Sushi is My Vice

1. Product Vision / Competency
2. Quality Recruiting and Team Building
3. Ability to Execute and Get Results.
4. Ability to Pitch and Raise Financing

1. Product Vision

Founding CEOs are responsible for product vision.  They are architects of products or services that don’t yet exist. In the beta stage of DL, I worked primarily with one designer to create all the pages in Photoshop and a wireframe program. Basically, I was a pixel pusher. “Pixel perfect” became my mantra. Then the founding team collaborated to create the product experience together. Along the way, the founding team contributed immensely to help mold the final product, but I still care about every pixel that goes into production.  All of our people in tech and design have heard me say our product needs to be pixel perfect! This obsession is the basis for refining our product.

2. Quality Recruiting and Team Building

I have met quite a few entrepreneurs who think they can do it by themselves. But having had some failed business partnerships over the past 10 years, I know that the most important thing is to build the right team from the start. You must have the right business partners! Building a great team isn’t just about credentials. There are intangibles that are difficult to identify but even so it’s critical to identify them.

3. Ability to Execute and Get Results

As a startup if you don’t get results quickly, raising money from investors can be difficult. The longer you have been executing, the more data investors have on your performance. By contrast, if you show a mixed bag of execution over a long timeframe, the investor may be doubtful. If you don’t perform well, investors will question your ability to execute, your level of commitment or both. Along these lines, it’s really important to continually update investors so they have the big picture. Is there a story behind a certain result in the numbers? The investors need to know.

4. Ability to Pitch and Raise Financing

Some entrepreneurs are gifted at communicating their vision and seemingly raise financing effortlessly without great vision, people or results. I wasn’t blessed with this gift, so I’ve had to prove #1,#2, and #3 in order to raise financing.  But in the grand scheme of things, the first three are more important for long term success and financing will be almost automatic if those conditions are met. I think Ben Silbermann of Pinterest falls into this category. Ben’s a great entrepreneur but many people declined the early opportunity to invest in Pinterest because the company had yet to hockey-stick. In my opinion Ben isn’t necessarily a showman. He’s more of a quiet, thoughtful guy. I think this affected his ability to fundraise early on. But eventually those tangible characteristics - #1, 2 and 3 – won the investors over.

By contrast, there are going to be companies that burn through investors’cash without ever creating substantial value. And there will always be investors willing to gamble on companies that lack fundamentals because some of them do succeed even with poor fundamentals early on.

As mentioned in #3 above, having bad results can turn investors off. But at the end of the day, people invest in the team and the story, not the data or the PowerPoint. So while bad data is never a good thing, investors know that the data can and will change. But regardless of the data, investors will never get behind a bad team because it’s possible to have good data in spite of having a bad team.

One thing I’ve learned from being an entrepreneur is that being decisive is everything.

I once had lunch at a sushi restaurant with one of our vendors. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the fish but I was particularly impressed by the uni. After the meal we chatted for a few minutes in the parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a small delivery truck driving through the parking lot. In mid-conversation and without warning, I started running toward the truck.

While sprinting I managed to get my phone out and snap a photo of it. You see, while I was having the conversation I had noticed that the truck had a picture of uni on it. Naturally it had to belong to the restaurant’s supplier. After having eaten such amazing uni, I made a split-second decision to get the supplier’s information. I wanted to order uni straight from the source.

This is the actual photo I took.

I got in contact with the supplier and eventually finagled a way to purchase directly from them. Now I can get live uni straight from the source at about half the regular cost. I even host uni parties at my house, which have become quite popular.

My conversation partners definitely thought that I was strange to run off like that but the thing is, if you are really passionate about something as I am about sushi, you are willing to go to extremes in order to get what you need. I had a chance to seize the moment and I knew I might never get that opportunity again. So I had to be decisive and I had to move quickly regardless of how it might look to my vendors. Opportunities are rare and they are valuable; we have to be bold in taking advantage of them, many times trusting your gut.

 Reaping the rewards.

When we started DailyLook I asked my psychologist friend to administer a professional Myers-Briggs test to each of the founding team members. It was important to me that we understood not only ourselves but each other because it’s critical to our company’s success. It was quite interesting and helpful to learn how each of us prefers to communicate, in addition to learning why we work well in various ways.

According to the test I am Extroverted/Intuitive/Thinking/Judging (ENTJ). The most valuable lesson from this is that it helps me understand the type of leader I am. I have a strong tendency towards decisive action and execution, which is an important characteristic in a CEO. But this trait can also be one of my greatest weaknesses. Sometimes I am not in tune with others’ feelings and I can be too blunt or critical.  Running a fashion company is very different than say a software or services company, and I have to constantly keep this in mind so I can be a better leader for our team. It’s all about self awareness.  

Knowing myself and my senior leadership team better will be progressively more important as each of our jobs increases in complexity and responsibility. In addition, we’re adding members to our team as DailyLook scales up. Those new additions will have to complement and adapt to the existing personalities on the team.

Being that we are a creative AND data-driven company, I believe that we need to build teams that are in a healthy state of tension. I can’t do that if I can’t identify the right people; tools like the Myers-Briggs test help me accomplish that.

Beyond just learning about myself, I’ve also invested time into genuinely learning about the 16 other personality types. It has helped me to quickly understand and assess what individuals can work together to have a winning result. Over time, I continue to invest time in understanding strengths and weaknesses in people.

Another tool I’ve used is Strengths Finders, which helps identify your personal strengths amongst 32 characteristics.  My #1 strength is Achiever, and it explains why I can sustain endless energy to execute day in and day out. Like Myers-Briggs, Strengths Finders also helps me pick the right leadership composition to build a winning world class team. 

If you want to be an entrepreneur and grow to become a CEO, it’s incredibly important that you know yourself to a fault and understand others for what they are now and what they could be.  I recommend that you start with Myers-Briggs and Strengths Finders.  Both have helped my personal growth incredibly during this journey.