The Case for a Relationship-Driven Life

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Welcome to The Startup Solution and “The Case for a Relationship-Driven Life.” I’m Heidi Roizen from Threshold Ventures.

This is the final episode of season three, and I’m going to use that as an excuse to talk about something that I think can be downright life-changing. Not only for how you work but how you live. And not only for startup entrepreneurs, but for virtually anybody.

I realize that sounds like a tall order, but I’m confident I can deliver. Because, as Will Ferrell said in Anchorman, I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal.

I am actually kind of a micro-celebrity when it comes to this topic – if you’re willing to extend micro-celebrity status to the subject of a Harvard Business School case.

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Many years ago, a Harvard professor wanted to write a case about how to build a business network. She wanted a female protagonist and had read an article in USA Today that described me as a Silicon Valley super connector. So, she contacted me about collaborating on the case. To be honest, I thought it was a silly topic for a case because most of what I did seemed like common sense to me. But she said trust me, common sense isn’t all that common. So, we did a bunch of interviews, the case was written, and much to my surprise, it’s still being taught in many top business schools around the world 20 years later. And I know this because every once in a while, I’ll get a couple dozen LinkedIn requests, all from students at the same school, and I’ll think, well, they just had my case.

I have to say, I never would have guessed that the case would remain popular for so long, or have such a big impact on me as well. I’ve met tons of interesting people as a result of it.

And because of the case, I get asked all the time for advice about building a business network. So, I decided to take some of the best answers I’ve come up with and distill them into actionable advice.

And that’s what I’m going to share with you right now.

. . .

I actually don’t like the way the case is positioned as advice to help you build and maintain a business network. To me, business networking sounds kind of slimy, like using people to monkey bar to your next deal or job opportunity. I prefer to, instead, think of this as advice for building a relationship-driven life, as opposed to one that’s transaction-driven.

In a relationship-driven life, the people are more important than any individual transaction. And as it turns out, not only is this mindset good for your work life, it’s also a pretty good way to live your personal life, too. And, if you believe, as I do, that happiness boils down to meaningful work and meaningful relationships, then it’s even a roadmap for how to end up a happier human being. How’s that for a reason to keep listening for ten more minutes?

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Let’s start with the first simple step. Make yourself easy to find. At a minimum, that means presenting yourself well on LinkedIn. I have mixed feelings about social media, but if you’re a social media poster, that can also be an avenue for allowing who you are to shine – just be careful that the shine doesn’t turn into a dumpster fire – and if you want to dive deeper into my thoughts about social media, please listen to the episode called "The Case of the Social Media Meltdown." Particularly for those of you earlier in your careers, put the link to your LinkedIn profile in your email signature line, so knowing more about you becomes one easy click away for anyone you email with.

Step two, before you meet someone new, do your homework. It’s mystifying to me when I’m interviewing someone for a job, and they clearly haven’t bothered to learn a single thing about me. Sure, maybe I’m not relevant specifically for the job you’re interviewing for because I’m just a board member, and you won’t report to me. But hey, I’m a gatekeeper, and don’t you want to make me feel like opening that gate?

On the other hand, when someone starts by saying, for example, that they really appreciated a particular episode of my podcast because they learned something that they were able to put to use, that not only gives us a conversation starter but it tells me that the person cared about this interview enough to do some homework. Just to be clear, this isn’t about winning someone over with ego-stroking. It’s about finding a way to start a human connection. And that’s a whole lot easier when you do a little homework ahead of time to sleuth out what those connections might be.

Step three is to make yourself easy to help. We humans are social animals wired to help each other, and throughout my life, I’ve found that people generally want to be helpful. But even those who want to be helpful are often super busy – in fact, some of the most helpful people are also the busiest!

Here’s the thing – what I find most people do when they ask for help, is they tend to use the minimum amount of their own time to articulate the request. But if they want to be successful at getting the help, what they should do is use just a bit more of their own time, to think about ways to minimize the amount of time that the helper will need to use to fulfill the request.

. . .

Let me give you an example. Let’s say I offer to introduce an entrepreneur to three other VCs, let’s say Tess at Bessemer, Shaheen at Lux, and Laurie at Playground. I offer to do it by email, so I ask the entrepreneur to send me something I can forward. The next day, I get an email from the entrepreneur that says, “thanks for offering to intro me to Bessemer, Lux and Playground. Here’s my pitch deck, my executive summary, and a link to a video demo. I really appreciate it.”

So, what’s wrong with this email? Well, first of all, this email is not immediately actionable by me. It can’t be forwarded to three different firms all named in the email at the same time because that’s kind of uncool. There’s no elevator pitch in the email, nor any request or call to action, so I’ll have to write those, and there’s a bunch of attachments that may not be appropriate for an intro email – but I won’t know that without opening them.

Because of this, to actually make the connections, I have to take my own time to write three separate emails, write a brief elevator pitch and form the ask, and then reattach the appropriate material. And I’m a busy person with dozens of other things pulling at me each day. So, this might just sit at the bottom of my inbox for a while or just not get done at all.

There’s something else wrong here, too. By not addressing each VC personally, the entrepreneur missed the opportunity to personalize their pitch to what each target VC might find particularly compelling or to give specifics as to why that VC or firm is a great fit for this startup. For example, maybe it’s in the space sector, and Tess’s masters in aero astro makes her a great choice for an investor. Maybe it’s an autonomous robot, and since Shaheen was an investor in Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company, and Laurie served on the board there, they both know the space. Trust me, it really helps spark interest when a VC knows why you think they may be a fit, so you don’t want to miss the opportunity to include that in your first shot.

So, how should this entrepreneur have asked me for help? I should have gotten four emails from them. The first one should have said, “Thanks again for your help, I’ve just sent three emails tailored for each of Laurie, Tess, and Shaheen, ready for you to forward if you are comfortable doing so.” Then, the next three will be so obviously tailored to each of those people (including clarity in the headline) that it will be easy for me to know which to forward to whom. And you know what, even though there’s four emails in my inbox instead of the one I got in the first example, I can handle all four of these in about a minute, unlike the amount of time it would have taken me to make the other one actionable. And that’s often the difference between my going ahead and giving the help… or not.

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The next tip is – lead with your humanity. We’re all people first, our jobs second. We all have personal lives, and with that comes personal problems. We all have bad days, or sleepless nights, or something else that may keep us from being our very best every single day. It makes our work lives, and frankly our whole lives, a whole lot better if we can just all acknowledge that and treat each other a little more kindly as a result. And even if you don’t think it matters in business, it does.

It’s actually quite important in the venture capital world, because, when we’re assessing an investment opportunity, we’re not only thinking about your product and your business model, we’re thinking about whether we want to spend the next five years working with you, the person. And I presume you’re thinking the same thing about us. So how you and we show up as people really matters.

I’ll give you two examples of this in action. In one case, I had agreed to meet an entrepreneur in Seattle, and I scheduled the meeting for immediately after dropping my oldest kid at their college dorm for the start of their freshman year. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that I might be a blubbering pile of emotional goo after doing that… and, well, I was. I got to the Starbucks with mascara running down my face, introduced myself to the entrepreneur and apologized for my emotional state, explaining what I had just been through. He didn’t even acknowledge what I said, he just whipped open his laptop and said, “well, let’s get started”. And in that moment, I thought, there’s no way I want to spend five years working with this guy.

In the counter case, I remember another pitch meeting that had been scheduled for September 12, 2001. For those of you who remember, that was the day after Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center, and I think the whole country was in a state of shock. I know I was. These entrepreneurs had flown into town two days earlier, so they were literally stuck in the Bay Area indefinitely, given that all flight travel was grounded.

We all showed up at the office but clearly our heads weren’t in it. So instead of pitching, they said, “hey, it’s hard to focus on any business thing when we’re all in so much shock, so why don’t we just go have a coffee and we can do this another day.” I wish I could tell you we ended up funding them, because that would make a better story. We didn’t – but what we did do was connect them to a few other VCs who we thought might be a better fit, and one of them did end up investing. And part of why we did that was because of how they showed up on September 12th.

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The next tip I have for you is to practice controlled randomness. What does this mean? It means to put yourself in situations where you may not know if you’ll meet any new and interesting people, but that the chances will likely be good given who else might be there. I practice controlled randomness every year through the fellowship I teach at Stanford. I don’t know who’ll end up in those twelve spots each year, but I do know that Stanford does a really good job picking grad students, and then 80 to 100 of those will apply for the program. So, by the time the resulting twelve make the final cut, I know they’re going to be pretty awesome people. We’ve had over 100 people through the program and some of them have become great entrepreneurs, great VCs, and also really close friends of mine.

Do note that I said controlled randomness, not just randomness. It’s important to be thoughtful about which events, lectures, conferences, or even parties might be target-rich environments because no one has infinite time. And, if you can, do some homework so you’re even better prepared to take advantage of the limited time you’ll have wherever you go. For example, if you can get the attendee list in advance, look through it to figure out who you would most like to meet, then go seek those people out.

Trust me, a great conversation starter is, “I looked through all the attendees ahead of time and you were one of the people I most wanted to meet, because…” – whatever your because is. But don’t target the highest profile person because that’s what everyone else will be doing. It’s not about capturing the highest hill. It’s about meeting interesting fellow travelers and building relationships, and you’ll have a better shot at doing that successfully if you’re not picking the one person that everyone else is also trying to get to.

Does this sound like a lot of extra work? Well, it is! But, like many things in life, that extra work can pay off in amazing ways.

. . .

My next piece of advice has its roots in something I learned way back when I was a business school student. For those of you who can, think back to the 80’s – the era of corporate greed and Gordon Gekko. I was a first-year student at Stanford Business School taking the introductory class on negotiation. The professor started by asking us to define negotiation. People answered with things like ‘get the best deal possible’ or ‘I win you lose.’ But then, the professor wrote something quite different on the whiteboard. He wrote: "Negotiation is the art of finding the maximal intersection of mutual need." This is so important that I’m going to say it again. Negotiation is the art of finding the maximal intersection of mutual need.

So, what does that mean? I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean entering a negotiation with only what you want in mind, fighting for that, and not caring about what the other person gets or thinks of you after the transaction.

And you know what I’ve found out since learning this? It turns out that if you work on maximizing the fulfillment of mutual needs, you’ll often end up with better outcomes for yourself over time as well, and better relationships with people that you will likely run into over and over again in the future.

One big mistake people make in a negotiation is coming in with a firm idea of what they want. Because when you do that, you’ve eliminated all the potential other ways to solve the problem that you have, that you may not have thought of. Instead, why not create an opening for solutions that the other person may come up with that you don’t know about or don’t have access to?

That’s why I don’t like to start with “here’s what I want”. Instead, I start with, “here’s the problem I’m trying to solve”. It puts both parties into a collaborative, problem-solving mindset. You may end up surprised that other people have creative solutions to problems you have that you never would have thought of. And when you ask the other side, “What problem are you trying to solve?” you can likewise change the dynamic from adversarial to collaborative.

Look, not all negotiations can be collaborative, and not all problems can be solved, but even if this approach fails, it ends up creating more connection and empathy between the people involved, which often turns out to be a good thing in the future.

. . .

Closely related to this is another tip I have about mindset, and that is, try to go into any situation assuming that the other person has good intent. If you assume bad intent, then almost anything can be interpreted as an affront and reacted to negatively, and that’s definitely not a good way to build a relationship. If you go in with the mindset of mutual good intent, and then you come up against behavior that doesn’t support that, ask yourself if there might be a reasonable explanation for that behavior, like pressures or crises that the person may be facing. This might help you navigate back to a positive place by bringing your humanity to the situation – like I talked about before.

Of course, some people do actually have bad intent, and I’m not suggesting you be a pushover to that. You still have to have your feelers out and respond accordingly. I’m just suggesting that you at least start any interaction with the mindset that other people have good intent until proven otherwise. If you want to test my theory, try this on your next customer service call. Treat the person on the other end of the line as a mutually respected human being and approach the interaction with the assumption of positive intent on both sides. You might be surprised at how much better it goes than your usual calls. And even if the outcome isn’t any better, you and the other person will at least feel better about it.

. . .

My final piece of advice is pretty simple. It’s just to say thank you. We humans do things for each other all the time, and it feels really great to be acknowledged for that. It feels especially wonderful to know something we did had a positive impact on someone else, even if it took months or years to come about. Some of my favorite emails are those I get from students I had five, even ten years ago, who say that because of some piece of advice I gave them back then, it changed the course of their career or their personal life.

And I know it’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche because it’s true – gratitude not only feels good for the recipient, it uplifts the giver too. And it doesn’t need to be anything fancy – a quick email will do.

I think that’s a good point to close on.

When I first started this episode, I said that I thought of business networking as sort of slimy. The funny thing is that when you reframe the goal from networking to building relationships, and you do it in the ways I’ve described, it’s not slimy at all. In fact, thinking and living this way makes me a better, happier human. And the magical thing is it also ends up being better for my work life than optimizing for each transaction. And I bet it’s going to work for you, too.

And that concludes today’s episode of The Startup Solution. Thanks for listening. I’m Heidi Roizen from Threshold Ventures.

Further Reading

Here’s another take on my favorite sentence in a negotiation: What problem are you trying to solve?  

Funny enough, First Round Capital covered me and my advice about relationship-driven living and more here.

And, if you want to actually read the Harvard Business School case, you can find it here.

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