long before I even got close to thinking about what that was.
But awesome.
If there was one major takeaway that you'd want people to have today, what
would it be?
I think it really is about when you're trying to build a startup,
focus on the business aspects more than on the sort of the technical
and the product aspects. I think most of the founders I talked to are so
into the nuts and bolts of what they're doing that they
haven't looked at the bigger picture, how it fits in.
And that's doubly true when they're thinking about fundraising.
So true.
All right. Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Calame.
I'm your show host. We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and
guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there.
Hey, what's up and welcome in Vision Pros. My name is Jackson Calame.
I'm your host. So excited to have you on today.
We have a wonderful guest named Lance Cottrell.
And Lance has a lot of experience in the startup world.
He has had exits. He's still part of the board from one of his long term exits.
He has a whole lot of insight when it comes to entrepreneurship and business
ownership. So if that's you,
if you're one of those serial entrepreneurs or young startup entrepreneurs
and or you're a seasoned entrepreneur,
but looking to look over the shoulder of somebody who's been at this for several
decades and you're in for a real treat today.
He's also an expert in I almost said cryptocurrency.
That's not the case is cryptography, online privacy, internet security.
We probably won't dive too deep into those aspects,
but the cool thing is if that's something that you need to know more about for
the sake of protecting the vulnerability, the privacy of your users,
then he's probably a fantastic person to reach out to and talk to about that as
well. So we'll talk a little bit more about his story before I bring him on
stage. But first off, I want to,
I want to derail a little bit towards our sponsorship. So icon maker live.com.
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We're talking about influencers. We're talking about the creator economy.
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It was such a cool setup to work, uh,
to be presenting on stage at the studio called Sage in Charleston,
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there was 300 people who had tuned in online to figure out how did they launch
a podcast successfully? How do you run a business?
Tom Madsen ran an amazing mastermind and session after session after session,
him and Cheryl Pluff as well. Both dove deep. Um,
Daniella ran an amazing event.
I've never been part of a better event and what's really cool is they had never
run an event together themselves.
It was the first time they all came together.
So the fact that they pulled that off and then out did 50 plus events that I've
been to, um, and over 500,
I should say 50 plus conferences that I've been to and over 500 events that I've
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two. And you can take Opus as well on top of that.
And you've got a phenomenal strategy to get your content out there without
having to be plugged into it on a day to day basis.
That can be very helpful when you consider that the top of your funnel,
if you are in, if you are working on your marketing, understanding marketing,
you look at that funnel,
there's the people who will buy from you at the bottom of the funnel.
But at the top of the funnel,
a lot of people forget the importance of the top row. The top row is distribution.
You've got to get your message in front of more people.
The more people you get your message in front of,
the more likely you're going to come across what's called the low hanging fruit.
That would be the 5% of your market who is ready to take action here.
And now it's very important to get yourself in front of more people in order
to be able to focus more on fulfilling with your business,
doing business with people rather than constantly trying to convince people to
do business with you. Not the, not the best approach. Then last,
and of course, not least we've got the water project.
The water project is one of my favorite charities on earth.
Please just, just consider going and giving five, 10, $15 to it.
Take a look at the projects that they have going on as well.
These kids, their families, their moms, their dads,
they don't have access to clean drinking water.
And this organization goes out and either plans what's called a sand dam or bore
whole well, or something similar to help them get access to clean drinking water
because they're either drinking extremely unsanitary water or they're walking
miles and miles away to bring water back to their village.
And that creates a discord on whether the people that,
that keeps kids from going to school because they have to carry these buckets,
long distances and, and go get water rather than being educated.
This absolutely changes people's lives in so many ways.
And I love being able to see exactly how you help and the outcome of,
of what occurs and you'd have the same opportunity and you get an email or
every time there are little updates about the community.
So you can see the progress of the good that you've done by simply giving a few
of your dollars to, to contribute to that.
And I don't, I don't think there's many better causes out there in the world
than helping people get water.
So thank you for hearing me out on that without further ado, Lance Cottrell.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Let's dive right in.
Welcome to vision pros.
Thanks so much.
Great to be here.
Absolutely, man.
So, you know, Lance, there's, there's so many things that we could dive into
with your years of experience.
The first place we'll start is kind of simple, but super pointed.
Who should be listening today?
Why should they listen to you?
And what are they going to get out today?
Show.
So who should be listening?
I really am focused on early stage founders.
So the content that I create, a lot of the work that I do now is oriented
around helping them be more successful.
So we're talking from idea stage through, uh, you know, precede,
or seed maybe as late as a, but I really like to work at that stage where
the company is in this formative process.
Uh, and, you know, they should talk to me probably for two reasons.
One is I've been there.
I had a very successful startup, uh, went through a pivot.
I've done B2B and B2C in that context.
And then after that, I became an angel investor and I'm now on the
board of directors of the North Bay angels.
I run our selection committee.
So I see huge numbers of startups come through and I'm really excited
to see how many different types of startups come through and I've
developed a really refined insights into what makes them successful, uh,
both as companies and what makes them successful at fundraising.
And, uh, you know, I've also parlayed that into being a global
entrepreneur in residence at the founder Institute.
So kind of my whole life revolves around startups.
Nice.
That's awesome.
So you said early stage, which is not necessarily 18 year old founders.
Uh, these could be founders that are also 48, 58, 68, that are getting their feet
wet for the first time with the process of starting a company.
Is that correct?
Absolutely.
In fact, I found many of my favorite founders are ones that have been in
industry for, you know, some significant chunk of a career, partly because they
really understand the market, they understand the problems, they have deep
insight into the customers that they're trying to, uh, support and address.
In most cases and you know, that's a whole different world than someone
who's just come out of an entrepreneurship program, just graduated
college and they want to do a startup, but there's often much less understanding
of the why around what they're doing.
I love that.
And I've, I've seen that myself as well.
Um, the, the, you can't replace the experience that comes from being
able to be exposed to the pain, the, the nuisances, the problems that
exist in the market, that they only come from being in the market for five
to 10 years first, um, not to discredit the young bucks that do have intuition
come their way.
So Lance, um, and energy and the energy, right.
That's true too.
That is super true with the young ones.
You got, you got a lot of energy that I can't compete with these days anymore.
Um, even at, at just 35.
Um, so I can only imagine what I feel like at 55.
Um, so, all right.
There was, um.
Oh, you mentioned your, your success.
Let's quantify that a little bit.
So the success of your first company, what does that look like?
What are the details?
So it ended up running for 13 years.
And I have to say, when I started the company, I had zero clue what I was
doing, but I was passionate about privacy.
I'd been building privacy tools in the open source community for some time
while I was doing my PhD in astrophysics and decided that that's really where my
passion was.
So in 1995, I put the PhD on permanent hold and created anonymizer, which was a
consumer privacy company.
And we grew that to probably a million active users, a hundred thousand paying
subscribers.
Uh, we survived the 2000, you know, dot-com collapse.
Uh, and then after that, actually, uh, today's the anniversary, 9-11 happened,
and it really got us thinking about how we could contribute in a more substantive
way.
And we ended up discovering that the government had a need for privacy and
anonymity, right?
They, they needed to be able to go after bad guys and not be identified for
obvious reasons.
I would have assumed this was a solved problem, but it turns out that they
really didn't have good solutions for it.
Uh, and so we started building tools for them.
And within three years, that was 95% of our revenue.
We were on this crazy hockey stick going up.
Uh, and then we eventually sold the company a couple of years later in 2008,
largely because I didn't know that customer, right?
I didn't come from that, you know, DOD, uh, intelligence community, national
security community kind of background.
Uh, so I didn't have the access and I didn't have the insight that I needed.
And I figured the best way to be, to maximize the potential success was to
pair up with a company that did that.
Yeah, that makes sense.
That's really neat.
So you took a strategic pivot because of your own weaknesses that you were able
to, to be self-aware enough about, um, and also probably to align further with
your passions, um, is, is kind of what it sounds like.
Um, don't let me feed you words so you can.
No, I mean, absolutely it was, it was a passion.
It felt like it was a way of doing something that was going to have an
impact on the world, but it's also an example of one of those sort of wild
coincidence opportunities.
Uh, the way we ended up doing the pivot was we were being subpoenaed by the
local FBI cyber crime group.
Uh, and we did consumer privacy.
That was not a rare occurrence, but this time it occurred to us to actually
ask them how they addressed this issue.
And they sort of admitted that, well, you know, largely we think people
aren't watching that closely, but if we think someone's going to like see that
we've got an FBI IP address, we'll use the Starbucks down the street.
And I said, wait, what?
We got to talk.
And they actually became our first customer in the government and really
opened the flood gates for us.
Oh, nice.
Okay.
Was this a six figure exit, seven figure, eight figure, or not, not
possible to reveal?
Uh, can't, can't share that publicly.
Okay.
That's fair.
Um, very good.
Then go ahead.
I've got a, I've got a big house and a vineyard in wine country.
Okay.
That's a decent way to quantify it.
Thank you for that.
Um, and you don't rent it for, for the sake of the videos.
Uh, right.
All right.
And when I do this advising, I do it all for equity because I'm not
particularly concerned about cash flow.
Right.
What does, let's see here.
So what does, uh, passion for privacy look like?
One thing that came to mind was, was a tin hat, um, you know, and, and,
and hiding in a closet, but I have a feeling there's a, there's a
different angle to this.
So, um, what does that look like to you?
Yeah. I mean, I really became aware of, of the, as the internet was
exploding and remember this was early on, you know, I was building
privacy tools in 93 and I think the worldwide web was invented in 92.
And of course the internet had been around for a while, but it became
immediately, obviously just how much data was being collected on people by
large corporations, by governments.
And so the thought was, how do you allow people to take some control of
that back on a personal level?
And so we ended up doing, uh, working with human rights groups.
We did some big projects, uh, to, uh, to censorship circumvention, uh, and
allow anyone to use the internet freely from within China, within Iran,
uh, bypassing all of their sort of oversight systems.
And then of course, with the government, uh, allowing them to be able to go out
and do the things they needed to do to keep us safe.
Uh, I remember I was talking to one customer and said, why, what is
driving you to buy the solution?
What, what do you need?
And this was a covert communications platform.
So people could do undercover chat from this country.
And he said, well, we have a bunch of people in this hot, sandy country.
And one of them turned out to be unreliable, tipped off the bad guys
and all of, you know, the other dozen people who were working with us
ended up minus their heads in a ditch.
And we don't want that to happen again.
And you're like, okay, that's a pain point.
And you can get up in the morning every day trying to address that kind of thing.
Right.
Absolutely.
Now you seem like too nice of a guy and too positive, too happy of a guy
to be in this space.
And here's what I mean by that.
When we look at documentaries or we look at people who are into privacy,
I mean, there's so much fear that is talked about express utilized in this,
you know, you know, not, not only like a big governments taking, you know,
all your data and, you know, hate Mark Zuckerberg and let's get our pitchforks
and, and, you know, torches and go just complain about it.
I guess that's the today's world view of how to do something.
But so how do you balance that?
You got this demeanor that says you're a really nice guy
and I could just have lunch with you and talk about cool things in life.
But you're also involved in an industry that is so tightly guarded and angry.
Maybe that's not fair, but that's what I see.
I mean, certainly there are some people in there.
There are definitely a lot of extremists out there.
You know, for me, I'm very pragmatic about privacy.
I think that people don't have a lot of control over their information
and there certainly are people trying to spine you.
But at the same time, we want the benefits of being able to engage in these things.
Like I always think it's fascinating when people say, I want privacy on Facebook.
I don't even know what those words mean in that combination, right?
You want to be able to share all the personal details of your life
without them being accessible to other people.
So it is a funny thing.
And I try to really focus on what are the things that I care about protecting?
Because if you're trying to protect everything, you're effectively protecting nothing.
So be very specific.
Know what it is that you're trying to guard and guard that carefully and then relax.
I'm not worried about Facebook because I don't post things that I'm worried about on Facebook.
Yes, I love that.
And you're right.
That is very much a mindset of I would say if you haven't thought through
what it is that you should be protecting in life and shouldn't be,
and you can actually be scared of everything if you'd like to be.
But that doesn't necessarily help you live life.
So in 30 seconds, what's your vision for those of you, Sarah,
what's your vision for these early stage entrepreneurs?
So really, I want to help them climb the vertical learning curve
because there is nothing that prepares you to be a founder,
except having been a founder before.
You've got to know everything on every topic.
It's an utterly unrealistic expectation.
And so I'm trying to provide both sort of educational materials,
but also sort of direct feedback to help people get up to speed really quickly,
discover the things that are their blind spots,
learn how to compensate for those things so that they can then build a successful business.
Because if they're just floundering around,
they're not going to get to where they're trying to go.
Yes.
And there's so much depth of truth to all of that.
So how accessible are you to these early stage founders, Lance?
You're accessible to me.
You came on my show.
So I appreciate that.
For sure.
Yeah. So it's pretty easy to get a hold of me.
All the content that I've created is free.
It's all up at feeltheboot.com.
And the name came from some of the people I was advising,
spontaneously began referring to me as The Boot.
And I decided to lean into that.
But feeltheboot.com has all these articles on all aspects of the startup process.
It's also a YouTube channel.
So it's all available there as videos as well.
Through that, I do office hours.
So I've got free office hours.
Anyone who's interested and signs up for my newsletter
can get on my calendar to get a 15-minute session.
I also offer paid advising for people who need longer chunks of time
or want to get on sooner because the free stuff does tend to book up.
I take on some clients as formal advisees, but not so many.
And then I also do advising through Founder Institute,
which is an accelerator program.
And there I work with cohorts in a number of different cities, primarily San Diego,
San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Tunisia.
Oh, cool. Awesome. That's fun.
Yeah, Tunisia is an interesting one.
The kind of businesses and the kind of problems that they have
are very different than the kinds of problems that you see coming out of, say,
London or Silicon Valley.
And so it stretches your brain a little bit to try to help them
navigate their unique kinds of issues.
Absolutely. What are a couple of those examples?
So one of the first is that a large fraction of the population is fundamentally unbanked.
So a lot of the sort of payment mechanisms that you might assume you have access to
don't exist there.
There's a lot of issues with corruption.
There's societal expectations.
If you're trying to do fintech, there's both problems and opportunities
because in most Islamic countries, you can't borrow or lend money.
But yet people still need financing for things.
And so you've got to go about things in other kinds of ways.
So it really does raise a lot of interesting problems.
Interesting. Thomas Friedman wrote a book a long time ago called The World is Flat.
And it's one I really enjoyed reading during my college years.
And it talked about how all these countries are starting to kind of
arrive to the same level.
And I love the vision. I love the dream.
But I mean, you brought up something critical right there.
It's not even close to level in many of these countries.
They have so, so far to go.
Yeah. No, they're coming up fast and often hugely disparate.
So there is an upper class in most of these countries that does have access.
They've got great Internet.
They've got access to all of these things.
And then there's the 95 percent of the population that's unbanked.
You know, 95 percent of the population, which is, you know,
in iron age in some cases.
And, you know, they've got a long ways to go to try to get access to these capabilities.
But it's funny how they're leapfrogging whole technologies.
Like they're not going to put in cable systems or telephones to every house,
but everyone does have a cell phone.
And so they're now suddenly getting access to all sorts of things,
bypassing whole stages that we spent decades going through.
Right. Absolutely.
And it's interesting because I don't think without help from people like yourselves,
you know, they would have as much propensity to magnify the opportunity.
Right. That's the whole point of having somebody come in who's been there and done that with the
technology that has those decades of experience bridging the gaps that you just don't necessarily
see or understand by yourself.
For sure. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of them here in America, you at least see
entrepreneurs around. We're sort of aware of it.
It's kind of in the water a little bit.
But in a lot of these places, yeah, it takes a pretty exceptional person to even sort of
conceive of this as something that they could go pursue and then go in that direction.
That's also what my South American counterparts concluded when I started our group to help
Latin Americans get involved in Fiverr, Upwork, etc.
One of my great and smartest friends from down there, Sid Jackson,
we grow up, we don't grow up learning about entrepreneurship.
You guys grow up making lemonade stands, you know, and like learning about how to become
entrepreneurs. And we don't have any concept of that down here.
We were never taught to think that way from the get go.
So this is completely foreign territory for us as a collective whole.
And I was like, wow, that is really helpful insight for somebody who's trying to go and make
changes in societies that don't necessarily have access to some of that.
I'm going to switch gears, though, back to you, early stage entrepreneurs.
I might get a kick out of this one.
So Lance, what's your worst business experience ever?
I have an embarrassingly large number to choose from here.
Sure.
But I actually did a whole episode of my podcast on my kind of worst day as a founder.
What's your podcast?
I need to know.
So Feel the Boot.
Feel the Boot podcast.
Oh, Feel the Boot podcast.
Makes sense.
I'm going to go back.
I'm going to interrupt you.
So The Boot.
You got called The Boot.
Is this about bootstrapping or is there some other reference to them?
Or is this bootstrapping?
I think it was a motivational kick in the ass is what it was.
Oh, there it is.
Good.
I like that.
We need more.
We need more of that.
That's right.
No, it's a boot of love.
But I don't know.
I've had fun with that.
And it's unique.
It's not the same kind of business oriented titles you see on so many of these kind of
incubators or startups or advisories.
My first assistant is one of my best friends to this day called me The Steel Bat.
So I think The Boot would have been better.
I did have to learn to tone it down a little bit.
So over a lot of it.
All right.
So your worst business experience?
Yeah.
So this was in 2000 as we were going into the teeth of the dot com collapse.
And but we had we were in a good spot.
We had an angel investor who was about to write a million and a half dollar check
into the company.
And we had an offer to acquire the company from a bigger security company at, you know,
it was like 12 million.
It was pretty modest.
But we were really over a barrel at that point and hemorrhaging a fair amount of cash.
But we're like, OK, we have investment and we have this deal.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, as the economy started to tank, the angel pulled out
and he was gone.
Got no investment from him.
No one else was investing at this point.
So money coming in was not an option.
And while we were negotiating with the acquirer, their stock price went from $30 a share to $3
a share.
And this was going to be an all stock deal.
So suddenly this was turning into being a fairly substantial fraction of their net worth
and their company size.
So that didn't make sense for them.
They pulled out.
And I think we had, I don't know, four, six weeks of working capital in the bank, basically
a six week runway.
And we buckled down and rode out 18 months with never more than six weeks of capital
in the bank before we were able to really get things right size, start getting some
investment, grow the company some more, and then accelerated out of that trench.
But that was a rough year and a half.
Oh, and the week that that deal fell through and the acquirer pulled out, my father-in-law
died.
Oh, man.
So that was a rough time.
So, you know, and I must have had at least 10 times when the company was just within a
whisker of total annihilation and we were able to, you know, just grit strong fingernails,
hold on and whatever we needed to do to struggle through.
We sort of at some point started calling it the cockroach strategy because, you know,
after the nuclear annihilation, the cockroaches will still be walking around.
Geez.
Yes.
So what are some of the things you guys did to hang on for dear life?
So we laid off some people, right?
We downsized and we just became utterly laser focused on immediate returns.
Right.
We did not spend a penny that could not generate a multiple return on like a 30-day time horizon.
So everything just narrowed down to like you're looking through a straw.
You cannot be distracted.
You can't think about any kind of long-term strategic things.
You just have to be there the next day.
Then eventually you'll be able to do the strategic things, you know, once that starts to open up.
You discover that there's efficiencies you didn't think you had.
You know, when suddenly everything depends on it, you discover the kinds of things that
you can eliminate or save money on or tighten down.
You know, we'd be almost out of money and you're like, you know, I wonder if we could
send out a renewal notice to people two weeks earlier.
Okay.
Boom.
There's another, you know, $20,000 in the bank.
That'll give us another week to go.
You know, you just had to get insanely scrappy around these things.
And it also sort of gave me a very relaxed worldview about things.
You know, people will be in a panic about some situation in their business and like,
no, no, this is not a crisis.
I've seen crisis.
This is not a crisis.
Relax.
We'll just, you know, unpack this and work out what the next steps are.
That's a powerful mindset that every entrepreneur has.
It's a lot of entrepreneur benefits from understanding how to go through.
You know, a lot of us didn't grow up close enough to the depression era to get that,
you know, to get that mindset inherited.
I was fortunate my parents inherited that pretty strongly from my grandparents.
And then there's Pearl Harbor.
There's this scene in the movie Pearl Harbor where they have to fly the planes across to,
I believe it is Japan.
And these planes were not designed to make that flight.
they're stripping down the plane everything they can.
They get it down, stripped down,
they're still not even close to where they're gonna make it.
And so they start taking out the seats, you know,
and the buckles, like everything
that you could possibly imagine, they had stripped down
and they're now stripping out more.
They're basically destroying the aircraft
in order to be able to complete this mission.
And it reminds me a lot of, again,
what you have to do during these crappy times
during startups, so.
Yeah, right, things that you would under normal conditions
never consider, like, no, these are essential things
suddenly become not essential anymore.
Yes.
I mean, I was holding board of directors meetings
at a local bar because they had free food at happy hour.
So, yeah.
Cool, that's a good find.
Cause that couple hundred bucks of food
was not meaningless to us at that point.
Right, exactly, nice man, I love that.
So, let's talk about the best experience in business.
What's your best experience in business so far?
You know, I think it was probably one of my favorite ones
was getting to do that project.
It was actually a contract to the Voice of America
to do the censorship circumvention into China and Iran.
Right, and being in a position to help
a hundred thousand people, roughly, in each country
get free access to information and free expression
and all of that sort of thing.
You know, that was incredibly rewarding.
And the feedback from customers, I think, as well.
Knowing that you're doing things
that are having meaningful impact on lives.
It's not, you know, some new widget or something like that.
It's life changing for the people who are using it.
That was hugely rewarding.
That's amazing.
Oh, that's awesome.
That might steer you in this question
or you might decide to shake it up.
So, what's another powerful, you've already shared many,
but this is one of my favorite questions
to keep diving into.
It's been, I'm glad we have the time.
What's another powerful lesson
these visionary early stage entrepreneurs
can learn from your experience, Lance?
I think probably two.
One is keeping an open enough mind to get luck, right?
Luck is sort of something that happens
when you are ready for it and you're keeping your eyes open.
So, it's really easy to get too laser focused in
on exactly what you're doing.
And then opportunity walks in the door
and you didn't even see it, right?
You didn't recognize it.
And that kind of goes back to that situation
where we were converting the people subpoenaing us.
And we had other sort of situations like that.
And I think that also ties to what I call
strong convictions loosely held.
I think that's the key to a lot of startups
is the odds of you being right
about your initial business model
and the first direction you're going aren't good, right?
Statistically, most successful companies
have had major pivots, often several of them.
But at the same time, you can't always be looking
for the greener grass on the other side.
It might not be.
So, there's this kind of Goldilocks zone
where you need to be totally committed to what you're doing
and ready to abandon that and move in a different direction
when there's sufficient evidence to show
that's the right move to make.
Because it's just so easy to get so locked
into the plan you had.
And as Ivor said, no plan survives first contact
with the enemy.
Yes, oh man, both super powerful.
So, and I see it a lot,
especially in the space that we serve.
So, your background with early stage startups
and entrepreneurs, they are,
by the way, so one of my first companies was a SaaS company
as was my second.
And the mentality of those companies
versus the ones I typically work with these days
is very different, very different attitudes.
I work with mostly coaches and influencers
and the creator economy.
And these individuals, they get into it more so
for the desire to impact on an extreme level,
like a coach, for instance.
They don't normally get into coaching
because they wanna make a bunch of money.
They get into coaching
because they want to make an extreme impact on the world.
They wanna have this legacy of helping others.
And then they start to understand that,
oh man, I need a business strategy to survive.
And the entrepreneurs, the startups,
the ones that are following the Jeff Bezos,
the Steve Jobs of the world,
that's kind of their hero persona per se,
or the Elon Musk's, they're kind of going into this,
hey, I have a business idea in mind.
I have something that I want to invent and create,
and I know it's gonna be successful.
And I better learn about business as much as possible
in order to create this.
They're very different ways of looking at
and how you shape reality, move forward.
So both of them, I would say,
have a different unique challenge of playing with luck
and missing the opportunity in front of them.
So I'm glad you're bringing it up
because I'm internalized for myself
as much as for anybody else.
But in the coaching cases,
they're not used to business people approaching them.
They don't know how to deal with it.
They don't know how to think through it.
They see somebody presenting a case study,
hey, here's how we can help you grow
as somebody who's coming after them,
ready to shark and eat them alive.
And they then end up turning their nose up to it
rather than understanding how to build a strong filter
around recognizing difference between Jackson Callum
as a startup advisor,
Lance Cottrell as a startup advisor,
and Grant Cardone.
They don't know how to assess the three difference
or your giant venture capitalists
that may not have their best interests at heart or may,
depends on which venture capitalists.
But how would you go about then breaking that down further
rather than just looking at it from the good luck event,
but saying, okay, if you've got an advisor coming in
to talk to you about your growth,
what are some of the core strength aspects you'd look at?
And what are some of the red flags
that they should also consider saying, whoa,
that's something that's kind of on the scary side
that they might not recognize on their own?
I think business model is often
one of the biggest red flags, right?
How aligned are your interests
with the people you're working with?
I see, for example, a lot of cases where people say,
well, I will help you do fundraising.
And so if you pay me $50,000,
I'll help you raise a million dollars.
Is that refundable?
No, right?
And so why can you trust this?
I'm always telling people to do reference checks
on all of these people, right?
Talk to some other people that they've helped
and really dig in to see, has this been successful?
What are these people able to bring forward?
Are they sharing information freely?
My approach to establishing my credibility
and credentials as an advisor
is this mountain of free content that I put out,
as well as free advising office hours.
So come in, try the goods, talk to me,
see whether this is useful.
If it's useful, I think it will be obvious
to both of us pretty quickly that this is useful,
then we can establish that relationship.
But I'm not asking anyone to take it on faith.
Nice, that openness and centeredness as a leader.
I'll also throw that in there, Lance.
It takes a special type of person in the business world
that has a base of success
to still remain open to the public.
I commend you for that.
I don't see that a lot.
And I don't think that Richard Branson's
necessarily bullying anybody to move forward
in meetings with him, or saying,
hey, I'm unapproachable.
I think he's the extreme case
where he's got so many millions of people coming his way
that he's gotta find ways to protect his time.
But at the same time, I have a feeling he's,
and it's Gary, you know who Gary Vaynerchuk is?
Oh yeah.
Yeah, he's the type of guy,
I think Richard Branson probably is too,
that will spend some time with people on the street,
right, everyday folk, and say,
hey, let's engage on a real one-on-one basis.
Now we can't do that with everybody.
There's some luck that comes into being one of the people
who's drawn out of that.
But I think everybody who's listening right now,
I hope you stay aware there's people out there like that
who will give you the time.
And you gotta be ready to have that conversation
when it happens.
You don't wanna miss the buck and miss that opportunity.
So Lance, how do you go about advising people
on how to do the reference checks?
I mean, I think really it is,
don't be worried about that power dynamic.
So when you've got an investor coming to you
or when you've got an advisor or some service provider,
I think it is not offensive to just directly say,
hey, I wanna understand
what this relationship might look like.
I wanna understand what it's gonna be like working with you.
I know you're doing due diligence on me.
I'd really like to be able to talk with some folks
you've worked with in the past to understand,
is this gonna be a good fit?
Can we work together effectively?
And if someone pushes back on that,
that's a huge red flag, right?
That suggests to me that you probably wanna run
the other way or start doing a lot of Googling
to see whether you can find people saying bad things
about working with that individual.
My experience is most people are more than open
to allowing you to kind of have that access.
Nice.
I was talking about Richard Branson,
one of the companies I'm advising,
super early stage founder,
but just through opportunity and networking
ended up getting invited to one of the big gatherings
on Branson's private island for a week
and had made all sorts of amazing connections
with the other people who were out there.
But made that effort to be in the network,
to talk to people, to have, create a situation in a space
where those opportunities can happen.
And then recognizing and jumping when they do.
That's awesome.
That's really cool.
I think that part of that,
everybody who's listening has to do with mindset.
As you open your mind to that reality existing
and you leverage the principle that Lance talked about,
it might seem super simple,
but I know there's so many people out there
who don't see it this way.
Especially if you come from like the MLM world,
there's a lot of high pressure tactics
that make you feel like, man,
this is your last shot.
This is your only opportunity.
And if you've been involved in that community too much,
it's important to test this concept
that Lance is talking about.
Break free of that mentality and say, you know what?
Red flag, I'm not touching it.
Red flag, I'm moving on.
Some will, some won't, so what next?
Which is also an MLM concept.
But you've got plenty of leaders out there
who are willing to take you under their wing.
If you don't know Lance
or you're not comfortable going to him yet,
I would advise you to check out
the small medium business development centers
and universities,
because they have free access to coaching.
But what I would do is I would go to them
and I would go to Lance
to get a different perspective
of how they both look at your business opportunities
and situations,
because one's gonna come with a whole lot
of university background
and not necessarily the expertise of having done it
versus Lance who's had the opportunity
to be in the trenches for many years
of running a startup.
What's your thoughts on the business development centers
that are out there?
I think they're great.
I mean, you have the opportunity to do in-person meetings,
which is advantageous.
And these people usually have a lot of experience.
They're talking to a lot of startups.
So yeah, it's a hugely valuable asset.
I think coworking spaces often have an opportunity
to network with other founders
or effectively creating a mastermind
that you can work with and learn from.
Really, you wanna have a diversity of advisors
because every advisor comes
with their particular experience and skillset and biases.
And so I try to be kind of take as much heat off the ball
as I can when I'm giving advice,
particularly if it's sort of not absolutely mainstream advice
because it might or might not work for you.
You should talk to more people.
You should get more opinions
because a lot of these things are contentious
and you'll hear different kinds of advice.
So talk to multiple people, get feedback.
And if you have a really strong opinion about something
and you talk to five advisors
and they all tell you to do something different,
that's the time to start embracing some humility
and think about that.
I talked about this a while back
in context of power in a company
and someone was really worried
about losing control and getting below 50% ownership.
And I said, oh, look, if you're bringing in a bunch
of investors and there's a dozen people
on your cap table maybe or more
by the time you get below 51%,
that's not a magic number, right?
The only way you lose a vote with 49%
and a dozen people on the cap table
is if 100% of them show up to vote and all vote against you.
And if that's happening,
you probably should be listening, right?
It's highly likely they have a good point
and you should be engaging with that.
And I think that's just universally true
is always be open to questioning.
And founders, I think, can often get a little tunnel vision
but yeah, listen to your employees,
listen to your advisors, listen to your customers.
Always be open to the fact that you may be running down
the wrong track or getting it wrong
and be prepared to reevaluate that.
Dude, that one clip right there is golden, thank you.
I mean, everything you've talked about
with that particular concept
can protect so many founders against themselves
and our greatest strengths are often our greatest weaknesses.
So I love that.
That's right, because it takes a huge amount of ego
to be a founder, right?
Inherently, it's sort of an insane thing to do.
But at the same time, that you wanna be servant leader,
you wanna really understand what you don't know.
And of course, at the end of the day,
you're gonna have to hire other people to do things
who won't do it as well as you.
Because those are things that you can delegate
and there are so many things as a CEO
that you can't delegate.
You're literally the only person who can do it.
That ends up being your whole job
and everything else has to go to other people
and you kinda need to let them learn, right?
You can't micromanage that, it doesn't scale.
Yeah, absolutely.
I wanna go back to one quote you said
because it's one that on the fringes,
I think I understand it, but it would be one,
it's like, I know this is a powerful quote
that would help me as well as others
to break down, you said,
strong convictions loosely held.
What does that mean from your perspective?
Yeah, so it does mean kind of utter commitment
to the direction you're going.
We've decided this is our strategy,
this is our target customer,
this is the solution that we wanna build
to address the problem.
And you need to have not only commitment from yourself
all in, in that direction without distraction
and from your whole team,
but at the same time, knowing that you might be wrong
about that, right?
As you're validating, as you're testing,
as you're going to market, always kind of being aware
that you may need to revisit that
and at some point drop that thing
that you had high conviction about
and pick something new to absolutely commit to
and run towards.
And so that's the held loosely,
you need to be able to sort of find that,
it's a bit of a part of the strategy
and it's a bit of a paradoxical mind state,
but to have the flexibility as well as the passion and focus.
Yes, I love it.
So in terms of a physical symbolism,
because I'm big on symbolism,
that would be like a pitcher, a baseball pitcher
with the confidence to throw a fastball or a curveball,
but you're gonna hold that ball
with a certain degree of care or a robot
that's holding a massive container,
fright container of delicate goods.
You have to hold it confidently,
but at the same time, you can't crush it like a tin can.
Otherwise you end up ruining the goods inside.
The same is true with our dreams
and our passions and our visions.
We gotta have that care and that ability to pivot,
but at the same time, the confidence
that we're going to move this vision forward.
So Lance, this was a massive, massive help
to everybody who's listening.
Thank you so much for being here.
Vision Pros, we hope you took notes.
We hope you go back and listen to some of these truths.
We also hope you take the opportunity to reach out to Lance.
And Lance, they can reach out to you on LinkedIn.
Is there somewhere else you also prefer to be contacted?
So LinkedIn is great.
And if you just go to feeltheboot.com,
there's a contact page right there.
And I'm always happy to respond and answer questions.
Excellent, guys.
Everybody have a phenomenal rest of your day
and we will see you on the next show.
Take care.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have a nice day.