← How I Invest with David Weisburd
How I Invest with David Weisburd
E265: What the Coach to Sequoia, A16Z and Benchmark Learned About Power and People
00:58:28
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- [00:00]
A
Patrick, I've been very excited to chat. Welcome to the How Invest podcast.
- [00:04]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [00:05]
A
Patrick, for those that don't know you, you've coached partners at firms like Sequoia, Andreessen, Horowitz, Benchmark, among many others. You also wrote the book Radical Delegation. So I'm excited to really start with how did you get into this business of coaching some of Silicon Valley's greatest founders and venture capitalists?
- [00:23]
B
It's obviously a very long story and a story of deep passion, I would argue. My journey started really more or less in 2004 when I joined LinkedIn as one of the very first team members. I believe I was number 16 or 19 or something. And back in those days, nobody thought LinkedIn would be anything. You know, like, the biggest concerns people had at that time was privacy reasons. Luckily, they were wrong, and now we have LinkedIn. And the reason I joined it is because I had a firm belief that relationships are so important, that this has to simply work in some form or the other. And then over the years, LinkedIn became what it is, what it is today, which is really utility. I see LinkedIn mostly as a electricity provider for relationships, but there's very little application on top. And so I decided there is something that could be done there more and get deeper into the notion of how to basically leverage relationships a bit more.
- [01:21]
A
Why focus on relationships? What's the strategy behind that?
- [01:25]
B
Yeah, so basically, I founded this company called Mind Maven. Mind Maven is a classic executive coaching company. We have a very unique mandate, and the mandate we gave ourselves is to help people reach the fullest potential by focusing on relationships. And your question points at that. Why relationships? Well, the answer, I think, is very easy. You've been around the block for a long while, right? You've been a founder yourself, and then you invested into a ton of company. So you probably know a lot of people where you would argue they have actually reached top, right? They managed to get to what is possible. But if we were to look at those people that you would list, we would probably both agree that none of them gotten there without help from others, right? It's a state that doesn't exist. You can't get to the absolute maximum without help from others. Yet if we were to go together to those people that just came to your mind and ask them, hey, are you doing enough to invest into relationships? I bet every single one to a T would say, no, I should be doing more. Right? And so that, to me, is a really intriguing question, because I have the privilege of living in San Francisco, in the Silicon Valley. And I would argue that's the world capital of problem solving. We have amazing problem solvers around us, yet it looks like no matter how successful you are, this is a problem that people have not been able to solve. And so you have to ask yourself, why is that? And the answer is actually kind of blatantly simple, at least in my eyes. The answer is that relationships are important. Almost everybody agrees with that. But the things you have to do to take care of relationships are almost never urgent. Right? And so, for example, let's think about an email that you have to send to somebody, a follow up email to a meeting. You can send it today, sure. You can send it tomorrow or, or next week, or like in most cases, how it seems to be the standard now. Never. That to me became a really worthwhile problem solving. And that's basically the basis of why Mind Maven was founded.
- [03:27]
A
I like to take things to a neurobiological level. And if you take it to a neurobiological level, if you have something, let's say you have an invoice that you have to pay, and if you don't pay, you have a $500 fine, you're gonna feel that pain. If you do not pay it, if you have another investment that you can make in theory, that could in theory make you $10 million, you're never gonna have to actually feel that pain. So we have been wired quite rationally, at least from a neurological sense, to focus on the things that could hurt us or could help us in very short term nature versus this more esoteric opportunity cost, which you can never really purely prove, which also means you never have to amortize the costs.
- [04:14]
B
Yes. Look, I think the difference really is one of timing, right? If you don't pay a bill, the consequences are weeks out, if not even less. But with relationships, sometimes the timing goes months. Like for example, I would argue, you told me you have a lot of people in the investment community following you. So let's say gps, every single GP listening today has an anti portfolio, right? Of things they missed. It's actually the job of a VC to have that. Because if you don't have an anti portfolio, you were not working hard enough, right? And I think we both can agree the anti portfolio is the most painful thing in a GP's life, right? Because. And if you look at what happened there is very often we then look at who is in the anti pitfall. It is that somebody, some VCs, MGP had a contact wanted to do the deal, but they weren't ready yet and he didn't stay or she didn't stay in touch in the right way. And then the next time they interact with the companies that they see on TechCrunch that they raised 20 million and not a dollar is out of their fund. Right? So, so yes, you are right. But on the other hand, the consequences of not taking care of relationships is way dire in many cases. And the $500 you have to maybe pay for, for a fine.
- [05:33]
A
It's, it's so interesting because the example you gave is such a good example because it's not that that founder came to you and make this grand presentation. You said, no, I will not fund you, Mark Zuckerberg. It's that you met him once or twice and you didn't follow up. You didn't even have the opportunity to miss on the investment because you were busy paying this proverbial $500 fine. It's much more subtle than it might seem. And still, it still could cost you a billion dollars in opportunity costs.
- [06:02]
B
Yes, easy, right? And in the way you have to think, it's, it's even more brutal if you put it this way, in the sense that the moment you miss that person, you knocked off a billion dollar of your fullest potential as a venture capitalist or as an investor or even, you know, for LPs, it's the same thing. You want to get into certain funds, that funds goes, goes crazy. It's, it's basically just a layer higher. But at the end of the day, probably the same thing. And you can never recoup that because you miss that opportunity. Right? And so it's inevitable that you will miss opportunity. But it sure damn should be your core competency or your most important job to minimize those. And the way you can minimize that, the only way you can minimize that is by being exceptionally good at managing relationships. That's why I think VC's only job in my view, you know, is taking care of relationships.
- [06:51]
A
And you use this term, relationships. And again, you've coached partners from Sequoia, Andreessen, Benchmark. What are their best practices for how to manage relationships?
- [07:00]
B
Well, what I would like to do is actually, generally speaking, what do they solve first and foremost and then maybe go into the, into the practices. So for example, to me, the question is, well, it's a very important thing to solve. Number one, we just established that. Number two, the problem is actually relatively easy, right? It is this importance versus urgency, urgency problem. The fact of the matter is that most of the things we have to do for relationships are not urgent. And we're living in an urgency driven environment. Especially if you're a gp, you have all sorts of deals flying around, some of them are hot and you have to close them. So you do nothing else but that. Then you probably have a emergency case in your portfolio that you have to take out, et cetera, et cetera. And when that happens, urgency just spaces out and makes small anything that is basically just important but not urgent. It's sort of the nature of life. And so how do you solve that? Well, the only way you can solve it is through two things in my book, right? One is intent. You can try to become more intentional on how you allocate your time. And there's a bit of the superpower in there and being very good at that, right? It is having enough thinking time, having enough relationship time and carving it out in the calendar. But there's a certain glass ceiling to it in terms of how far that scales. So that leads me to the second solution. The second solution is that you have to get leverage, get more leverage into the office you're leading. You know, be that you're a partner at a VC firm, be that you're an LP or be it that you are, you know, just a CEO of a company, you're leading an office. And very often when you get to that level, you have a hard time finding further points of delegation, finding further ways of leveraging, right? Like you already hired the associates, you already have a, you know, head of community and so and so forth. So all the functions you can outsource, you probably outsource. But then there's the function of the partner of the firm, right? And you can't outsource that because that would be replacing you. And so people often from a delegation point stop there and say, well, that's it. And I think that's flawed. That's wrong, right? Like, like, like you need to start looking at how you can delegate within the office by basically not looking at the function as a whole, but splitting the function up in several different elements and then looking at those elements and seeing other things I can delegate.
- [09:27]
A
You are not only one of the first 20 employees at LinkedIn which was growing at hyperscale. You've also directly coached these hyperscale founders. Taking founders from zero to billions of dollars on crazy timelines compared to any other businesses in the history of business, in the history of the world. What are the best practices of delegations for the founders that are able to scale themselves Effectively without hurting their enterprise.
- [09:52]
B
Let's take just one example, you know, an example that I like to call a playbook, right? Just, just, just as an example to demonstrate how you can get leverage in an area where you can delegate in an area where you think you cannot delegate anymore. David, you'd agree with me, right? Like you meet with a ton of people, you know, you have a huge network. Would you agree with me that it is a good experience for people that get the opportunity to meet with you, to get also a follow up email from you afterwards, Would they appreciate that experience?
- [10:21]
A
Absolutely. Right.
- [10:23]
B
But nobody's doing it anymore, right? And those that are doing it are doing it on a disciplined level where they literally sacrifice so much because they're doing it from 11pm to 1am because that's the only time they're fined to do this work. And yet we both agree this is really important work, but it's not urgent and that's why nobody's doing it anymore. So if we look at that follow up email and really think about it, there are three facts that we have to bring to the table here. Fact number one, and I'm curious to see if you agree with me, fact number one is that nobody has ever valued you for writing an email. Never has happened and will never happen. They always only value you for sending it. Isn't that right? Number two, you can talk four to five times faster than you can actually type, even if you are a fast typer. But if you are like me, where English is a second language, it's like probably more eight to nine times, right? And then the third thing that is true is that you can talk wherever you are while you can only type when you are in front of a keyboard, right? So if you take these three things together, there's a very simple solution, you know, and that solution has gotten just even more exciting with AI. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about that later. But you have a dictation solution on your phone that lets you dictate the email you want to send. And you do that right after the meeting, right? Like the five minutes you have before you step into the next meeting. You just like everything from that meeting is fresh in your head, right? You dictate that it gets shipped to the assistant. Often we send it through AI these days so that the assistant gets a nice clean written transcription and then basically maybe even a cleaned up version as well so that the EA can choose what to pick from and then takes that and puts that into your draft folder. With the email address already associated to that email and a subject line that makes sense. Again, AI could help with certain elements of that sub. But the point is you're now shifting what isn't valuable to you, and that is production of email. The typing does not create any value for you, but it eats up most of the time in the production of this experience. Right? So at the end of the day, you met 10 people, you will have 10 emails sitting there and all you have to do is read, click Send. Read, click Send. Read, click Send. Read, click Send. Read, click Send. What would take you? If we're really honest and you are one of those people that want to send a thoughtful follow up email, It'll be probably 10 minutes per meeting. It's in the olden days where you write your own email, this is now reduced to a minute. And that is an order magnitude efficiency improvement that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else in your office. I mean, in order of magnitude, that's massive, right? And so that is one of the reasons why people resonate with our work so much. Because while we started off with theoretics about relationships, even though I thought we did a good job by coming up with a really pragmatic example of why it's so painful, you know, it has a very high levelness to it that doesn't trickle down to the day to day life, what I just gave you is an example of how you basically can set yourself up in the right way to follow up with every single person you ever meet. And it only costs you a minute. And if it only costs you a minute, you really have no excuse not to do it. No matter how busy you are, if you don't do it, you're just lazy.
- [13:46]
A
Alex Hormozi, who's become a close friend of mine, he works, drilled it down in my head to operationalize and take everything to the fine details. So let me try to do that here as the receiver of the email, not as the sender of the email.
- [13:58]
B
Yeah.
- [13:59]
A
So we have this podcast and at the end of the podcast we agree to have a meeting in San Francisco at lunch meeting after this, you would take the recorder record. I had a podcast with David Weisford. Here's the transcript. We agreed to do a lunch meeting in San Francisco one day in November. Draft up some emails with some available times. You draft that up, you maybe put in a little touch from our conversation that AI might have not captured. When I receive that, even if I know that that was AI assisted, what I care about is one you cared enough to actually draft up an email. Two, you're the kind of person that's proactive, somebody that as I have more meetings, I'm positively rewarded with future activity and probably it'll result in something potentially positive, whether it's personal or financial. And three is basically you're signaling both that you care enough to follow up, that you're proactive, and also that this is the kind of relationship that may result in some positive outcome in the future. Whether or not you typed up 90% of it or used AI. To me it doesn't really matter. In fact, I would actually argue that I want all of the people I'm doing business with to be hyper efficient because if you could scale yourself 10 times, we could do 10 times bigger deals. So correct my thinking and improve upon it.
- [15:22]
B
You know, David, I knew that it would. The moment he started talking, I knew I would be talking to a pro today. Look, not only did you.
- [15:28]
A
That's the nice way of saying a nerd, but that's okay. Well, I accepted, I've accepted my lot.
- [15:33]
B
I. In my world, there's nothing cooler than a nerd who nerds out on relationships because it's, it's literally what makes, what defines the human condition. Right. But the reason I said that to you is, is, is, is this. Not only did you summed it up mostly correctly, you actually brought in another playbook which is the meeting debrief. To me, that's separate than the actual follow up email. It is sort of where you dictate things that were important in the meeting. Maybe we use AI in, in the meeting summaries to basically extract certain information that then gets basically processed by your EA in whatever workflows you set up. And there's some really, really powerful things there that we can jump into in a later, later point because I think a lot of your listeners are actually having a lot of meetings and might be interested in this. But the one point I did want to make, and this is really important, David, is you would actually dictate your own email so, so you wouldn't let somebody else write it for you based on what might have happened in the meeting. Because we're still managing relationships and if you dictate the email, the email is yours. It is your content, it is what comes out of your brain, right? And then at the back end, you're still the one who's clicking send. Meaning it still is your judgment, your judgment, it is your message. Everything about this value chain, this workflow is genuine, is authentic. The only Thing you're doing is you're smart about how you go about producing it and so people will get mad at you. If you have other people write your email, they will somehow figure it out because something is wrong and it's off. And that is so destroying for relationships. You've probably seen it happen to you.
- [17:10]
A
Where people try to incantate value, but with people it sounds like you, but it's not actually you and she figures out it's not you. That's damaging.
- [17:19]
B
That is so crazy as damaging. I mean, literally they think you are phoning at home. And nobody wants to partner with anybody who's phoning at home, especially not in the venture world, right? So that's why even though we have AI and all of that, I would say, hey, make it you and make it real so that you can at any point when somebody approaches you, defend that particular approach. You're saying, wait a minute, it is my words, it is a genuine email. And I clicked send. And then you turn around to that person saying, so if I do this this way and I reached out to you and under other circumstances, and let's say for example, David, that what you reached out to was an offer of an introduction. Because what I just displayed, the, the follow up email example is just one way in which you can produce emails. But for example, you can use this is another playbook to send introductions, right? And then you ask that person who's complaining to you, hey, let's call him Michael. Michael, would you rather not gotten that email? Because I would have not had the time to do so or would you rather have gotten it? If I use this system, 100% of the people will say no, no, I love that I got the email right.
- [18:23]
A
And it's basically, it's another hermosism. But Alex Hermosi believes that behind every relationship there's a transactional layer and it only becomes evident if it's uneven or one person's not bringing or both parties are not happy. It's a philosophical concept. I do subscribe to it, but I actually have an exception that proves, I think the rule to this process and why this is so powerful. I had a partner at, call it $10 billion growth equity firm, one of these top three firms during 2021 that I worked with many years. I sent him five companies that he ended up funding and he would always respond, he would always give me direct feedback. And after we did, we did five deals together. So pretty significant. At some point I actually sent him an email and I said, thank you for Backing my companies. Would you like to meet for coffee and just, you know, get to know, like, now that we've done five deals, maybe we should touch our face tonight. This was before Zoom. Yeah. And his response was, no, no coffee, thank you. And I just thought it was so good. No, it was so direct. And I continued sending him deals and he continued responding to me. And I, first of all, I valued the frankness so much. I accepted his premise, I met him where he was, and it was one of my most important relationships. And it's this really almost absurd example of how sometimes the value and the efficiency and just the commercial transaction itself can build very deep relationships and very real relationships, even if you literally never meet the person in person. It's the most extreme example I've ever had. But looking back at that, it is a kind of interesting counterexample to what most, most people believe.
- [20:03]
B
Isn't that true? I mean, this is, the exact point is like, like there is a hidden extreme efficiency if you basically focus on relationships in the right way, right? You and him, without ever meeting with each other, got to an understanding of value and that led to a deeper appreciation of the relationship. And you didn't even need coffee, right? And the guy was so confident in that. And you know, it doesn't mean that he doesn't appreciate you. He just says, this is not an efficient way for our relationships. Right? And that is perfectly fine. But I have one more thing to say around that. That one, you know that the one playbook that we discussed about sending follow up emails, right? So we said like, hey, there's a dramatic efficiency improvement of 10x or an order of magnitude, because instead of 10 minutes, you use only one minute. And a lot of people gravitate towards that. That's why we have a very successful coaching business. But that's not why we're doing it, right? This is really important. The reason why we're doing this is if you talk the email you want to send, if you dictate it, you have the opportunity to be more thoughtful about the email. David, you would agree with me that most of the thoughtful or meaningful experiences or exchanges you had with any human are verbal, right? So our brain is really good at processing things verbally that are then more meaningful. So you have more time on your hands because you're four to five times faster, but you also are more trained to be thoughtful about it. So, for example, and that to me is the reason you want to use delegation, not just to get the 10x improvement, but to basically be More thoughtful in the way you reach out and therefore deliver better experiences to people around you. Because only good things can come come from that. The example I have for you is one thing that we, for example, train every single client of ours is when you dictate a follow up email, add one sentence, one sentence about something you've learned in that meeting. Because we learn something in every meeting, it doesn't have to be huge, it doesn't have to be earth shattering, just something you've learned. And when you add that habitually to every email, you're inherently delivering a good experience, right? It's like one of the most elegant power moves because you're giving somebody a compliment without it feeling as a compliment. And if you're listening right now and you're a gp, you also have that real interesting dichotomy of the power level, like people asking for money, you having money. There's a social ranking in this. But if you are the one who's now sharing to that person that perceive themselves lower in the social ladder as something I've learned from you, what do you think that makes you know, that makes them feel exceptionally good in some form or the other, right? It is a good feeling that you're delivering, right? And so at the end of the day, the reason we're doing it, if I could sum it up real quick, David, is I think everybody in the profession that we're talking to today has sort of a mandate to make come true. That famous quote by Maya Angelou. I'm sure you've heard about it, right? Maya Angelou said, people will forget what you said to them, people will forget what you did for them, but people will never forget how you made them feel, right? And the powerful thing about the work we're doing here at Mind Maiden, David, is this. A lot of people get to the making feel good by making huge gestures, right? Inviting you to invest into a huge deal that is going to pop up that made you feel very good and therefore you will not forget. But it is not necessary because that's hard to scale, right? Like you don't have that many of these very powerful options, but yet most people think that way. You know, to make that person not forget, to me, I have to do something big for them. And that is just really flawed in the sense of efficiency. All you have to do is consistently in every touch that they get from you and every interaction they have with you make them feel good. And again, many of your listeners right now might say, what are you saying? I need to make Them like me, it's like not at all. Make them feel good. And you a beautiful example earlier, David. Right. That guy didn't try to make you like you or vice versa, but you still felt good anyways.
- [24:12]
A
I felt better because I felt he was extremely honest.
- [24:15]
B
Yes.
- [24:16]
A
See, essentially he wasn't trying to curry favor through a facade. He was just looking to. He respected me almost as a peer and as a counterparty. He has somebody to, to fake, be nice to. Yes, exactly. You know, you bring up this word efficiency and I think about this meme, efficiency versus effectiveness, which is efficiency might be having 10 Zoom meetings in a row, nobody remembers you. And effectiveness might be actually having the same 10 Zoom meetings in a row, but taking that one minute so that 20, 30, 40% of those meetings are memorable. Yeah, that's a magnitude of scale, greater effectiveness. Just with that one task.
- [24:56]
B
I invite everybody listening today to think that way. And if I may give a very pragmatic tip to underscore what you just said is, you know, if you want to stick to the example of 10 meetings and you want to need to do 10 minutes, 10 meetings, reduce the amount of the meetings. Like for example, if you typically do one hour meetings, well then make them 50 minutes because there's nothing you can't get done in 50 minutes that you need to get done in 60 minutes. You can do it. Right. And that buys you these 10 minutes. So that five minutes you can do your debrief and your follow up email and any other things we can talk about later that is possible to be performed during, during that time. And then you have five minutes to prepare for the next meeting and show up 100% present, but also well informed. We have again things you can delegate in that sense that we could talk about later as well. But that's, that's, that's the pragmatic tip that I have here. It's actually quite simple to get to that.
- [25:52]
A
So it's a great tip because what are 90% of things on people's schedule? It's meetings. But I'm sure you've amassed other tips over decades of coaching people on effectiveness. What are some other highly practical tips that our listeners could integrate today into their way of working or schedule in order to become more effective?
- [26:17]
B
I mean, look, the beauty of it is that it is so much that we could probably spend the rest of the time talking about playbooks. So here's the thing, David. I gave you one playbook when you asked me what can one do to get leveraged into the office Right. And then I used that playbook to show how what is valuable in that particular workflow of sending a follow up email is the idea of the follow up email and what you want to send. Right. And the clicking send but everything within between you can outsource. Right. And this was one playbook of over 50 different playbooks we came up over the years of doing this of how you can basically parse and parcel. I don't know if I said that correctly but you know what I mean out things that you thought you cannot delegate because they're part of your value chain.
- [27:00]
A
So maybe instead of going into this playbooks, what are some principles and maybe we should start with what should somebody never delegate and then go from there.
- [27:09]
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A
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- [28:07]
B
Well, that's the wrong attitude, right? Like what shouldn't some. Well okay, so fair enough.
- [28:11]
A
What are the principles for being highly effective?
- [28:14]
B
Yeah, no, no, no. I mean the reason I said that never delegate the wrong question, the wrong attitude is you should think of delegating everything and then look at what is maybe not wise to delegate versus that. But the problem is most, for, for most of our listeners today, David, their problem is that they actually don't delegate enough. Right. And so, and that they struggle with, with letting go and, and, and, and, and, and aren't willing to push the envelope because they work in a framework that says this is my world, my office and I'm supposed to do it kind of thing. So that's, that's where My reaction came to is, is like, no, like you should push people to delegate almost everything. But if I were therefore be forced to answer your questions, is anything that puts you at risk of coming across as inauthentic or not genuine?
- [29:02]
A
Right.
- [29:02]
B
Like, for example, going to the beach and having somebody answer all of your emails in your inbox, but also send them is a recipe for disaster at one point. But having said that, you know, to get to another playbook, one of the most powerful ways in which we can actually free up 12 hours a week. You know, the one thing that I didn't mention in this notion of leverage, if you have an ea, we have ways of almost, you know, like in most cases can get people to free up 12 hours of stuff they're doing that they don't need to be doing. Right? So, so imagine somebody comes to you, David, and says, hey, I can give you back a day, a week. You know, wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't. Wouldn't you at least have to talk to that person and say, wait a minute, is this vape aware of this real? And what I hope I'd be able to present to you and your audience today is that what we do is absolutely not vaporware, but it works because it's founded of years of years of practicing and refining small little best practices, we call them Playbooks, to basically, you know, free up 12 hours a week. And one of them, one of those playbooks, is this concept of inbox shadowing. So the idea is very simple. It is using your EA to, to do the inbox for you, right? And there are several levels of how far you can push it. But at the end of the day, what they do is they look at the email and then they decide, can I answer it or not? If they can answer it, they will answer it and they will put it into your draft folder. They will never send it, right? If they can answer, and that's about 80% of the email that needs answering, they will be able to figure out, depending on how long they worked with you and how much context they have about you and how much they've worked with you to understand how your brain is operating, they'll be able to answer 80% of your email, and then they're 20% of the emails that they don't know how to answer. They're typically decisions or their requests for advice. Let's say something like, hey, I'm a founder of a SaaS company. Do you know anything about SaaS pricing? And you might happen to know a lot about it because you've helped a lot of SaaS companies because that's what you invest into. That's something that your EA might be struggling with answering, right? And so they move that into please handle it. It's a folder called Please handle, right? And then everything else that doesn't need answering, they will be able to figure that out and put it into FYI, a folder, right. Like I would argue, anybody who's listening and has an EA could start doing that today to a certain degree. Although it's a little bit more complex than just starting it. Right? And then the beauty, the beauty of this, and I'll let you ask a question a moment, but the beauty of this is that when you now go to your inbox, you have a fundamentally changed relationship. Most people feel enslaved to it in some form or the other. If I don't look there regularly, I'm going to fall behind. Imagine I have clients that they easily use the first two hours for thinking time. We call it white space time, another playbook where they commit two hours of the day to just thinking about strategic things and so on and so forth. And they do not look at the inbox until 10am why? Because they have somebody else looking into it. And if there is something red hot, a founder sends you a message that says, I'm going to have to divorce my other founder. You know, that's all hands on deck moment. You will get a text message saying you have to pay attention to that, but as long as there's no news, no news is good news. And your mind can focus on something that actually moves the needle more than answering emails, right? So you have a fundamental change of it. And then the second thing is, what we've seen is that basically if you do this, and let's say the average listener today spends probably an hour and a half to two hours in inboxes every day. That basically can be reduced by 50 to 60%. So think about it, that's like an hour to an hour and a half of time back every day, right? So it's one of the examples we have of why we can claim 12 hours easy, right? Because now somebody else is doing the triaging, is answering the operational type of emails and then basically you just have to answer the please handle ones. And even there we can give a tremendous amount of power because very often the email that they can answer are the most important ones for people that are emailing you because they're emotional or their request for advice. But what you do at that point in time, but they're also often not urgent, meaning that they don't have to be handled right away. And so what you can do is instead of actually answering the email and writing a 50 minute essay to give them the advice they want, you talk it, you dictate it, and basically the answer gets produced by your assistant. And if you're really smart, now we're dipping into another playbook. We call it the value payload database. If this is an answer SaaS pricing, and you basically write three, four paragraphs about SaaS pricing and you know you're going to get that question over and over again. You ask UEA to put it into your value database of templates that you already use over and over again next time around. All you have to do is saying, hey, you know, here's some personal comments on that email that is specific to this situation, but please integrate these comments into our standard value payload on SaaS pricing. Right? So you see how everything is a little bit interconnected, but you know, if you just envision rolling that out over 50 payloads, the amount of efficiency you can get is powerful, very powerful.
- [34:18]
A
And are you just using the iPhone recorder app? Do you have a separate recorder?
- [34:22]
B
We have a off the shelf app that we use for it. Look, the one thing that we felt is like we should never become a technology house because there are other people building software faster than we could ever because our business is coaching best practices to people, right? And so we always look for off the shelf solutions and we constantly are revising what we think is, you know, standard of care, if you will, of, you know, like what is best practices. So right now I could give you two, two different ways you can do this. One, the most proven way is using a tool called Audio Memos. You can find it on the app stores. And then what you have to set up is basically it literally lets you press one button to record and then one, press one to say done and then you're done. Because it then drops it into something like Dropbox. And then basically we use tools like make.org or Zapier to grab that recording, send it through Whisper to translate it, you know, and to, to even, you know, we've been quite successful on using AI and this is also something we do. We help you set up and AI, your, your suite, your office suite. We try to make the email be in your tone, right? So taking the content of what you dictated that has been transcribed, then basically sending it through a specific use specific prompt to then basically drop that into a task management solution for your ea Now, a lot of people would ask, well, why are you not just dropping that into my draft folder right away? And I'm saying, that is the reason I'm hesitant to doing this. We will end up doing this when AI is good enough. But AI's paradigm right now is you get as much as you can, offload it to it, but you have to validate, validate, validate and verify. Right? And I don't want you to be doing that if you have an ea, because it doesn't make sense. But for example, one of the things that I'm personally very excited about is that I have to say no to a lot of people that I can't work with because they don't have an ea, but now we can, because we can show them all of those things. And sure, they have to take on the role of that EA when it comes to validating, validating what they get, but it's still way faster, you know, way faster for them to operate that way than if they do it the traditional way. And here's the real secret benefit that my clients tell me over and over again. If I just by having a draft sitting there, and even if that draft is not quite perfect, it's not ready to ship, I slip first and foremost more into a role of an editor, and therefore I make the email better. But because it's sitting in my draft photo, I end up sending it. Right? So it's binary, it's a different.
- [36:59]
A
And then you're a subtle thing. Your ego is not attached to it, somebody else wrote it, and now you could correct it with your ego. And it's much less frictionless than being judged for a unique piece of art.
- [37:10]
B
Yeah, fair enough. Exactly. That. That is, that is true. Although remember, you still dictate the email. So it is your content. So you never wrote it, but it is still your content.
- [37:19]
A
You could blame the problems on the AI and take all. The AI deals with that better than humans.
- [37:27]
B
Well, the AI would maybe smoothen it out, but it is still your content, you know, and, and you know, sometimes you realize what the AI came very often, regularly, I would say when the AI comes up with something, it doesn't feel right to you and you end up using what you actually dictated. And frankly, if you are good at dictating, if you're good at verbally expressing yourself in the way you would write something, you don't need AI because it's just an extra step of something you have to read and verify. But if it's the words you chose, that show up at the back end when you want to click send, it's ready to go then, because you know what you said.
- [38:03]
A
So I want to double click something that you implicitly said, but you didn't explicitly say this. Your EA could use rule based decision making. 80% of your emails on a weekly basis are highly predictable. Now, most people don't want to think that. They want to think that every week their email is extremely idiosyncratic and they've never had these kind of emails. But what you're essentially saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that 80% of your emails, your response is predictable. And the 20% is really where you should put your effort. Is that what you're saying?
- [38:30]
B
It's a question that Nobody's ever, in 15 years of doing this, nobody's ever posted to me. But I would say this, I don't like the word predictable. I would say, or maybe, yes, maybe it is predictable. I mean like the, the point is you need to have somebody not only be able to predict it, but also predict within the context of the environment they're working in. Your environment, your attitude, your approach, your style.
- [38:54]
A
So predictable by somebody that understands you very well and has been shadowing you. Not generally predictable.
- [39:00]
B
Yes. And I would argue anybody, you know, I would challenge everybody to look into it because it's actually like, you know, it's emails, like, hey, a good example, right? A founder of yours reaches out to you with sort of an emergency email like, hey, I do need to talk to you in the next 24 hours. Isn't that predictable that you would say, yes, even though this is an important email and it's an important relationship, of course you will do, right? And here's the beauty of inbox shadowing, in my view. When that email hits you right, this is one of the very fine benefits or fine grade things that you can look into when you do inbox shadowing. When that email hits you, this particular example of an emergency request from one of your founders, you are most likely in a meeting. Maybe you're even in back to back meetings for two, three hours right now you have somebody looking at that, sees that this is red hot and can actually act on it. For example, your EA could go to his or her own inbox and write to that founder, hey, David has asked me to get him on the calendar today. Does 6:45 work for you? He has 50 minutes, then he can do it. Think about the SLA you're delivering now as an investor and how, you know, what, how you make those people. Again, back to Maya Angelou, how you make those people feel, you make them feel that you are living up to the promise that you would roll up your sleeve like every single GM on the platform in the world is offering. But most people aren't. If we're really honest, they can't. Because then back to back meetings in the today world, they will hear from you maybe in five hours. Right. Or four hours. But here they hear through your office that they have time with you within 10 minutes. Right. And we all know how powerful fast responses are. Right. And especially in these important things. And that's what I'm saying is like this, that's. Yes. That is predictable.
- [41:00]
A
And it's interesting because although you've institutionalized this in thousands of organizations, venture capital firms, startups, et cetera, this has been around for centuries, if not millennias. If you think about what the President gets every day, they. He gets a military briefing. Yes. Which condenses from 20 different kind of management chains down to. We have this issue with Iran. Here are three options. Yes. I think the Simpsons has done like a funny episode on that. It's like option. They're like three pictures you could do essentially. That's, that's this like hyper streamlined process. And why does he have that hyper streamlined process? Because it's one person trying to manage an entire country. He must be focused. He can't react individually on emails. I think, you know, President Trump doesn't do emails. I think he literally signs letters and faxes them. I don't even think he has an email. But neither here nor there. It's these systems that work at the highest level and they also work on an individual organization level, obviously because they could, they could work in the most complex systems.
- [42:05]
B
David, I think you, you, you nailed it. Like you could argue that Mind Maven is in the business of democraticizing the office of the President and making it available for anybody who can afford in the. If you want to operate in the way a. George, you know, J.F. kennedy operated or maybe even, you know, like whoever is the person that you look forward, you know, Jeff Kennedy was known to know everybody's meeting and had backgrounds on it. Right. Like, and you know, there's some presidents, they had this feeling like, I think there's a story around Bill Clinton too. Right. That he had this weird thing of making people always heard and listened to in some form or the other. Right. But if you really look at it, he just knew about who, he knew enough about the people that he's meeting. With and, and, and basically were able to deliver this exceptionally powerful experience to everybody he touched and, and, and creating then creating these legends and that created these legends around his presidency. And if anybody's interested in doing this, that's sort of the business that we're in. You know, always looking at how to make people feel good because it's just turns into legends. It turns into very good outcomes.
- [43:19]
A
You're reminding me of this article that I read probably a decade ago. And I just remember that every president had their own managerial style. I'm going to use two examples. We're going to use a Democrat and a Republican so that nobody gets triggered. Yeah, exactly. Are two of the biggest micromanagers presidentially in the last hundred years, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. Probably not the two most highly popular or effective presidents the last hundred years. So there, there does seem to be something about if you try to micromanage at some level, other, other parts of your performance may suffer as a result. Is applies to businesses. It applies to the chief executive of the country. Yes.
- [44:01]
B
And I would add to that. Isn't it true that the higher you build your organization up. Let's, let's take the example of a portfolio CEO of yours or anybody who's listening to. At one point the company becomes big enough that they fill out their first team, right? They have a VP of marketing, product cto, whatever you need. Everything is there because they scale the organization successfully to that level at that point in time. One could argue that the only job left for the CEO if we simplify it dramatically, is managing relationships. That's all they do. They have to continue to find the best people possible for the organization and then convince those people to join. And then once they join, convince them to stay around and stick around by making them successful. All of that is no IC work. It's all about relationships. Right? And some of the most effective leaders were able to get the best people to follow them through hell and back. And you do that again by a very simple formula of making sure people feel good about interacting with you in some form or the other. So no big leadership frameworks, but basically what do I do tactically on a day to day basis in the way I interact with the people around me to make them feel good by making them successful, by supporting them, whatever works in that sense. And that's probably true with the presidents too.
- [45:24]
A
It's become such truism that's become so trite that recruiting and business development. But specifically recruiting Steve Jobs, Ken Griffin talks about who has one of the most largest capital constrained pools of capital in the world. One of the top managers, even though he has all these different quant traders and all these really smart people doing really smart strategies and constantly generating alpha, he says that his only sustainable advantage is recruiting. And the people that I've talked to around him say that that's not a joke, it's not some bumper sticker. This is one of his main kind of operating principles, is that you must be able to recruit the very top people. And that's one of the things that he really takes the reins on.
- [46:04]
B
Should we make this pragmatic? Can I throw a playbook against that? Right. So for example, this is one of our playbooks. And it's so basic, David, that you're like, he comes on my show, talks about this. It is simply so basic. You would argue with me that everybody you know who is building a business or running a fund comes across people from time to time, sometimes even more regularly, where you look at that person and say, one day I want to hire that person or one day I want to work with this person. Isn't that, isn't that something that people think consistently? Right. The funny thing is 99% of the people out there are doing nothing with that thought. And that's a shame, right? So what I think people should do is the moment you recognize that you have that thought, you need to basically, in the debrief, after the meeting, this thing that you basically mentioned, meeting debrief, you dictate to the EA to put this person into your talent pool, right? So you create a, you know, everybody should have a CRM. We help with that as well. But you know, in that CRM, you have a bucket of people that at one point you want to hire. I think this is particularly point and for startup CEOs because they meet a lot of people, especially in the early days where they cannot hire the person they would like to hire, but at one point they will be. And that's also the right timing for that person to join you because the person operates at that level, right? So imagine, imagine building out a 30 to 50 people talent pool for any kind of spot you have in a scaling organization, right? And then basically you make sure that with the help of your ea, you stay top of mind with these people. What that means is maybe a message every six week, you know, as you grow, updating what's going on, checking in on their families, whatever it is, right? Maybe having the EA look up what's happening in that person's world by going to LinkedIn by going to Twitter or by going to Instagram or whatever it is, to seeing what's happening and then writing them an email based on, hey, I noticed that you spent the weekend camping. What tent do you use? Or you know, you know, especially if you are also into camping, that's, that's really important if that's a common ground and so forth. Right? And so now you run this pretty regularly. At one point your company is going to be ready to hire that person and then you basically ping them. The other thing that will happen is when you basically add them to the talent pool. You will let them know that, hey, if you ever are wondering about your career and the next steps you want to do, feel free to use me as a resource. Right. So to who do they turn first?
- [48:30]
A
You.
- [48:31]
B
Which gives you first, first dip to saying, you know what, it's a little early for us, but I think this is the time to do it. And isn't that true that every single gp, well, not every single, most gps are looking for the holy grail of the founder and the holy grail of the family founder is the founder has been able to do something with nothing. Somehow they were able to use very little resources to pull something valuable out of thin air. We call them the resource effective founder. And a resource effective founder is managing relationships. That's the only differentiator you will ever find between them and others. They are the ones who basically stay in touch with these talent people because they Instead of paying $120,000 to recruiters, they're getting these people for free. And very often these people come along with similar high quality people, et cetera, et cetera, and that's how you end up scaling. So this work that we're talking about right now, for many people listening today is not optional. This is not a conversation about like, oh, here's something I could do, delegate. It's like if you are on the mission of reaching the top, the fullest potential you can have within your vision, within the mission you're pursuing, investing time into relationships and learning how to do that well is not an optional choice, it is a must have because otherwise you can't get there.
- [49:45]
A
A common theme among all these things that you're saying, these are all long term games. Whether it's getting the next lead for your, for your fund or for your startup, whether it's recruiting CXOs and top level talent and they are definitionally non urgent. Why, if it doesn't take, if it takes two to three years, it cannot be Urgent. Yeah, both be highly urgent and take three years. Yeah. These are the number one things that suffer when you focus all your time on urgency. The most important strategic things. Which leads me to my final question, thinking time. You mentioned these two hours a day. Some people maybe could only afford two hours a week. And ask you a paradoxical question. What are the best practices for unstructured thinking time? And how do the very best leaders make sure that they're focusing on the right things during their thinking time?
- [50:34]
B
Oh, easy. Like we call this white space time. Just, just sort of like imagine yourself locking yourself into a room that has only white walls and nothing in. And you can just focus on this one thing that you really want to focus on, right? And the way you do this or the way most people attempt to do this, by just doing calendar blocking, right? They're saying, I need two hours of thinking time, I'm putting it on the calendar. But anybody who's attempted, the majority of people will end up finding out that they get meetings written over it or they end up not using it in some form or the other, right? And it becomes very, very challenging to be successful with that, to just call it the calendar blocking. And that's why we call it white space time. Because what we do in, in addition to that is that we build really strong fat retaining walls around that time. And what I mean by that is that you use your ea, who basically is supposed to have control of your calendar and explain the difference between important and urgent and saying that there's nothing more important than my white space time for our success. So nothing in the world can ever move this period, right? Then you have to build in exceptions because the world spins and things come up and you sometimes have to move it. So you say if you have to move this white space time, you're only allowed to move it if you can find another place in the same week on the calendar. And if that means you have to cancel something not important and non urgent, do so. And so that helps with basically maintaining this. Another thing you should do is use your EA as a, as an accountability partner. So we like an EA to send you a weekly performance email that says how many meetings did you have and of how many did you follow up with an email? You know, like, what's your percentage? We want them to say how many hours of the hours you want to do every week did you spend in thinking time or white space time? Four out of six. Frankly, anybody who comes to me with four out of six is like, congratulations, you won. Because it's more than zero. Right. So that makes a difference. Right. And so forth. And then you asked me about how to make sure that you use that time really well. Sure. You've heard about Paul Graham's famous blog post about make his time versus manage his time. Right. So white space time is traditionally in the maker's time paradigm. Right. The problem for those that don't know this concept, it's very simple. It's like a lot of people say they struggle because they have a dichotomy of responsibilities. At one point they're managers, but they're also making. They have to build, they have to create.
- [53:14]
A
Right.
- [53:15]
B
And what often happens is that basically the manager's times the easy to maintain because it's driven by. You have to show up for meetings and manage or listen. And the meetings have the tendency of just being there and all you have to do is show up. You don't have to activate or self activate to do anything for them. And so what happens is that very often the manager's time crowds out the maker's time and the maker's time gets too little. Right. And so that's one thing. And then the second thing about it is that it requires a completely different mindset. When you are in manager's time, you're often just reacting when you're answering emails, that is manager's time. When you're sitting in a meeting and people talk to you, it's manager's time. And so one of the most powerful things is to come up with a checklist before you step into white space time of how to restructure your brain for proactive thinking. Right. It is, number one, using principles out of mindfulness to calm it down. When it's very reactive, it's looking for new signals and wants to do things.
- [54:13]
A
Right.
- [54:14]
B
But that's not helpful for the process of proactive thinking. So you want to calm it down. Right. Then you want to switch your mind into a positive mood, into a positive. Into happy space. You want to be happy.
- [54:27]
A
Why?
- [54:28]
B
Because a happy brain is way more creative than a defensive brain or reactive brain. Numerous studies have proven that. I'm sure you're nodding because you've heard about this before for. Right. And then you want to. And you do that by just thinking about funny moments. Yeah. You make yourself laugh in some form or other. You know, like you might think to yourself, I'm like a crazy lunatic in a room laughing. But it's actually really good for you to do the best work. Then be very clear what you want to Work on even before you go into it, right? And then the last thing, the most powerful thing is just get started. What I mean with this is figure out what is the very first step or the very first thing you want to do. Take away ambiguity because there's the ambiguity effect, a psychological construct that is real and makes us be paralyzed when we have too many options. We end up not choosing a single option. It's sort of the summary of it, right? And so just say the first thing I need to do is write, open up a notion document, Google document, whatever it is that you're working on and write a bullet point list of certain items and go start. Because a lot of people struggle switching and so they end up like, I'm going to answer quick few emails and all of a sudden those two hours that you set aside are sent are used for emails, right? And you want to not make that happen. You don't want that. And so you have to just get started in the think time. I would argue most people listening today would say, yes, once I get started, I don't stop, right? So there's two things once you get into flow, right, Once you start. And it's often just a little hump, but often that hump is too high for most people to actually get into it because it is a proact way of working. And some people really struggle. I'm, I'm one of them. Especially those that have ADHD struggle more.
- [56:11]
A
For example, sometimes that environment, a different environment, different. I like to literally use a whiteboard, if not sometimes even taking a walk. Elon Musk has talked a lot about this. He kind of deprises his. He doesn't literally go in his sensory deprivation tank, although some people have taken to that extreme. He goes where there's no distractions. He just sits and he calls it thinking from first principles, like what comes up and, and the thoughts will come up to your point. If you silence the mind, the important things will spring up and you just have to be there to capture them.
- [56:42]
B
Yes, that's exactly it, Patrick.
- [56:46]
A
This has been an absolute masterclass. I want to write this down for myself. If, if somebody wants to work with you, how do they go about working with you and what are the next steps?
- [56:54]
B
Well, the first thing I would recommend is check out my book. I'm very, very proud of it. It took me four years to write it. And so it's not one of those like thrown together. Not a single word has been written by AI in this.
- [57:06]
A
It's like I have read it and it's extremely good. And that's, that's how I reached out to you.
- [57:11]
B
Okay, fantastic. Well, that's good to know. My co author, Connor, will be very happy to hear that this is a consequence of writing this book. We put a lot of sweat into it. The way we work is very simple. It's a coaching process. If you think anything that you listen to is interesting, I would recommend people reach out to us. My email is patrickindmaiden.com or you can come through us through the website. We have a very unique sales approach and it is that we actually don't sell. It's because of the business model we're in. We're coaches. Right. And if you don't and our coaching is habit based, if you're not really ready for it, we will not sell you because we wouldn't be successful and we have a 95% success rate. But what we do do is get to know people. Right? And so even if you don't think this is right for you right now, reach out to us and have half an hour call. Usually what we do is what you and I did today in this call is we listen to some of the channels they have and then we try to match playbooks to it. Like the talent pool. Playbook was just an example where you described a challenge that people have and I was like, this is how we would try to solve it with the people that we work with. And so at a minimum, people that talk to us walk away inspired and the only thing we want in return is goodwill. You know, talk well about us and, you know, that's how I've been building a business and so far I feel like I've been quite successful.
- [58:33]
A
Well, Patrick, thanks so much for your time. I know it's your most scarce resource and appreciate you sharing it with me in the audience and looking forward to doing this again.
- [58:43]
B
Can I say something to you as a host? I've had many hosts. You've done an exceptional job of getting deep stuff out of me and really being a good partner in this call. I really like. I enjoyed this so much because your examples allowed me to dig deeper and it was an absolute pleasure to work with you today.
- [59:07]
A
Thank you, Patrick, very much appreciate it. That's it for today's episode of How I Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.