14 Years as a CEO taught me 6 things
Who you surround yourself with really matters. If I didn’t have people to lean on when things get tough, there’s no way 14 years happens. Early on I tried to lone wolf it, got about 5 years in, and hit a wall. I guess you could do it if you had a really strong support system outside of work, but that’s not my preferred way to operate. Specifically, co-founders, business advisors, life partner, friends, family, all play a strong role in the whole thing remaining operational.
I am responsible for how I feel. For a long time I let the business determine how I feel. And to some extent it still does. But when I started to take more responsibility for my own feelings, things got much more evened out. Businesses are crazy, they fluctuate like a nothing in this world. Irrational, unpredictable, erratic. If I let that kind of pattern determine my mood, it will not be great.
Anything decent takes at least a year. Every initiative that’s actually led to long-term growth in our business has taken at least a year to build up. This is just my experience, not speaking on behalf of anyone else. But our key product differentiators and our key GTM differentiators all took at least a year to gain any real traction, and more like 3 years to get into full swing.
A great team accelerates everything. We have a great team, and everything is accelerated as a result. Every aspect of the business moves faster and self improves because different people look at different areas of the business and work on them every single day.
1.01^(5,110) = Progress. 1% improvement every day for 14 years leads to a lot of good things. Trying to improve 10% in one day? Impossible. I have to remind myself of this all the time. Compounded effort over a long period of time leads to great outcomes, trying to push a result in one day doesn’t work, and you’ll burn out hard.
Keep a lookout. When we started in 2013, only unserious, scammy people were using social media for business. They would go on there with some snake oil offer to an unsuspecting crowd of people who were mostly there to look at fun photos. I wrote it off, not interested in a crowd that just wanted to use our product to run shady pyramid schemes. But then that started to change. Around 2017, early adopters started building real businesses on Instagram, and then TikTok, and I missed it. I wasn’t keeping a lookout. We fell way behind in marketing on those platforms, and it cost us dearly.
