For Me, It’s Not Just Business
Startup CEOs come in different styles. For some, “it’s just business.” But, for many founder CEOs, it is far more than that as they pour all their passion into their startup and embody it profoundly. That embodied passion is often the activation energy that propels the startup out of the gate and onto a successful trajectory as it persuades others to take chances and join in.
Each founder, leader, and CEO has their own personality, character, and skills that form through time and experiences, ultimately becoming their special magic that they bring to what they choose to do. Each of us is unique, so what I am about to share, while foundational for me as a founding CEO who excels at the formation, product development, and commercial stages, may not be and likely is not a universal truth for all startup CEOs, especially as you consider the full sweep of a startup’s lifecycle.
Some say, “it’s just business.” They bring a transactional mentality to what they are doing. They look for opportunities, adjust the team, execute fast, and move on. Often, these CEOs are brought in at later stages of startup development, where bigger teams, more developed processes, and different challenges may demand different skills than the founding CEO has. Sometimes they will come in with a focused mandate to either scale or sell the business. At the end of the day, they assess the startup, execute the playbook their experience tells them will be successful in the present scenario, and seek to accomplish the goal quickly and efficiently. They typically do not have deep ties to the roots of the startup.
In contrast, I am one of those startup CEOs who pours her heart into the formation and development of the startups I lead, establishing the startup’s mission, culture, and deep roots. I care deeply, passionately, and authentically about every aspect of the business – the unmet need, the product, the team, the stakeholders, the partners, and the customers. I set enormously high standards for myself and my team as we craft the foundations of a workable business. I think this passion and caring are often characteristic of founding CEOs.
Other stakeholders have a different degree of emotional investment. Team members believe and hope. Investors believe and hope. Partners believe and hope. But founding CEOs and their co-founders commit and own making “it” happen. At the earliest stages, the passion of the founding CEO often carries the day as they compel others to enroll in the always risky startup-building process.
Others are skeptical and focus on the gaps and obstacles. The product isn’t there yet. The market doesn’t understand the value yet. The supply chain and manufacturing teams haven’t worked out the kinks yet. The feature set is incomplete. But founding CEOs must see the vision, the hope, the dream and then chart the path to achieving it. They have an ownership mentality and the motivation and drive to move mountains and successfully build something out of nothing.
Organizations are built of a web of relationships between people and systems. But it is more than just a process. It is personal and relational. By showing that I genuinely respect and care deeply about the people who make up the business, be they team members, partners, prospects, or customers, I can persuade them to care about my business and want to engage to help. These are natural human dynamics – and I have found it profoundly important at the earliest, unproven stages of a startup when it is often the trust you can build that convinces other people to take a chance on you.
Building impactful relationships, especially for the first time, requires creativity, authenticity, and risk. Caring plays into forging relationships because others respond to the fact that I genuinely care about them and their needs, being excellent, delivering on promises, and making a measurable impact on the problem we set out to solve for them and, as a result, they often engage by taking a chance on something new. When you get it right, you hear things like, “I will do this for you because you have earned it,” “I trust you to take care of me, so I will take the chance,” or “You have poured your heart into this – and I want to help it succeed.”
Who cares about a startup as much its founders? No one. And that intense caring can make all the difference in persuading others to take a chance on the dream, whether they are investors, team members, pilot or beta customers. Never underestimate its importance.
