Today is the annual USV CEO Summit. Once a year we ask our portfolio CEOs to gather at our office in NYC and spend the day talking to each other about what they have learned and are learning about building and leading companies. This is not a novel idea. Many/most VC firms do this sort of thing. We have been doing it for something like ten years now. We will have about sixty CEOs in our offices today.
I often think about the founder/CEO who has five or six VC firms invested in their company. They get invited to attend five or six of these a year. And participate in five or six networks. That’s a lot of networking with other CEOs. I sometimes wonder if there is a point of marginal utility for them in all of this “learning from others.”
Don’t get me wrong. I think there is so much founders/CEOs can learn from their peers. I encourage the CEOs I work with to join CEO groups, talk frequently with their peers, get peer CEOs on their boards, and do whatever else they can to learn from the experiences of others. Our CEO Summit today will be yet another great opportunity to do this.
But at some point, you have to learn things yourself. You can talk to peers until you are blue in your face about how to hire a great VP Engineering or CFO. But making a bad hire or two in these roles will teach you a lot more about it than talking to others. At some point, you are going to have to figure things out by yourself. There is no substitute for direct personal and painful experience. That’s just how life works.
So I like to think of learning from others as a way to steepen the learning curve. You can get there faster if you talk to others and are open to lots of feedback and advice. But no amount of feedback and advice will make you an amazing leader on your first day as a newly minted CEO. That comes with time and the scars and pain that result from your bad decisions. I have many of them myself and wear them as a badge of honor.
