Prompt Your Way To Personal Growth - Ep. 51 with Steve Schlafman

Steve Schlafman (0:00)

I paid ChatGPT $20 a month. I now have access to a skilled Jungian analyst, dream analyst. I designed using ChatGPT a fire ceremony. What happened is I basically walked in with my VC clothing, like an old outfit that I used to wear, and I literally stripped down naked, burned it, put on basically a robe, and then had this crazy experience, like huge emotional release. AI is like the ultimate integrator of these peak experiences, of these rich experiences, and it helps us deepen in ways that we wouldn't have been able to before. What I'm realizing is that AI has a real opportunity to dramatically expand consciousness of people.

Dan Shipper (1:07)

Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Schlafman (1:08)

Hey, Dan. So good to see you, brother.

Dan Shipper (1:11)

So good to see you too. So for people who don't know, you are the founder of Downshift. You are a former VC, and now an executive coach. You specialize in transitions for high performing people like founders. Your main claim to fame, of course, is you're an original Every Investor.

Steve Schlafman (1:28)

Yes, yes.

Dan Shipper (1:30)

And one thing that we were talking about, which I kind of wanted to start with, is I think you were reflecting a little bit on, I guess, the journey that you've seen us take and what that, I guess, what that says about what it's like to start something new versus what people typically expect a startup to look like. Can you just like tee us up for a second?

Steve Schlafman (1:56)

Yeah.

Well, Dan and I were reflecting for a few minutes before the show began to roll. And one of the things that I really appreciated about Dan when he was starting his fundraising process was like, I don't think I want this to be a venture-backed company. I don't even know what it's going to become. But, hey, like we're going to build something special. And I think there was something really magical about that because he wasn't here kind of giving this grand pitch in this vision of the way the world was going to be and what and how every was going to fit into it. And as I've been sitting with it and watching you and the way you've built it, it's like I'd imagine that version of you five years ago couldn't have predicted whatever it was going to become.

SPEAKER_2 (2:47)

No.

Steve Schlafman (2:48)

No way. No way. And it's almost like as I think about us building Downshift, I see Downshift as a container for emergence. So I think a lot of the time in startup culture, it's like we have this idea and we see it as a company day one, and then it becomes a thing that's rigid.

And instead of seeing it as a company in the earliest days, just seeing it as a container for emergence.

Dan Shipper (3:20)

I love it. How do you define emergence in this context?

Steve Schlafman (3:23)

Yeah, it's almost like I love the idea of the adjacent possible, Stuart Kaufman at the Santa Fe Institute coined it, Stephen Johnson popularized it. But it's this idea that there's sort of like a set of... They use it in a technological sense where there's a set of capabilities and that current set of capabilities eventually unlocks the adjacent possible, which is an entirely new set of capabilities. And so the way I like to think about emergence is that we have that in a company, there's like a set of ideas, a set of capabilities, values. And as we move through time and space, we learn and the container emerges and the opportunities emerge and things are proven, disproven. And it becomes this almost like this organic process versus this process that's like forced.

Dan Shipper (4:24)

Yeah. Here's how I think about this. And I think this fits in really well to your point. And I've only recently been able to sort of articulate this. But I'm curious what you think. I think it'll be interesting. So I think the thing that you're pointing to, like when I showed up and was fundraising and wasn't like, here's a big, here's this big thing. It's definitely going to be change the world or whatever. But I was like, here's some things I know and here's some things I think. And I kind of want to create a space to play around, basically. I think the reason why the other way of doing things is, sometimes it's helpful, but a big reason why it's not helpful and why it becomes rigid is because that is basically people doing what they think they should do or telling the story they think they need to tell in order to raise money. And sometimes that is actually true, you actually do need to tell that story. But as I've run every for a longer and longer period of time and just generally have been starting companies for basically my whole life, I've started to realize how much of company building is an expression of who you are as a founder and how much better companies go when a company is an expression of who you authentically are versus who you think you should be or think you need to be or whatever.