Founders are Made, Not Born: How Founders Become Learning Animals (Part VI)
Part VI: Breaking the “Vulnerability ←→ Confidence Tradeoff” Myth
This is the “Founders are Made, not Born: How Founders Become Learning Animals” series, based on my Stanford Masters of Education research about founders & learning. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Extensions: Parts 7 and 8.
Teams look to founders and CEOs for answers. They expect confidence in those answers. But during our conversations founders repeatedly said they felt a tension between optimizing for learning, which required being vulnerable with stakeholders, and presenting themselves confidently to all the stakeholders they needed to show up for — including board members, advisors, VCs and teammates.
This wasn’t isolated to the earliest stages. Founders at all stages highlighted the issue. (Imposter syndrome is real, many of us fake until we make it).
I decided to call this the “Vulnerability / Confidence Tradeoff” because so many founders described this tradeoff as impacting their learning.
“Learning is almost inherently being vulnerable. It’s hard to choose what depth of vulnerability to show at any moment — which affects how much you’ll learn. I know that it was hard for me to show. I heard VCs talking about other founders saying well they didn’t know XYZ. It’s made me afraid of being more vulnerable with them.”
Anonymous
This was a recurring theme, the difficulty founders sometimes felt in being completely transparent with their investors
“VCs are difficult — it’s hard to be open and transparent with your VC — they have expectations of you. They don’t always want to see how the sausage is made.”
Anonymous
This isn’t unique to investor relationships. Founders described how even asking non-board member, informal advisors could be daunting
“I didn’t want to ask my mentor how to set up a bank account because I felt like it might waste their time or they wouldn’t know how to respond. There is something about going up to these big people that feels awkward.”
Anonymous
and…
“I’m working through the insecurity and reality of needing to skill-up.”
Anonymous
and…
“It requires a lot of vulnerability to ask for help for yourself.”
Anonymous
Founders and executive coaches described how transparent or smart communication and practicing switching quickly between showing confidence and vulnerability could help overcome this obstacle.
“This conflict can be solved with smart communication — saying ‘This is what I know and this is what I want to find out’.”
Enhao Li, Co-founder of the Female Founder School
and...
“Great founders are constantly asking questions and can switch back and forth quickly between self assuredness and awareness that they don’t know something. I believe that to really learn, founders have to be willing to connect to different stakeholder groups without judgement. One way to think about this is suspending assumptions. Founder should suspend judgement of investors and employees, and vice versa. Founders get themselves into trouble when they think they know who is on the other side of the table rather than really listening.”
Lenore Champagne, Executive Coach
To summarize, tips for navigating the vulnerability / confidence tradeoff include:
- Smart Communication — clearly state what you do and don’t know
- Practice switching between higher confidence (assuredness) and lower confidence (vulnerability) mode
- Suspend assumptions about the other person’s agenda
The End — Reflections
Throughout writing this series and the interviews I reflected on how founders in many ways are like elite athletes. They do the impossible — they break through walls fortified by large incumbents and government regulations, they convince high level executives and hundreds of people to follow a dream while getting paid less, and they create new experiences for the masses.
Elite athletes have regimens, physical and mental, that coaches guide them through every month. I’m not the first to say but I’ll say it again — I’m not sure that founders’ psychology, and specifically how they learn to get better at their roles, receives enough attention.
The End — Thank Yous
If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read these posts. This six-part series was immensely fun to work on. A HUGE thank you to everyone who took time out of their busy schedules to speak with me, a student at the time, who had nothing to offer you. Your insights were incredibly valuable.
If you enjoyed reading this and are like me, a total nerd when it comes to mental shifts and understanding founder psychology, don’t hesitate to reach out: mbent@lsvp.com
