When coaching startup founders (and being a founder) I have learned that there needs to be an equal measure of brutal truth and hope. Without brutal truth, we live the startup dream until we run out of money and go back to our day job. Without hope, we never begin.
When founders practice a pitch with me, I say what I am privately thinking as an investor. It is often brutal. But I think that small amount of pain is better than 50 investor meetings turning to nothing because investors privately think something.
We hold ourselves by the same standard. One of our board members told me the other day that our metrics in Pollenizer were vanity metrics. It was brutal feedback. I was gutted. I teach startup metrics for goodness sake. But he was right. We changed and now we are properly learning from our metrics.
But there must always be hope. Otherwise, any sane human will go home.
- What’s the next action? “Here’s something bad, but let’s try this way to make it better.”
- Remember what normal looks like. “In startups it is generally bad like this. Here’s a story of how someone else had the problem and beat it”
- Live without fear. “So what if some people hate it, some people love it. You can’t please everyone.”
Without failure, there is no learning. Without brutal truth we drift. Without hope, we stop.