"You basically spend all your time working with founders and through that studying, you create frameworks and training and you use that in your work. I think that's what many, many founders are looking..."

"bring you Jonathan Loewenhar. Jonathan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Lenny, I am damn excited. So am I. The reason I'm excited to have you in this podcast is that you basi..."

"job. So that's Origin. That's what got me going. This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application. Tired of bouncing around multiple..."

"oneschema.co. There's obviously this new meme of founder mode. I'm kind of tired of talking about founder mode, but it feels like what you're describing is founder mode and manager mode. You basically..."

"think this is really helpful for folks to hear that are founders and people working for founders too. Along these same lines, you have a really helpful and really funny also kind of mental model for h..."

"They're either comfortable with the brake or comfortable with the accelerator. The challenge with those who are comfortable with the brake, what I mean by that is they don't want to spend any money. S..."

"micromanager one is the opposite of laissez-faire. They believe that no matter how many employees they have, they can do the job better. The challenge with this one is it is massively disrespectful to..."

"is amazing. Okay. So let me recap these labels that you have just for folks. I have them written down here. So... There's the robot CEO, perfectionist CEO, pleaser CEO, micromanager, laissez-faire, re..."

"to help them through that? I think ready, fire, aim is the most common that we've seen. And that has been an affliction that's been growing in the last number of years. It wasn't long ago. that CEOs c..."

"next fundraise? And that's a qualitative and quantitative answer. But we write it down. We need to get better at go to market. We need to land our first partner. We need to launch next iteration of th..."

"It's interesting that's the most common type of CO when with founder mode, it feels like it just accelerates that further, the whole meme of founder mode, which is what makes you upset. Great. Okay, s..."

"common is selling. At the same time, founders have never done this before. They don't know what they're doing. The other side often has done it many times. And so it's a pretty treacherous and scary a..."

"But the methodology itself is is a inversion for how venture and venture boards have thought about startups being ready for sale for a long, long time. It's utterly countered to so much advice that fo..."

"deal done. Sounds very familiar. And it's one that often will just hit the nervous system of any founders that's been through it a couple of times because man, is it a fraught exercise. What Magic Box..."

"we were going along. And we had some large construction tech companies and real estate companies and development companies leaning into us. And one particular company then said, huh, we're really good..."

"this brings us to the four characters you're going to meet along the path of Magic Box. There might be a fifth. You're going to meet your champion. You're going to meet your advocates. You're going to..."

"I need to prove it. Okay. Because I have a champion who wants to say yes, Proof can be really easy. And the reason the proof is so important is not to convince the champion they're in love with the fa..."

"case. The ending of the story for the company that I was describing. It was a business sub two million in revenue. Our prospects of raising series B felt low. We were not yet profitable. And that was ..."

"So whatever is starting to shape in your buyer's mind, get to know it. Live that. Everybody wins from that game. Second, corp dev. They will probably show up in this dance. Corp dev make deals. They a..."

"extremely delightful to listen to. I've never heard like a M&A strategy be this fun. And it makes me want to sell a company. Okay, let's do this. I'm hyped. I think you got it all. I have a few questi..."

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"What you're looking for in that first conversation, and this is what we ask our CEOs to do, is to ask questions like, what do you care most about the next year? What's the mandate? What about for your..."

"their path to become a great CEO. How to sell the company? It's one of the skills. We teach this to all of our founders. as well as hiring and management and planning. I don't care what the thing is. ..."

"hire amazing people? Yeah. So we actually think the CEO has three jobs. We agree with the two that you said, but we think there's a third. One is make sure everyone knows where we're going. The second..."

"applicable today as it ever was. And I think there are three core mistakes that founders make all the time that can be really easily rectified. The first one is you should hire people who have already..."

"Document it. And then when you interview people, look for people that have already done that stuff. Second, the notion of does the person in front of you have a history of creating raving fans? They t..."

"Third Core values matter a lot. Culture is not an accident. Culture at scale is the codification of what matters to a business and the ritualization of living those values. It starts with whoever the ..."

"actually, I imagine you know this at Airbnb, there was actually a values interview team that was formed around studying what the founders, Brian and Joe, Nate valued specifically, and then they codifi..."

"the values of the founder and the business essentially, right? Yes. And if for the recruiters out there and a really simple way to kind of get rid of a lot of the crap that ends up showing it up to th..."

"pipeline of X and close Y in business, et cetera. What we are looking for then in their history is they have any sales chops of any kind. They could be selling Girl Scout cookies or tickets to some ev..."

"architect, the optimizer. This is someone who's now going from a few account execs to maybe 10, 15, and we now have targets we have to hit. The business is now reaching a different level of profession..."

"whether it's fundraising or exit or winding down. And for hiring, you have the similar advice. Work backwards from what you want this person to achieve in the first year, whether it's drive the sort o..."

"the, oh God, I need another PM. It's no, here's the set of features that we've said matter most this year. Here's the gap in the resources we have and the resources we need. That's why we're hiring th..."

"to keep feedback loops short. Now we can go back in the business and then we'll check again in a week or in a month. I love that. That's actually a great segue to the final bucket I want to spend some..."

"them, find this topic pretty overwhelming. because it branches into so many areas. So we do try and distill it to something that is in bite-sized chunks. We think of it in four pieces. First piece is ..."

"simplify to say, how can we go find the humans we want? I've long loved the book Traction, Gabriel Weinberg. I'm going to forget, unfortunately, the co-author's name right now, Jason Maher. Sorry. Whe..."

"doing demo? How are we moving to close? If we can get through those four, then we can start to talk about deployment and customer success and upselling and account management, et cetera, et cetera. Th..."

"Your voice has a megaphone attached to it even if you can't hear it. So you have to turn down the megaphone if you actually want to learn what your people have to say. So brain writing is I'm going to..."

"But if you do live brainstorming, you have diminished all the folks that prefer to sit and chew on something first. That's very much me. That's exactly how I operate. I need to think and process. I'm ..."

"is enough for them to say, I want to go on a date with you. That's it. There's no discrimination of any kind. Like, oh my God, they like me. I'm in. That's the mistake that hounds first timers. The ve..."

"and expansion later. I like to remind them that Amazon just sold books. We can start with one thing and be great at it. So where the founders often get hung up on for us is that they've moved towards ..."

"the ReadyFireAim CEO doesn't have. That's the one most founders have only started to learn to have over the last few years when capital dried up. I love that. I love just how practical and real talk y..."

"because we're not on the preferred side of the caps table. We're not fiduciary. We're not board members, not a co-founder, none of those things. And so in those moments, we'll just say, can you get re..."

"go work on your craft in addition to working on the business. Be honest with yourself about, here's the shit I'm bad at. I don't know how to read a financial statement. My board meetings suck. Half my..."

"the craft seriously enough. I'll leave it that. I love that. And I think I've made the mistake during our conversation of confusing founder and CEO and making, assuming they're the same thing. And I r..."

"have recommended most to other people? My number one business book that I've recommended would be Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. I do think it always comes back to team. The right te..."

"one, it goes more personal. It's a book called untethered soul by Michael Singer. It's this was at least for me, the first introduction to this idea that I am not my brain. Uh, and yeah, that my brain..."

"show you've really enjoyed? I just watched and really enjoyed, by the way, I have a three-year-old at home. So the amount of content I now consume is reduced tremendously. Well, my wife and I just wat..."

"I've loved both those. I just watched Will & Harper and completely agree with your sentiment about it. I wasn't planning to watch it and my mother-in-law started watching. I'm like, wow, this is reall..."

"A-U-G-I-E Studio. Sounds amazing. Augie Studio, I will... I could use that. That sounds awesome. Two more questions. I feel like this one's going to be a good one. Do you have a favorite life motto th..."

"So you ran a casino at one point, I believe, and it was like a Harrah's casino. Is that right? My first career was in the casino business. Okay. But before I go on, what's the question? The question i..."

"mantras that I've had for the rest of my life, which some people roll their eyes at, but that is gambling does pay. I love that you remember the exact amount. What games did you end up playing that he..."