MasterStroke with Monica Enand & Sejal Pietrzak

Insights -with Advisor Ned Renzi

• Ned Renzi - Enjoy the Work & Birchmere Ventures • Season 1 • Episode 18

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In this episode of Masterstroke, Monica and Sejal chat with Ned Renzi from  Enjoy the Work, a seasoned venture capital advisor. They explore what it takes to go from a passionate founder to an effective CEO. Ned, a founding partner of Birchmere Ventures, shares traits that make entrepreneurs successful, like a passion for problem-solving and a relentless drive to improve.

They talk about the importance of postmortem and premortem analyses in refining business strategies and decision-making. They also highlight the role of investor board members and the need for collaboration and trust in growing a business.

Don't miss these valuable insights as Ned discusses "walking dead" companies in the venture community and how founders can become leaders by mastering general, functional, and self-management skills. He emphasizes the importance of loving the problem you're solving, not just your product or technology, for long-term success.







Georgianna Moreland - Executive Producer | Managing Editor;
Matt Stoker - Editor


Ed Renzi:

There's a lot of walking dead among the venture community. Right now, these funds are effectively out of business. They just kind of don't know it yet, or they just need to let the time play out.

Monica Enand:

They're walking dead companies.

Georgianna Moreland:

Oh yeah, welcome to Masterstroke with Monica Enid and Sejo Petrzak Conversations with founders, ceos and visionary leaders in tech and beyond.

Monica Enand:

Today we have Ned Renzi joining us. He is currently working with the Enjoy the Work team as an advisor, and we're so excited because Sejal Ned has worn all of the hats you can possibly wear in the startup world. He founded a company, so he was a founder. He spent two decades as a capital allocator, as a VC, raising funds and deploying capital into the startup ecosystem and advising companies from that perspective as an investor, and now he's doing something interesting that we want to learn a little more about at Enjoy the Work as an advisor and coach.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Very cool. Well, so nice to meet you, Ned. Thanks for joining us.

Ed Renzi:

My pleasure.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Actually tell us about Enjoy the Work. Monica may know about it. I'm just learning about it. Tell us a little bit about Enjoy the Work, ned.

Ed Renzi:

Yeah, so Enjoy the Work is a collection of ex-operators who advise and coach founders, and our mantra is we help turn founders into CEOs and it's an amazing partnership. Like I said, they're all ex-operators and in that process of teaching founders to be CEOs, we focus in three primary areas. We focus on teaching them general management, functional management and self-management and so like. On the general management side, it's everything from how to hire, you know, like processes like Monica had mentioned on top grading in our email exchange, getting your company into an effective operating rhythm, kpis, okrs, mission vision, values, communication, architecture, managing a board, et cetera, and so just like all those things.

Ed Renzi:

And then on the self-management side, you know what we find is some founders just need to get better at listening. Some need to manage conflict better. Founders just need to get better at listening. Some need to manage conflict better. Some just need to get their calendar under control and get a good sleep and exercise routine, and so it's sort of whatever they need to work on. We have playbooks, frameworks and things like that. That none of them are 100% perfect, but kind of is a good starting point, and then we customize those to help the CEO go where they want to go and we hold them accountable to it.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I love each one of those three pieces. They're so important, not only for founders but I think for anybody in business and working at a high intensity job. Really important. That's great.

Monica Enand:

Yeah, and I want to hear more about those playbooks and frameworks that you talk about. But but I want to first talk about Ned you we talked about. You were at Birchmere Ventures allocating capital and you raised and deployed six funds and achieved a cumulative value, a market valuation of $15 billion. And achieved a cumulative market valuation of $15 billion. And I know some of the entrepreneurs that you've invested in and I know you've spoken about loving the great entrepreneurs and the companies that you've worked with. You've invested in Cvent, ironclad, sleeper and Paper Learning, amongst many others. I know, but when you're looking for an entrepreneur to either work with or invest in, what are you looking for?

Ed Renzi:

Yeah, you know, I think there's always a lot of things you would look for in terms of intellectual horsepower and grit and things like that. But if I had to focus it on just like two things one, we've had the most success with people who fall in love with the problem and then, second, people who are relentless about getting better and winning. And so if I take a step back and look at all the companies that you mentioned and others, the founders who were solving a problem they deeply cared about ended up being the most persistent and dogged and stuck with it. Right, they just couldn't imagine a future without solving the problem they were addressing.

Ed Renzi:

And if I counter that with some founders who are in it, where they fall in love with their technology or they fall in love with their product, they tend to have some biases that when that doesn't work out, I found it harder for them to pivot right. They try to find another way to make their tech work, or they try to find another way to make their tech work, or they try to find another way to make their product work, rather than looking at new ways to solve the problem. So the people who fall in love with a problem we've seen have more outsized success. On the second point, I'd say I was really fortunate to work with smart people who were coachable and committed to getting better every day, every week, every month, every year. Right, that kind of growth that just compounds over time. It's kind of like that compounding lends itself to that phrase you hear it takes 10 years to be an overnight success and people are just relentless about getting better. We've had a lot of good success with I love that phrase.

Sejal Pietrzak:

It takes 10 years to be an overnight success.

Ed Renzi:

Yeah, it's a funny, monica. I don't know if I ever told you this story, but I got into venture in the late 90s and I was part of this partner training program and I got sent to Silicon Valley is kind of my first trip out to the West Coast. And I went to this conference and I kind of felt like a fish out of water and that there was lot you could imagine, a lot of just like really smart but self-absorbed people who I just didn't relate well to. And at the end there was one fireside chat with an elderly gentleman who turned out to be Bill Draper, who's one of the Godfathers of Venture. And so I kind of go up to him after the pitch and I said you know, what you said really resonated with me and I had this line.

Ed Renzi:

I said I'm a recovering engineer. Three years in this new industry, this new career, what advice do you have? And he kind of looked at me down over his bifocals and he said, kid, good news happens over 10 years and bad news in every phone call. And uh, you know, it's like 1998, everything's up and to the right. I kind of shrugged my shoulders and said, yeah, whatever. And then, you know, monica, it's like six, nine months later we invested in Cvent and it was, like you know, 11, 12 years later till the IPO. And I look back and he was right, right, it was the old fashioned way of building companies.

Monica Enand:

No, absolutely. You know, I felt that way about my venture. There would be these moments in time where you had some liquidity event or you'd have some transaction with partnering with Vista or partnering with a private equity team and people would go, wow, congratulations, How'd you get to this success? And I would think God, it does not feel that way. It feels every day like there is bad news every day. I get 99 problems all the time. That's right.

Sejal Pietrzak:

It always in anything in business, doesn't it? It feels, when you look back, like everything was a smooth, linear road, but in fact it was such a roller coaster and there's so many ups and downs in everything that you do and in every role that you're in, and I think it's really important for everyone to maybe realize you know when the downs are happening, you know that it's going to get better, and when, then, the ups are happening, you know. Just be prepared. Don't think that it's always going to be that way and have false expectations.

Ed Renzi:

Yeah, I think that's right. Nothing goes up and to the right. And even if the business is performing well and the numbers are going up and to the right, it's still an emotional rollercoaster, right, you're still every day dealing with people, issues and contracts and fundraising and board meetings and things are working. Things are not working right. So, to your point, it is that emotional roller coaster.

Monica Enand:

We actually did an episode recently, Ned Sejal and I did, about managing up. So I'm going to ask you and we've been on boards but I think, as we've never been kind of investor board members, so as an investor board member, when the bad things happened, what would you say the CEOs who handled that well, how did they handle it with you and what do you think they did well?

Ed Renzi:

Well, how did they handle it with you and what do you think they did? Well, yeah, so we're big believers in these premortem and postmortem analysis. Like my original training my first 12 years I worked in the Department of Defense and specifically with Navy SEAL teams Right, and when we would do operations after the operation, we would do these postmortems that were completely without judgment and you would unpack what happened, kind of step by step, no pointing fingers, and you would try to figure out were we lucky or were we smart? Were we prepared or not prepared? Right, because sometimes you succeed and you were lucky and those are the dangerous lessons to learn.

Ed Renzi:

Right, because you think you could replicate that and sometimes you fail, but it's like in blackjack you played your hand correctly and you still busted, but it's still the right play. And so you sort of have to triage these situations and have to have trust among the management team that you're all on the same page, you're all on the same team and you're not really throwing people under the bus. You're just trying to figure out what worked right and didn't work right because of our processes and what didn't work right. And if it didn't, how do we improve our processes, and so you know, kind of coming around to say you divorce process from outcome and have people who are just relentless about keep improving the processes.

Monica Enand:

And you did. You get involved with the management teams in doing this as an investor board member.

Ed Renzi:

It's funny, yeah. So Jonathan Lowenhar, our founder, and I lived a few blocks from each other in San Francisco and we would meet every quarter and he's always telling me what he was doing with this enjoy the work which he just founded and was a solo practitioner for a while. And I would always just marvel. I'd say like I would never let my companies pay for that because I do that for my companies. And he would say, ned, you're like 5% of all board members who roll up their sleeves and work closely with companies like that. Most investors don't do that. Most are just on too many boards to practically do that. And you know it turned out he was right. And the more I get into it and now that I'm on the advisor side of the table, I'm finding out even more things. Founders tell me now that they never told me as an investor board member.

Sejal Pietrzak:

What are some of those kinds of things that they tell you now?

Ed Renzi:

Well, I'd say two major categories. One is just on the people side that you know. A lot of times they hire people and they turn out to be wrong, and sometimes you know it right away. But it kind of makes you look bad if you sort of bring this person on and they're not working. It looks like you don't know what you're doing. You know, et cetera. So instead of fixing the problem, you try to cover it up and make it work. You know, et cetera. So instead of fixing the problem, you try to cover it up and make it work. And then I also think there's times the business isn't working as it should Like. You have early warning signs of a plateau.

Ed Renzi:

And I remember in particular there was one company spun out of Stanford seed stage. I was on the board through the seed A, b and the C rounds and it was one of these things up into the right. It was a tech-enabled service in the ed tech space and the company was performing extremely well. But at the board meeting a lot of the numbers just weren't making sense from an efficiency standpoint. I would ask these questions and I would get these kind of vague answers and I just could not put my finger on it and ultimately, right after we did the Series C, we started missing our numbers and it turned out like when the business was having issues, we were throwing people at solving the problems and not tech, and so we weren't scaling efficiently. And that's fine, like a lot of companies do that. But a long story short, we ended up having a good exit in that company.

Ed Renzi:

The CEO ended up getting replaced by the Series C investor and like six months after he was replaced, we were taking a walk in China Basin and I asked him I'm like hey, when did you know things weren't going well? And he's kind of like six months before we closed the Series C. And I'm like how could you not have like raised the flag? Yeah, we could have solved this problem, we could have fixed it. And he just like I just didn't feel like I had anybody to talk to, I didn't feel like I could tell anybody and they'd enjoy the work. We pride ourselves. In addition to the three areas that we teach the founders, we're also that confidant. Like you both know, as founders, there's conversations you need to have. You can't have with your co-founder, you can't have with your family and friends. You can't tell your board. We're often the first phone call and that's kind of what's different now in my role than when I was an investor board member.

Monica Enand:

I think that's critically important because even as I listen to you say that, thinking about myself in the CEO chair thinking I needed to raise a Series C, I don't think I'd be looking for problems. I mean, I might have an inkling they were there, but I wouldn't be trying to dig them up and surface them. I'd be trying to package the company.

Ed Renzi:

That's right. It's like, hey, we got nine months of cash. I need to get this fundraise done, then I'll fix it later. Then I'll fix it later yeah that's right, that's right.

Sejal Pietrzak:

That's really important. You know something you said Ned earlier was the CEO may tell you oh, certain people that I hired were not the right people. I understand that you have an interesting methodology you use for hiring and to get the right people. I know a lot of our listeners, whether they're in startups or any kind of company, who are managers and are looking to hire people would love to hear about some best practices. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Ed Renzi:

Sure, absolutely. It's a process called top grading and I beg borrow and stole it from a book called who, which is a pretty famous book in the Valley about hiring, and we just sort of made some tweaks to it. You know, as we implement it, we found what works most of the time for our companies and not. The focus is on defining the outcomes and competencies needed to succeed in a role, which is very different than a job description. Right, because it's much more results focused. Right, most of the people I talk to feel like they're really good at hiring, but the data shows it's a 50-50 proposition at best, especially if you're using traditional techniques. And what top grading does is it forces a rigor and a process that gets you to the right person more like around 90% of the time, so it's a much higher hit rate. And so when you start working on the outcomes, you want to interview for those outcomes that define what success looks like 12 months out, 24 months out, et cetera. And as the interviewer, we sort of force you to say what does great look like in this role, on this outcome, what does good look like, what does poor look like? And it's a lot of work up front. It's time consuming and worthwhile. But I liken it to the old adage is if I have six hours to saw a log, I spend three to four hours sharpening the saw, and that's what sort of putting this scorecard together feels like.

Ed Renzi:

Then on the competencies, there's a list of about 50 competencies the top grading process identifies. We advocate picking the top five or six that are needed to succeed in that particular role and interview specifically for those competencies. And these aren't competencies. You make up it's a defined list of 50 or so and you pick the ones that most apply. And, as you know, no candidate's perfect right. So you're gonna be interviewing these candidates and they're gonna fall short in some areas. Right, they're gonna be good, not great, or they're gonna be poor and they need to improve. And so what I have my executives do is have three buckets right, not great, or they're going to be poor and they need to improve. So what I have my executives do is have three buckets right.

Ed Renzi:

There's a bucket of easy to change things, medium to change things and hard to change things. And so, for example, if you really like a candidate but they're not good at something like oral communications or written communications, that's in the easy to change bucket right. They have the intellectual capacity and if they have the willingness to change and put in the work, that's an easy thing to learn in 30, 60, 90 days, whatever right. I'd say to the far right. There's the hard to change things right. That could be like they don't have the intellectual horsepower to solve problems that you need solved in that particular role or you identify a potential trust or integrity issue and those are just red flag showstoppers. We just sort of send those people out the process. Then you'll find a lot that are in the middle, somewhere between easy, medium and medium hard to change.

Ed Renzi:

You have to make the decision of you know one. Are they worth it? You think they could generate the outcomes and they're willing to put in the work to make the change and they commit to it, then yeah, go ahead and hire that person. But if you get the sense that it's going to be too much work, you can't oversee or take on that project Because startups cannot just always be in this employee training mode, right? So people kind of have to do this on their own. If you don't think they're going to make it, then we don't hire Right code If you don't think they're going to make it, then we don't hire them, right. But it's really implementing that process with that rigor and discipline has really increased the hit rates with our executive hires.

Sejal Pietrzak:

That's really interesting. Yeah, you know, I think you can do that every time you're hiring, which is to think about the outcomes, think about the tangible results and then also whether someone can learn it. I'm always hiring at different companies and have done so much in my life and I think a lot of times maybe our gut instinct takes us to those questions. But it's really great to have that methodology so that you can actually, you know, clearly have some kind of ranking system or something written down, and it's sort of sometimes you fall in love with candidates because of their personality or because of something or another, Um, but maybe they're not the right fit for for the role at the time.

Ed Renzi:

Yeah, and again I just focused on like the 30,000 foot view of what separates that from other hiring methods that the book really gets into detail. On screening interviews, because, like one of the things when I start working with a company, one of the things a lot of direct reports to the CEO complain about is they spend too much time in interviews that were just a waste of time. That person should have never gotten to me, right. And so we're really rigid about putting in like rigorous screening processes and only making sure the candidates like there's ways to screen out a lot of the B and C candidates and just sort of a 20 minute phone call. So it's only like the sort of B plus and A's that sort of make it through to the interview process and then it gets into.

Ed Renzi:

Also, like, how do you do proper reference calls? Like most reference calls are perfunctory or people skip them and different things like that. And what we found is there's ways and tricks to sort of learn useful things in reference calls. And so one of my Birchmere companies right now is a pre-IPO company. We're interviewing for cro. We've been looking for this role for like 15 months and we finally got the person and something turned up in the reference check, which nobody expected. It's kind of like you know, um, you know we're not starting over again, because part of this process is also you just kind of keep the final live until that person actually starts. Even when they accept an offer, it's not guaranteed, right. You got to make sure they show up and stuff and so yeah, but you know we have to restart with some candidates.

Monica Enand:

I've actually spent energy on reference calling and the questions that I ask and that the way you can ask a question and put somebody in a moment and then ask them can really elicit a completely different response and you can learn things about their interactions with the candidate. It's just really in the phrasing of the question actually.

Ed Renzi:

Do you have a favorite question that's worked for you? I do, let me hear it. I could tell. I could tell I do. I always I'll flip the interview.

Monica Enand:

Okay, yeah, you're not supposed to be interviewing me, but okay, well, I do always ask, and so I'm wondering, now that you've studied reference calling, tell me if this is a good one, but it has worked for me. So I always ask if I called you six months from now and told you that we had hired this person but that we fired them you heard it six months from now what would you guess would be the reason? And 90% of the time the person will go oh, because they pissed somebody off, or oh, you know, they just blurted it out, like if you guessed why would they get fired, why would it be? They blurt out the reason and then you're like, wow, okay, you didn't. You said all these glowing things during this reference call. You never even failed to mention, you know you didn't even mention that.

Sejal Pietrzak:

That's a really good one. I don't think I've ever asked that.

Ed Renzi:

It's the gold star, right, because we that that is what we call a pre-mortem question, right? So, like when I talked about the when something doesn't work and we do the post-mortem analysis, the pre-mortem is hey, if I hire this person in six or 12 months from now, they don't work out. What are the most likely? Two or three reasons, right, and that pre-mortem is an effective framework we use across the company, right? So if you're setting financial goals and you say, hey, if a year from now, at the end of the year, we don't hit our goals, what are the most likely reasons why?

Ed Renzi:

New product, new, real and then what you do is you identify the top three or four risks and you build risk mitigation plans. Hey, we're launching a product September 1st. What are the top three reasons If the launch doesn't go as planned? What are the most likely reasons why? Maybe it's scalable architecture, or you're having an issue with the database, or maybe it's like a channel partner you use whatever and then you build risk mitigation plans, and so what you did is took that and applied it to interviewing, which, you're right, that is the best question and that framework works across the company.

Monica Enand:

Oh, wow, okay, I didn't even know. When you said premortem, I thought that was interesting and I've, of course, have done postmortems or retrospectives. I actually sometimes, when we launch new products, people want to call them postmortems and I would always say I call them postpartums because I feel like we did something new. But anyway, whatever you call them, but I I had never actually thought about you the way you're saying pre-mo. Is that something, sejal, you've ever done?

Sejal Pietrzak:

I've never heard of that either and I think it's fascinating. I've never actually asked the question because you know it's kind of a negative thing that oh, what if we fail. But it's a great question to ask which is any initiative you're doing, whether you know you talked about it in the hiring concept, but it could also be in any kind of product launch or initiative or new strategy. What would be the reason why we failed at this?

Ed Renzi:

That's right, sejal, and one of the most effective scenarios to ask it is fundraising and so not like in, say, the first or second meeting. But now you have an investor starting to lean in and you sort of have built enough trust and confidence and to sit down with that investor and say, hey, look, we're coming up to the investment committee in two weeks. If, for some reason, you get pushed back in the investment committee and this is not approved, what's the most likely two or three reasons why? And what that will uncover is behind the scenes, when they're having these hallway conversations about your company and your deal. It's going to identify the pushback your, your champion, is getting internally and then it gives you a chance to sort of say, ok, this is what I get in front of that partnership and that investment committee. Here's what I need to emphasize, because this is the questions he's getting.

Monica Enand:

Yeah, you know, actually I did do that in fundraising and it's interesting, I never thought about it that way. But I have to tell you that when I first started fundraising, I never did that. I that took me a while because and it was probably this, and I will tell you that my body got hot, my face probably got red and cause I will tell you that it took up some nerve. It was the working with stupid investors and sorry, working with stupid investors for a long time and then not passing, not then having it fall apart and feeling like I wasted so much time that finally got me to start asking that question. Um, but it was such a scary question. It's like why is my baby ugly? Like, if you like, you know it really is a like, tell me why this would fail. I think Sejal's right. Like it's a hard, it's sort of a negative question.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I'm literally writing this down right now because I want to remember it for you know.

Monica Enand:

For example, going you can listen to our podcast.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I know, but I want to write it down to that Even today, when I'm in meetings, I'm I'm asking that question because it's such an important thing to think about that. I don't know that I've ever phrased it that way. It's even in life, when you look at it and you know you're, you're saying, hey, when I go and do this and it's not successful, for whatever it is I'm speaking at an event or your son's having a test coming up. If it's not successful, what are the reasons why it might not be successful? And then you know, you can imagine even you know your son and he's has a big exam and he can list out all the reasons why. Well, I didn't spend enough time studying, or I didn't do this and I didn't do that, and maybe he can get even more specific. And then that maybe can guide the decisions today because you know what could cause the failure tomorrow. I wanted to ask specifically about the VC world right now.

Ed Renzi:

Sure.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Are VCs having trouble raising funds and, if so, why? What's going on in the macro economy right now that's affecting venture capital?

Ed Renzi:

So I'd say, you know, the venture industry is in flux. It's gone through several boom and bust cycles in my career and it's still looking for a new equilibrium. So you know, venture works on these 10 to 15-year cycles. Each fund's a 10-year partnership, but it could take 15, 20 years, especially if you're an early stage investor, to get out right. And so what's happening is there just hasn't been a whole lot of exits and money getting returned to LPs, so those LPs can, in turn, re-up in the funds, right. And so what's that? The industry, I'd say, from 2015 to 2020 or so, had a velocity where the successful funds were raising new funds every two to three years, and now it's kind of like every four to five years, right, because the IPO markets are closed.

Ed Renzi:

Washington is very unfavorable to big tech right now, so there's fewer M&A transactions going on, so it's harder to get to liquidity, and so if there's no liquidity, there's no money going back to the LP, so there's fewer funds getting created.

Ed Renzi:

I think, on top of that, there's a lot of funds that were raised in 2018 to 2021 that deployed money really fast at really high valuations, and the metrics the valuations were out ahead of the metrics, right, and some most companies are not going to grow into those and those funds are not getting to exits, and so there's a lot of walking dead among the venture community. Right now these funds are effectively out of business. They just kind of don't know it yet or they just need to let the time play out, and it's very opaque to founders, right. So you know back to some of these questions you ask when you're fundraising. One of the questions we always ask is how many de novo investments have you made in the last 12 months? So you want to find out are they actively deploying capital in new investments, not just follow on and things like that? You know my sense is it's going to take a few more years to play out.

Monica Enand:

So when you say walking dead, so some of the funds are dead and actually I recently got it. I'm blanking on the name, but there was a famous fund that just went under their walking dead companies as well as.

Ed Renzi:

Oh yeah, that's right. So, like I can see I can see in my portfolio we're sort of in year nine of a 10-year fund, right, and we had some early successes and obviously a lot of early failures, because we're doing pre-seed and seed and so we sort of have this portfolio right now where there's three or four companies that really have legs. We think they have IPO or big exit potential and their numbers reflect that right. They're sort of 50 to 100 million year revenue growing at high rates that suggest future success. But then you have that handful of companies that didn't fail but they didn't have good enough metrics to raise money and they did what good founders do, right, you get to break even, right.

Ed Renzi:

And so now we have these businesses that could be, you know, two to 10 million revenue growing 10, 15 percent a year. Not enough to get venture excited, not enough to to to exit at a multiple the founders happy with, and so they're almost like somewhere between a lifestyle business and something that's going to take like another 10 years to get to an exit that the founder wants. And there are a lot of companies out there like that and for me that's the founder's choice If the founder is comfortable running a $30 million business with good EBITDA and that's what they want their life to be. You know that's great. I do have other founders who have certain ambitions that you know they do want to keep taking big swings right.

Sejal Pietrzak:

And right, wrong or indifferent ventures a young person's game. Talk to us a little bit, maybe, about the coaching side and how you know you recommend and doesn't have to necessarily be just to CEOs or just to founders, but just in general about coaching and the value of it and what are some of the things that you know you would recommend as people are considering getting coached.

Ed Renzi:

Our model is a little bit different. Like, our model is, like I'll say, much more intensive than any of those. We meet with our founders on a weekly basis. We know the business as well as anybody outside the company, right, more than typical advisors and mentors, better than board members, et cetera Almost any better than anybody else on the team. And the other thing enjoy the work does is we bring a team of people to this.

Ed Renzi:

So, like I said, we're all, we're 12X operators and, for example, like, say, I was working with your company, monica, you and I would have these weekly calls what's most important and what's urgent to you and your business, and we would work through those issues. And all of a sudden, you come up on something where one of my partners has a superpower. So, say, you're launching a new product, I would pull my partner, mike, into a meeting, right? Mike ran seven product teams at Airbnb and he could help you with that product launch. Or if you're doing a go-to-market as you scale up, you just closed around and you want to scale up sales, devin, one of my partners, was chief revenue officer of three different unicorns. I'd pull him in for a couple of meetings, right? Our newest partner, sarah is an expert in payments. She's already met with a couple of my companies. How to, you know, increase revenue from payments and also decrease our strike costs, you know. So, things like that.

Ed Renzi:

My partner, kristen, who I think you met, kristen I mean Kristen, I IPO'd company, right, so I have a company preparing for an IPO, you know. I have them start meeting with her. Or she's also helped me interview some VPs of marketing. So you get the sense of like, if you're a founder considering this, where are you on that spectrum? Are you looking for something more on the self-help side? Are you looking for this like weekend immersion, or are you looking at something that's really going to change your trajectory long term?

Ed Renzi:

Right, because I look at these companies in three logarithmic phases. Right, there's a zero to one phase, where you create something from nothing, and there's a one to 10 phase where you build repeatable, scalable processes, and then there's just sort of blitz scaling. Right, get, get big, no problem, no solution. Higher position, manage those position players and our goal is to help the CEO keep their job as long as they want to keep their job. And so, like, some coaches are really good at the zero to one phase, or some are really good at the scale up phase and what we try to do is help the founders and we have these playbooks and frameworks and our experience levels.

Ed Renzi:

And what we try to do is help the founders and we have these playbooks and frameworks and our experience levels. And you know, monica, I mean I've invested in you know 50 or 100 seed stage companies but a handful of them made it to IPO once or twice a portfolio. I've stayed with them to do the IPO. So I've seen this movie a few hundred times. I joke with my founders that the best I could do is help them make new mistakes right, because I can help them avoid a lot of the big mistakes that I've seen. And I think it's up to founders to decide what they're looking for in that coach advisor relationship.

Sejal Pietrzak:

That's really great.

Monica Enand:

It's great that you're talking about sort of the job, sort of training you for the job and keeping you trained for the stage and what is stage appropriate for the business, the magic here at Enjoy the Work. It sounds like you're fusing both those things and then having partners around the table and then playbooks and best practices.

Ed Renzi:

That's right, because you're coaching and advising the whole person, not just the CEO in that particular role. Right, because if you're coaching just the business stuff and just the CEO things and that person's not sleeping well or their marriage is falling apart or their kids won't talk to them, they're not going to be successful in their CEO role. And again, we are not therapists. You know we don't get into like back issues that people are dealing with from their past. We recommend therapists or CEOs if, if, if, if they need them, but we do coach the whole person.

Sejal Pietrzak:

You know, just in this conversation I've taken two pages of notes.

Ed Renzi:

Isn't that funny.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Literally like think that I know that I can improve and I want to use and not forget and I'll listen to the podcast too, but you know I want to remember it right now. So this has been really great.

Ed Renzi:

Excellent.

Monica Enand:

Yeah, Sejal has multiple companies that she's board chair for and on the board of, and high-growth companies and just some pretty spectacular things that she's doing, so I'm sure she'll use that effectively.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, ned, it has been fantastic having you on the show. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing so many valuable lessons and interesting facts about what's happening in the macroeconomy as well, and I want to thank you so much for and it was great to spend time with you, great to meet you.

Ed Renzi:

Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks.

Monica Enand:

All right. Well, that was another episode of Masterstroke. Thanks, sejal Ned, and thank you to our executive producer, georgiana Marland.

Georgianna Moreland:

Thank you for listening today. We would love for you to follow and subscribe. Monica and Sejal would love to hear from you. You can text us directly from the link in the show notes of this episode. You can also find us on the LinkedIn page at Masterstroke Podcast with Monica Enid and Sejo Petrzak. Until next time.