Uri Levine: belief

Transcript context

…You also talk along these lines, you have this in your chapter, the section of never give up in a crisis and throughout your journey, this is by far the most important behavior of a startup CEO. Can you just talk about that. Because a lot of times it's like maybe just stop, maybe just give up. You shared one example where it's like I don't want to deal with regulation, other companies, I'm just going to stop. Any advice there, just like, okay, maybe it does make sense just to stop and try to give the investor's money back versus, yeah, it's just part of your job not to give up. I heard of cases that you basically say our underlining assumptions didn't work out and our thesis is wrong and therefore we would like to return the investors their money. But entrepreneurs never give up. And this is the most successful behavior of startup CEO, never give up, always keep on looking for ways to make it work. And so it is going to be a journey of failures, and in particular during crisis, but you still need to keep on trying to make it work even though it's way harder. So never give up is the most important behavior of successful CEO of startup. The second one, by the way, is making decisions with conviction. This is true for all CEOs or for all companies, not just startups. Now startups, those decisions are probably more frequent and there are a lot of them. But during crisis, all CEOs in the world need to make hard decisions. And you need to make them with conviction because if you don't make them with conviction, then what will happen is that the team is not going to follow. If the team is not going to follow, then you are not going to be successful. But never give up. You ask entrepreneurs what will happen and they will basically tell you, "No, we keep on fighting." One of my other startups in the travel industry called Oversee, back then they called FairFly. And the CEO told me that a cat might have nine souls. We are a cat in that sense, we have nine souls. And the reason that I know that is that we already died nine times or almost died nine times. And so the reality is that you don't give up, you keep on as long as ... And for a second I would say, look, there are only two reasons that you would like to give up. One is that your mission is wrong. So the problem disappears. And if the problem disappears, your mission is no longer relevant or no longer valid, and you might want to consider to give up. The other one is that if the team is not right and you are unable to change it. So you brought toxic investors into the board and they started to control the company and obviously in many cases they create more damage than help. And you're unable to change that anymore, then this is a good reason to give up. Other than that, never give up. Crisis, not crisis, hardship, no money to pay, no ... anything that might happen, anything that you might want to think that might happen will happen. I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi Christina.…

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