Nicholas (4:20)

Hi Prof. G. My name's Nicholas and I'm a huge fan of your podcast special Shout out to Ed for having to laugh at your dick chokes. Anyway, I'm 36, Canadian and have about 10 years of experience as a business generalist. I started as an engineer, got a top MBA and then spent about five years in Luxembourg at McKinsey and Amazon. Tired of corporate, I've moved to the south of France to join my in laws Family business only to confirm your thoughts about that region. Great place to spend, but not to earn. So my wife, two kids and I have moved to Toronto for better opportunities. Now I think my best move would be to join an early stage startup as a COO or chief of staff to build a company and some wealth along the way, which sounds super interesting and challenging. My question to you is, knowing the high failure rate of early stage companies, what advice do you have for picking a winner? How can I assess which startup is worth betting this next chapter of my career on? Thanks and keep doing what you're doing.

Prof. G (5:17)

Thanks very much. Nicholas from Canada. What an interesting life you've led and how it's kind of good to be you. Okay, so it sounds like you want to go to a startup. So first off, nobody knows and there's hints. What I've always done is I've always picked people, not companies. And that is if you have the opportunity to interview with small firms, you want to go where you think the people are most impressive. Because a lot of times with small companies they end up doing something that they hadn't originally anticipated. But if the people are super smart, they can more often than not figure it out. So I think you want to go somewhere where you think the person I'm going to report into, I'm going to learn a lot. And these people just seem really together now. Hopefully, if it's just a stupid idea, then fine. There might have been a lot of smart people with that dog walking app backed by SoftBank, but that was just a stupid idea. But you basically want to go into battle with people that you want to go to, you know, you would want to go into battle with. And then also I think the, the where the company is in the life cycle is sort of interesting. My general experience is that joining a company with zero to 10 employees is that the risk reward ratio isn't there. Now, if the, if the company works, those people make a shit ton of money. But those are the people we read about in the newspaper. We don't read about the 6 out of 7 companies and end up with a 0. Even worse than that, sometimes they go 3, 5, 10, 20 years and then end up with nothing. That happened to me at Rent Envelop. I was there 10 years to work my ass off, invested $3 million in my own capital to end up with nothing. That story doesn't get told a lot, although I tell it a lot. But the 0 to 10 is huge upside. But I would argue if you're not the founder and you're not going to get 20 or 30% of the company. I'm not sure the risk reward is there. At the same time, when you join a company that's already at a couple thousand people, unless it's a moonshot like a Google or Salesforce, you'll make good money, but you'll never make super, super huge money. I find that the sweet spot from a risk reward standpoint is kind of 20 to 200 employees. And that is you're still early enough to get significant equity. But if they're at that point, it means that they have probably some level of product market fit. So I find that sort of the sweet spot of risk reward, especially given that you have, you have a family. In addition, there's other signals. Who are the people who have backed the company? How much capital have they raised? How much press have they received? There's, you know, not all of these are, you know, it's sort of the good housekeeping stamp of approval, which, by the way, approves talcum powder, which ended up giving people all sorts of cancer. So it's not a guarantee. But when there's good people and VCs or customers involved, there's signals you should be able to discern around how the company is doing. But again, I like the sweet spot of kind of, there's pro, there's some limited evidence of product market fit. But at the same time, if I show up, I'm still going to get, quote unquote, real significant equity. But again, this is a good problem. And also, you got to let the market decide. You got to get the job first. So your first objective is to get one, ideally two offers so you can play them against each other. But let me finish where I started. With your background living in Toronto and a family, it's just good to be Nicholas. Thanks for the question. We have one quick break before our final question. Stay with us.

Hank (8:48)

Fox Creative.

Tommy Taylor (8:49)

This is advertiser content from Canva. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the game show that lets you decide. Was that stunning presentation crafted with Canva or does that deck have a tad too many missteps? This is Canva or Canva. I'm your host, Tommy Taylor. Let's welcome our first contestant, Mary from Indianapolis.

Prof. G (9:09)

Excited to be here, Tommy.

Tommy Taylor (9:10)

It looks like We've got a Q1 strategy deck here. So, Mary, what do you think? Is this Canva or Canva? Well, it looks very modern, has a nice clean layout. I'm going to go with Canva. That's right, Mary. Canva offers thousands of stylish presentation templates. Our next contestant is Bill from Phoenix. Bill, what do you think of this annual revenue report? Canva or Cantva?

Prof. G (9:39)

Well, it's a little cluttered and kind of looks like it was made in 1997. I'm going to say it's a Canva.

Tommy Taylor (9:47)

That's right. But thankfully every Canva can be beautiful with just a little help from Canva. Now it's time for our lightning round. True or false? The brain process visuals 30,000 times faster than written language.

Prof. G (10:01)

True.

Tommy Taylor (10:03)

That is false. The brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than written language. And our final question. True or false? You can collaborate with your co workers in real time and use AI to generate text and animations in Canva presentations.

Canva Ad (10:20)

True.

Tommy Taylor (10:22)

That's absolutely true. This is not a hard game folks. It's nuts. We're still on the air and today's winner is everyone who uses Canva Presentations. To learn more about how you can love your work with canva presentations, visit canva.com.

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Nicholas (11:52)

Foreign.

Prof. G (11:57)

Welcome back.

Sasha (11:58)

Question number three hi Scott, my name is Sasha. I'm a big fan of your podcast and I'm a sophomore in college in Boston and I find your career fascinating. With that, I need help understanding networking. As a student interested in a career in consulting, there's a lot of pressure to quote unquote network. How can I do this authentically and I'm lucky to already have connections at mbb. But what can I ask those connections to really do for me? Thank you for your wisdom and considering my question.

Prof. G (12:24)

Thanks, Sasha. So I say yes a lot. Business school and college are fantastic ways. You get invited to all this crazy shit. You get to go see. I remember. I don't know why this popped into my mind. I went and saw Don Valentine speak at an event at Haas. And you as a student can go up to Don Valentine and say, hi, I'm Scott Galloway. And I found out he ran this firm called Sequoia. And I don't think I leveraged that content, but I eventually ended up raising him a lot of money from Sequoia. But you can kind of call on anybody from a professional standpoint and they'll meet with you, have coffee with us. When students call me, and I'm not suggesting you do this and say, I want to have coffee. I'm much more inclined to have coffee with them than even at this point, like a CEO of some company. Right now, you just have currency to meet people. And I would take advantage of that, both professionally or kind of networking at these sort of corporate events. But also a different type of networking is just to try to make as many friends as possible and have fun. Say yes. Go to football games with people or whatever it is they do at your college. Go out for a drink. Also invest in relationships, Send people nice notes. Be happy to see them. There's this great study that looked at who are the most popular kids in high school and was it the athletes? Was it the best looking kids? No, you know what it was? It was the kids who liked the most people, not the kids who had the most people who liked them. But the easiest way to get someone like you is to like them. The kids that were friendliness, waved at other people in the hall were confident. Those kids were the most popular. I thought that was so obvious, but fascinating. So what do you want to do? You want to go to as many of these kind of networking events as is, you know, doesn't get in the way of your studies. Say yes to stuff with your friends. Be nice to people. Be friendly, like as many people as you can. And take advantage of the fact that people want to meet with you and you have access to all this incredible stuff. And more than anything, try not to be in your dorm room or your fraternity or wherever you're living more than eight or ten hours a day. Be out. Be out in the wild. Be out in the jungle, meeting people, running into unusual opportunities. That's what I worry about with most young men is there's too many temptations to sit at home and believe you can have a reasonable facsimile of life.

Canva Ad (14:36)

With a computer and an algorithm.

Prof. G (14:37)

No, get out of the house, go on campus, go to these events. Another trick I do. I did this whenever I walked into a room, whether it was a networking event or a corporate event at business school or a bar, I would demand that within 10 seconds I'd lock eye contact with someone and I'd walk up and introduce myself. I'd break the seal because it's easy to sort of walk into a room and you don't know anybody and you just kind of sit there and you look at your phone to pretend you're doing something and before you know it, you're just sort of, you know, sequestered and you're getting too used to not talking to people right away. You roll into, you roll into a situation, you're going to go up to a group of people or to someone and introduce yourself. Just break the seal right away. Anyway, Sasha from Boston, thanks for the question. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to office hourspropertymedia.com Again, that's office hourspropertymedia.com foreign.

Canva Ad (15:41)

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.

Prof. G (15:43)

Our intern is Dan Shalon.

Canva Ad (15:45)

Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prophecy Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for.

Prof. G (15:52)

No Mercy, no Malice as read by George Hahn.

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And please follow our Prophecy Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

Tommy Taylor (16:01)

Foreign.

Canva Ad (16:06)

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