The founder's personal journey and entrepreneurial mindset, including overcoming rejections, adapting to challenges like COVID,.
The founder's personal journey and entrepreneurial mindset, including overcoming rejections, adapting to challenges like COVID, and leveraging unique hiring strategies. It highlights the psychological aspects of building a startup from the ground up.
Being in a hyper growth environment like this, you obviously want to keep learning, keep the pace so that you avoid what happens in many of those stories where the company ends up outpacing the founders and and it's just like a it creates an environment that is not not very pleasant. So I guess for you in order to keep up, in order to continue learning, how have you gone about that? Great question. Um one of the things that I feel so fortunate about is my co-founder Saban um has been the perfect match to me. Um and what he forces every single day is we have a very big value at Land called say the ugly thing out loud. And what we encourage everybody at the company is you will never get in trouble if you raise your hand and you say this thing is not working or I am not doing this thing well or this is the ugliest thing. Um it is really core principle. I think it starts by saying is always
assume that you're sort of wrong about everything. And I don't mean double, you know, guess yourself on every decision. What I mean is assume that what you're doing today has something wrong with it and ask yourself constantly what is that. And so me and my co-founder Saban as a constant exercise we're saying what is wrong. And then once we have a feeling in our gut of what's wrong, we have a team of mentors that we we basically just ask questions to relentlessly. This includes like the founder of Twilio, the founder of PayPal, um you know, a lot of YC investors, people that have built amazing companies that we go to and sometimes we get great replies, sometimes we get no replies, sometimes we get advice that we disregard, but we're constantly saying what is the ugliest thing we're not addressing right now. How do we say those words out loud to hold ourselves accountable? And then once
we know what that problem is, how do we go talk to a person who we think's been through it?