Jonathan Lowenhar: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love that. I'm glad we got there. I wasn't planning to talk about founder mode, but I think this is really helpful for folks to hear that are founders and people working for founders too. Along these same lines, you have a really helpful and really funny also mental model for how to think about common failure modes of founders. You have these labels that I love, and this is actually the first thing I heard about Enjoy The Work is these labels that you guys use, and you also, a similar mental model for failure modes for a startup. Can you just share these modes that you've come up with? We do take a bit of a comical approach to some of this. As I've shared with you previously, the name of our company is not an accident. If we can't be playful, we can take the work seriously and not ourselves, so we do fuck around quite a bit. I think if I would separate failure modes for companies versus CEOs for a minute, the company ones are not quite as comedic, but they are ones we see all the time. One is you chose the wrong market. I don't think we need to belabor that one. Lots of your prior guests have talked about the importance of getting that part right or nothing else really matters. Second, back to what we were discussing a minute ago, build something people want to buy, got to go build the right thing. Cool. Third one, founder's function. We like to joke that more companies die from suicide than homicide, and it's grim, but also if the two or three people in charge of the business can't get along, nothing else matters. It's all going to break apart. Then fourth, execution, and execution now leads back to CEO. Okay, so now we have a bunch of playful ones here. We have the robot CEO, who believes emotion should not ever exist at a startup, at which point we train them on a very simple formula. Emotions are messy, humans have emotions, startups need humans, therefore startups are messy. I love how engineering-oriented that advice is, which makes sense for robots. Yeah.…

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