Exploring the personal and professional practices of startup CEOs
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Turing Fest 2020
360 Degree Leadership
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Hello everyone, my name is Mark McLeod and it's a real pleasure to be speaking with you here today. You can't tell from my accent, but I'm Scottish and I lived there till I was eleven years old. Unfortunately, I'm from the same island as Donald Trump's mother, but we'll ignore that.
The point of all this is I've been a fan of touring fest for a long time and it's a real pleasure to be part of it here this year. I only wish it was in person and hopefully it will be in the future.
I'm here today to speak with you about what I call three sixty degree leadership. I'll briefly give an introduction to myself and more importantly set up the topic. And then I'd like to share with you seven practices that I recommend for you personally as leaders and seven practices for you to adopt within your company.
A little bit about myself. You know the most important thing, I'm Scottish. I've been in the venture capital backed startup world since nineteen ninety nine. I spent fourteen years as CFO for a number of companies, including Shopify. I was there through the series A and series B funding rounds.
FreshBooks where I led finance, business development and corporate development. I was one of the original general partners in Real Ventures, was and still is today Canada's largest seed stage venture fund. For the past five years, I founded and ran SurePath Capital Partners, an investment bank based in Toronto, Canada and San Francisco focused exclusively on companies like Shopify and Fresh Books.
So SaaS companies that serve the small and mid sized business market. And just this year, I launched a coaching practice focused exclusively on the CEOs of venture capital and private equity funded companies. And throughout all of those roles, whether as a CFO acting as a right hand to a CEO, a VC investing in CEOs, or an investment banker helping CEOs make the most important decisions in their startup journeys lives and realize big outcomes.
The thing that I enjoyed the most was being a right hand sounding board to those CEOs. And so this kind of pivot towards coaching has just been a natural evolution that I've been working on for the last twenty two years. So let's kind of just set the table for today's topic.
What is three sixty degree leadership? Three sixty is really simple. It's all of you. It's your personal, your professional, you know, you are a human being with feelings, emotions, and all of that shows up at work. If things are falling apart in your personal life, that will manifest in how you show up at work and vice versa.
And so to be the best leader that you can, you need to work on the totality of yourself. You need to work on your personal aspects and you need to work on the business side. And then leadership is a simple but powerful concept.
It's really inspiring and motivating others to achieve specific outcomes. And the most scalable path to leading a high growth company is creating a company that is full of leaders, full of people who like yourself, feel ownership, act like owners, feel autonomy, feel empowered and have the context and skills necessary to make great decisions so that you do not make all the decisions.
What do all these founders and CEOs have in common? First of all, they're all white males. That's unfortunately a topic for another time. They all have achieved massive outcomes, all don't have to work a day in their lives and yet they still do.
And all have led their company from start to finish. What I've observed over a couple of decades now in startup world is the biggest outcomes are almost all universally founder led, start to finish. And so there's almost a hundred percent correlation between your performance as CEO and the outcome and trajectory of your startup.
And so this is why I've chosen to work exclusively with the CEOs of venture backed and private equity backed companies to help them achieve the best and the most that's possible for them so that they do achieve those outsized outcomes. And so there's just five folks here, but this is a pattern I've seen very consistently, like I say, over a couple of decades now.
The biggest outcomes are almost universally founder led, start to finish. And, you know, the fact is good things take time. You know, Shopify is in its sixteenth year. Kind of this bottom column probably contains some startups that you you use in your company today, all of which have been around for a long time.
I think if you read TechCrunch too much, you think that companies are built start to finish in three to four years and that happens sometime, but for the most part it doesn't and good things just take a long time. Before getting into the practises, I just wanna share with you my thesis for CEO growth and the link between CEO growth and company growth.
And the thesis is as follows. Can read all the books, all the blog posts, can have all the advisors and mentors, but nothing will unlock your growth as a leader more than unlocking revenue growth in your business and hanging on for dear life.
And the fact is that year on year revenue growth is all else being equal, the single biggest driver of valuation in your business. It's the thing that will attract investors in your business, it's the thing that will scare the crap out of strategic buyers and have them want to buy your business.
And I would argue it's also the thing that acts as a magnet to attract the best talent. And when you can unlock growth, there's this like virtuous cycle that gets unlocked. And Shopify and their leader Toby is gonna show up a couple of times in today's talk, but you know, eight years ago, Toby was running a twenty three million dollar business.
Last year, that business did one point five billion dollars. You know, these companies bear no resemblance to each other. And, you know, Toby talked often about having to requalify for his job every year and nothing will have changed. There's like this virtuous cycle that gets unlocked where the reason why Toby is such a great CEO is because he's been through this journey, right, from twenty three million to one point five billion and whatever they'll do this year.
The reason why Shopify is such a great and valuable company is because Toby is such a great CEO. So it's just like this virtuous cycle that gets unlocked. And so the key more than anything else to transforming yourself as a leader is unlocking revenue growth in your company and hanging on for dear life.
So let's get into the practices and start with the personal because this is the foundation. You cannot get the most out of your company until you've gotten the most out of yourself. First and foremost, have the right motivation. As I mentioned earlier, good things tend to take time And this graph depicts, I think pretty accurately what startup life is like.
It is not a straight line up into the right. The fact is there are peaks and valleys and probably more valleys than peaks. And you need the right motivation to get you through that crazy ride. If you started a company because there's a big market and you think you'll make lots of money, that's just not the right motivation.
That's not gonna get you through those dark days and those existential crises that are just part of the startup journey. If you've built a product and you're in love with that solution, you know, you may be closed to other possibilities and get disrupted in time by someone else who isn't attached to the solution that they built.
In my experience, the right motivation is that you're just in love with the problem. You are compelled or called to work on this problem. And if that's truly what motivates you to start your company, that will give you that is sustainable and that will keep you going through all the dark days and feed you.
There's a concept in Japan called ikigai. And, you know, if you find a purpose and work on something that is at the intersection of what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for and what you're actually good at. First of all, you will feel like you're never working a day in your life.
You'll just be working on your purpose, your reason for being, and that will feed you like nothing else. And so I really encourage you to think about whether you're what you are working on or what you are thinking about working on. Does it check all of those boxes? Is it something I love?
Does the world really need it? Can I make money doing it? And am I good at it? Practice number two, set intentional boundaries and priorities. The fact is, and I've experienced this myself, I'm sure you have to, work will expand to fill all the time that you give it.
If you allocate eighty hours per week for work, guess what? You're gonna be working eighty hours. If you allocate fifty hours, my hunch is you probably will get ninety percent of what you would have gotten done in the eighty hours, done in fifty.
There's also an important thing to think about in the context of high growth startups, particularly ones that have raised venture capital. The fact is, is most startups fail. And if you defer your life, if you intentionally say I'm just gonna work and you go to your partner, you'd be like, listen, I'm doing this for a period of time and I need to sacrifice and it's all about work and you spend less time with your partner, less time with your friends, less time with your family.
If your startup fails, will you look back on that with regret? If so, then I would say it's important to carve out time for all the most important priorities in your life and really recognize what is most important to you. What feeds you?
Maybe it's taking time to read, maybe it's getting out of nature, spending time with your family. Do those things first. Work will fill in the rest of the time. But if you have done those things that truly feed you first, my belief and I've lived this myself is you will show up more energized, motivated, fulfilled and actually accomplish more in shorter periods of time than if you had just woken up and opened up the computer and just piled into work.
A thing about time. Many people think we have to, it's the startup hustle, we got to put in those eighty hours a week and if we don't, then somebody else is. But here's the thing, not all hours are equal. If you put in eighty hours a week, you know, there's diminishing marginal return on those hours over time.
There's only so much creativity, only so much inspiration that you have. And so I would argue that if you're putting in forty or fifty hours, those are likely higher quality hours than if you're putting in the eighty. So just don't fall into this trap like, well everyone else is doing it so I've got to do it.
Focus on output, focus on results, don't focus on input meaning hours. Practice number three, work on your mindset. You know, the fact is we only experience the world through our subjective perception. We simply cannot experience it objectively. If you have a glass half full mindset, you will see the world, the exact same situation, the exact same context, very differently than someone who has a glass half empty mindset.
And the startup journey is a long one, it's a crazy one, there will be inevitably highs and lows and therefore how you perceive those is really, really important. And the fact is gratitude is both powerful for yourself and contagious because others will see it and feel it and be grateful as well.
And this is a thing that comes up with the CEOs that I work with all the time. Many of them recognize that they have a lot to be grateful for, but don't really take the time to acknowledge that until it comes up in our conversation.
I'm a Buddhist and so gratitude, daily gratitude is a part of my practice and so I've seen the power of this firsthand and this is why I bring it up with my clients. In many cases, I advocate, journaling, something I've done for most of my adult life.
And many of my clients are kind of not ready to just pick up a blank book and start writing free form. And so I've recommended this book, The Five Minute Journal. As the name implies, it's, five minutes a day, but it really helps you capture the essence of the day, including what you're most grateful for.
And so, it's something I recommend if you're new to journaling and curious about it, and if you too would like to feel more gratitude in each and every day. You know, creating space in your mind is so important. We have never ending email messages, app notifications, Slack messages, you you name it.
And our brains are bombarded and overwhelmed. And you will only have creativity and inspiration and great decision making if you can create space. Again, as a Buddhist, I meditate daily. I don't think you need to be spending tons of time on the mat, but having some sort of practice and some sort of daily practice, even if it's a minute a day, five minutes a day, is super powerful.
There's a couple of apps here that I recommended, that can help you get started if this is something that you're curious about. Number four, connect with your peers. You know, I often joke that startups are like sausages, they taste good but you just don't wanna know how they're made.
And all startups of all shapes and sizes struggle. Nobody's a straight line up into the right. And what I've observed is startups exist in one of two states. They're either struggling to create growth or they're struggling to keep up with growth. There's almost no in between.
And as a CEO, you feel alone and you feel a bit crazy and you probably feel imposter syndrome and you feel like you're the only one who doesn't have it figured out. The fact is nobody's got it figured out. And so it's really important to connect with other CEOs because you'll realize that and you'll get tips from each other.
Similarly, get support. The stakes are high. If you've raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, you are mandated to create an outcome worth hundreds of millions. Get a coach, get a therapist, surround yourself with the people and resources that you need in order to thrive.
Number six, prioritise physical health. You know, we often identify with our brains, with our minds, because that's the thing that's going all the time. But the fact is there's this big body that's much, much larger than our brains and it's meant to be moved.
And startup life is a marathon, it's not a sprint and therefore physical health is super important. So what does that mean? First of all, well, move every day. Include some resistance training a few times a week, but move your body every day, eat real natural food, not packaged garbage, emphasize sleep, try and get seven hours of sleep a day and try and minimize alcohol if you can.
Practice number seven, explicitly make time for fun. We're in a bit of a crazy time at the moment, so we can't get together and party with each other. But nevertheless, making time for true explicit fun, no other agenda, no purpose other than having fun.
Super important, super restorative. Let's move on to company practices. First and most important, get the right people on the bus. The single most important thing that you can do, the single highest leverage thing that you can do as CEO is build the strongest senior leadership team that you can.
If you do that, it's going give you maximum leverage. You will have the best leaders, which means that they will drive their functions really well and achieve great results. They will also be a magnet for great talent, which enables this virtuous cycle. Great team members achieve better results, attract better team members, achieve even better results and so on and so on.
Once you've built that team, align them, you know, your leaders and align the whole company around mission, vision and values. You know, mission and vision speak to why we are here. I think more and more, especially in these crazy times, everyone is looking for meaning and authenticity and purpose.
They don't just want a paycheck, they want to work for some greater good. And so mission and vision are super important. Values are often the biggest source of disagreement and conflict, certainly between co founders, but I would argue, you know, companies at large.
And, you know, I've included a list here, take a photo of it, take a screenshot of it. And I would encourage you as an exercise to look at those and think which ones resonate with me, which ones are most important to me, and are they consistent with the values in my company?
Are they consistent in the values that my co founders have? This is just a really important foundational exercise. Number three, communicate over and over and over again. More senior you are, this doesn't just apply to CEOs, but the more senior you are and the bigger your company is, the more that your role is strictly a communications role.
You need to be communicating through every channel, every opportunity, constantly reinforcing why we're here, vision, mission, purpose, values, priorities. And this is especially important if you do unlock hyper growth. If you haven't spoken with your team, meaning the whole team, the company in a month, there's gonna be a whole bunch of people who've just come on board in that month who've never heard from you ever.
And so basically, if you're not sick of hearing your own voice, you're not speaking enough. Number four, operate at the right altitude. Many CEOs who come to me come because they're overwhelmed. They have too much going on, their brain is full, they can't keep up with the growth of the company.
And often that's because they're operating at the wrong altitude. They're just two in the weeds. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures came up with what I think is the best articulation of the role of a CEO. And it's really simple. It's three things to set an articulated vision and communicate that vision, build the strongest senior leadership team that you can and make sure the company doesn't run out of cash.
If you're working on those three priorities, then I would argue that regardless of the size of your company, you will have the space to keep up and the space to be strategic and to have impact. For many of you perhaps your calendar looks like this and it is because I would argue you're at the wrong altitude.
You've just got meeting on top of meeting, overlapping meetings, you're trying to squeeze in lunch here and there and everywhere. And you need to distribute and scale decision making. Many CEOs, especially founders just love to be the hero, love to swoop in and make decisions, but you will blow up.
And so you need to enable your senior leaders and the people below them to make decisions that are consistent with the ones that you would make. And you do that by making sure they constantly know vision values, purpose and priorities, and making sure you obviously have the right and best available team members.
One simple tactic is what I call the barbell approach. This can apply to meetings, it can apply to projects. If you think about where as a CEO you need to be involved, you need to be involved upfront to define success. What does success look like for this project?
What are we trying to achieve in this meeting? And then at the end, did we achieve that? That whole messy middle, you don't need to be involved in. So there's like an hour long status meeting on a project, pop in at the beginning to reinforce values or pop in at the end and just see where are we at and is this consistent with the success criteria that I laid out at the beginning of this project.
Practice number six, work on the business, not in it. This is related to what I was saying earlier about altitude. If you are in the weeds, if you are in the critical path, driving a function, making day to day operating decisions, you're just not at the right altitude.
Now in the super early stage pre product market fit, none of this applies. This is all about in the scaling, the growth stage. But once you're into scaling, think of your company as the product and what features, functionality does it need? The analogy I use is like clearing the forest.
You are out ahead of the company chopping down trees and clearing the path so that as the rest of the company comes through, they can come through at maximum speed. So you're not playing an instrument, you are the conductor of this orchestra and making it Final practice, have a roadmap for yourself.
In the same way that your product has a roadmap, you need a roadmap for yourself. As I mentioned earlier, Toby from Shopify talked about having to re qualify for his job every year. And if you think about that journey that he went through from twenty three million to one point five billion in revenue, he clearly has transformed many, many times over.
How do you do this? You know, look objectively to the extent that you can and think about what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses, am I going to double down on my strengths, am I going to develop my weaknesses while I hire around my weaknesses?
And kind of fundamentally based on the size of company that we're trying to be a year from now, what and who do I need to be as a leader in order to continue to be relevant at that scale? And I'll end with a mantra and a practice that again, Toby from Shopify embodied every day.
Toby's mantra was, I wanna be one percent better every day. If you graph that, which I've done over an approximately two hundred business day a year, you will improve sevenfold. That is transformational, especially if done year after year. So this sounds great, but how do you actually do this?
Toby's practice was pretty simple. Every night when he went home, he would replay his day, he had almost a photographic capability to visualise and replay it like it was a movie. And he would note what he did well, he would note what he did not do well, He would show up the next day and speak to people that he had met with the day before and acknowledge, made this mistake, this is what I should have done.
And he would improve every single day. And there was a coaching culture that was created. He had invested in coaches early on. He invested in coaches for his entire exec team and they eventually built a coaching function inside the company. So that everyone would go through this personal growth roadmap and become one percent better every day.
And I'd say the results there speak for themselves. There you have it, those are the practices. I wanna thank you for tuning in. I hope we meet in person at this event in the future. And until then, I invite you to contact me at any of these channels.
Thank you so much. That was a fantastic talk, felt, and a lot of stuff in there to dive into with Mark. We're gonna bring him back in live now. So if you've got questions, just fire them across on the app. Thanks very much for that talk.
Tremendous stuff. Mean, so many good points in there. It's kind of hard to know where start. But maybe one that stands out from early on is about which I was surprised by, actually. He said the biggest outcomes in startups are almost always from founders that go all the way from inception to, well, the exit of the company or the hyper growth, the massive stage that some of them can get to.
That seems to be at odds with, I guess, the mythology around startups. And certainly from an investor perspective, you hear a lot of investors talking about can founders make it all the way? What's your view? What do you think is it the passion that founders have that is the key thing?
Or is it only particular exceptional people that can scale themselves along the journey? Yeah, that's a great question, Brian. I mean, many elements to it. First of all, to be clear, most startups fail, right? Yeah. And venture capital actually only adds to that.
It's steroids and if applied correctly can achieve great things, but it can also blow up and otherwise perfectly functioning company. So that's important, you know, context. And so there is a general concern about founders and whether they can go all the way, because most can't, right?
But the ones that do the companies that do hit escape velocity almost universally, they are founder led start to finish. And that's a combination of, you know, absolutely incredible, motivated founders, you'll talk, they're completely obsessed with the problem. It's a mission for them.
So therefore, they're just gonna always be working on it, always improving. They do unlock revenue growth. You could be the most amazing CEO, but if you build a company that is just too early for the market, you're not gonna achieve a big outcome.
Right? Because the market's not ready. So that brings up a huge element, is luck and timing. Right? So, you need all of those elements as well. So it's it's a real mixed bag, but there's nothing structurally that prevents a smart founder from becoming a CEO, you know, and becoming that true world class CEO.
But, you know, as I mentioned, the thing that will unlock their capability and that transformation more than anything else is going through massive revenue growth. Yeah. Yeah. And you saw that with Toby and and the Shopify journey. We and we've had a similar, I guess a similar outcome from out of Scotland a few years ago.
We had Skyscanner go from being a three person team at the beginning all the way through that hyper growth journey. And that was led by Gareth Williams. He was the CEO from start to finish. We've another great company locally that you're probably aware of, Free Agent, who have had a similar thing with the three founders, have been part of the journey the whole way.
Thinking about you mentioned the longevity as well. Mean, of those companies, off the top of my head, FreeAgent's probably thirteen, fourteen years old. I think Skyscanner, by the time they exited, was probably about fourteen years old as well. The longevity, again, you make a good point about TechCrunch and the insta startup success that we all hear about all the time.
Do you think founders are prepared generally for the longevity that's probably ahead of them? I mean, for some, it's a short journey, right? And all ends pretty soon. But for the people that make it, they're in there for ten plus years mostly. Yeah, I would say many are not.
And so a lot of CEOs that come to me, come to me in crisis mode. They are just up to here. They are at full capacity and the startup is still in the early stages relative to their ambition. And so part of this is, you know, I'm a CrossFit athlete and in a CrossFit workout, if you come out too hot, you just won't last, you'll blow up.
And it's the same thing in the startup world, right? If you start putting in these eighty, hundred hour a week kind of better work schedules, you're not gonna go thirteen years. Right? You just it's physically impossible. You'll just blow up. And so part of it is pacing yourself.
Part of it is a huge part of it is having the right team. You know, many CEOs carry all of the burden on their shoulders. And, the tragic mix where the CEO is just completely overwhelmed and the senior leaders beneath that CEO actually want more autonomy, more scope, more responsibility.
It's completely unbalanced. So, you know, a whole host of things. But long story short, if you try and do a marathon at a sprint pace, you'll fail. You know, periods will stop. Yeah, yeah, agreed. It's interesting to hear you talking as well about things like sleep and diet.
It feels like even, I don't know, five, ten years ago, these were not things that anybody was talking about in the startup world. It feels like we've kind of moved away from that, like hyper aggressive, you've got to work thirty five hours a day, you know, kind of insanity that Silicon Valley was kind of pumping out a few years ago.
We're getting a bit more balanced now. We're getting a bit more real. That can only be a good thing, right? A hundred percent. I think, this mythology of, you know, I'll sleep when I die is total ******** doesn't serve anyone. You know, the fact is if you think about the expectations that are on these founders and these executive teams, like, I don't know if you've noticed, but, like, funding rounds are getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Like, a series a today is like a series b a few years ago. And you just, oh, yeah, this company just raised another thirty million bucks, like, whatever. But, like, for venture capital math to work, that thirty has to turn into a hundred.
And that's just from one funding round. And so I kinda liken the expectations on these founders to be the same as on professional athletes. And so professional athletes are going to surround themselves with performance coaches, nutrition consultants, mindset coaches, you know, everything. They'll do anything and everything to promote their performance.
And I think it's the same thing for for venture backed CEOs. And I actually think all this with COVID has given us pause to recognize like what truly matters in life. And that I maybe do need to have a more balanced perspective and, you know what, I'm probably going a little bit crazy if I've got a little kid at home and I'm working in the room next door.
But it's been really nice to see my kid a lot, you know, so I think it's given everyone a different perspective as well. Yeah, yeah, agreed. You mentioned coaching there, which is something that you've gotten into over the past couple of years. And it's something I hear CEOs and founders talking more and more about these days and thinking more about when's the right time?
Yeah. I kind of, it's a good question. I I break the startup journey into two big phases. One is pre pre product market fit and then post. And that's an oversimplification, but it's important for this question because pre product market fit, nothing matters other than achieving product market fit.
When I was a seed stage venture capitalist, I would tell the founders I've just packed like, I don't want take anything away from what you've accomplished, but you don't have a company yet. You have a project that's going to become a product. And if we launch the product and the market likes it, we'll build a company around it.
Meaning, forget your fancy title. Maybe I have a right to a board seat, but I'm not going to sit on the board. I just want you a hundred percent focused on achieving product market fit. So pre product market fit is not the time for a coach, even though it's a really challenging stage, you know, you're still trying to figure out if your company deserves to exist or not.
I actually think once you're into scaling, that's when all the challenges and opportunities of company building and being a CEO kind of, emerge. And so so that's really, I think the time. You know, as soon as you start building a leadership team, as soon as you start transition from doing to oversteeing, you know, from playing an instrument in the orchestra to being the conductor.
Yeah. That's the time because, everything changes. Yeah. So is there a, I guess there isn't a number you can put on that. But, you know, it's, I guess, startups have those different phases and stages, under ten people, ten to twenty, then fifty people, then one hundred people.
It sounds like maybe you're talking about maybe that twenty to fifty person phase is maybe where this becomes something that becomes a real tool for founders. Yeah, it's probably a good start. You know, most of my companies are quite a bit larger, but I have some that are probably in that fifty person phase and aligning fifty people is hard at any time.
I think it's especially hard when they're not in the same room. So yeah, there's there's real challenges that emerge today even at fifty people. Yeah. The hardest thing of startups is people. Right? You you mentioned In life, everything in life boils down to people.
Yeah. For sure. Which, you know, that's a good thing, I think, the end. The best leader who would you say are the best leaders that you've worked with and why? Or or what are the best traits they had? Yeah. A hundred hands down, Toby from Shopify, you know.
He's here and everyone else is going to lower down. And to be clear, right, there is a chicken and egg aspect, right. And as I mentioned in the talk, the reason why Toby is such a great CEO is because he went through all the scale that Shopify went through.
It's not like he was that amazing CEO when he started the company, he changed and he is still changing, which really brings up, I think the single biggest component of being able to achieve that change, which is self awareness. You know, I think many CEOs have, first of all, human beings have egos, and some amount of ego is healthy, and some amount.
And, you know, the startup kind of culture is everyone's crushing it. They walk around telling everyone they're crushing it. And the reality is most are not. And so if you have this kind of force field on, you're not necessarily open to learning and seeing things as they really are.
And self, the atomic unit of progress in a startup is the rate at which you learn. And self awareness promotes much more rapid learning. And, you know, it is not a coincidence. I don't know if you've ever seen Toby speak, He's very introverted. And Yeah.
There's a huge correlation between people who are introverted and people who are self aware. So if you were to come up with, hey, what is like the stereotypical persona of a charismatic CEO? It's not Toby. It's painful, you know, for him to to lead and put himself out there.
But that self awareness is a superpower. Yeah. For sure. And at the other end of the scale, worst practices that you've seen, you don't need to name names. I mean, you can, but you don't have to. What, you know, worst practices? Yeah. Yeah. What's to be avoided?
Oh, man, that's a whole other talk. Cancel the rest of your agenda. And let's just, let's rip into that. I mean, I think a big part of it is like making it about me. Like the best leaders say we, we achieved this, we are doing that.
This is our priorities. The worst leaders is like, this is what I wanna do. I have made this decision. I believe we should go in this direction. Like, that's like, I just wanna throw up, you know, like, that's a real turn off. It's not scalable.
It manifests in a whole bunch of different ways. I think that it makes the best people not want to work with you or not want to stay. It demotivates people. It also blows up the CEO because that person go and swoop in and make every decision.
And that just doesn't scale, you know, at a certain point, you'll blow up. So tons of other things, but that would be the big one that stands out for me. Yeah. Yeah, that all makes sense. Something that you've come back to a few times in your talk and again in this chat is about identifying weaknesses, and self awareness.
As a leader, as someone who's trying to build a team of people to follow them into battle, suppose, really, how do you identify your weaknesses? Is that perhaps different for different people, but how much of that is an internal process, a self driven process versus what what other frameworks or when do you need third parties, that kind of thing?
Yeah. I mean, it it's a mix. Ideally, you know, senior leaders, whether in the CVR role or other roles, show up to that with a reasonable degree of self awareness. But, know, as I mentioned in the talk, nobody can see the world truly objectively.
So we need help standing where we are weak or not. Yep. And so that could be tactically things like, I do for many of the CEOs, I'll do a thing called a three sixty review. So once a year, I will actually meet and interview all the direct folks who report to them.
So the senior leadership team, I will interview the board of directors, and get feedback. And it's a structured way to provide the CEO with a three sixty degree view of his or her leadership. And so that type of thing can be applied, you know, to other roles as well.
So that's definitely a thing. And a lot of it shows up like going back to what I was saying earlier about how the atomic unit of progress in a startup is the rate of learning. I think the best performance reviews are forward looking and focused on potential and get a rearview mirror and like you did this badly and blah, blah, blah.
I think any rearview mirror looking should be done in the moment at the completion of a project, not once a year, you know, give me the feedback right away so I can learn and grow right away. And maybe, maybe the last thing I'll say is like, while it's important to know your weaknesses, I don't think it's actually the best strategy to emphasize correcting them.
Instead, double down on your strengths and your superpowers, and surround yourself with people who fix those weaknesses. And so I'll again go to Shopify, right? If you've Toby super introverted, his right hand leader Harley completely in the other direction as extroverted as it gets.
He's a force of nature. Toby didn't try and become someone he wasn't. He acknowledged like, I'm introverted, and it's all good. And he hired Harley and, the results speak for themselves. Yeah, for sure. Mark, thank you so much. That's been it's a great talk and a fascinating chat as well.
So thanks. Thanks for joining us. And maybe we'll get you back to back to the homeland next year. I would love that. Thank you so much for having me, Brian. And kudos for pulling this off. I know it was challenging and this is a crazy environment.
So thank you for having me. Take care. Thanks, Mark. Cheers. Okay, folks. So that that's a wrap for for day one. Day one of the first week of eight weeks. So we're we're up and running, but we've a lot more to come. For for this Thursday, we've got roundtables, which you can sign up for within the the event app.
And we've also got a chat with Eamonn Carey from Techstars, to my mind, one of the most interesting interesting people in the startup scene in the UK and actually operating on a sort of pan European level at the moment. He's got a new fund that he's running alongside Techstar.
So loads of interesting stuff to talk to Eamon about. And the other thing as well is our partners are are are on the platform. Do go check them out. Go talk to them. None of this would be happening if we didn't have those partners involved.
So, a big thank you to them. And a big thank you to our first three speakers of TuringFest twenty twenty. We're off to a flyer. And I'll see you all soon on Thursday.