Be the Adult in the Room

Or why it’s disorienting to look up and see no one there

Uninvent helps startup founders with the most important factor in their success: their team. We help founders manage their own motivation, productivity, health, and relationships with co-founders. We’ll discuss hiring and managing great people, building a strong culture, and keeping people aligned and working on the right things. See the series overview in Welcome to Uninvent.

In “Be the Adult in the Room” we’ll talk about how great founders learn to take responsibility for their startups and be willing to make hard decisions and stay accountable for their startup’s success or failure.

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“When you think everything is someone else's fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.”
— The 14th Dalai Lama

“Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want.”
— Paul Graham, Before the Startup¹

“Perhaps it isn't that responsible people become founders, but that the act of founding makes the person responsible.”
— Naval Ravikant

Seeking permission

You wake up at 4 a.m., tired because you barely slept, and wired because today will be stressful. You look at your calendar, and everything on it makes you grumpy and resentful.

The day starts with breakfast with one of your new investors. As usual, she’ll push you to raise next quarter’s revenue targets, sharing “helpful” ideas to accelerate the plan. You mentally rehearse how you’ll convince her to stick with a lower target. These interactions stress you out since they remind you of the quarterly negotiations with your boss that were a fixture at your previous big company job.

Next will be your least favorite meeting of the week — your one-on-one with your VP of Marketing. He constantly makes excuses for missing his pipeline targets, arguing that he needs more budget. You know you’ll spend the rest of the week grumbling to your co-founder and to your husband about how much easier life would be without him.

Then, you have to prepare for the Friday all-hands meeting, where you have to defend the growth targets (ironically, your team will think they’re too high). You’ll explain that the board wants to see more growth, and you don’t want to have to tell them at the next board meeting that you missed.

Friday night will be dinner with your parents, where you’ll mount your weekly defense of your life decisions. They’ll ask why they paid $300K in tuition at Tufts just to watch you turn down a job at Morgan Stanley that would have paid you 4x more than you make at your startup. They’ll remind you that your sister is a surgeon, but you work out of a dumpy office that you sublet from an auto-body shop.

You knew that running a startup was hard work, but you underestimated the number of mouths you have to feed. You wonder if you can ever keep everyone in your life happy.

But how much energy do you really need to put into defending your choices and reacting to everyone else’s agendas? A lot less if you learn to be the Adult in the Room.

The Mommy and Daddy Syndrome

Like the fish who has never heard of water², most of us have a model in our heads for how the world works that we don’t notice since we’ve never been without it. That model is formed early in life by:

Parents or guardians who guided us, rewarded or punished us, and whose approval we sought.

Teachers who graded our papers, corrected our behavior, judged our potential, and wrote our recommendations.

Coaches who judged our performance, praised or reprimanded us, decided if we got playing time, and had the power to demote us to the Junior Varsity team.

Admissions officers who held our futures in their hands, deeming us worthy to attend their schools by standing in judgment over our grades and activities.

Bosses who hired us, ranked and rated our performance, rewarded us with raises and promotions, and could fire or lay us off on a whim.

Growing up under this regime gives us a worldview where:

Someone else is responsible

At a regular job, no matter how much responsibility you have, your boss is ultimately accountable for the results of your work. The boss can coach you, navigate thorny decisions, and ask for more resources.

At a startup, there is no boss. You can’t kick decisions upstairs because no one is there. You can’t ask the boss for help because you are the boss. You can’t grumble about your company’s lousy management because you’re doing the managing.

Someone else gatekeeps our success

In school, the teacher designs the test and judges if you pass it. At work, the boss decides if you get the promotion or the raise. You hope they use objective and fair criteria, but they are the final arbiters. 

There are no gatekeepers to start a startup, which confuses people who aren’t part of this world. They look at the geeky and scruffy young founders who run the industry and assume, “OK, these can’t really be the folks in charge. Someone else must be.” 

Gatekeepers have a chokehold on many industries like media and entertainment, which explains why their coverage of startups is so dismal. It’s why you read articles about how a startup begins charging for its product because “their investors expect a return,” as if the founders never would have figured that revenue is important without adult supervision. It’s why “Shark Tank” is named after the “adult” Sharks instead of after the entrepreneurs, who are the actual stars.

Appearing to do a good job is the same as actually doing a good job.

If you’ve had a corporate job, you’ve probably worked with someone who is likable, professional, always knows the right thing to say, and gets precisely nothing done. Those people can get amazingly far by LARPing a person who produces results instead of being a person who does.

At a startup, you don’t have anyone to reward you for effort or appearance. Results are all that matter. You either make the hire or you don’t. You either close the funding or you don’t. The customer either buys or they don’t. You can easily find founders with impressive credentials, great communication skills, a great network, and who know how to raise money but who fail anyway, almost always because customers, unimpressed by these credentials, don’t buy the product.

The differences between being the adult and not being the adult are rather stark:

This might not resonate so far. It might seem obvious that the founders are responsible for their startups, and you are confident you’ll be one of the rare founders who adjusts to the role in no time. But humor me and ask how naturally these will come to you, especially when things go wrong:

Always blame yourself

When things go wrong, as they do every day at a startup, human nature is to find someone to blame. At previous jobs, you might have blamed your boss for a lousy performance review because he didn’t appreciate your hard work. You might have blamed the marketing team for losing a deal because they provided content that missed the mark. You might even be correct.

Blaming someone else never works at a startup. You can’t blame the boss because you’d be blaming yourself. You can’t get mad at your team since you hired, trained, and managed them. You can’t blame your customers since, if they don’t buy, you chose the wrong market, built the wrong product, or are bad at explaining it to them. Even if your co-founder is the CEO and not you, you chose to work with them, and as founders, you are responsible for working well together and making the right decisions.

Being at fault for everything might sound stressful, but it’s also liberating. You don’t spend time tracking down who is to blame since you are. You don’t bore your partner at dinner by ranting about the terrible boss since it’s you. And since the problems are all yours, the solutions are yours, too, and no one will stop you from implementing them. Being the adult in the room has its advantages.

Never point to investors or the board

It’s so natural to expect an adult in the room that many founders look for one. They find investors with money, experience, confident opinions, and puffy vests with logos, so they assume, OK, I found the adults. It’s these folks. Then they snap themselves into a comfortable manager-employee dynamic and act like they “work for” the investors.

Nothing makes me cringe more than watching a founder stand in front of his company and say things like, “We are raising the number because investors want to see more growth” or “Don’t make me go to the board meeting with bad news” or “The investors wanted me to fire our VP of Marketing since we aren’t building enough pipeline.”

Blaming the investors or the board undermines your leadership by signaling that you aren’t in charge of your company, but an investor who spends 15 minutes a week thinking about your startup is. It signals that you are executing plans you disagree with because the board asked you to. It makes you look weak and indecisive. Don’t do it. 

Yes, you have to manage investors, but they don’t have the time, energy, or knowledge to be the adults in the room. They invested in you because they thought you would be.

Don’t seek out gatekeepers

Many careers require permission from gatekeepers. Becoming a lawyer means getting accepted to law school, impressing your professors, and passing the bar exam. Success at Google means getting a manager to hire and promote you. Starring on Broadway requires impressing agents and casting directors.

You don’t have to ask anyone permission to start a startup. You can start one sitting on the couch in your underwear. This seems a bit too easy to some founders, so they start looking around for gatekeepers.

Some founders assume venture capitalists are the gatekeepers and put a disproportionate amount of worry into finding them, catering to them, and fearing the investors will “steal” their companies if they are insufficiently impressed. Many founders turn this into a self-fulfilling prophecy by approaching their jobs as if they were employees and not owners. 

Other founders look at accelerators like YCombinator or TechStars and, seeing a rigorous application process and a single-digit acceptance rate, think, “Ah, I’ve found a hoop I can jump through.” But accelerators, as great as they can be, want to accelerate your company, not gatekeep it. The startups they like to accept are the ones who wouldn’t be dissuaded if they were rejected. When I read accelerator applications, I give a low score to anyone who says they’ll only move forward with their startup if we accept them.

Don’t ask to be rewarded for effort

In school, sports, or previous jobs, you may have been rewarded for taking on challenging assignments, trying hard, and working many hours, even if you ultimately failed to ace the test or close the deal. At a startup, there is no one to reward you for trying hard. Hard work only helps you when it produces results.

Founders often hit this disconnect when they try to raise money. They go to an investor pitch proud of the hard work they’ve put into their startup, only to discover that investors aren’t all that impressed by what happened in the past, only about what you’ll achieve in the future. If anything, they are more impressed by the company that got traction after only one year of hard work instead of three years.

Receiving no praise for effort doesn’t feel great, but no one ever said that being an adult would be a bundle of laughs.

Don’t resist hard decisions

The setting on a founder’s adult meter is often revealed when they need to make a hard decision, like firing a key team member or betting the company on a pivot. Adulting means facing the decision head-on and not denying, delaying, or equivocating.

Founders can’t sit back and hope someone else decides, since no one else will. Their teams watch them closely and are frustrated when decisions are made slowly, capriciously, or not at all. Not deciding is deciding.

Monitor your emotions when you need to make a hard decision. You might feel some fear, denial, or even resentment that you have to make an unpopular choice with limited data and time to analyze it. When that happens, power through. Opportunity for growth and all that.

Filter advice from "adults”

As founders progress through their startup journey, they bump into adult-looking people, like angel investors, venture capitalists, executives at legacy competitors, and random uncles at Thanksgiving dinner who “know about business.” These “adults” are usually older, have long resumes, and speak confidently in a loud and steady voice. But they usually know nothing about your startup.

I’ve made this mistake several times, where I walked out of a meeting having had my mind changed by an opinionated “adult” (usually a venture capitalist) only to realize they knew less than I did about the situation. I was swayed by their status, not their ideas.

Don’t ignore advice from experienced people, but learn to filter it, as we discussed in “Embrace Contraction.”. A venture capitalist friend of mine, Greg Gretsch, says, “All of my worst investments were when the founders listened to none of my advice or to all of my advice."

All successful founders learn to be the adults in the room, and many unsuccessful founders never do. Next, we’ll downshift from hard things to how you can Load Up On the Free Things.

If you have feedback or suggestions for future posts, please comment or contact us at uninvent@substack.com.

1. The Paul Graham essay Before the Startup covers several ways startups are unintuitive to those who have never started one.

2. David Foster Wallace’s excellent commencement speech, This is Water, while having little to do with startups, is still an excellent read for anyone entering a challenging career.