Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?
A. The first time was when I was probably about 16 or 17. We lived in Newfoundland, and I was a distribution representative for a multilevel marketing company. I had to recruit other distributors and train them, and it was my first experience trying to understand how to motivate people.
But I learned some of my most important lessons when I founded an Internet advisory firm called Zefer. I was 25 and going into Harvard Business School. I certainly wasn’t as self-aware at that time — being really honest about my strengths and weaknesses — as hopefully I am now. I think early on in many people’s careers, you have a tendency to want to show off your good side, and vulnerability and degrees of humility are not viewed as desirable traits. It probably made me a more intimidating, more inaccessible person. I was also less direct than I am now.
Q. And what was the biggest lesson from that experience?
A. The seminal inflection point for me was being at the highest of highs and then going right through the nuclear winter of the dot-com bust. We had a business that had grown from nothing to over $100 million in about five years, with about 900 employees. We had filed to go public, and I could probably tell you the second of the beginning of the dot-com crash, actually on the day we were to go public, April 14, 2000. We then had layoffs and a significant restructuring. It’s hard to even describe that period, but we eventually came out of it.
The lesson from that was that self-awareness trumps all. You need to know what your superhero strength is, but you really learn at tougher times what your and others’ weaknesses are. The biggest shift for me was that I realized how important intrinsic rewards are — like the value of a meaningful role — over extrinsic rewards.
Q. You must do a lot of mentoring. Any advice?
A. One of my partners, Mats Lederhausen, has developed a good framework for mentoring. It was inspired by Deepak Chopra, but Mats has evolved it over the years. There are five questions to pose to someone you’re trying to be a mentor to: What is it that you really want to be and do? What are you doing really well that is helping you get there? What are you not doing well that is preventing you from getting there? What will you do differently tomorrow to meet those challenges? How can I help, and where do you need the most help?
The sequence is important. You have to understand the larger purpose; understand the person’s self-awareness around their strengths; understand external or intrinsic blocks to doing that; and understand the person’s plan and motivation to change before you just assume you can help. It’s just as important, for clarity and to reinforce self-awareness, to have the person play back to you after the meeting in an e-mail what they heard and said.
Q. What are some things that you’ve learned from mentors?
A. One was Jay Chiat, one of the founders of the Chiat/Day ad agency. He had this incredible capacity for optimism, particularly optimism during mentorship. He had this amazing ability to think of every reason why an idea might work before criticizing it and thinking why it might not work. When you’re a mentor, you’ve got to realize that people are often sharing their dreams, and I think it’s human nature to be a critic. We’re skeptics. As you get older and more experienced, wisdom is great, but you also have to be careful not to automatically impose your mental framework and your lessons.
I’ve translated it into a rule that I try to get people to follow, and I’m still working on this. When someone gives you an idea, try to wait just 24 seconds before criticizing it. If you can do that, wait 24 minutes. Then if you become a Zen master of optimism, you could wait a day, and spend that time thinking about why something actually might work. In venture capital, you’re at the intersection of human capital and their big ideas, their dreams. My favorite quote is from Eleanor Roosevelt: “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
Q. How do you feel your leadership style has evolved?
A. I’m pausing more for self-awareness, and I’m just trying to take time to reflect on decisions, and to be more intellectually honest. As an example, I will go into our annual meeting and we’ll put down the five things we say we’re going to accomplish this year. The following year, I’ll bring out the exact same page.
But what hasn’t changed is that I’ve always had a certain amount of drive and intensity. My college roommate once told me I have “pregnancy envy.” And by that he just meant that I had this desire to give birth to something, to create.
Q. How do you hire, and also size up entrepreneurs you might want to invest with?
A. There’s the two classic buckets. You look at the hard-skill stuff and the soft stuff, and I try to focus on more of the soft stuff. On a résumé, I think you can pretty quickly assess a person’s track record. I then look for a sense of cultural simpatico. It may be even more important when you’re investing behind someone. And I tell them, with venture capital, you should really think of this as us getting married. And they say, yeah, yeah. And then I add: and we’re not allowed to get divorced.
So you want to get a sense of their values, and whether you would enjoy spending time with them. And I’ve described the four traits I’m looking for as heart, smarts, guts and luck. Whether you are hiring someone or investing behind someone, especially early stage, you need to feel some of that heart and that will, that fire in the belly. And you can feel it. This often comes out more through stories, so you have to probe. Does this person have some weight behind them, meaning they’ve overcome challenges and adversity? I often ask, “Have you sold anything when you were young?” Because I will never forget selling door-to-door at age 15 in Toronto. You grow thicker skin. Rejection early is good, because you get used to it.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/business/tony-tjan-of-cue-ball-on-accepting-new-ideas.html?partner=rss&emc=rss