JF
Josh Foreman
InDebted · EP 32
His biggest regret is "the times where you haven't trusted the instinct as much." VCs he respected told him his pricing model sucked; he attempted to rebuild it 15 times; ten years later "it's the same freaking pricing model that it was when we started."
See Josh Foreman's full take
The self-doubt mechanism is specific: "you meet people that you overwhelmingly respect, and then they say something" that keeps you up at night. But a person who meets you for 15 minutes has spent 15 minutes; a founder has spent 50,000 hours in front of clients, customers and investors. The wasted detours cost more than time and emotional energy — "it also causes you to make the wrong hire... and when you make the wrong hire, you waste $1 million or $5 million."
The lesson isn't that founders are always right — "that doesn't mean you're perfect on it." It's that your intuition about how the machine operates and how the company should move forward deserves more weight than a confident stranger's snap opinion, especially when the conflict is not on data but on the aura of the person saying it.
PH
Phung, Daniel and Hanson
SipHRD · EP 12
Three answers: Hanson said "being patient and not losing hope"; Phung said "Progression over perfection... especially being the person creating the content"; and Daniel said "embarrassment is the cost of entry."
See Phung, Daniel and Hanson's full take
Each founder gave a different lesson they wish they'd heard earlier. Phung's was "progression over perfection" — "especially being the person creating the content," because "not all of my content is going to be the best of the best," and "just pushing out content and being out there" is "better than just ensuring that everything is curated and perfect." She added that in a startup "things move really really fast and you have to be really quick with um decision making" — "even if we're going to make a mistake, it's something that we can always ultimately fix." Daniel's was "embarrassment is the cost of entry," because "if you're too afraid to start learning a new skill" out of fear you'll "make a fool of yourself, you're never ever going to master that skill" — "that goes for business and in life as well."