Is there a level of early success in a career or firm that’s the optimal foundation for long term sustained success? Are there fields where too much success too early means a level of scrutiny that’s unhelpful? An erosion of necessary humility? A creation of incentives that lead to premature scaling?
In venture capital, firms that enjoy too much explosive success in their Fund 1 tend to be given a very long rope from LPs who automatically re-up for several subsequent funds. With a long rope, GPs can hang themselves by over scaling. Size tends to be the enemy of greatness in fund returns. I know of GPs who hit it out of the park with a $10M Fund I. Fund 2 is $200M, Fund 3 $300M, and within a decade their AUM is over a billion. The later fund returns never approach the high water mark of Fund I.
Now, of course given a binary choice, you’d rather your first fund be successful than not successful, and early success does produce advantages that compound. You can attract better talent, for example. You spend less time fundraising from LPs and thus have more time to focus on investing. And so on. So, there’s an “optimal” amount of early success that’s well north of merely average for positioning you for great long term success. But optimal but is probably less than “maximum.”
In short, a Fund 1 that returns 4x might be better for long term franchise returns than the Fund 1 that’s a 10x.
In athletics, there are plenty of examples of youth who flourish early but then wilt under the excessive scruinity their early success attracts. David Epstein’s work also points to premature specialization of youth athletes — a kid who starts to break out as a star soccer player in middle school is whisked into club teams and told to specialize. Perhaps counterintuitively, early specialization actually reduces their readiness for a long term professional career in that sport.
Finally, I’ve heard an argument that late bloomers (in whatever field, but especially artists) often experience high levels of productivity early in their career and then experience long dormant periods. They re-emerge as a late bloomer — which is when they make their signature contribution to society. If true, did something happen in their early years in which they were too productive? Could they have been a medium-length bloomer (instead of late bloomer) if they didn’t come out of the gate so strongly?
Compounding loops and the rich-get-richer effects and the early-bird-gets-the-worm effects are real and pervasive. But perhaps we don’t say often enough, about people or firms: “She has a great future but I worry she’s had too much early success…“
Many years ago, as a 15 year old, I snuck into a tech and business event in San Francisco. My basketball-ready height masked my age at events like these. (Or if it didn’t, no one ever bothered to vocalize their suspicions.) I had my schtick down: When I arrived at 5pm at the downtown venue, I registered at the front desk, grabbed a name badge, and carefully dodged the various registrants who were standing around tall tables and munching on carrots and bell peppers, pretending to be enthralled in conversation.
Once I found my way to the bathroom, I entered a stall, closed the door, and sat on the toilet. And then I waited, staring straight ahead at the beige bathroom stall door. Nature did not call but that wasn’t the point. The clock was ticking — that was the point. After about 15 minutes the networking happy hour ended, the main stage speaker took the microphone, and it was time for me to symbolically flush the non-soiled toilet and re-join the gathering to watch the speaker. At the conclusion of the formal programming, I bee-lined my way out of the hotel before the networking started up again.
I was a young entrepreneur; I had read the various business books that extolled the virtues of networking. But converting knowledge into action in this area required having answers to questions that made my palms sweaty:
Doesn’t everyone already know each other? What if the other person finds me boring? Would I ask for their contact information afterwards and if so, would that be awkward? What are you supposed to talk about?
Fast forward 21 years later and I now work in an industry (venture capital) that has me hosting and attending these sorts of previously-terrifying gatherings all the time. And I don’t mind it. (You can learn almost anything!)
Now, despite my current comfort with unstructured networking hours, I far prefer more structured gatherings. Assigned seating. Assigned speaking roles. Small groups. I tend to avoid unstructured events.
But…if you find yourself attending an unstructured networking cocktail hour, here are some tips:
Barge into existing conversations. It may seem easier to approach someone who isn’t speaking to anyone. But actually, a person who’s staring down at their phone may actually be on their phone for good reason. Instead: join a group of two already in conversation. Odds are you are not interrupting two best friends talking about confidential topics.
When you approach and turn a twosome into a threesome, just use a simple opening line: “Hey how’s it going? I’m Ben” and extend your hand for a handshake. (Until such time as we ban the stupid norm of handshakes and replace with the Japanese bow…) Another terrific thing to say, per Nick Gray, right as you join a larger conversation: “Please continue.” This avoids the awkward round of introductions among people who’ve already introduced themselves to each other. As a late joiner, you can just vibe in when the time is right.
As you’re talking to someone, don’t scan the horizon looking for someone else more interesting. Give the person you’re talking to your full attention. It’s dreadful to be on the receiving end of someone whose eyes are darting around. Let’s all treat others the way we want to be treated: give the person you’re talking to at a cocktail party your full attention. Take comfort in the knowledge that you know how to extract yourself from a conversation if necessary.
Don’t get trapped in one conversation the whole time. A common fail mode in a cocktail party setting is being unable to extract yourself in order to go talk to someone else. It can be intimidating to break off from your conversation partner and wade into the unknown until you’re find a new mate.
If you’re in a two-person conversation (you and the other person), there are two basic/obvious options: “I’m going to get a drink, it was really nice talking to you” and “I’m going to head to the restroom, it was really nice talking to you.” The advanced option? Don’t make up an excuse. Just say, “It was great talking to you. I’m sure I’ll see you around.” Put out your hand, and then wander off. And pray you don’t bump into the person a minute later before having paired off again.
If you’re in a three (or more) person conversation, it’s easier. Say: “Excuse me for one sec” and then step out and walk decisively away without waiting for a formal reply, and let the two others carry on.
If you see someone standing on their own, awkwardly, while you are in conversation with someone, invite them into your conversation. Literally gesture to the person, waving them into the circle, with the phrase, “Come join us.” If you want to be especially generous, quickly bring the new person up to speed on the conversation: “We were just talking about this book Jane read on the history of Morocco…” And if you’re feeling particularly assertive, try to keep the conversation going versus reverting into self-introductions from everyone standing in the circle – which will inevitably be repetitive for most of the people standing there.
Now… when you’re in the conversation itself:
Don’t saturate a conversation with overexplaining and drawn-out stories. Smart people are sometimes tempted to unload all their special knowledge and insight and clever explanations into a conversation. They flood the zone.
Speaking too much is the obvious sin. Don’t do that. Don’t speak for more than 60-90 seconds straight. This is true in almost any meeting context but especially true at cocktail parties or happy hours.
One version of this sin is more subtle because it’s an activity that’s otherwise lauded by experts: storytelling! Stories are indeed a great way of making a point. At their best, nothing beats them. The issue is, as Sasha Chapin has pointed out, storytelling in casual work conversation can also go horribly wrong. A story that isn’t tight quickly becomes a worse situation than boring non-story delivery of facts.
Drawn-out, painful stories are torturous in any social interaction. But it’s especially problematic in cocktail parties where there’s faster cadence expected.
Bottom Line: Try to avoid unstructured cocktail parties when you can, but if you must, consider these techniques to make your time more worthwhile. 1) Barge into existing conversations and say “Please continue” 2) Don’t scan the horizon while talking to the person, 3) Don’t get trapped in one convo, excuse yourself to “get a drink” and go find others to mingle with 4) Invite lonely stragglers into your conversation, 5) Don’t saturate cocktail conversation with overexplaining and drawn-out stories.
And if you’re hosting your own cocktail party, Nick’s book will show you how. If you want deeper frameworks on how to build your network, The Startup of You shows how.
On a collaborative team, a great employee should be a team player: helping their colleagues hit *their* individual priorities. Do favors for them, offer feedback when asked, build social capital. Whatever it takes to help the company succeed.
As Fred Kofman says, “Your job is not your job. Your job is to help the overall team/company win.” Fred’s diagnosis of much organizational dysfunction is that employees become too absorbed by their individual project list and lose sight of the common goal. His canonical example is that of a defender on a soccer team who thinks his job is to defend (not let the other team score goals) while his actual goal should be for his team to win the game.
Yet a star employee must *also* stay focused on nailing their own individual projects and KPIs. It’s possible to be too much of a team player — to the detriment of your own performance, which ultimately impacts the org and the workflows you’re responsible for. In this circumstance, you don’t set enough boundaries and you get “used” by your co-workers.
Senior, savvy operators tend to have good intuition on how to balance their time between “my KPIs” vs. “others’ KPIs”. When I’ve hired more senior people, their savviness at navigating the favor-trading dynamics that circulate inside every team — their understanding that they need to be a team player and also they need to nail their own task list and not get taken advantage of — sets them apart from less experienced folks.
It’s one of the things you pay for when hiring someone senior onto a team.
How easy is it to separate your experience of someone’s style from their substance?
By “style” I mean a person’s personality, work habits, communication patterns, and so on.
By “substance” I mean a person’s overall effectiveness, performance, intelligence, etc. in the workplace.
Many professionals assert they can work with and respect the performance of people across the stylistic range — so long as the person is substantive. Successful people who work in teams like to think of themselves as flexible on style, inflexible on substance.
But how often is this actually true in the workplace?
In my experience, our rank of people’s substance is heavily influenced by the other person’s style. People, me included, tend to think more highly of the substance of professionals who happen to share our style. In this way, style similarity or differences hinders our ability to think clearly and fairly about the substance of the people we work with.
Why, then, do so many people think they’re immune from this bias?
Because in the vast majority of interactions at work, there’s a clear power dynamic that resolves stylistic tension. If you’re the person with more power, it’s easy to steamroll over the stylistic annoyances of the other person, or to force the person to adapt stylistically to you. For example, if an ultra detail oriented boss is supervising a not-so-detail-oriented subordinate, it’s obvious who in that relationship is going to have to make some stylistic tweaks to their behavior in order for the collaboration to work. The natural difference here eases tension, clears the mind, and allows for an accurate rating of substance.
However, in situations where two people are closer to power parity, style matters hugely because the stylistic differences do not get easily resolved. Which creates friction. Which affects your ability to fairly evaluate the person’s substance. Persistent stylistic friction clouds one’s judgment of substance; it makes it harder to see reality clearly.
Take two people of roughly equivalent power levels. Both super substantive in their own respect. But introduce a significant stylistic difference: perhaps one person is extremely humble by nature and the other person extremely boastful. Or perhaps one person is highly collaborative by nature and the other person highly decisive, even authoritarian. Both are substantive, successful, thriving professionals. But these stylistic differences, impossible to fully resolve due to their equal power positions, will cause them to likely rate each other differently on substance — more so than what would be advised based on an objective, god-view of the “facts” about each person’s performance.
Bottom Line: You can more easily separate stylistic differences from an objective evaluation of substance when you’re relating to someone meaningfully more or less powerful than you. When you’re relating to a peer or partner, stylistic differences metastasize and infect your ability to objectively and honestly evaluate substance. So, be really attentive to how stylistic differences may be affecting your view of true peers.
In these Covid times, we’ve all done more video chatting than ever before. Some people love it. Some people are missing in-person.
What are the personality, cognitive, and communication style correlates with someone preferring Zoom/video chat meetings to in-person or vice versa? This is not an exhaustive list of pros and cons of video vs. in-person companies or meetings, but specific to the individual personalities of people who seem to prefer one over the other.
People who prefer in-person meetings tend to be:
Extroverts. Extroverts report that socializing makes them feel *more* energized, whereas introverts get their batteries drained and then need solitude to recharge. In-person involves more energy transfer between and among the people involved than on a Zoom — either energy addition (for extroverts) or energy subtraction. (H/t ToddS)
Kinesthetically communicative. With physical touch, hugs, slaps, rubs, hand gestures, etc.
Good at reading other people’s body language. These tend to be people with a high degree of emotional intelligence which helps them read eye contact, body gestures, and “wayfind” in a conversation through subtle cues.
Physically attractive. And aware of how to use attractiveness in the room.
More “quiet” or reserved in meetings. Because they can get shouted over or interrupted more easily on videochat. In-person it’s easier for them to signal to a group, “I want to speak.”
“Personal” relationship builders who don’t always prioritize short term efficiency. These people bridge to personal topics as well as professional ones in meetings, broaching intimate topics based on the trust that’s usually only established in-person. Even if it means going off the agenda and “wasting” time to explore these areas.
People who prefer video chat meetings tend to be:
Introverts. For the inverse of the extravert reason above. Energy transfer in-person is more draining.
Focused on efficiency and productivity in meetings in the micro sense. There’s less random chit chat on a Zoom. On a video meeting, you get straight to the agenda, usually. If you don’t love small talk, you get to skip a lot of that when doing a video meeting. Easy to do a 15 minute video call; not easy to do a 15 minute coffee meeting.
Focused on efficiency and productivity in the macro sense. You can do 12 back to back Zooms in one day. No travel time. No walking between meetings. No down time. All meetings, all the time.
People who are socially awkward in person. Or people with body image issues. If your physical appearance isn’t a plus — Zoom helps level the playing field.
People with high computer cognitive skills and good multitasking skills. They can multitask while on a Zoom and get more done. In-person, you can more easily be “caught” and seen as rude if you’re multi-tasking in a meeting.
The fourth dimension
Myself? I find a lot to like about both videochat and in person. One of our founders recently said: In-person for innovation; remote for iteration. I think that captures it well: In-person seems superior for the most complex conversations. Videochat works well for small iterations on top of an agreed plan.
I don’t think we’ll ever go back to having as many in-person meetings as we did pre-Covid, given how effective Zoom is in so many use cases.
Nonetheless, I suspect that when people return to sustained in-person interaction, post-Covid, they’ll realize just how unsatisfying so many of their video calls are in comparison. They’ll remember the richness of being in person. I’ve certainly experienced this in the outdoor meeting I’ve participated in since Covid.
I’m reminded of a Po Bronson line: “Physical affection is a fourth dimension: You can get through life without ever knowing that it’s there, but it sure adds something to the experience when you open up to it.”
