This Week in Startups - E1056 AMA: StartX & Nexus Events Founder Cameron Teitelman answers questions from founders: how universities with no entrepreneurial culture can mimic Stanford, building flexible & sustainable culture during COVID, scaling Nexus Events rapidly & more!

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

StartX & Nexus Events Founder Cameron Teitelman answers questions from founders: how universities with no entrepreneurial culture can mimic Stanford, building flexible & sustainable culture during COVID, scaling Nexus Events rapidly & more! Join the TWiST Slack: https://launchevents.typeform.com/to/kLq5Bi Mentioned during the AMA: Cameron's new startup: https://mixer.nexusevents.io/login_mixer Cameron's most recent TWiST appearance: https://youtu.be/zsNqOLs-NVI Questions: 0:37 Cameron intros his AMA and describes his new company: Nexus Events https://mixer.nexusevents.io/login_mixer 1:31 Kevin: Are seed investors investing right now? What have StartX companies been seeing lately from early-stage investors? 2:55 James: How can universities with no entrepreneurial culture mimic the success of Stanford in creating an environment that encourages building and innovation? 4:29 James: How does the accelerator structure change for current students? What are some of the common pitfalls you have seen people make starting their company whilst finishing their degree? 7:18 Presh: Could you share more about your new startup? What are you building and why? 10:15 Ashley: How are you looking at accepting companies to StartX through the COVID lense? Which companies (in your portfolio or not) do you think are particularly well-positioned for the post COVID environment? 12:43 Jean: Regarding mentorship, in what areas do solo founders need the most help with? 14:41 Annette: Will Stanford affiliated applicants get priority over referral applicants? Would consumer startup applicants that are non-COVID related be considered during this time? 17:35 Henry: What are your thoughts in terms of building a flexible but sustainable culture? 19:26 Matt: Do you take a different approach with health tech portfolio companies and educate/manage/support them separately from the rest of the portfolio? 21:21 Laura: Given that companies don't give up equity, and there is no structured program, how do you cultivate high-level engagement with your founders/companies & mentors? 25:27 Luke: Can you talk about how the collaboration between StartX and the Stanford Hospital and Clinics works? How are the grants assessed and awarded? 26:14 Jacqui: Do you see the StartX Med COVID-19 Task Force as a new model to accelerate advances in biotech or to generate solutions for other critical global issues? 27:07 Heidi: How can other med schools around the country partner with you to develop satellite programs? 29:17 Dan: Do you have any war stories about running Nexus Events during COVID and what you’ve learned from it?

Today, on This Week in Startups, we have an Ask Me Anything featuring StartX founder and chairman Cameron Titalman. This AMA was recorded live in our Twist Slack channel. To participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 25,000 founders, join us at this weekin startups.com slash slack. This episode is brought to you ad-free, thanks to our partners' LinkedIn and broker and Notion. Okay, yeah, so hi, everyone. Just as a reminder, my name's Cameron Titleman. I founded StartX, which is a Stanford-affiliated startup accelerator and founder community.

We've been around for about 10 years now. It started in 2009, 2010, 2009. The exact start date is always fun. fuzzy on things. And I've worked with probably around 700 companies to date. Companies have raised about $8 billion. Ones like Line Bike, Branch Metrics, Snapchat, a bunch of biotech companies. I'm now founding a company that was a kind of built off of my insights around how people

build professional relationships at StartX and in that community to help event organizers run online conferences, trade joes, and professional networking events. Yeah, one of the big things where a lot of our founders are asking, I'm hearing from a lot of people, is this question that Kevin asked, which is, are seed investors investing right now? And then what's happening for later stage also? So usually the fundraising timelines are focused around the end of the summer, the beginning about end of January, early February, and then this month in May. And so we advise our companies to usually fundraise around those times, and that's when we have our demo day. Although

what we're seeing now with this crazy environment with COVID is that a lot of angels, particularly, and even somewhat bigger investors, are actually sitting on big piles of cash because they're not really sure what's going to happen to the economy. And so they are actively deploying money, but they're not necessarily, they didn't get rid of a lot of their cash in the first part of the year. So actually right now in the next couple months is one of the best times to fundraise. One, we see the economy kind of going back to these levels that are a bit nuts from my perspective. I mean, you know, maybe this won't age well, but, you know, people's portfolios are, the NASDAQ at least, is higher than it has been, it was,

higher than it was in March, being of March. So yeah, I would say right now is a good time to fundraise. So James asked, at my university in the UK, there was little to know entrepreneurial culture. How can universities like this mimic the success of Stanford, et cetera, and creating an environment that encourages building and innovation? So I was very lucky when I founded Star-X and that there already was a very strong entrepreneurial culture at Stanford. And there's kind of this, If you think of building a product, there's a different layers of the technology stack, and building ecosystems is very similar, where the base of the ecosystem needs to be inspiring people to be interested in building companies, which I think there's a lot of online content

that does that now. But the best way at the university can do that is to engage an alum that has been successful to come back and give thought leadership talks. The kind of second layer above that is the Steve Blank type stuff, which is, If you've never looked at Steve Blank's classes, take a look at that. A lot of that's around allowing students or people to do stuff, kind of like what Startup Weekend does, which is experiment and kind of play around with a startup idea by doing it.

And then the third layer on top of that is more intentional support for the people specifically that are very serious about building companies. And that's where kind of I came in and built Startex. As far as like entrepreneurial culture, Yeah, I mean, that's a super hard one, but usually do it, again, through inspiration and role modeling. And then building support structures for people. James asked, you love the look of the Stardex student residence program. Does the accelerator structure change for current students?

And what are some of the pitfalls you have seen people make starting their company while it's finishing their degrees? Yeah, so we initially started for people right out of school. Actually, one of our first batches, the current CEO Stardex was in with his company while he was graduating. and we've evolved so that we're now supporting first-time founders, second-time founders, people like Sebastian Thruns companies who, you know, we founded Udacity and a bunch of amazing companies. So we kind of have those different tracks as well as the early-stage companies in the accelerator that are pre-product market fit, the post-series A, and growth-stage companies.

And so what we found is we were going up-market, and we didn't want to lose support for the earlier for the students. And so the key with any product development, which Stratics is a product for founders, is to make it specifically focused on your market. And so for students, it's not a traditional accelerator. We mainly focus it on helping them get mentorship around focusing on the things that they need to focus on to create strong fundamentals in their company. And that directly ties to the common pitfalls companies have. So the number one reason startups fail is interpersonal team dynamics. And so making sure their initial team is set up correctly,

you have conversations about equity, roles, around what happens in crazy scenarios, like if someone wants to sell early and someone wants to go along and build a billion dollar company, how do you make those decisions, how do you set culture? There's a lot of just basics. And having a foundation where you can repeatedly build trust within your founding team by having clarity around roles and decision making as well as having a weekly feedback session with each other so you surface any issues we have with each other

those mechanics generally make for a strong founding team which any seed investor is going to look for before actually working with you the second thing we look for um which is again what we look for in the accelerator in general but we help the students with is um making sure they're actually working on something that is a problem. And so getting them to actually focus on product market fit and even more like problem identification and talking

to a lot of the potential customers to really understand if this is something that is a real pain point versus just something I think is a cool idea. And so from my perspective, not having good team dynamics and not focusing on a real problem that you deeply care about

are the main pitfalls for any founder not just for students. Pressh said you drop that, you're working on a startup now. Could you share more about that? What are you building and why? So this kind of goes back to ecosystem building. So accelerators that are very successful

and are really more about very strong, intentional founder communities. And the programs that are going to persist long term are ones that are not only a, just like a rebranding, of an angel investor, but people that intentionally develop their community into a structured ecosystem that supports itself. So a lot of what Stardex was about and is about is around helping a coach a founder to identify what their biggest pain point is and what they need to focus

on, and then helping them build a relationship with someone who can support them with that, whether it's another entrepreneur, that's at the same stage, that's later stage than them, an expert who in an industry, an investor, and that both is related to getting the access to some insight, as well as getting them access to specific people, like potential hires, investors, customers. So my new company is a virtual events company, professional events. And really at Star-X, we did about 17,000 matches with people.

between founders and people who can support them. And I personally ran about a thousand events while I was there. And if any of you have run events before, they're a pain in the ass. The logistics are just awful and making them a great experience. So what we're trying to do with this new company is say, we're going to allow organizers to create virtual networking and professional events and conferences, trade shows, so that we can help any attendee build a relationship

with someone who will help them move their business goals forward. And actually, on that note, I'm actually running a fundraising talk on that later today. I think it's around like 3 p.m. Which will include both kind of peer-to-peer networking as well as talks. So anyone in this channel is actually welcome to join. You can just go to nexusevents.io and sign up to the fundraising training. It's like fundraising basics. This is a training I do at orientation at Star-Dex.

And I've worked personally with about 500 companies on rounds. And we did about 700 investments within StarDex. So we basically got to see a lot of the patterns of how to use structure, a fundraising, a fundraise so that it's very systematic and effective, as well as a bunch of mistakes people make that we have to dig themselves at a whole list. So go ahead and feel free to request access to that event. I'll just cross-check that you were part of the.

Slack channel and then give you access. Ashley asked, how are you looking at accepting companies through the Startex COVID lens? Which companies are your portfolio or not do you think are particularly well positioned for the post-COVID environment? So I think there was a lot of startup tourism in the last 10 years. And it'll be easy to, I won't say easy, but it'll be a good environment to funders right now. It won't be probably in a couple months. And so I think our criteria that we use to select companies is recession proof because what we're looking at are people, individual founders who are extremely passionate. And what I mean by passion is intrinsically motivated.

There's some internal reason why they want to solve this problem and they're going to fight through until they solve it. Whether that's a, you know, we have this one company called Six Dot, which is a braille label, that helped older people with arthritis that have these really horrible braille labels that hurt their hands. It basically turned it into QWERTY keyboard instead so that they can print out Braille because they're blind. And like Stevie Wonder used it

and it was a relatively small market with respect to venture, but from our purposes of a nonprofit, it was a huge success for us. And, you know, people needing to label things with Braille or blind people, that is a need that is kind of is independent of the recession. And that being said, there will be a bunch of our companies who need to pivot. And so that is another reason why we focus very heavily on strong founder dynamics and intrinsic motivation around a problem.

And they may need to pivot to a slightly different problem or a slightly different solution to the problem given the current structure. We have seen, so we have this company called Marco Polo, for instance, which is doing incredibly well. It's a video social app. Those companies are taking off and doing incredibly well, whereas our hardware companies are struggling. But then a lot of the hardware companies have like these virtual robots that they have like, they basically, not virtual robots, they're robots and their manufacturing plants in China that they're kind of tuning into or logging into and having them do the prototyping. And it's just kind of crazy, this environment. So the companies that are

positioned well are obviously the, you know, the ones that are focused on. online interaction and getting people essential services. So, you know, but it remains to be seen. So Gene asked talking about mentorship in what areas from your expertise to solo founders need the most help with. Yeah, so I'm a solo founder. And do you see differences in what help and mentorship is required based on certain factors like age, experience, formal education?

Okay, so solo founders, the biggest risk with being a solar founder is that if someone's not on the same social status with you as a company or within your company like a co-founder then people don't necessarily people default aren't comfortable arguing with you and that can create a very strong echo chamber where you're not actually getting real good information from the rest of your team. And so as a single co-founder, the mentorship you need, if you're not good at this already, is to be able to listen very carefully and create an environment where people feel safe sharing when they disagree with you. I mean, I, like one of the things I just saw is I did something

that I kind of shut down one of my employees recently on something and they basically gave me feedback that I really appreciate about, you know, like, hey, you shut me down on this but didn't hear me out. And so that's great. I'm happy I've made an environment where they feel comfortable sharing that. And then I go back to my whole team and I create a norm through saying, okay, this person gave me feedback. I agree with it and I appreciate it. And like this is what I'm going to do based on that. And you can kind of create that cycle. So if you can get, so yeah, single founder is super tricky. And so you need to hire and you need to be able to delegate. You need to be able to build a good open culture. As far as mentorship based on

factors like Asian experience, I mean, this is more of a question. on what skill level you have rather than your age. I tend to see maturity and skill is only somewhat correlated to age. So, you know, take that for what it's worth. Annette asked, will Stanford affiliate applicants get priority over referral applicants?

So, no, the referral applicants, as long as they're referred by people within our community, are evaluated the same. for whatever reason it's generally been about 10% of the class has been non-standford um however we do have some insight into how stanford people were groomed culturally and a lot of the special sauce at stanford is that they spend an administration spends a lot of time on developing a specific culture of and this is going to sound surprising because there are bunch of arrogant Stanford people out there.

But those are usually the edge cases because we try to make a environment of humility, where we're not, we don't think, you know, we have our, you know, we, um, yeah, I mean, we're, we're trying to keep the West Coast vibes of like humility and more, more relaxed and we don't want to, like, elitist is a bad word for us. We don't want to, um, uh, we respect like, you know, people from all backgrounds. And a lot of that is that the people that are getting into Stanford, a lot of them are people from underprivileged backgrounds. There is kind of like the 30% what's it called the certain percent that are like the legacy kids

who are still really smart, but they come from more affluent backgrounds. I was on a full scholarship, so I didn't. But I was very privileged in my upbringing, so I was kind of in the middle group, and then there's a lot from the underprivileged. And so you have a very strong diversity at Stanford from people coming out. So anyway, the intentional culture building helps us know that these Stanford people gone through that. And so we just do extra reference checks for non-standard people. Because building a very strong culture of founders who are there not just a take,

but to provide value to other founders is extremely important to us. Because in essence, we're not like a Y Combinator or these other programs who are kind of like a bunch of partners training you. we're about curating excellent individuals to support each other and then pulling out the best insights and sharing that. So we're much more of a distributed organization and distributed community than kind of a top down. Consumer applicants that are non-COVID related be considered during this time.

Yeah. I mean, again, for us, honestly, the idea does not matter. It matters that the individual has good clarity of thought, good team dynamics. They intrinsically they care about what they're working on

if they're not going to give up when things get hard and there's some other kind of long-tail things we look at. I already talked about

so Henry regarding building initial company culture what are your thoughts in terms of building the flexible but sustainable culture

especially during times of COVID? I actually have no idea what that question means. Oh, I think I get what you're saying, which is you want to be able to evolve your culture over time, but have, but also sustain it. And so the nuance here is that you need some core principles. And so in my companies, both in Star-X and in my new company Nexus events, there's this core principle we have that works really well right now, which is execution over feedback. because speed is extremely important in building your company. And so if someone on my team is asking for feedback or approval from someone else,

it's more important to get that thing done than get it done perfectly. And so every employee and everyone on our team, every team member, is authorized to say, here's a deadline I need this feedback by. And if you don't hit that deadline, they get to move forward or make the decision. And that way, execution is always prioritized over feedback. you always try to give feedback, but then you go for execution. So that's an example of an operating principle that works really well early days. It's kind of like the move fast and break things, thing that Facebook had,

but I think a little more less destructive. And that worked really well for them. It works really well for us. When we get bigger, those operating principles need to change, whereas one of our core cultural values is transparency, which is extremely important for remote companies, and that will never change. And so you kind of have to have the different set of what will change.

and what won't change and what you believe long term is important as a foundation, versus what is a set of operating principles that help you move quickly right now. Let's see. What else we have here? Matt, it seems like health tech is a significant focus on startups. Do you take a different approach with those portfolio companies, educate, manage, support them from the rest of the portfolio? So this is also very similar to, it's just product differentiation. So we have our core infrastructure of, what do you need help with as a founder? We help people figure that out. Here are a bunch of peers, mentors and expert that can help you on that.

And so the program is actually 100% customized per individual and per company. And then we just plug in different mentors and support people and different content. And so we don't really have a curriculum. That being said, we have found our bio companies that require FDA approval. We have a six-month program versus a 10-week program. And so that's a little bit different. Um, besides that, like, an ecosystem of individuals that are focused around supporting your needs can really help anyone. And so I think for us are, are, are we have about 30 to 40% of our companies are medical.

Um, more as a function of the percentage of medical companies at Stanford, um, creates than as a, necessarily a focus of ours. Um, we only, we built med is, and like, we have like a hardware vertical and a enterprise vertical and a consumer vertical and an nonprofit. profit vertical, we don't promote those as much. Because the main reason is that medical people think that they're very different from everyone else. And so you need to have kind of a concentrated brand for them and specific resources. But for the medical side, it's more like we help them with FDA consulting and getting SBIR grants. And right now, a lot of our companies, which are a lot of Stanford professors companies, are working together to actually share samples for COVID research. and like we actually had one of the first COVID tests in Connecticut from one of our founders

because someone from Stanford sent a sample to someone from Yale to get it started. So that's like super inspiring. I don't have a medical background, but I've learned a lot about that. So Laura said, given that the companies don't give up equity, there's no structured culture. How do you cultivate high engagement with your founders, companies, and mentors? So to be clear, there's a very, very structured program. The point is it's kind of like saying, oh, a university has a bunch of, bunch of different classes and so it's not structured. It's like, no, they have a class structure

where there's an hour lecture, there's a teacher and there's students, and there's a structure. And so we just built a certain infrastructure around peer support and each other, mentorship programs, both advisory boards as individual mentors, a concierge system where people can request access to something and we deliver a resource back to them within 24 to 48 hours. And that could be a person for them to meet, an expert for them to talk to, a certain content, Kind of like Google for founders, but with a very curated set of resources. And so the way we have created engagement is through building engaging products. And so our founders have problems, and they look to us to solve those problems.

And if we have a very low friction, high value way of solving that problem, then they'll engage in it. I really don't like these programs where – so actually for us, everything is optional. everything we do is optional I don't necessarily agree with that for our first time founder program and so that's kind of something we're figuring out because sometimes there are things that founders don't know are useful and so but our perspective is we should be able to communicate the value of it and convince them to join it rather than kind of holding their feet to the fire

and saying if you don't do this like da-da-da I think it's lazy for programs who and founders don't like that founders don't like being told what to do they're role breakers And so the programs that succeed the least are the ones that, except for ones that have a lot of power, like, you know, a Paul Graham used to threaten founders if they didn't do certain things, which I never liked. You can go back and look at the history there.

But I don't like, and so when you have that much power, you can, sure, exert power over people to make them do things, which I think is a little messed up. But our approach is more like, let's build good products and market them well and then create engagement. And as far as equity, there's something called market norms and something different called social norms. And these are in products.

And so an example of this is there used to be this product which was a like parents helping each other with carpooling. And it was just parents signing up and it was an app and they could sign up for a certain amount of times or as a website or app. I don't know. They could sign up for times to pick up kids along the route. And it was very successful, but it wasn't monetizing. And so what happened is they ended up putting in monetizing. about like give a tip to the person who's doing it and usage dropped off like 90% or something. It's because people were helping their neighbors and their community out of a a social desire to

add value to them and when they felt like they were being it was like their time was being valued at a dollar a ride. They're like screw this. I want to do this. And so Stardex, the thing that's special about Stardex is we're very much focused like the BJ Fog types. I mean I took all the all the psychology and classes at Stanford around creating engaging products and the guy who created like did all this like Facebook and Zinga and all that they're professors at Stanford and you can have market norms where you're paying people for things and it's very transactional but I strongly prefer to go with a social norm perspective and so what we provide our mentors and our founders is a very rich and rewarding experience where we can both help them learn through teaching others

and make them feel very like their time is being valued. So we have a huge amount of mentors. We don't give any equity to. And the purpose of that is that we do a very good job at helping them feel like their time is being spent. Wow. And that's a lot of what the Stardex ethos is. It's kind of like a big commune founders

that have all opted in to support each other and we're the logistics system. So talk about the collaboration between Stardex and Stardex Hospital and Clinics. How are grants assessed and awarded? Okay, so we have a strong relationship with both Stanford and Stanford Hospital. The hospital and Stanford, a lot of that is around us connecting our founders to the right people in the hospital. And we have kind of regular sessions with the leadership of the hospital to kind of address, figure out what do they need help with and what innovation are they looking to facilitate?

And then a lot of it's around, a lot of what we do with our founders on the enterprise side is help them with enterprise sales. And so really what that means is you have to help founders figure out who the right person in the company is to talk to and then how to talk to them. And so that's really how we facilitate that. Jackie asked, we have a Stardex-Med COVID task force. Yep. Are we able to do that for other global solutions? Yeah, it's a great idea. I'll pass that along.

I mean, definitely climate change is something we know is a huge issue and we want to support. And so, I mean, it's a cool idea. And it has been really inspiring being on these weekly talks. We're having everyone from, you know, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to all the, all the people involved, like the main people involved in funding COVID joining these weekly things with us. And so that's been inspiring. Yeah, as far as believing in another pandemic is in the non-sidition future. And we have, oh, and we have global warming to continue with.

Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, I don't, I mean, yeah, it seems like a good idea to create other task force. I'm not sure what else I can say there. So Heidi wrote, building off of James' question on mimicking the success of Sardix Med, How can other med schools around the country partner with you to develop satellite programs? Yeah, so the new CEO Sardex, he actually was a, so he, he, He actually ran like, he had this company called Wi-Fi Slam. They got acquired by Apple. And so he's, that was basically building automation and algorithms around your Wi-Fi indoors.

So you're actually, your iPhone uses his software to do, to do location more than GPS. And what he's been spending a lot of time on is automating what we do in software and kind of building repeatable systems. And so at some point, we would love to open that up and partner with other. the universities. But with any startup, you have to focus on your core first before you grow and kind of spread. And so I think just reach out info at startups.com. And I mean, he's probably, he's usually willing to talk to the universities. What I'm also doing in parallel is I have this new company I'm working on,

which Star Tex and Harvard uses is kind of their core community infrastructure. And a lot of that is about virtual events and virtual networking and content, which is the core of what these programs need to do, is they need to connect people so that founders can have help identifying what problem they need to focus on and connect them with a resource to support them on that. And really the benefit of the university is you pull together a group of people who all have a common affinity with each other because they both went to the same. same school, and then they're just more willing to help each other. And so I would just say, you know, reach out to us, and ideally we'll have both software and content in the future that will allow you to, actually, this is a great idea. I'm just going to start running a regular like how to build the University Accelerator online event, and I'll give talks on that and ask questions. I think that's a solution. Okay, war stories about running Nexus events during

COVID and what you learn from it. So I'm in a very, very lucky position where every trade show and conference in the world is basically shut down until like this opens back up. And so I think personally I've been able to recruit and fundraise and get customers very easily. And so I'm very privileged in that perspective in this environment. And so I think our war stories are more. that we're kind of taking off and getting a ton of usage and customers.

And it's just kind of like being able to manage and not making sure you're sleeping and everything. I know a lot of companies in our portfolio are having to do layoffs and salary write downs and that sort of thing. And so that's challenging. For us, it's always interesting because as a founder, speed is the ultimate weapon. And this guy, Mike Cassidy, speaks at Star-X and gives this talk. You should check him out.

I'm going to have him on our Nexus events to give a talk at some point. But the core with speed is really following the 80-20 principle. And what the 80-20 principle is, you all should look it up, is that generally, as like a design principle,

a life principle, 20% of the work gives 80% of the value. And so there will be a lot of people you hire which are pushing you to make perfect products and make things like really good before you push it out. And you read Hoffman said this thing that always made sense to me, which is

you should be embarrassed by what you release. And so my worst story, part of the worst stories is that we had this one customer like last, I think it was two weeks ago, who every day we had to talk him off the cliff for canceling the event on our product because he was like, he wasn't sure, like, oh, online event, like I'm not sure.

Will people be happy? and we just had to every day convince him to keep it going. And then when he ran the event, it was very successful. And yeah, he was very happy. So especially with these early, with kind of the early adopters or with products that are really small or early stage, there's a lot of handholding you have to do with early customers to have them try, like work on your thing,

like make sure they actually follow through. on what you're working on. And let's see. Do I have any other war stories? Well, I went from two people to 11 in three weeks. And so that was insane. And I think part of that, part of the tricky thing there is making sure the people you're hiring are right for the job and building a culture at the same time.

And so my ops person is going to hate me for this, but I did this thing, which I knew was a big mistake. But I didn't know for sure, which was I switched our task management system. Like was something that me and my one engineer is working with were had like a process around. We were trying to switch to Jira. And I've learned this over and over again that when you're rolling out, new infrastructure to your team, you have to like set it all up and then do a hard switch over to it. So right now we're still working off of a spreadsheet for engineering and Jira for business. Jira, in case you don't know, it's a project management tool. And that can create a lot of

issues internally in a company. But one thing that is really nice is that I had a ton of experience at Stratx with managing remote people because most of our staff were volunteers. And so there's a couple of things that I implemented early that have helped us avoid a lot of firefighting. And if you all don't do that, it's super important, which is one is weekly or biweekly one-on-ones where you check in on how your team is doing personally and how they're feeling and unblocking them. Two is making sure there is a heartbeat in your company where you have a regular cadence around weekly or daily sinks.

three, which is something I still haven't done, which I need to do this weekend, which is OKRs, which is making sure you're setting monthly goals. And four, especially in this remote environment, is making sure your team members are building relationships with each other. And that's way easier to do in the office. And so having regular, we actually, actually, we're kind of using our product for this, which is cool.

But having either first daily or buy, weekly or once a week sessions where you get together and have a very intentional hangout where you're talking about each other. Oh, embarrassed by what you release. There's a question mark. Yeah, so just to talk about that. So I don't know about you all, but I'm kind of a perfectionist, and I always have to fight my perfectionist tendencies to, well, I think I'm much less a perfectionist than a lot of people because I'm okay releasing things that are like not fully baked. But the, But the point of releasing something that you're embarrassed by is the following. An MVP does not mean it's not an MVP.

Like, it still has to be functional. And I always love the Google Docs analogy, where Google Docs was like, had such little functionality early on. It was really ugly. It was really clunky to use. But it did the one thing that people really care about really well, which was like the real-time collaboration. And so it didn't need all the other stuff to look pretty, to do all that.

And founders have this huge mistake where they try to, make things beautiful first and then release it or kind of do this like the steve jobs approach of making everything perfect first but what you don't know is steve jobs did a massive amount of internal testing with really shitty things first um and so um part of this is like really nailing the value prop that you're providing but all the other stuff around like is the ux perfect is it is the ui like the visuals do they look really nice are there no bugs like no just let that happen like get the product in customers hand. And if you're not a little bit like,

oh, like, they're going to hate this part of it, then you're not releasing early enough. I think that is all the questions. And just a quick reminder that I'm going to be doing regular founder trainings on our site, probably weekly or biweekly. So go ahead and, yeah, sign up to that. Thanks for listening to Cameron Titleman's Ask Me Anything. If you'd like to participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 25,000 founders,

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