Jonathan Lowenhar: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's like I imagine each of these is very particular and it's this journey you go on to work on yourself. Let me just ask, what's the most common issue that you've found across these labels of type CEOs? What's the most common one and what do you often recommend someone to work on specifically to help them through that? I think ready, fire, aim is the most common that we've seen, and that has been an affliction that's been growing in the last number of years. It wasn't long ago that CEOs could paper over poor execution with easy access to capital. Suddenly, over the last number of years, we're expecting founders to be better operators. Better operators means eventually being on a path when more cash comes into the business and out of the business. That doesn't happen by accident. The ready, fire, aim CEO has probably suffered this pain where they took lots and lots of bets. Maybe they measured the outcome after the fact and they were wrong and they were wrong and they were wrong in ways that were expensive, and they've raised their hand to say, "I see it. I want to get better at this." Basic, basic business design and business planning is not some corporate effort. It's some thoughtful exercise that starts with what are we working backwards from? Because in any given time, Lenny, companies are working backwards from one of four things, whether they like it or not. I am working backwards from an exit. I'm working backwards from a next fundraise. I'm working backwards from profitability or I'm working backwards from winding down. We don't talk about the fourth one that much, but I got to choose one. I got to choose the top of the mountain. More often than not, they're choosing a fundraise. Then we'll ask that founder, you know your market, you know your investors, you know the next set of investors, we've done some intel. What has to be true to unlock the next fundraise? That's a qualitative and quantitative answer, but we write it down. We need to get better at go to market. We need to land our first partner. We need to launch next iteration of the product and show this level of efficacy, engagement, what have you. Can we codify that? Yes. Can we talk through what actions would be required on what cadence to unlock that quantified set of results? Yes. ... that quantified set of results? Yes. Do we understand what resources would be required to do those things? Recognize we might have to squint through some of it, but again, the answer is yes. [inaudible 00:24:13] now aimed. If we have a culture that has some accountability, that has a communication architecture, so there's some rituals about how we meet and how we share information and how we talk through problems, and how we work through bottlenecks, well, now we have a plan and now we have accountability. I now no longer have to just guess all the time. And this only works for the CEO who says, "My improvisational efforts got me here, but I don't think they'll get me there." There's a guy I worked for a long time ago, and he had this phrase... He had like seven or eight phrases, he would use them over and over and over again. It was hard not to commit them all to memory, and one of them was, "If you keep doing what you're doing, you keep getting what you're getting." phrases, he would use them over and over and over again. It was hard not to commit them all to memory, and one of them was, "If you keep doing what you're doing, you keep getting what you're getting." And for the ready, fire, aim folks who realize the weakness of that at scale, the way to counteract that, is to start with good planning.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.