Conviction - The Essential Ingredient For Focus & Scale (Edu)

**Chris Saad** (0:00)
When you're talking to customers, you need to be listening to their pain, not their prescription. does that saying customer is always right? Well, no, actually in product and in software and in a lot of cases, the customer is almost never right.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
You're listening to The Startup Podcast. This is an educational episode, in-depth masterclasses about the concepts essential to building, running and investing in Silicon Valley style startups. Whether you're a founder, investor or operator in a startup, you'll gain insights into the principles that power high growth disruption, the same way Facebook, Google and Uber do it. The conversation starts now.

**Chris Saad** (0:41)
Hey, I'm Chris Saad.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:42)
I'm Yaniv Bernstein.

**Chris Saad** (0:44)
On this week's show, we're going to discuss one of the most important concepts in startup life, conviction. It underlines everything you do in your startup and in your operator journey. We're going to talk about what conviction is, why it's important, what happens if you don't have it, and how to go get it and propagate it in your company. It's going to be a compelling conversation. It's super important, super subtle, and super essential to your journey as a startup founder. So stay tuned. All that and more coming up straight after the break.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (1:12)
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That's vanta.com/tsp for The Startup Podcast to get $1,000 off. Welcome back. I have conviction that this is going to be a fantastic episode. And just before we bust into it, I wanted to remind you all about the TSP Pact. Those of you who are regular listeners know that all we ask in return for this fire hose of free and valuable content is for you to follow us, give us a rating and review in your favorite listening app, subscribe to us on YouTube and give us a shout out on LinkedIn or wherever it is that you have your audience. It means so much to us. It helps us grow the show, continue to get fantastic guests and keep doing this for all of you. Thanks so much. Now, Chris, let's talk about conviction.

**Chris Saad** (2:26)
Before we explain what the heck is conviction, let's first talk about why we've come to this topic. So, you know, in my advisory work, and I'm sure you've seen the same thing, I meet a lot of founders who are sort of tied up in knots about what to do next, or they're really building a technology-backed services company with nothing that's really coalesced into a product. Things are moving slowly. They're maybe shipping a lot of things, but none of it's really laddering up to polished products. And scale is a lot of dysfunction happening. And in a lot of cases, one of the root causes of this is actually a lack of conviction by the founders, by the CEO and maybe some of the key leaders in the company. That's what we want to address today is one of these root causes, which is conviction and helping founders find their conviction. So what is conviction? Let's start there. Conviction, for me at least, is having clarity of purpose and executing toward that purpose with alacrity, to convert potentialities into a single, often embarrassingly narrow reality. It's about making a bet and it's about overcoming your fear, your indecision, your doubt, maybe feeling those things, but choosing a single path and committing to it anyway.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (3:42)
Conviction is something that comes from inside. It is a view of the future that you are trying to create. This is really important in startups because otherwise you end up dissipating your energy. And Chris, you talked about Vanta is being tied up in knots and things moving slowly and nothing laddering up to Polish products. And the reason for that is that the world of business is brutal. I cannot emphasize this enough. Whatever you are trying to do, you will get knocked down so many times. You will try things and most of the time they won't work. You will have customers who give you feedback who surprise you to the downside and money, right? You're going to be running out of money all the time. You're always running out of money. You're just going to have all of these things that make turning your vision into reality really challenging. So the pressure to start to dissipate from that vision, to try to say, okay, how can I bring in money quickly? How can I do what the customer tells me? Or, you know, abandon this thing because it doesn't seem to be working and try something else and thrash around.