Never Too Late to Startup: How Mid-Life Entrepreneurs Create Wealth, Freedom & Purpose by Rob Kornblum

Author:Rob Kornblum [Kornblum, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619614215
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

It’s also crucial to know yourself and the things you like to do and want to do. Lew Cirne of New Relic knew he didn’t want to be “sitting in meetings” or “dealing with extensive pipeline reviews,” so he hired brilliant people to do those things.

Here’s where you have an advantage over a younger entrepreneur. As Cirne suggests, your personality and skills are pretty well-developed at this point in your career. You have the self-awareness to hire compatible personality types with complementary skills.

This is a major thing for a founder starting their company later [in life]. The difference between me running Wily (author’s note: in his twenties) and me running New Relic (author’s note: in his forties) comes back to that self-awareness and self-discovery. I’m far more comfortable with me as I am, with weakness and warts and all, instead of trying to be…someone I wasn’t. I don’t get excited about crawling through pipeline reviews and looking at [sales] deals and making sure we have a disciplined process for scaling the organization. And I don’t like to sit in meetings.

All of these things are super important for growing and leading a company, but I discovered what I love to do is create stuff. I love to kind of convince other people to join the cause. I love getting people excited about the cause. I’ve got a list of things I love to do. But then I need to hire for the other things that most people think of as CEO responsibilities. I need to hire very senior people that might otherwise be CEOs and give big responsibilities [to] them.

So the result, for me personally, is I’m sitting around a table that has six chairs, and this is the only place where I have meetings. If the meeting has more than six people, unless it’s a board meeting, I don’t need to be in it. I think it’s very rare that someone in their twenties has that much self-awareness to really know…[how] to hire to complement their weaknesses.

And be comfortable letting go. Because as a founder, you have to be passionate about the company and you’ve got to care about the details, but yet you’ve got to be comfortable letting go of those details, so that other people can really grow and blossom.

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