How to Kick the 10 Worst Startup Habits

Yashad Kulkarni40min

Unknown Speaker

00:04

Hello,

Speaker 1

00:05

I hope everybody's having a great day. So far, it's been a fantastic show. I'm lucky enough to have Leah Sullivan here with me. As Jordan mentioned, she's a general partner at fuel capital. Her investment portfolio includes early stage companies across a really wide range of categories, including consumer tech, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. And I think that she's probably the perfect person to go over this next next topic with us because she has some experience as a founder as an operator, and then also now as an investment advisor, with startups, so can't wait to hear from Leah about how to kick the bad habits. Welcome, Leah.

Speaker 2

00:45

Thank you so much, Darrell. I'm thrilled to be here. Hey, everyone, I hope you're having a great day. And let's let's dive right in. I remember being a founder back in 2008, in Boston, when I was just starting TaskRabbit. And I remember going to a conference similar to this, and hearing from a late stage investor about the 10 mistakes startup founders make. And so I've been dying to do this presentation, sort of 10 years later with my own take on things. So let's get going. So, um, the first mistake I see founders make is holding their idea too close. So you know, people say all the time, well, if you share your idea with too many people, someone's going to steal it, someone else is going to do it. Let me tell you something, I am not the first person to have the idea for TaskRabbit. It is a very simple idea, right? It's like neighbors helping neighbors get things done this exchange of skills. I can't tell you how many times I would be giving a presentation. And someone after the presentation would come up to me and say, oh, my goodness, I had this same idea for TaskRabbit, like 10 years ago. And I'd be like, great. What did you do with that idea? And I think the point is, is that the idea itself, isn't the magic, the magic is in the execution of your idea and actually turning that idea into a business. If you share that idea freely, with as many people as you can, you just never know where your connections are going to leave. And I'm going to get to that point, actually, in a moment. So my next, my next tip, is to take conflicting advice. And this may seem rather strange, but I found as a startup founder, I would go to really smart people, all the time, I had built an mazing network of advisers around me, to help me work through challenges and think through problems. I would take a problem to the same to different CEOs to different advisors. And I'd say what would you do in my situation? What advice do you have for me, and these really, really smart, brilliant CEOs, these really brilliant people would all give me different advice. And I would think like, how is that even possible?

Speaker 2

03:10

I think what I realized over time, was that no one knew my business like I did. And no one could ever make the calls that I needed to make. And so it was my job as the founder to take all of this conflicting advice. And then to make the call and make the decision and be confident about that decision myself. So I'm take conflicting advice. My next tip is to get your ethics in check. Well, what does that mean? Well, this has to do with company culture. You know, it's never too early to start thinking about your company's culture. What is your mission? What is your vision? What are your company values, um, even if it's just you, you can start this work, it's you and a co founder, think about this, be intentional about it. I know, when I was running TaskRabbit, I always felt like we had built this amazing culture that happened both organically and intentionally, we did this work upfront. But it was very familial people were very friendly with each other, we all have this shared mission around helping people make money in this change in the workforce. And at times, that felt really, really good. But at other times, I almost wanted the culture to feel a little bit more like a high performance team. And, and be a little bit more driven and a little bit more with a sense of urgency. And so I actually wish I was a little bit more intentional about creating a culture that drove the urgency but also kept the balance of feeling familial and feeling like we had this shared mission and shared goals together. So that's just one example. Okay, so I mentioned, tell your idea to everyone, you know, you never know where connections could lead. And so the interesting thing about this is, you never know where the connections can lead because you have to ask for the next connection. So my advice is, whenever you're networking, when you're building relationships, say you get a meeting with someone at the end of that meeting, always ask them, who else should I talk to? Is there someone else in your network, you think that could be helpful to me or that I could chat with? And I'll give you an example. So I was at dinner with friends back in 2008. Early It was early that year, January, February, I had the idea for TaskRabbit. And I was chatting with friends over dinner about the idea. I was still working full time as a software engineer at IBM. But one of the friends at dinner said, Oh, you know, I love this idea. I really think that you should reach out to my friend Scott. And she gave me his email address. I think he really loved this idea. He said, Okay, so I emailed Scott. And the next morning, he wrote back and I realized that it was Scott Griffith, the CEO of Zipcar. I had no idea he was the CEO, when she made the suggestion that I reached out to him. He very kindly wrote back and he said, Hey, why don't you come by my office? And you know, tell me more about your idea. And so Scott, and I really hit it off. I started meeting with him kind of every couple weeks and developing the idea for TaskRabbit. It turned out a lot of what he was thinking about and in Zipcar, and sharing resources in a neighborhood was very

Speaker 2

06:37

similar to how I was thinking about building this marketplace around services. And so Scott, at one point, said, You know what, I think you should talk to john Zimmer, he's the founder of zimride. Now, zimride, later became Lyft, as some of you may know. And so I met john. He was visiting Boston, actually, and he was cutting a deal with Zipcar at the time. And john said, Hey, you know, there's this incubator program that Facebook is running in the summertime. So the summer of 2009, if you decide you want to apply, let me know and I'll put it in a good word for you. And so I did ended up applying to FB fun, this this Facebook incubator program that was run in the summer of 2009. JOHN put in a good word for me, participated in the incubator program that was great. At the in the middle of this program, Tim Ferriss came and he presented to the the class of Facebook companies. And Tim, at the time, was, had just written the four hour workweek, The New York Times bestseller, and you can imagine, you know, writing about how to make your life more efficient and time more efficient was very aligned with how I was thinking about TaskRabbit and outsourcing app. And so I got the chance to meet Tim, Tim, you know, over lunch, said, You know, I would love to share this idea with one of my investor friends and Mira co at Floodgate fund. And I was starting to think about raising money at the time. And so I got to meeting and ended up leading our first round of institutional funding a million dollars See,

Speaker 2

08:23

whole process started in 1008. And ended with an investing the first money in the TaskRabbit in October of 2009. So if at any point in that relationship building, I hadn't taken the introduction, I hadn't met with that person, if I hadn't been out to dinner with friends, I have no idea if that path would have been different. And so it just goes to show you, you never know where these connections can lead. And you should definitely take every connection you can and then asked for the next one as well. So this one is hard. Don't mind the haters. And it's it's twofold. You know, on one side, you've poured your heart and soul into this company, this business, this idea. And sometimes people have bad experiences. And it just really got to you, you can really take it personally or maybe people don't like what you're doing or how you're doing it. Um, one way to look at it is that you've built something that is so important that people feel passionate enough about it to tell you they don't like it. And so that is one way of kind of looking at people that are that are having trouble with your service or site or don't like you know how you're building something. The other way of also looking at it is illustrated through I think best through a story so five years into tasks. Grab it. We had built in scale this marketplace business, we had 60,000 taskers in the US, we had millions of customers. And we wanted to actually try something new, we wanted to try a brand new mobile first product. And we thought, you know what, let's launch this product in a brand new market where no one has heard about us before. So we can get some real data on how it's gonna work because it is so different than the marketplace we had built to date. So we took this product, we launched it in London, and it was mobile first mobile only. And it's a completely new way of operating for our taskers and how they were making money and how they're picking up jobs. It works great in London, all of our key metrics doubled, if not tripled, we're driving huge revenues. And we were like, Oh, my gosh, we've got to roll this whole product back to the US market. It's just so compelling. We've we've got to do it. We know it works. So in 2014, we decided to take that new product, and we relaunched the TaskRabbit service in the US market. People were pissed, they hated it, particularly the taskers that had been on the platform for years and had gotten used to operate in a certain way and, and making money a certain way. And the truth is, is that we were really improving the way they made money, how fast they made money, how much money they can make. But a lot of people can see that they were just so used to doing things a certain way. And that's what they were focused on. And so that was really, really hard. We worked through some really tough conversations with our Tasker community on this change. And in the end, we had the confidence to know that it was going to work because we had seen it work in London, thank goodness, we had done that first and used it as a test market. And so we pushed through, it was really hard. And we ended up training the Tasker community, some of those early, early tabs didn't stay with us, new people came on board, and we're thrilled to be making money in a new efficient way, we're able to actually grow the marketplace faster and stronger and more sustainable over time. And so it really was the right choice for the company. But it was really, really hard. And I think the point here is when you change product, when you change things, even though it is the best decision for your business, it's the best decision in the long term. Sometimes there are short term pain, painful moments that you have to be able to work through. And by the way, there were some taskers that had started with me back in Boston in 2008, that are still on the platform today, and still making money today and stuck with us in our, you know, super happy with where they ended up. So there's always both sides to the coin.

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