Spreading the Founder Fire

A founder's role in the growth stage is to scale your passion not your presence.

If you haven’t read it already, Paul Graham’s post on Founder Mode, penned briefly after attending a talk by Brian Cheskey, CEO of Airbnb. The post and topic has created a lot of buzz around Silicon Valley, and even though I’m far off in Chicago, I wasn’t immune. The struggle of the startup founder scaling their baby has been interesting to me for some time.

After reading Paul’s post, I was intrigued to hear what Brian’s response would be to Paul’s depiction of his experience. Skift gave me what I was looking for:

Chesky clarified his thinking at the Skift Global Forum in New York City: “The most important question isn’t, ‘Is the CEO the founder?’ It’s, ‘Does the CEO understand deeply, more than anybody else in the company, the product they sell?’ If I was running an ice cream company, then I as the CEO better understand ice cream better than anyone that works for me. If I’m running an airline, I better understand airplanes better that anyone who works for me. If I’m a fashion company, I better understand the clothing better than anyone.”

I think that Brian is on to something — well, of course he is — it’s his lived experience we’re discussing here. And, without his permission, I’d like to further refine his question:

“Does the CEO understand deeply, more than anybody else in the company, the [PROBLEM] that they are looking to [SOLVE]?”

After all, it’s the understanding of that problem, and that got them to the point of scale in the first place. When they pitched their product for seed funding, it was their expertise around the problem that struck the investors — this is the person who will be able to crack this problem.

But as the old adage goes, “what got you here won’t get you there.”

It’s true. The founder needs to stay on top of their game. They need to continue to develop their understanding of the problem they seek to solve. They need to be as in it, as current, as passionate as ever to keep the momentum going.

But is this really enough?

I would argue not. What will actually breed success is when the founder scales their passion. Paul and Brian are right. It’s not necessarily about how you scale your organization, what roles you add, what kind of best-in-class-managing-up leaders you hire. But Paul and Brian are also wrong. It’s not about the founder being in every conversation. That is not scalable. That is not realistic. That can lead to micromanaging and frustration if the founder doesn’t have the requisite people skills.

How, instead, can you scale the spirit of the founder to the organization? How do you scale their passion to EVERY employee?

Starting a company is no easy feat. The road is filled with hurdles, sleepless nights, and countless challenges. One of the key attributes we looked for in founders when they pitched ideas to Area120 (Google's internal incubator) was the passion they displayed for the problem space. That fire was going to be what got them through the ups and downs of building a product. I can imagine the world outside the air-cover of a big company is even more challenging.

I recently listened to an episode of How I Built This with Guy Raz with GoodrCo. Founder and CEO Jasmine Crowe-Houston. If you haven't heard it, it's worth your time for so many reasons (link in comments). Prior to founding Goodr, she spent a great deal of personal time tackling food insecurity (aka "hunger"). It was through repeated exposure to the problem that she a) developed her passion for the problem and b) started to see an alternate framing and therefore an alternate solution. It's this passion and perspective that she brings now to a company that is making a difference at a foundational level. As she's grown her company, I'm sure she's scaled her passion to her leadership team and employees.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the past two years of working closely with startup founders. Special shout out to Charmaine Green-Forde, SPHR, SHRM-SCP and Matt Wallaert for their insights. (Note: the thoughts below are an expanded version of a previous post: Scaling passion is critical for startup success).

Some founders I’ve spoken with questioned the very premise of my provocation. “No one can do it like you do,” they said. They contend that a founder’s passion is unique and no one can replicate their level of excitement and commitment. While founders may hope for this to be true, I believe it’s critical to make the effort to up-level the passion of everyone i on the team. Here are a few practices founders can employ to make their teams more passionate:

1. Share your journey: Help people understand your motivation. This can be by telling them — but may be even more effective by showing them. Show how you developed your motivation by taking others on the journey with you. Help them experience what you’ve experienced. (Read more about the concept in my article From Insights to Intuition). Reconstruct the experiences that led you to developing your conviction around the problem space and help your teammates, leaders, and reports feel that conviction on their own.

2. Build an emotional connection and intrinsic motivation: Make the team’s connection to the mission an emotional one — even better, make your connection to them, full of emotion. If they feel the mission, the motivation is more likely to move from being extrinsic (motivated by external factors) to intrinsic (deep seated internally). Don’t just get them excited — go deeper. When we were building Files by Google (now over 1B downloads and the default file manager on Android), it was easy to pass the product off as being a mundane utility. Who can get emotional about that? We sat at a dinner table with a mother in Mexico City who lamented over losing 5 years of photographs from her son’s childhood when transferring files between devices using SD cards. We sat with a college student in the outskirts of Delhi that told us about how special he felt when a friend shared a file with him first. The utility he used helped him strengthen his friendships. Even file management has an emotional layer.

3. Encourage your team to internalize and express the mission in their own way: The mission may not manifest for others as it has for you. So — let them be themselves. Let them talk about how they feel about the mission. Give them a venue to shine. Support their unique interpretation by giving them the space to experiment and show you what it means for them in practice. This cross-functional internalization of the mission will help your product blossom. An engineer will see something different than a marketer will, a user experience designer will see something differently than a business analyst. It’s their joint vision and the conversations that happen between them that will create a beautiful deep conviction within the company.

4. Communicate with clarity and respect: One of the immediate responses to my earlier LinkedIn post regarding this topic was, “Passionate founders have the ability to proselytize their passion onto the rest of their company.” Yes. True. Make sure you are a clear communicator. And then follow that up with a leadership style that allows for others to see you embodying the mission. Again, to my point above, make space for others to express their passion as well in their own way.

5. Connect on value: What is the value that your team connects with most deeply? Getting back to Point 3 above re: emotion — what gets them emotional? If they’re hyped around the business being successful, then build out that story further by talking about the value generated for the business. If they’re all about the effect that the product will have on people’s day to day lives, detail out that value. What are the outcomes that they can have a tangible impact on? that they can play a role in bringing to life? Extending values to outcomes will give your team purpose.

6. Experiment with real outcomes: Focus in on what is it that you want people to do once they “believe.” Then, what do you think is going to cause them to “believe” more? What is keeping them from believing? Experiment with these pressures to find out how to tangibly have an effect on their belief. (e.g. You want people to work longer hours as a sign of their dedication; Does your change have an effect on their behavior?) Try various approaches to align with your team’s needs and see what produces the desired results.

Do you have more ideas on how founders can scale their passion? I’d love to learn.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Find some time with me, DM me, or join the chat above!

Thanks!