Finding A Healthy Work/Life Balance - What Entrepreneurs Need To Know

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With a fiber backbone, they deploy a series of antennas to spread the internet across geography. Using previously deployed infrastructure or their proprietary in-home router, they allow residential and commercial customers to tap into their network wirelessly.

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Finding A Healthy Work/Life Balance - What Entrepreneurs Need To Know | James Smits

Celebrating those small wins are very important because when you're on the battlefield, it's a blur. You don't appreciate how far you've come in the grand scheme. Founders tend to overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can do in the long term. Every time there's a setback, it's the psychology of loss. A loss hurts a lot more than a win. We dwell on our losses and take them personally, because how can you not?

It would be nonsense to say to any of the readers who are founders or want to be founders, “Don't take it personally.” This is your life. You are foregoing safety, stability, sanity, and sleep to do this, so it's going to hurt. If it doesn't hurt you emotionally, you're a psychopath. It's going to hurt, and that's okay, so try to dwell on the good things.

I want to hit on that point as well because it's important, especially in a world where everyone's working remotely. That’s also the nature of our business. We are a remote-first team because we're out in the field so much. We have an office. It has four desks and a co-working space, but the vast majority of our team at any given day is out in the field, building, selling, helping, and doing whatever's needed. When you have that remote-first nature, you have to be able to find those common bonds.

Celebrating those successes has been very important for us along the way. Every time a new subscriber signs up for our internet, three bells pop up on the subscriptions channel on Slack announcing to everyone that we have a new customer. The same thing goes every time we're closing a building. We're doing something similar as well from a sales perspective. Being able to make every employee attached to those small wins as they're happening in real-time is very empowering. It's fun as well.

A financial analogy for people here is that markets tend to climb slowly before rapidly. It does feel like that when you're in a startup. It's not necessarily one step backward, two steps forward. Sometimes, you're climbing a building and there isn't an elevator. Often, you'll fall an entire fourth floor, and it is bruising when that happens.

As a pitch is a play on emotion where you're trying to build the person you're pitching on their emotions so that they build this attachment to what you're doing, as a founder or even as a startup employee, you have a grand emotional attachment to what you're building. Local minimums can make every local maximum disappear. You're so focused on trying to roll this ball forward that every time it rolls backward, it can be very demoralizing.

Something I've always struggled with is maintaining that viewpoint on what we've done and been successful with, but also what else is in the hopper that we're going to be successful with as well. Looking towards that future is something that's difficult. In my role, I'm very focused on the day-to-day operations and execution of our business while trying to maintain those corporate goals that we've set. Knowing that we’re racing our way towards those goals is what gets me excited in the morning and why I love answering emails at 6:30 in the morning.

Otherwise, you will dwell on the negativity. You might encounter people that are like that. You can't afford to keep them in your startup even if they're great performers because they will ruin the morale. You need to look at what's coming next and how things will be better. Define for us the local minimum and maximum for the people that are trying to understand that concept.

Signing a new customer is high. Losing a customer is low. Signing a new building is high. Losing on a sales opportunity is low. An outage is always low. Those are the ones that hit me the worst. We have very few outages, which is nice. We're very fortunate there. When they happen once a month, they are demoralizing. When you dealing a good internet, it is essential. People need that 99.99% uptime. Feeling like you've let a customer down is always a local minimum for me.

If you break down a startup's gross into a series of local minimums and maximums, at what point do you analyze what's happening and decide to fix something that keeps on happening, like local minimums? Have you got to a point where you feel like, “This has been happening too much? We need to dedicate resources to preventing some of the local minimums.” That's difficult to do. The local maximums can keep going up.

Before you answer that, I encountered a situation in the startup funnel that I ran. We grew like a rocket ship. We had $850,000 in year one. We had $15 million in year two. We had $56 million in year three. We then had our plateau. It wasn't a plateau, but it felt like a plateau. We went from $56 million to $64 million, or something around that.

We then went to $150 million and then $300 million. That year was when I realized we had a lot of local minimums. Our local maximums were so big that they hid the local minimums. Those local minimums can sometimes turn into a disease. They can grow. They hold you back. They’re a dead weight on the rocket ship. You need to touch them to fix that.

I spent an entire year retooling, replacing many people on the team, changing a lot of our marketing, and re-engineering our actual software and platform. There comes a point where you've got to realize and track, “Why am I losing deals? Why are we not growing fast?” The best time to do that sometimes is when you're growing fast. It's easy to overlook. Once growth slows, you're suddenly going to go down.

The lifetime of a startup is a ten-year journey. We've been around for three years. Every month of it is the 36th of our lifetime. It's quite a significant portion of what we're doing. If you don't spend that time to continue iterating on all processes, it's not worth it. We have a series of cross-functional committees. They're focused on different aspects of the business.

We have one that's focused on network maintenance. We meet every two weeks and go through everything that's happened in the past two weeks. We try to understand if there are recurring issues and share tips and tricks. It also lends itself. We are constantly iterating on what we call our standards. This is our standard of what we are building and putting out in the field.

Being able to make every employee attached to those small wins as they're happening in real time is very empowering.

It could have been easy to come up with a standard and lock it in a couple of months ago, but then you lose months of innovation and advantage that you have on whoever else is in the market, whether they're Verizon or someone who's smaller like us. Continuing to process those standards is important not just for our engineering team. In my world, it's more customer success, marketing, and everything we're doing as it relates to our customers once they've decided to sign up for our internet. Always being able to take that omniscient view on your work and processes is important.

Being able to measure is also quite difficult, especially when things are qualitative to a certain degree. You can see the quantitative metrics like, “In this one building, we're seeing higher churn. You can narrow in there.” Frequently, it's going to be much more anecdotal and qualitative. That cross-functional committee process for us works quite well because you get a viewpoint that isn't like the viewpoint that's been in my head every day for the last month or last two weeks.

Something to the earlier point about continuing to build that pitch deck and always be iterating on that, when we start a new raise, we start from scratch. In between raises, I’m thinking about our existing pitch and updating it along the way because you're always pitching. Let’s get real. When someone asks for materials, you want to have something to send them that isn't cobbled together. That process of starting from scratch on a pitch is important because businesses evolve.

If you're going through these micro pivots over the course of a business, twelve months of micro pivots are going to add up to a different story probably. That's going to need to be reflected. There's a reason you've come to that new story, so shouldn't you be excited about telling that new story as well? That process is true in every aspect of the business that we operate.

The only way to learn all this is to do it.

I went straight from school to work in venture. I did not have any credence in telling a founder what to do. People took advice from me. I hope that worked out well for them. For some, it has, but what ground did I have to stand on? At the same time, in working in a venture, my favorite part was working alongside companies. When you work with a company, as a VC, you always exist at this 10,000-foot view. You are never in the weeds doing much.

Being on this side of the table, what I love is doing. Our ability to push that rock uphill is somewhat dependent upon my ability to show up and perform on a daily basis as well. That puts everyone in this high-pressure situation. That's what gets me excited as well and why being a founder works well for me. It also leads to those sleepless nights. Maybe one day, I won't have as many of those. I feel bad for my partner. She’s stuck with me for now, but it is what it is

To round up, do you have any thoughts on maintaining your work-life balance and your sanity in trying to improve your overall quality of being and getting some sleep?

One of my favorite activities outside of work is cooking. It's a process and you're going through it. I like tinkering. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen growing up. What I love most about it is that I don't have my phone on me. It is what I describe as my therapy where I can zone in. I cook what tend to be complex things. They take some time as well.

Spending that 45 minutes to 2 hours in a kitchen, focused is fantastic for me. It's that opportunity to decompress. I would love to say that I read 52 books a year, but I'll also admit that I finished my first book in a year not long ago. There are a lot of ways to decompress. For me, cooking is one. I play a lot of tennis as well. Find your thing that is wholly different than your work.

Some people have physical activities that they do. There is one thing entrepreneurs tend to have in common, and that's an obsession. I suffered from this. I would work hard and play hard, and that's dangerous. Sometimes, your break away from your work is equally tiring. I used to do mixed martial arts. I would go to jujitsu class and get my butt kicked. I would then limp to the office with bruises.

Now, I'm on the battlefield trying to build a company. It’s contrasting to this life. I miss being an entrepreneur. I mentioned getting back and starting a company, but life is good. You don't have to work as hard because you're on the VC side. I'll tell you that because it's true. You work hard, but it does not compare. You work hard relative to other people because that's how you are. VC can be demanding, but it isn't a different dimension compared to running a company.

As I age, I like to do things that are less stressful on the body. Reading's very good. It could be gardening, cooking, or going for a walk. These things are important. Physical activity is important, too, but you've got to realize that with physical activity if you're pushing too hard, it's a source of burnout. It's attached to your adrenal system. It's a source of stress. You do want to play hard, but you also want to make sure you recover. Maybe it's yoga, but not heated yoga with loud music where you’re sweating buckets.

As a lifelong tennis player, I enjoy leisure sports. That's my speed right there.

This has been fun having you on the show. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K92fRT04Qjo

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About Zain Jaffer:

Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle, after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780M.

His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as “Forbes 30 Under 30,” “Inc. Magazine’s 35 Under 35,” and the “SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award.” He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.