Your Startup Will Fail Because You Don't Listen

Sean Weisbrot: Russell Brand is the co-founder and managing director of responsible.com, a company that has helped thousands of early stage startups on their go-to-market strategy. In this conversation, we talk about things that founders do, which cause them to fail, things that startups can do, which cause them to succeed. Things that they look for when deciding whether to work with a founder or not. Mindset alignment and these kinds of issues. So if this is something you're interested in, you're going to enjoy this episode, and if there's someone you know that could benefit from this, then definitely share it with them too. Why do you feel the need to. Invest in, invest and advise startups.

Russell Brand: It's very easy for a founder or an inve inventor to have a, a brilliant world changing idea, but not a pathway to bring that into the world. I've seen many good ideas that didn't make it into the world and have eaten up literally 10 or 20 years of someone's life by talking with someone early in the process. We can either help them to get on a path that will more quickly bring it into the world or let them realize that there isn't a way to bring it into the world so that they don't waste 10 or 20 years of their life.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you feel like there is a bias against you because of your age? It's something that I, I'm concerned about for myself. I'm approaching 40 and I see like my dad's a dentist. He's just turned 68, and I feel like he feels like people don't wanna work with him because he's quote old.

Russell Brand: So I'm in my sixties. I tell people, it's not that I'm really smarter than you, it's that I'm old enough to be your grandfather, and I've seen all these mistakes happen before, and you have a choice. You could learn the mistakes on by doing them yourself, or you can learn the mistakes by hearing stories about others who've made them. And so having a grandfatherly tone works very well as an advisor. If I were to go out and look for funding, that might be ano another story. There's no statistical difference in success rate between young founders and old founders and single founders in groups of up to seven. But there are a lot of, a lot of prejudices, so getting funding at my age would, would be harder.

Sean Weisbrot: I guess my specific question was on the advisory side, but you, you did a good job of answering that question. Um, the reason why I. I'm concerned about it is when I talk to people generally, they're like 20 years younger than me and I'm like, I'm almost 40 and they're 20 years younger than me. And some of them look at me like, you know, how do I know you're gonna know what's current? It's like my job is to know what's current.

Russell Brand: And in my case, I'm 40 years older than they are, and so, so if I can't explain it to your grandmother or you can't explain it to me, you're never gonna be able to explain it to an investor. If I don't already know what's important, then you should be able to tell me what's important. And if you can't, that's bad. But other than in some very specialized fields of biology or some specialized fields of particle physics, I generally know more about what people are working on than they do if they're in their twenties.

Sean Weisbrot: I love the idea of like a grandpa test. I think they're kind of funny. But very true, for sure. I remember when my grandfather turned 65, I was like 10, 12, 15, something like that. And he was given two options. Either learn how to use a personal computer for work or retire. He chose to retire and I'm afraid of being left behind, which is one of the reasons why I am learning everything I can about AI and, and employing it in my business every day. I. Do you find that it's easy to stay, uh, up with all of that stuff because of your background and experience?

Russell Brand: Less of it changes than we would think. Right. I started doing AI in the seventies. In the seventies. It was very different. It was, it was symbolic ai. It was the improving, it was inference engines rather than giant matrices. But the problems we had, well, there wasn't enough data. The data wasn't good enough. There was confusion about what it meant. The problems have remained the same as the technology has gotten different. My first quote, personal computer, was a sun micro system that cost and 10,000 or $12,000 in the day. So they wanna say $25,000 now and right. And it ran a version of Unix that. Isn't particularly different than the Linux I run today. So there's, I think there's less change than people think other than in very shallow differences in the tools other than everything's become cheap. And so you can do things that just would never have been cost effective before. I think we spend more time computing the rounding of the, of the window edges. Than we did on the entire computation of like the Apollo mission or something. You know, nine orders of magnitude cheaper does make some difference.

Sean Weisbrot: What kind of qualities do you look for in a founder before you get behind them?

Russell Brand: Biggest problems that we have with founders is they have no knowledge of their customers, no interest in their customers. They're interested in the solution. So if they're not interested in learning about their customers, that's a recipe for failure. I. If they don't show up for meetings on time, they don't follow through. That's a recipe for failure. For failure. If they don't incorporate the ideas, if things don't get better week for week, that's a recipe. That's a recipe for failure. And generally, you know, because I keep saying, you gotta fix this, you gotta listen that if they're not gonna change things, they get annoyed enough that they self-select out pretty quickly. The founders that are focused on, I need to get funding. I need to get funding. And it's like, well, you don't know what your product is yet. You don't know what your pro, you don't have a prototype. You don't know who your audience is. You don't need funding now. You need knowledge. So ones that are overly focused on fun on getting funding before they've done anything else. Those I actively drop everyone else. Yeah. They tend

Sean Weisbrot: to go away on their own. Do you ever touch upon mindset with people? Because for example, I was talking to someone, I, I do this, uh, website called Growth Mentor. So I do some free sessions every week and I got this, uh, husband and life that came to me yesterday and they're like, oh, we don't have any sales for our product yet, and we don't know why. Can, can you help us to figure out what's going on? And I said, well, let's take a step back. And let's think about your goals for the business and your, for your personal life and as a couple and your mindset. And I realized that they were not aligned on the size of the business or the focus of the business. The husband didn't even wanna be involved in the business, but he felt compelled to join his wife and doing it even though they had two other businesses that already have profit. And I, by the end of it, I was like, guys, you should not be doing this business and you should not be doing this together.

Russell Brand: It sounds like that's an issue of alignment. More than an issue of, of mindset, so roughly three quarters of all businesses that have exit opportunities. Fail to exploit the exit opportunity. Well, or even at all. 'cause they find out at that point that they weren't aligned on what counts as success. One of them says, that's enough money to retire. We should sell and leave. And he says, no, we turned into a trillion dollar company, double down, triple down. And in the fighting about that, they lose the opportunity. So alignment of goals is very, very important. It's not something I myself work with. But it's assuredly a recipe for failure by mindset. Most people are talking about the, the Dweck stuff about growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And again, very important, but I don't see it as a problem in, you know, a couple of thousand founders I've spoken to, if they haven't gotten past that, they, they haven't become, they haven't gotten to the point of reaching me yet.

Sean Weisbrot: When I say mindset, my. Idea of that is how much money do you want it to make? Or what kind of a lifestyle do you want it to give you? Or why are you doing it? Right? So it's kind of a, a combination of goals, right? And oftentimes they, they say, oh, I have this idea. I want to have freedom. Okay, well what does freedom look like to you? Oh, I wanna make $10 million a year. Okay, great. But like, is 10 million gonna give you freedom or is it gonna give you not freedom?

Russell Brand: So, yeah, so, so that, I would call that an alignment problem. Alignment problems are very, very common, and they're generally not found until much too late in the process and they cause disasters. Missed opportunities, nervous breakdowns, destroyed friendships. If you're able to fix that early, then you're doing a great service for people.

Sean Weisbrot: That's the hope, because I suffered a misalignment myself in my own startup, and it caused me great anxiety and suffering for years. So I don't want anyone else to have to go through that.

Russell Brand: That's a valuable service. What do you do in order to make sure people at least notice their misalignment?

Sean Weisbrot: I ask them questions they've never asked themselves before,

Russell Brand: and so and so I'm immediately tempted to say, do you have that list of questions? Can we publish those questions as a self-assessment saying, here, here are my answers. Here's what I think my partner's answers are, and now let's look at them together. Because the number of people that could download that self-assessment or take it on a website. Is is huge and scalable where the number of people you can talk to in onesies.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't have it written down, but I have it in my head. So writing it down and turning it into a little form on a website or something is like super easy with the help of something like lovable uh, and a no-code AI bot.

Russell Brand: It sounds like you should do it, and if you don't wanna do it on your own, it's something that we'd be happy to help you do.

Sean Weisbrot: You've mentioned a number of recipes for failure and disaster. What's a recipe for success?

Russell Brand: Recipe for success is listen to customers, talk to more customers than you think. Recipe for Success is to say, there is some group of people out there that I can service better than the existing. Tools and I understand who that group is and what their, and what their needs are. Identifying and understanding a target market is a key recipe for success. Follow through is a key recipe for success. Listening is a key recipe for success.

Sean Weisbrot: How often do you think people fail at listening?

Russell Brand: Very, very often. We record all of our mentoring sessions. Many of those are pitch practices and we send people the transcript and we send them the recording and say, here are the 20 things you should fix in your pitch or your business plan, or whatever. And when 18 of them are, are broken in the same way in the next area, they're, they're not listening very well, they're probably not gonna make it. They say, oh, the customers don't really know what they want. They don't, they, they actually talk to customers but don't listen to the answers. Or they go and rely on SurveyMonkey multiple choice questions and try to count things up before they know the right questions. Um, these are are all very common ways to, to not to not listen. You figure that probably. Nine out of 10, maybe 19 out of 20 of the companies are failing because they're not listening. Most of those three quarters of those are 'cause they're not listening to their customers.

Sean Weisbrot: What compels someone to ignore their customer? Obviously you mentioned one of them very specifically. They don't believe the customer doesn't know what they want. My answer to them would be, screw off. You're not Steve Jobs.

Russell Brand: People are often really focused on their solution solutions in search of problems. Don't lead to successful companies and they're so caught up on this is the right solution that anyone that doesn't see that they're not listening to, 'cause they'll come around later.

Sean Weisbrot: At what stage do you like to come in to help a founder?

Russell Brand: We like to come in as. Early as po as possible, right? This is the greatest leverage of mid of midcourse correction. When you come in early, it's very, very common. I have a first meeting or I'm on a panel, uh, a panel with judges, and I type what they're doing into a search engine and then say, oh, how do you compare to these f the five top Google hits? And they've never heard of any of them. Right. Hearing that then, rather than a year later is ver is very important. Um, we have this new problem in the last year or 18 months of people pitching perpetual motion machines. They really think that they have come up with a way to get free energy and, and, uh. And, and they need to realize that that just doesn't happen. The, the, the physics of the world doesn't do that. And we say to all of them, that's very exciting. If it works, when you have measured it running for a month, come back and talk to us. And hopeful. And, and either they've get a, a measurement there and they can do it and they deserve a Nobel Prize. Or maybe being forced to take a real measurement will get them to realize that it doesn't work. It's often the case that that, oh, what you're doing is a really important problem. There are an existing set of grants that you should apply for, and it's gonna take a year or 18 months to get through the process of applying for those grants. So start now so that at the point you're far enough along that you'd be able to use that money. Well, you can. You can use it. Well, there are lots of people that need to build a community or an audience. And building a community or audience quickly is very difficult or very expensive, or both. Building it incrementally over a year or two is much cheaper or much easier. So if we can start them on these long poll tasks early. We can increase their chance of success if we can introduce them to a potential partner or co-founder early. So highest leverage is talking to them very early, and for many of them it's talking them out of their business saying, oh, that sounds great. Have you, have you looked at this commercial product that you can buy right now? And they haven't. And they buy the product and it works and they realize that they need to pivot or they need to do something else. Maybe they learn that they need to look out in the world before they put effort into creating new things.

Sean Weisbrot: How do you get the best out of a founder?

Russell Brand: By listening more and talking less. People are often believing and planning really stupid things, and it's obvious that they're stupid things. Telling someone that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard is rarely effective. One has to understand a whole lot about. Their context and why they believe it. So one can ask that better question, and it takes a lot of patience to listen long enough, to listen long enough so that one can. Can ask that right question.

Sean Weisbrot: Hey, just gimme 10 seconds of your time. I really appreciate you listening to the episode so far, and I hope you're loving it. And if you are, I would love to ask you to subscribe to the channel because what we do is a lot of we're, and every week we bring you a new guest and a new story, and what we do requires so much love. So that we can bring you something amazing and every week we're trying really hard to get better guests that have better stories and improve our ability to tell their stories. So your subscription lets the algorithm know that what we're doing is fantastic and no commitment. It's free to do. And if you don't like what we're doing later on, you can always unsubscribe. And either way, we would love a, like if you don't feel like subscribing at this time. Thank you very much and we'll take you back. How do you handle wins and losses with your, you know, founders? Thinking

Russell Brand: of them as wins and losses? I, I don't know that that's really helpful to people. One wants to take as an experience and say, what went well, what went badly? How can I do better at it next time? And at the point that one can learn enough from each of these things to improve for next time. There are no losses, just very extensive lessons.

Sean Weisbrot: I was thinking about the terminology from the point of view of when I've interviewed people for jobs, I'm looking at how are they handling sometimes when something goes their way and when something doesn't go their way. So if you're working with founders, you may experience these situations where maybe you gave them advice and they didn't listen, and as a result, something negative happened. Or maybe you gave them advice and something positive happened and therefore you know how you know. Is there something that you do specifically to encourage them when. You know, something could happen. Like, so that's, that's kind of the, the background to the

Russell Brand: first thing is we give them good advice and they don't follow it, and then say, what, what could I have done? So they're more likely to follow the advice next time at the point that they've had a good outcome or a bad outcome or what, or counting a good outcome or bad outcome. Then we go back to mindset. The mindset is how do we think about that as a learning experience? How do we understand that so we can have a better outcome next time? Counting them as wins and losses, uh, as a founder, I think is a, a very bad mindset. It's probably an okay mindset if you're a salesperson, but otherwise. It's a mindset that I think would slow down growth.

Sean Weisbrot: Why do you think that is?

Russell Brand: At the point that one thinks of 'em as successes and one's too busy celebrating to have lessons of what could have been even better, or how do I apply those techniques to other things When one thinks of them as losses, then there are a lot of losses in this world. It's easy to get discouraged. One doesn't think, what were the pieces of that that were good, that I could. Replicate. What are the individual causes of the things I can do better? I think it interferes with retrospectives and postmortems, and as a founder, there's often no one to talk to. There is no one who would understand your situation. So at the point you're thinking about them as losses. There's no one who can understand it that's really lonely and you're thinking of them as victories. And yes, I just got this $10 million thing and everyone you know is working their nine to five job at 40 bucks an hour or whatever. No one can really understand what that success is, and so the success failure mindset, unless you've got some really well curated peer group, is a recipe for loneliness.

Sean Weisbrot: The reason why I am always curious about that is because. A lot of founders, when they experience success, it feels like nothing they, it, it feel like literally there's no feeling or it feels bad because they didn't prime themselves to appreciate that success. Rather, they were so busy chasing, reaching that success that when they reached that success, they didn't know how to respond.

Russell Brand: Not an area that I. That I, that I know about, one can imagine all of the general semantics work that says, oh, what they've grabbed is a symbol of success rather than, than than success. Or, they're caught here and they haven't thought next steps. So I can imagine a lot of useful interventions there, not interventions I would know how to do.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. So the, the way I think about it is if someone has a goal of reaching a million dollars a year in sales. And they spend three years and they finally get to that goal. But then when they reach it, n not only is it that they don't have, they, they don't have another goal, or maybe they do, but when they reach that goal, they feel sad because now they, they don't know what to do because they've, they've reached that goal, but more so they. They go straight into like anxiety mode because everyone around them is now shooting for 10 million a year or whatever, and they didn't stop to take a break and go, I should celebrate this. I've reached this goal. Maybe I take my my kids out for a day in the park. Something simple, something beautiful, something that's meaningful for you, something that goes, I. Did this, I accomplished this goal and so many people are so stuck on the I hit this goal, now what's next? But there's never a I'm satisfied, there's never a I did it. I, I reached my goal. Even if there's another goal behind it, they, they fail to appreciate the win because they were so busy sacrificing on the way there.

Russell Brand: There's a more general problem of people that have goals rather than systems. Most people who have a goal to run a marathon and they achieve that goal, they never run a second marathon, right? Most people that have a weight loss goal, once they hit that weight loss goal, they don't, they don't maintain it. Focusing on goals without some broader system to put it in is a recipe for long-term of failure and long-term unhappiness. It sounds like your people are, have found, your people who are doing badly with achieving their goals have, have found new and more interesting ways to, to exercise this failure mode.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you feel is really important to share?

Russell Brand: If you're making a real, you know, Silicon Valley style venture company, statistically this is a 10 year project. If this isn't something that you're willing to put 10 years into. Then this isn't the path you should be taking if you're only going to be saying, this is three years of my life, or five years of my life. Then there are other types of entrepreneurial enterprises or non-business enterprises you should be thinking about, but matching up the timeline of what something takes to how much time you're willing to put in. And how much time it's worth. It would be the, the key thing I'd ask people to think about.