29th
Don’t be a Grin F>cker
Mark Suster wrote a great post last night, Don’t be a Grin Fucker. His post reminded me of a time when I was out raising money for PhoneTag in 2007. I will not bore you with the details but one of the VC’s I met with, David Weiden from Khosla Ventures, saw some metrics in the business that he did not like.
He could have easily sat there, smiled and sent me on my way. He had already decided that he was not going to invest. Instead he spent about a hour pulling (maybe even ripping) pieces of my business apart. When I left the meeting with him I was close to tears and angry. At first angry at him but in reality angry at myself for letting these issues fester in the business.
Over the next few weeks we turned around almost all of the things David had pointed out. Looking back if we had not done this at that time we probably would have run out of money going into the melt down of 2008 rather than going into it profitably as we did.
The below except is from Mark’s post, figured it made for a perfect ending:
“Don’t be a grin fucker. Stop the corporate bullshit when it hits your desk. You don’t have to do it as publicly and vocally as I did – in fact I don’t recommend it. But please be willing to politely and respectfully stand your ground when an internal initiative is off base or you don’t agree with it. I’ve stated previously that I believe that respectful open debate is the highest form of democracy. It also makes good business sense. Stand for high quality. Stand for holding people accountable when they’re proposing something you believe could damage the company’s reputation or waste time and resources. Make your arguments fact based.”
