all the information and get everyone to sort of be calm and work through the problem and we had to do that quite a bit at Ticketmaster when there was massive on sales and you know, Michael Jackson YouTube is going on sale. We had people from around the
The world if there was a problem that would get on a call and there would always be a leader a triage leader and it was this very much of okay, the first and most important thing is ensuring that there's fantastic
communication. Now, this is exactly the sort of calm measured management that startups you're in for and there was one startup in particular in desperate need of Salinas help. It was a funky little website called SurveyMonkey the founder built an incredibly popular tool for online surveys and succeeded.
With an astonishing shortage of everything a company needs to
scale. So the founder of SurveyMonkey is an amazing guy. I mean if you think about the fact that this company started in 1999 in the Midwest and then he picked up and moved to Portland sight unseen just because he was found the Midwest too cold. But if you look at his tenure and trajectory, it's amazing. I mean he built a business without a penny of funding he think invented the freemium model or at least was one of the first people in the world to use the freemium model there.
Was essentially to developers the founder his brother and 10 customer service agents. And that was it
Shirley monkeys former CEO and departed friend. Dave Goldberg was well aware that his team was understaffed and in need of an experienced firefighter like Selena. So in 2009, he started selling on the founders Vision. It was an uphill
battle. You think surveys like that's not that interesting. I would say every single person underestimated SurveyMonkey just because of the way it looked every
Product engineer and even myself where you walked in and the first thing you thought was surveys like is this that interesting both from a standpoint? And then you looked at the product and you thought well this looks like it's from 1999. And so everybody underestimated both the size of the business as well as just the true consumer value that the product was actually providing, but when I heard his vision for building out product, we're not only were you listening to
People's voices and being able to make impact and make change but also building a platform for a Data Business. It was truly inspiring two days before I came to interview. I realized I was pregnant and I flew back to London and when I landed I had an offer in my inbox from day from SurveyMonkey and I wrote him back a note and I said, you know here I want to negotiate my comp and I can't leave because I'm on a European contract for at least three months. So I have a long wait.
And I realized I'm early stages of pregnancy and I wanted to give him that opportunity to say, you know, sorry, I'm can't make this work waiting for you months and he wrote back within 5 minutes and told me that he wanted to make SurveyMonkey a place where you could build a family or you could create a culture where we could build a big Revenue business, but at the same time by bringing in people with experience, we could actually also make sure that we could have dinner with our
kids sounds great right every fast.
Straight up sounds great from the outside. Then as you move closer. You start smelling the
smoke. There were three of them that were coding. I mean that is amazing for a company doing that much revenue. I mean the margin of the business was unbelievable, but when you have a technology stack that built for three people to code and then you're trying to scale an engineering organization. It doesn't
work then Dave dropped a bombshell.
Selena is about to find out just how many fires were raging in the background. You might be tempted to think SurveyMonkey was wrong to let this go but you'd be
wrong. So when he was interviewing me, he told me said there's no
backup by no backup Dave meant the survey data the bread and butter of the business could vanish Without a Trace. Can you explain what would have happened?
If a server failure wiped out server monkeys data if the system had gotten corrupted or the data had gone down the
This would have
been done because people come back to the same product partially because you want to see your data and Trends over time and if you lose that you potentially lose the entire
business.
So in other words Chernobyl complete capacitor be crazy as it sounds every startup at some point will flirt with a Chernobyl and there's only one sensible response to a potential nuclear. Meltdown Think Like Rain Man.
Fans of that movie remember Dustin Hoffman's character sitting at the poker table. I started as he calmly calculates the odds of a winning or losing hand. I try to maintain that calm rationality when I'm faced with a crisis when I'm looking at a fire. I will assign probabilities. I'll assign vectors of probabilities like is a probability going up or down down better. Obviously. I'll say okay, what's the actual damage of it hits and then is it correctable after it hits?
So it's a definite fatal like okay, we have this possibility that the business is just going to be over like boom. Done and by the way, almost all startups start in that position. I mean LinkedIn was years before it had a backup database. Now we had backup data that we could reload so it could come back in a day or two but like the failover system that was probably six years in so you look at and you go. Okay we have is really
proud wisdoms. This could kill it. Let's adjust it. But by the way, what's your probability is it like? Well, it's point one percent or .01% every particular day. Well then actually in fact, you can solve it in three months or six months because it's like, okay that doesn't add up to a lot over time. Right if it's 1% per day over 30 days then all of a sudden you're like 15% going to be dead in 30 days 15% Okay, let's solve it now. So when the Survey Monkey Team sized up the odds of a data loss.
Pounced you know, the team fixed are really really quickly in terms of putting at least like a copy of the database. We absolutely not only were stressing about the situation but very quickly trying to rectify it to ensure that that scenario didn't happen
and was thinking about the potential Chernobyl the worst case
scenario invigorating or distracting them both.
You know, it's always invigorating because you have to balance the how do we solve something that's on fire very quickly with how do we make sure that you're building out a long-term solution and not wasting a bunch of cycles and that's always a hard but very fun Challenge and
problem. Chernobyl is invigorating. Now, that's an experienced firefighter talking once she had that Blaze under control. Selena worked her way down a long list of troubles SurveyMonkey, like every fast growing startup had no marketing plan. No strategy for international use
Is a rigid Billing System that prevented some customers for paying for the service and a mess of code that made every customization a headache Selena and turn hired Engineers marketers UI designers translators an army of Specialists to clear away impediment to growth but what I find fascinating about her story is the fire. She left burning in the
background. Yeah people definitely call the Survey Monkey web design
ugly. This wasn't her personal opinion everyone told her
so and people kept saying
Hey, you know this thing doesn't look nice. This thing doesn't look
pretty the critiques continued for
years, but from my perspective. What I was more focused on was the fact that people love the product and it was performing and so I was going to let it be ugly for the sake of being able to actually build a great
business. And so it was that one of the cases where you're like, okay, I hear you. It's an instant important thing to do later but triage to a tertiary concern or a secondary
concern and I think the standpoint of is that
People spend a lot of time building beautiful websites and I think that that's important in certain types of businesses, but we're talking about it business where you're trying to get somebody through a very difficult experience and something more functional. It's far more important that the product is easy to use and beautiful and easy to use are not always the same
thing. Although it's funny. I think Steve Jobs thinks differently, but that's okay, but other than his particular genius which you know, there's only a few
of right and his products are beautiful and easy to
Use and that and obviously if you can do that that's magic, but I think if you have to prioritize one of the two, I would always put easy-to-use over
beautiful. Let's set aside the beauty versus ease-of-use debate the both obvious virtues Focus instead on Salinas willingness to pit one virtue against the other slaney can say Apple's products are thing of beauty. They're magic. Wouldn't we all love to have a product as eye-catching as the iPhone nonetheless. I won't fight that battle today possibly not for years.
There's magic to that decision as well. We shower so much praise on the entrepreneurs who knock a product out of the park. We forget to celebrate all of their brilliant punts Jeff Bezos. CEO of Amazon is admired for a lot of things design is not one of them. Look at the Amazon website. It's not going to win a Webby award anytime soon. I can guarantee you a really good product person looking at that website would go. I know how to get a much stronger engagement loop on this page what Bezos knows
Is that what matters most to people is convenience price and speed that's what customers like and that's what Amazon gives them. And Bezos won't allow anyone to vary from those three goals at all. Even if they say but you could do this. No no no convenience Christ speed Jeff and Selena. Don't just say all let that fire burn they commit to their decision even as the smoke creeps under their door.
Can you recall a specific example of a glaringly ugly design flow the
time? So when you finish paying for the product and you finish check out there was this big massive heart that came to say thank you and everybody was just like oh that's a terrible image. But you know, we wanted to retain some of the essence of the product there were certain pages like that that people would just sort of you know shudder at but that page as an example. The consumer has just paid you, you know, and so
Is that the most important page to improve notes most important to get them back into their experience quickly to let them finish out their
service my fellow investor at Greylock. Jerry Chen is unflappable in the face of complaints. He's a former vice president of VMware. One of those behind the scenes tech companies that allows you to connect and secure application across devices. Jerry said an unusual measure of success for his
team. The worst thing is you launch a product. No one cares your notices and if you had sales reps complain or customers file bugs against
It then two things one re-releasing while you're so embarrassed all your role and be people only complain when they care right
and so I always says a
metric. You know, how many complaints did we get as a positive metric as opposed to metric is people are
engaged you need fortitude to accept these fires as a byproduct of growth because if you leave one fire burning long enough, it will merge with another fire and that's when your strategy of intelligent triage will be sorely tested SurveyMonkey.
Web design for instance wasn't just an eyesore for users. It actually hampered Salinas ability to recruit
Talent. It's like the don't judge a book by it's cover but people were sort of judging. This product is being a non silicon valley-based non beautiful site and under estimating both its consumer love and it's
financials given that it was affecting recruitment that put pressure on you to try to address the design
or did you have some other way of trying to overcome the recruitment challenge once we got
if people in the door were able to get them excited but the hard part was how are you getting people in the door? And so it took more effort whether it was going to pycon meetups whether it was going to pilate he's whether it was going out there and just talking to people talking to Engineers talking to product people using your network to get people to enter and so that was a bigger challenge for us and part of that again was people were judging what the business was what the product was and until you were able to interact with them and Pitch them you were
able to sort of break that barrier
Selena hints at another benefit of letting fires burn you want employees who will rush into a burning building alongside you and there are two ways to spot these employees you can engage in all sorts of Behavioral questions, you know suppose you had 10 seconds to put out an electrical fire and extra propane tank. How would you handle it or you can just let the smoldering parts of your business speak for themselves. And this is key. Most of us are willing to fight fires. It's a smaller subset of people who are capable of noting the presence of
Roaring Blaze that might soon cut off all escapers while staying focused on the blaze that's about to consume them and this isn't simply a matter of hiring battle-tested employees because even the most experienced firefighters will occasionally miss a five-alarm fire in the making Salinas. Well on our way to scaling her third startup kick, so she launched the app this summer. It's an ambitious venture to bring live fitness classes to your smartphone and despite her experience. She readily acknowledges. She hasn't seen
It at all. She knows your blind spots and she's already hiring employees who can help her scan the Horizon for smoke signals.
So what would you say in order to accelerate your younger
selves learning of
which fires to let burn it off? What advice would
you give your younger self? And one is not everything is Theta don't panic. But what would the other things you say? Look here are some of the principles I now apply that I would want you to learn
faster. Yeah. So I'd say some of the principles one is that it is important to do.
That learning fast. So putting things out the door fairly quickly and getting consumer feedback even to a percentage of the audience that far helps avoid fires, right? Because if you get some feedback from an audience, you start seeing what's happening to the numbers and that makes a huge difference in terms of avoiding fires. I'd say that the second thing in terms of avoiding fires is hiring the right people.
You know, you can't expect that you especially at 22 or 23, but even now are going to know all the different things. I mean I mentioned before I like designs not a strength of mine. One of the first tires it kicks. I was a great designer and so it's balancing your own weaknesses with great people because you know that they are going to have the ability to see those fires ahead of
you.
I'm Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening.
And now a final word from our sponsor Capital One business by
the end of the summer. We will have a better understanding of this new reality we're living in and then forwarding groceries is going to become a big thing for people.
We're back one more time with Nama more on CEO of cheetah restaurants are reopening but Nama isn't leaving consumers behind. In fact, she's doubling down soon cheetah will offer home delivery at wholesale prices.
The consumer business has quickly turned into with about 25 to 30 percent of our total sales. We have a unique opportunity to offer affordable groceries because we are sourcing directly from Growers because we're cutting so many unnecessary links in the supply chain will be working to weave ourselves into the fabric of people's lives so we can become a true alternative to the incumbent grocery stores that people are shopping
from Capital one's. Jengar Bach.
Immense Nama and cheetah for their leadership during these uncertain
times. Nama is another great example of a business owner who has displayed the courage and The Innovation to adapt her business through some of the most trying times. We have seen recently Capital One business is proud to continue to partner and support business owners on their road to recovery and rebuilding as they innovate for the future that's with every ad on Masters of scale the entrepreneur you just heard from was real and
unscripted Capital One did
later for participating in this
campaign
masters of scale is a wait what original the show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio inside Sy Partners in New York. Our executive producers are June Cohen and daren't riff. Our producers are Chris McLeod Jenny Cataldo Dan CAD. Me and Ben vanilla are supervising producer is Jay Punjabi original music is by the holiday mother's mixing and mastering.
Ryan Pew special thanks to Jessica Johnson say it is sepia Ava Lisa Schreiber crochet David Sanford Stephanie Kent and rafina mod visit masters of scale.com to find the transcript for this episode and be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter.
