Facing Fear
“Oh, we’re fucked“
-Every entrepreneur, ever, at least once
Through the life of every single company I’ve been around there’s been a near-death moment. Successful or unsuccessful, every single company has this. If you die, you’ll be fucked to the point where it leads to death, and if you’re successful you’ll definitely have situations where you could have died. They come from different places: market risk, cofounder conflict, competitors, legal struggles, bank runs, and more. Being fucked is a problem, but then there are problems that lead from being fucked to being dead.
Most often, when a company is fucked with no other options, the first person to notice is the CEO. It’s their job to manage situations that are life or death. When the CEO realizes, often there comes the second problem with being fucked. Now the CEO and the CEO only (or a small group) knows they’re fucked, and they need to manage how to tell stakeholders that those stakeholders are also fucked.
Investors, employees, and customers do not like being told that things are fucked.. CEOs and leaders know this, and this leads to the second, and likely more important problem with being fucked: the fear of being fucked.
The only people that truly understand this fear are other entrepreneurs, because they have been there before. They’ve raised money, made many many promises at the highest of expectations and then had to face this, and it’s hard, very hard.
When you have a leadership team that’s afraid of being fucked, you need to solve the problems in reverse order. First, you need to face the fear of death of your company. Then you need to face the problem that can kill you. The solution is unique per company and entrepreneur, but more often than not facing that fear is the deciding factor if the company lives or dies.
If you can face that fear and find some strength to get through it, more often than not those investors, employees, and leaders will support you. It takes a lot of humility and courage to show up without a solution but be able to say, “I don’t know how to solve this right now and it could kill us, but I’m going to do everything I can to figure it out.“ For high-achieving venture backed entrepreneurs it’s hard to show up without an immediate solve when it’s your job to solve everything, but a lot of the time the solution starts with facing the fear of that unknown with curiosity instead of defensiveness.
It’s not a skill that anyone who does this is born with, but it is a skill that you can learn, and it translates into many other places in your life. When you lose someone you love, or a relationship, or something scary or unpredictable happens in life, the ability to show up and say “I don’t know, but I have faith we can figure it out“ is critical to creating the best outcomes. I’m grateful that entrepreneurship taught me that. It still isn’t easy, but it’s possible, and it’s much much better than defaulting to the certain death of your company.