As a startup founder or leader, your time is always the most valuable time in the room. Truly.
There is no other business person whose company’s survival is measured in actual minutes and dollars. Yes, for you, time and money are your two lifelines. I know – I have lived this life for over thirty years.
You don’t spend a dollar unless it unlocks a minute, and you don’t spend a minute unless it unlocks a dollar. Both are life. And the misuse of either can result in catastrophic death. For real.
That means that I have a contract with you, as a fellow entrepreneur. That contract is not to waste your time.
Over the past 10 years I have dedicated my life to decoding the universal tools that are essential to our success. I personally lost too much time and money to parasitic consultants that promised me they could deliver value that I critically needed at different stages within different company incarnations, and the failure of those consultants and advisors to deliver nearly cost me my life, more than once.
When I was recruited to Deloitte in 2018 to build an advisory practice for Startups, I asked myself how I could use that opportunity to give back to my community, the startup community? What did I wish for in my most critical moments of life-&-death growth?
The answer was clear: Actionable tools. Real wisdom. Keys – clean, and clear and simple and powerful – that could shine a light in moments of deep fog, and illuminate the path ahead of me.
There is a sentiment attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, the Tosafist Rabbi Isaac ben Yehuda ha-Levi, the French philosopher Bernard of Chartres, and Moses: “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.
This sentiment taught me something, both as a father and as a business person. That those of us who have previously walked a given pathway of life have a duty to hand off our hard-learned lessons and wisdom to those who now forge forward into new and uncharted territory, so that they can leverage our previously acquired wisdom as a starting point to see farther down that road of life.
I don’t see this as an ego-claim, but rather a call to service.
When we have been blessed to learn something that the next person in line behind us can benefit from, share that wisdom! It is one of our greatest duties as human beings in a shared world and a shared story of humanity.
I am a father to 5 kids, all grown up today. Believe me, I have done everything I can to share with them all the lessons I learned in fire, so that they should not have to traverse the same hot coals again on their journey. Sure, they will go beyond where I have travelled; and yes, they will face their own, original fires. But that is the gift of starting from the shoulders of those that have walked the planet before us. And it is incumbent upon those of us who walked the path yesterday, to share our painful lessons and profound discoveries of wisdom with those who begin where we have left off, so they can start from our shoulders, and from those heights climb higher than we ever did.
So here I share with you Startup Alchemy, the tools and secrets I have decoded in the furnaces of my own many startup incarnations, and have refined as I have guided hundreds of incredible entrepreneurs in scaling their business visions to success. My hope is that as you read each chapter, and learn each decoded tool, you will feel smarter when thinking about your own business. That is the measure of my contract with you: To honor your time, which is life, and to create value for you in every minute you spend learning the tools of Startup Alchemy.
If you read these pages and think, “Wow, Yehoshua is a really smart guy”, then I have failed you. If after you have read these pages, you think, “Wow, I have become smarter in the way I think about my own company”, then I have honored my contract with you.
I have been blessed to share these tools with scores of startups over the past decade, and the results have been capital raises collectively surpassing $500 million dollars, and many great innovations now scaling as mature businesses and positively contributing to our world.
I cannot promise you that you will raise money. Nobody can, and anyone who does is lying to you. Finding your investor is 50% effort and 50% blessing, much like finding a loving life-partner (truly). We all know may wonderful people who are single, and many jerks who are not. Similarly, we all know many worthy startups that never get funded, and a lot of garbage at which VCs mistakenly throw their money. But just like looking for love, you are guaranteed to stay alone if you don’t put yourself out there. 50% effort, 50% blessing.
That said, no-one works harder for a strategic meeting than we do as startup leaders. We target high-value meetings for months, and place a super-premium on those moments in the room with key decision makers. Sometimes we will get a “Yes”, and sometimes we will get a “No”. However, there is nothing quite as painful as getting a “No”, and leaving a critical pitch-meeting (be it to an investor, potential partner, or customer) feeling like we failed to strike with clarity – that we did not land our punch with full force. There is nothing worse than feeling that a “No” should have been a “Yes”, and the only reason it was a “No” is because we failed to land our punch.
What I can give you through Startup Alchemy – what I can commit to you – is the gift of clarity. Of always having 100% confidence that you have landed your best punch in any meeting.
Startup Alchemy will give you the gift of landing every punch in every meeting with the pure force of absolute clarity.
You won’t always get a “Yes”, and no-one can promise that. But when you get a “No”, it will be a clean “No”. And you will leave the meeting knowing that the deal was simply not meant to be, because you landed your punch and delivered your strategic value proposition with perfect force.
In the articles that follow, I pay my own journey forward to you, my dear community of fellow entrepreneurs.
I invite you to stand on my shoulders, and take these lessons learned in fire to levels and places beyond my greatest dreams, to the new horizons that belong to you.
Here’s to changing the world.