Hello, and welcome back. Our next guest is ecosa, a moistly. He's the founder and managing general partner of eco VC partners. It's a seed in early stage technology venture capital firm, serving underrepresented founders and underserved markets. So he gosa thanks so much for coming. And I without further ado, I just want to hand over the reins to you so you can give your presentation.
Great. Thank you very much for having me. And welcome to everyone joining us for this for this part of the TechCrunch event honored to have been invited. So the the theme of my talk is is is the all 22. And this is a construct that is used in sports to give essentially this enterprise view of of pro sports. And I'm going to use American football as the primary example here of the fact that I like the sport but it also sort of helps and and what we're using as this mechanism is to take some of the insights from the learnings from the alternative view to transpose those into the types of learnings that we can use as operators and investors and team members in in startups. So what I will do first of all is to kick this off by sharing a very short video of Twitter and you'll get to be able to see very quickly how how people in America Football World breakdown plays actual things that work maker
that haymaker is called bunch right? Why arches f quarter, which is designed to go to kid it's similar to the play the 40 Niners used to beat the saints back in week 14 Samuel runs a slant across the field to open up room for kettles option wrap after all the chaos caused from the bunch formation get a will have an easy read on the defender. If he's inside of kettle goes out. If he's outside, you know goes in the other wide receiver Kendrick Bourne is supposed to run a quarter route but instead he runs a swirl route that breaks back inside. We'll get to him in a second. The chiefs are playing cover one dog with a traffic check to the bunch formation cover one positions one safety deep and zone coverage. While the rest of the defenders are in man dog refers to the blitzing linebacker, Ben Nieman, there are several ways to play bunch formations on defense when you're in main coverage. Some teams prefer to play it straight up where I Have you no matter what, but this can be problematic Rob concepts and players running into each other, the Chiefs use a traffic check, which means Rashad Fenton will take the point man and man coverage in bashaud, breeland and Tyra Matthew will play kind of its own coverage in and out on the two remaining receivers.
So I'm you know, I know, there's a lot of complication to that. And, you know, I'm certainly happy after the presentation to to, to to share more about it. But what what was what was most important, I think, to, to to share there, and I'm going to sort of switch to slides now is that football is very complicated. Right? And you know, what you were watching there for a brief brief moment was the different views that the different participants in the same game we're seeing, right, you had you had the the offense, you know, with the quarterback driving that, who saw a set of of a defensive postures. And then you have the defense that saw a set of offensive postures. And what I think was most interesting in that has always been that, you know, for operators and investors, what we see is usually very driven by where we stand, or where we sit. And, and what you have to discover really is how can I get much better views. And the best view is always the plan view, you're looking from the top down, you're watching the movement, and you have line of sight, you know, that's essentially 360 degrees. And that's really the key theme to what I'm trying to sort of share today in terms of the alternative view. And so the key takeaway, I think, for operators and investors is, you know, why camera views matter, right. So what I have here is, you know, six different screenshots of different games, but what you're really seeing is six different screenshots of camera views. And what you can tell very quickly, is that depending on where you're sitting, you're going to see very different things. And what you're trying to figure out is what skill sets can I acquire, so that I can get better camera views that I can integrate into my decision making. So what I like to tell, you know, folks that we support and work with is that life technically is a two sided coin right as an operator or an investor and they Two things that you said are really constantly focused on burnish it. The first is your self awareness who you are as an individual state in motion. The second is your situational awareness, you know how you essentially capture the signals that are being giving in every context, how you process those signals, how you now build decision making frameworks around those signals, and then how you sort of drive and execute outcomes. But this is a very important tool that I personally have used my constantly use that I certainly tried to support a founders and using, which is that you are on a constant quest to improve your self awareness and your situational awareness, and one doesn't go without the other. And what you really have to think of focus on constantly is, how do you get better at each. So, you know, we've talked a lot, and certainly over the course of the pandemic, mental health has sort of come front and center for all of us. You know, and I think part of that is, is certainly because you stay at home, the pressure, I sort of unveiled all the all the, as unveiled the grind, really, of sort of what we go through every day. And of course, you know, I always said a point to social media as a purveyor of falsity, because what you always find is, you know, people are sort of presenting this, you know, virtual world of progress and happiness, and, you know, 114, and fame.
Whereas, in many cases, it's just, you just played it on TV. And so one of the things you want to be able to figure out, you know, again, is making sure that, you know, your self awareness really has you plugged into what these things and these behaviors that are outside of you, how they impact you. And they're very interesting, more subtle ways in which a lot of these external stimuli can be corrosive. And so what you want to think about is, okay, what are the tools, and one of the things that we've seen, become more democratized is executive coaching. And, you know, when I think the other, the other sort of advance, that we really appreciate, is that the ability to show vulnerability and the ability to show weakness, right, doesn't necessarily extend to you be able to say, look, I want an executive coach, right. And I want to focus on my mental health. And I want to make sure that my team gets access to coaching, and my team gets access to mental health tools and therapies and, and and purveyors. And this is so important, you know, I can't overstate this, it is super important for people to be able to sit in situations, whereby they can sort of say, look, I talked to someone, and they open my eyes. And so if you haven't reached out to try to figure out how to get an executive coach, or how to figure out how to get mental health check ins, you should, it is no sign of weakness. In fact, it is a sign of strength, because that ability to reach out is, in fact, self awareness. And I know, one of the one of the lessons, you know, I've learned, you know, over the course of my career, especially when it comes to executive coaching, is that it is very much the process of finding executive coach is very much like the process of dating to marriage, right there is there, you will go out on many dates. And, you know, it happens whereby your first date is like, that's the person I'm going to marry, and you know it and it happens. And sometimes you have to sort of go through multiple dates and find that person that you want to sort of, you know, make a life with. And so it's very important that if you try with executive coaching, and it doesn't work, don't give up, it's a very important element. Because eventually, you want to be able to have that person who's able to shape you as you evolve as an investor or an operator the like.
So the other element of the coin is sort of acquiring situational awareness. And I always, you know, the big kill switch here is really where you have to, you know, you really have to sort of, and this, of course, comes out of these, you know, you know, sort of self awareness. Are you open to reading situations, you know, and one of the key elements of this always keeps showing up, which is, what are the assumptions that you're bringing into the analysis about your situational context. And assumptions are weird because they can be patterned All later. And in some cases, that can be a hybrid. And so what you have to do, when you start reading a situation is to say, what are the assumptions I have. And if you, if I go back to the short video I shared, one of the things about the old 22 view is that it lights up, almost like you know, before you before the play starts is dark fiber, and then, you know, you light it up, and it lights up very quickly, what assumptions people framed, based on what they thought they saw, right, and so when you see a lot of these plays, you then realize that, and then you see the interviews after the fact, you know, the players will tell you look, we saw this, and it didn't work out. And, you know, we immediately sort of took action, and we executed because of based on what we saw. So there's a point in that play, you know, it's about a two minute video. And, you know, you know, I'll share that sort of, you know, by the organizers, but there is a, there's a point in that play where a defensive player moves his shoulder. That's all he did. And what he had done was to figure out the tendencies of the quarterback. And so he moved the shoulder and the quarterback bit, as a quarterback immediately thought, Oh, if we move the shoulder, that means he's moving in that direction. Whereas that's not what it was. It's just a fake. And so what was interesting was the quarterback then essentially built a stack of assumptions based off of that. And it's why the play broke down. And so this is a very important thing. And so you know, whatever context you're in, it's always very important to say, look, to your team, to your co founders. What are the assumptions we're making here? And how do we unbundle the two first principles. It's a tool that has worked for us as a firm, and I certainly will commend it, you know, to the attendees. So part of this as well is, you know, again, so measuring situational awareness and your context, I'm bringing yourself awareness to that analysis, part of it requires that you identify your tendencies. And, you know, in sports, they call it film study, you know, one of the things that, you know, people always made fun of people like Jordan, and you know, and I say fine, because eventually, you know, you kind of realize who won and who did it, but they made fun of Jordan, and Colby, because they were relentless. Film study, folks, relentless, you know, the legends of Coby staying up at night, till four or five in the morning, just watching film. And what he was looking for, was tendencies. That's all he was looking for. And so when, you know, watch him in the game, and a very similar to sort of what you know, Michael Jordan did, which is, you know, you never see the 3000 free throws in the you know, during, you know, the middle of the day, because I don't invite you in, but then you're not asked me why I'm so good at like, on in the game. A lot of this is about sort of trying to recognize what your tendencies are. And we can call them tendencies, we can call them biases, a different set of, you know, terms for this, but it is, how do you react? In other words, what is Pavlovian about you, as an operator or as a founder, or, or however, what is pub lobbing? What do you do when you hit the bell ring?
And then you can now stop and say, I am reacting in in motion. But I need to go back into state and figure out what it is that I think I have heard. And what is is that I think I have seen, and again, these are tools that you sort of bring into your decision making process. Because it's very, very important with a lot of people talk about biases, and I try not to use the word biases, because people tend to react somewhat viscerally to that word, right. And, you know, they're not that they don't get excited about it, right. It's it's a little bit of a burden. But the truth is, we've gotten what I want, but film study. And that's what you're doing that with your, you know, executive coach, your mental therapist, whatever it is, with your team, you're the damn day, it is very important to be able to sort of open up the vulnerability because you will never know who's going to be able to recognize a tendency that nobody else has seen. So this brings us back to set up the entire framework, which is what does decision making under uncertainty look like and how do you improve it? And Adam Grant is, you know, is a very well known author on University of Pennsylvania. You know, Professor, he wrote I think one of the seminal books on on human psychology in motion, which was given take, where he essentially triplicated people into givers, takers, and matchers. And I always, I think that book is a seminal study. And I think it's very important for everyone to read it, no matter what role you you are. But he, you know, he calls him he is researching human psychology, you know, in motion, and one of the things he's sort of done in his latest book, think, again, has been to, essentially encourage us to, to do that, which is when you are, you know, when you're really when you are absolutely confident that you have all the facts in your possession, and you have seen all the permutations of how it plays going to happen, bring it back to a football construct, and you have seen all the tendencies of the opposing team, um, think again. And that's fundamentally is being open to revisiting the decision framework is being open to revisiting your assumptions is being open to revisiting your views. And I love this, because what it allows teams to do, especially teams that are much more collaborative, instead of not top down, you know, autocrats is that it allows you to go back and look at it. And again, going back to the old 22, there are many videos of, you know, where coaches are interviewed after the game. And they just confess that, look, they saw something. And I'm going to talk a little bit about pattern matching as well, this or something. And they were like, Oh, we've seen that before, and immediately jumped to react to it. And what they didn't do was to think, again, you know, could that have been? All you needed to see? Was that something else that you missed? And these are things that, you know, as I think, as Adam Grant has sort of, you know, highlighted in his book, it's a very hard and difficult habit to acquire, but it's a necessary habit to hold. And so, instead of addressing the mistakes we make, you know, we talk a lot about sightlines and, you know, there's a term I called x topia, which is, whatever it is, what kind of opiate you're bringing, whether it's, you know, myopia, hypertrophy, whatever, whatever opiate you're bringing, um, the fundamental problem, when you have an ExoPlayer is that you are limited by the type that you have. So if you are short sighted, if you are alongside and if you have, you know, you know, Aztec Madison, whatever it is, right, you're walking around with the recognition of sort of what it is that you're, you don't really see that great, but you still bring that overarching level of confidence, and what you always have to, but really, the big puzzle is the quality of your sight lines, it is very easy for me to sit on the sidelines of a game and tell you, yeah, I can see all of this stuff. But do you see it in such an acute way that you can understand it.
And that's what the concept of ExoPlayer is, right, which is, everybody needs to identify what version they carry. So that we all sort of know. And then I say they sort of in a very dramatic way, we'll all sort of know what lenses we need to get prescribed. And, you know, the truth of the matter is that, you know, sight is only one of the five senses, right? And so some people will bring, you know, auditory, some people will bring all factory, you know, so hearing or smell or whatever it is, but at the end of the day, sight is such an important thing because the brain gets trained to I think react faster. And this is sort of an observation. I'm not a psychologist, but I'm just telling you that it feels like you know, the brain is trained to react faster to that. And so what then happens is the first thing that gets reacted to becomes the dominant thing. So, identifying your ExoPlayer and your teams is a very important element of knowing how to go augment, fix it augment it, limited downside, right, but something needs to occur. So in again, talking about This is a, you know, a little bit of a little bit of a, an eye chart. But one of the things that great teams and great players do is they do diligence. Right? Um, I know that we are in a world now where all startups are going to be unicorns. Bitcoin is going to $25 million NF T's are going to be sort of, you know, everybody's gonna be an NF t purveyor, you know, there's so everybody's Right, right, and everybody's making it 14, and everybody has figured it out, and everybody has cracked the code. So unfortunately, I'm not one of those people, because I've been through two sort of real strong economic recessions. And I kind of now understand how cycles can change. And so when you're in decision making for a variety of reasons, and you don't want making many decisions every day, small, medium, large, whatever it is, part of what you want to be able to do to improve your decision making is your diligence. In other words, using a sporting metaphor, what does your scouting report look like? And it goes back to that whole thing I mentioned about Jordan, and Colby, which is they're hunting for your tendencies. And so this is essentially a scouting report about the Denver Broncos, you know, and it gets to the level of detail, whereby folks are essentially saying, Look, when the quarterback, just the quarterbacks cadence alone, or the fact that he uses certain words in order, and when he changes the order, because you know, we're very, it's so easy for us to fall into habitual mode. Right, and, but we always assume that no one is paying attention to us. And what this government report sort of showed was, there was an infinite amount of detail, the people that used to build a report about how people operated in the field. And this is important because you are the subject of the report. And you know, you'll go into a decision, maybe it's about a big deal. Maybe it's about an investment, maybe it's about hiring, and someone's cracked your code. So how do you get to be able to build a team that sort of is able to do that. And I use the word team very, very, very, I highlight that, because as much as we think we're the greatest in the world, we're always better together. And people see things that everybody else misses. And it doesn't matter where they where they sit, it could be your executive assistant, it could be your CEO, it could be your product manager, it could be the most junior analysts or engineering just hired. Right. And, you know, that's what diversity of teams will do for you is that it improves.
It gets you to all 22. There are only 22 players on the field. But depending on your perspective, you might only see 14, you might see 11 you might see 17, but they're always 22. So this is a very important in and our process of making sure that you get to use the 22 everybody has a role, and everybody has value. So what do you then do to start to think about a reliance framework. And again, coming back to this, right and this the slide is, you know, I took a couple of additional screenshots, because what this slide is doing is that it's identifying the different people and rules that these players take. Well remember when I talked about who you are, we say this all the time characters measured, you know, addressed an emotion. So what you're looking at here is what it looks like at rest. But the minute the ball is snapped, it looks like complete chaos. It never is. There's, there's a ton of stuff that is working. And what is kind of important here is for you to be able to understand that transition from rescue motion, you're going to need different contributors, you're going to need your coaching staff, your team, you're going to need decision trees, you're going to need advisors, you're going to need scouts. But this is a reliance framework. And again, key thing is making sure that you touch upon these folks. And I added the concept of lenses. And it could be metaphorical, or literal or figurative, doesn't really matter. But it is about what you see. at rest and in motion. And if you have ExoPlayer, and you don't have 2020 vision, great. Let's bring in people who do. So in final analysis, what, what we've seen, um, man, so And I say that sort of across the two recessions and the giddiness that we're sort of all enjoying now is that in whatever role you are, there are four legs, that powering should always power you. One is curiosity, not necessarily intellectual curiosity as a sort of, you know, more generic approach. The second is humility. Because that in combination with a third openness allows you to receive new information. And the fourth is flexibility, which is the ability to ingest new information on new data, and be flexible enough to change your mind. And, you know, back to our old 22 view, the very, there is no winning coach, as long as I've been watching football, that has cracked the code that has not come to the podium after the game and admitted that he completely blew it. That he literally just, he came in there with his assumptions and his biases, and whatever it is, and he got his got his ass handed to him. And so what you're looking for, is to be that coach that says, Look, I have used all the tools. I mean, you know, sometimes the work and some do that. So you win some games, you lose some games, and that's fine. But every time I have come into these games with curiosity and humility and openness and flexibility,
I have won more than I've lost. And this is true for a lot of the winning coaches.
And so those are the legs, the powers, the traps are the ones that show up a lot. overconfidence because you know, what has carried us bias, so many different types of biases. Over conviction is another thing that I see in, in both founders and investors. And the fourth and most important is calcification. Because when you get calcified, you are almost not just unwilling to change, you're unable to change. And calcification is an important thing, because in our world venture startups. We always talk about pattern matching as a process to speed up decision making. And one of the biggest kill switches without imagine is calcification because eventually you just figure out okay, Miss that because I thought so I thought why, or someone told me that they thought actually thought why and I really respect that person, which is that concept is what I call stacked calcification. And so what we what you then find is to really spend enough time to keep reminding your Have these traps. I know everything's happening at speed. And, you know, I knew sort of, you know, you're thinking, look, you know, I have capital I, you know, it's weaponized, I can do X, I can do that, you know, look, I did this in this country, and so I can do it in the next country. You know, and you know, and look, the last two times I did this, you know, I had conviction, no one believed me, and I made it happen. And these are things that we all we all fall prey to, every every day. But
you go back and ask yourself, what have I missed in my old 22. Because the funny thing about the old 22 is, it's actually a look back. You only process it after the play is done. But what you're really doing is taking what you have processed, and imputing that into your decision making process. So you don't fall for it again. You can make real time adjustments. So these are mechanical things that I think, you know, they're hard to build into habitual format. And I'll be the first to tell you that, um, you know, the four legs require that you're constantly poking and prodding on a self awareness, you know, side of the coin. And that can be can be hard. You know, it can be tough, it can be painful. You know, and I'm not saying it's easy. But what I what I will say, though, is that we will get to be able to have much better top to down outcomes. If we're all able to do this, you know, as part of our decision making processes. And when I talk about decision making, it's, as I mentioned, this small, medium large decisions every day, every day. Right, so it, you know, it can be can be worrisome. But what you're trying to do is to make sure that the traps don't hurt. And some of these traps lag, right. So you fall into a trap today, you may not actually sort of realize its its impact for another year. Right, so there's a weird timeline that occurs as well. So you know, you're doing stuff on a daily basis, but you know, some of these things are sort of, you know, forward looking. So these are, these are sort of the thoughts that I have on, on the all 22. You know, I hope that, you know, this will help, we're certainly happy to, you know, you know, keep sort of exploring other elements love to get more thoughts and ideas about how founders and investors, what kinds of tools they're using, to address some of these issues. But, you know, fundamentally, like I said, you know, it's going to be a key thing. What is your view look like? And based on that view, how do you how do you sort of impact your decisions? And I believe that's what we have.
Whoops, sorry, I muted myself. Um, well, we're getting really close to ending the time, but I have so many questions, so I might have to ask you a few of them offline. But I wanted to go back, um, just briefly, if we can fit a few of these in, um, as far as picking an executive coach, do you? What are some very, like quick tips on what people should be founders should be looking for? And do you recommend an executive coach to work with the entire team or just a co founder, the co founders or founders?
So I think to the second question, first, I think that this senior management, if you can afford it, senior management should definitely have access to executive coaches. Um, you know, and, and I do think that, you know, the people have done different things, sometimes you go into, you go into the executive coaching, just all the founders do it, or each one sort of picks picks an executive coach. But I do think that if you go with the each person, pick an executive coach, there has to be some mechanism where there's reconciliation, which is like how the understanding works, right? And that's the challenge, right? Because, you know, it's very simple. I usually like marriage, you know, marriage therapy, there's, there's value in having both parties in an on one couch, but there's also value in having each body on a separate couch. And I think that's, you know, we can sort of use that as a metaphor for how to think about it. But I'm very, very focused, I think, on making sure that, you know, your very senior leaders who become some of your purveyors of culture, have access to coaching.
What do you think are the most what's the most common trap that you see? founders that you're advising fall into of the four you listed. And do you think the giddiness factor that's happening right now with the economy? You? Would you add that one in there?
Yeah, so I think I think what what what if there's one sort of constant has to be overconfidence? Right? It is. It is, it is, it shows up a lot. Right? And you know, and I don't know, I mean, you know, you know, you don't want to be instead of Debbie Downer, or you're like, but you know, you want to sort of remind folks this, and there's one thing about capitalism that we will never ever get away from is that it shows up in cycles. Right? So how you calm overconfidence, is by injecting humility. And that's why the four legs matter, because they can start to counter the four traps.
So one more question. And then we have, we have to wrap but and I'm gonna ask you some more questions offline, too. But you talked about doing diligence. And I'm wondering if, as part of diligence, do you think that if you were to look at all of the potential traps you can have doing your diligence, being self aware, being situationally aware? Um, does it come down to diversity on your team? How important is that, for a founder to be thinking about? And when we talk about diversity? What should they be looking for? Not just, you know, gender balance, for example, but I mean, what out? Or, you know, ethnicity or race or region, what else should they be looking for in terms of diversity to avoid missing or falling into some of those traps?
So I think, broadly speaking, um, founders should really be invested in, in diversity, and I'm talking about it across all vectors. Um, you know, and I'll be very honest, you know, we have a very significant portfolio led by women. And, you know, we have, you know, when we keep trying to add more women to our team, but I will say that, I mean, I've done probably, you know, the most deals, you know, but I will say that, I am so excited about having, you know, women on the team, because they have, you know, and I said it's very generically, you know, but they have much better instincts. Right, about the, sort of below the surface reveals, right, and it's, you know, I don't know how to sort of craft it, but, you know, you just, it's just just that recognition that this thing doesn't work, or something is not working, or it's not, you know, and, you know, you really have to learn how to appreciate and value that, right. And I think, you know, also getting people will have different perspectives. Again, this is the same thing with the old 22. You know, you're a founder, and you're sitting on the sidelines, you know, you have a team that is sitting on the overview, and not appreciating what they're seeing, literally limits, I think you outcomes, but a large degree, you know, we tend to find that a lot of stories that are told, are, you know, shaped, you know, they don't really give you the truth, right. And the truth is hard to sort of digest, and everyone that does post mortems doesn't really do them that well, because they also, you know, they always have their biases. But I do think and I, you know, we can say this over and over again. But the diversity of the team, right brings in, you know, you're sort of really merging, you know, into one great set of maybe progressive lens. Right, and that's what you want. You want a progressive lens in the team.
Right? Well, well said, Thank you so much. I wish you could squeeze in some more questions. But to our audience, please keep an eye out for a breakdown of ego says talk, which we'll have coming out. So we'll hopefully be able to address a few more questions in that article. And thank you again, so much for joining us.