I wanna win by breaking all their rules

Forget relationships, forget culture, forget all that bullshit

I was watching my favorite podcast, My First Million, this evening and they had James Currier on as a guest.

James is a very successful entrepreneur and investor who is a Managing Director of NFX, a well known Silicon Valley VC firm, which has backed the likes of Doordash, Lyft, Patreon and Trulia.

Anyway he’s talking with host Shaan Puri and is asked what he attributes his success to and he says something about how it’s all about the interpersonal relationships he’s built up.

And that he’s really invested in getting better at this interpersonal part. Which boils down to stuff that is along the lines of the famous Stanford Business School class “Touchy Feely”.

This made me wanna barf.

And today’s i’m gonna explain why.

And how i’m going to ignore all of that bs and still kick some very serious ass with my startup, Reviv.

The famous “Touchy Feely” course at Stanford

Apparently when people that graduate with a Stanford MBA become very successful in their career they look back and often attribute a big part of their success to what they learned at the class “Touchy Feely”.

The course is officially named “Interpersonal Dynamics” and it’s all about learning to communicate in a smarter way with others.

This lady Carole Robin in the video above was one of the instructors that taught it for awhile.

It teaches you things like:

• How to give better feedback to others

• Crafting how you tell others things

• Focusing a lot on how you feel and how things will make others feel

• The importance of being very good at developing interpersonal relationships

Why I’m not a fan of this mantra

This playbook focuses so much on interpersonal relationships and how you make them work for you.

But do you really want the success of your business to be based on interpersonal relationships?

I definitely do not. I wanna build a business that is bulletproof to whether specific individuals get along with each other.

You see my experience is that humans are very flawed. Some colleagues will become tight friends while others will become bitter enemies.

And the more people you have in your group… there is always gonna be some of each. I’ve literally never seen an exception in any large company I have ever worked for.

Even the ones that touted that they had a ‘great culture’ always had pockets of people that could not stand each other and would be playing silent politics behind the scenes.

I also have seen lots of senior leaders that i considered ‘useless’ to have a lot of leverage and a strong following based mainly on their interpersonal skills. And on one occasion I saw very clearly how such an individual drove the company into the ground. Literally.

I don’t want my company to be driven by those shitty ass rules.

So I threw them out and made my own.

With Reviv we break all the rules

Reviv is my health D2C ecommerce company that I started in September of last year. We sell mouthguards that tap into ‘dental biomechanics’ and run a paid community.

At Reviv we do not invest at all in relationships or culture.

I am the only full-time person and we have something like 20 freelancers that perform all of our various functions. I am the only full-time person.

Nobody earns a set salary. Rather they are paid for what they do.

We have no team calls. I don’t do 1-on-1’s. We have no formal updates or reports.

I make no effort to get to know anybody in the team better.

Many people in the team have never even seen the face of the others.

We operate by making everything a task in Clickup and operating according to a highly disciplined system.

• Rule #1: Everything is a task (if it takes at least 10 minutes)

• Rule #2: All work is an update to a task, eg. a comment (No update = we can assume no work was done)

• Rule #3: Everyone clears their Clickup inbox daily at least once

How it has played out

I’ve been building up to this by implementing this system in various clients for the past four years but I would say Reviv is the cleanest version I’ve seen yet.

Probably because I have full leverage to do it exactly the way i want to do it.

And my view is that it is a masterpiece of how a small company should be run. Because the system is optimized for speed, agility and cooperation.

What do I mean?

• We hire and onboard people (as freelancers) in like 24 hours usually. We also offboard them if they’re not working out just as fast.

• I can test lots of different ideas & projects while committing very little resources. And pivot away from them at the drop of a dime if I want.

• I can double down on something that is working with more resources and people just as fast.

• Anyone can tag anyone else in the team on any task and expect support within a few hours. Regardless of their relationship.

• We are opening new markets and channels at a very rapid rate. And doing it while staying very lean and keeping the fat out.

I am the center point of this system and I know everything that is going on to quite good detail. Which is enabled by the fact that i’m following all of the important tasks on Clickup and keeping my inbox clean makes digesting this breadth of information far more manageable and timely.

Meaning I react to information that comes in almost immediately and not after waiting for the next weekly update.

This also means there is no overlap of what people are doing. No wasted reports or updates.

We have taken the ‘fat’ that exists in most companies and we burnt that shit.

Oh and by the way we are kicking some ass

I don’t wanna give specifics but sufficed to say we blew past the $1m ARR mark and are now going for the next milestone.

While maintaining quite good profitability.

How many SEA startups hit $1m ARR in six months and were bootstrapped & profitable? Do i hear crickets out there?

Everybody in the team is loyal despite being freelancers

I haven’t seen any true trace of politics.

We work like a well oiled machine. I make comments on tasks at 9pm or 10pm at night and usually get responses almost immediately. Despite the fact that the person on the other end is not obligated to at all.

We have a ‘culture’ even though we don’t invest in one. And that culture is something like: “Focus on the work and get shit done fast and as efficiently as possible.”

And if we do that we will all get along, feel supported, and feel like we are creating value.

Which is far better than the hordes of people in corporate who probably feel like they’re just playing politics most of the time and doing stuff that creates very little value.

Closing thoughts

If you think about what I’m saying… you’ll realize that I am trying to do the exact opposite to what the common mantra is about building interpersonal relationships.

I’m trying to show that there is a very different playbook that can work better than the one this “Touchy Feely” class is peddling.

And I think my playbook will prove itself to be far more sustainable longer-term.

Because i’ve removed the whole interpersonal element.

In my system we don’t care about building relationships. Because human relationships are flawed.

I’ve known great people that absolutely hated each other. And tried to trip each other at every opportunity.

Is that good for a young, growing company? No.

When you do it my way… you focus on the work.

And you counterintuitively realize… “Holy shit!!! Everyone is even happier when you do it this way!”