0:01
Do you have the confidence to attempt the difficult?
This is the question were going to examine,
were going to think about it in the context watching on behavior.
What it means to be confident and
the impact of that on the success of entrepreneurs.
As well as assessing your own personal confidence and
assessing some traps that we sometimes fall into.
0:46
And what that means, is we begin to deconstruct the term is that we're
going to talk about confidence, we're going to talk about risk.
And then, we're going to discuss interpersonal skills and
later social capital and the roles they play in new venturing, so
there are many statistics out there on the failure rates of start-ups.
You may hear that 10% of new companies survive or
10% of all new products succeed.
Perhaps it's an 18 or even 20% success rate for repeat entrepreneurs and for
veterans that have started companies, and have raised venture capital in the past.
They may achieve a success rate as high as 30% when they go on and
start new ventures.
1:43
And so when we look at confidence, it's the belief in one's self or
one's power of abilities.
And in this context, we're looking at self-confidence,
self-reliance and assurance, it's other perspectives for this confidence.
Confidence and self-efficacy, while two sides of the same coin are differentiated
in that self-efficacy is looking at the likelihood of an individual activity.
Where self confidence is a bit of a broader measure and
it's thinking about how you broadly perform in different dimensions, and
your level of satisfaction or expectancy in being able to do so.
So we're going to take a few minutes and
hear from the CEO of Jive Software and some of his perspectives.
[MUSIC]
>> You ready Anthony?
>> [INAUDIBLE] Anthony?
[LAUGH] My mom calls me Anthony.
>> [LAUGH] >> We didn't even talk about my parents,
I mean, it's kind of an important part of my story.
>> Really?
>> Well, they're both first-generation immigrants,
neither of them went to college.
My dad was a bartender for 50 years,
I picked up garbage to put myself through college.
>> Tough work!
>> Brutal in Cleveland, in- >> In the freezing cold and
all the snow and the ice [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] And the bugs and
the humidity in the summer.
That's awful.
>> So you know what it means to work in the trenches?
>> I do.
>> And that's what it's like being an entrepreneur too.
>> And, being a CEO, although people think it's a glamorous role,
it can be look at me today.
>> But not in a startup.
>> Not in a startup, not in a private company, not when you're grinding and
even when you're getting after it.
When you're still in the growth trajectory, you're, even once you go
public, or clarify, or even at Mercury we were a substantial company.
It's still brutal, it's still very lonely making those very tough decisions.
>> So what gets you through?
>> What gets you through it is being open and honest and
if you're wrong, then you're wrong.
You say you're wrong, and you call it, you don't, there's no shade.
There's nowhere to hide, just be open and
honest, and if you clue everybody in, they'll follow you.
>> Where do you get that mentality?
>> From my parents.
3:49
Riveted into me from day one, and quite frankly,
I've been in the valley a long time.
I've been here 30 years, and I gotta tell you,
about two-thirds of the perspective in the valley I'm not a fan of.
I'm not a fan of, it's all about me.
I'm not a fan of I gotta be on the cover of your magazine.
I'm not a fan of, I make all the decisions and all the success is because of me.
Not a fan of that, what I am a fan about, I grew up playing competitive sports.
I was a pretty gifted high school athlete and in Ohio, it's football,
basketball, baseball.
And so, they're all team sports, so I'm a huge fan of,
we win as a team and we lose as a team.
>> You're a University of Cincinnati boy, not a Stanford or Harvard guy.
How do you compete?
>> It's hard in this valley, it's very hard.
You compete with [INAUDIBLE] and experience.
When I came to the valley I was fortunate enough to have had a variety of
internships.
Where I actually had practiced engineering and the various aspects of technology.
So that put me actually a little further ahead.
>> Probably helped you were at Intel from the very beginning.
>> Yeah, that helped me a lot.
So, the way to compete is what you know and what you can get done.
Quickly, the degrees go away unless you're going to job hop and
go to the next job and then Stanford and Harvard really matter.
At the end of the day, even the people I hire,
I want to know what they can do for me tomorrow.
What can you do for me the next week, and then the next project,
and are you up to the challenge?
And the fact they went to Harvard or Yale or Stanford is interesting.
But if you can't produce, I'd just as soon you went to the University of Cincinnati,
because that's all that really matters to me.
And so, I just tried to practice that and really,
really perform unto the best of my ability and it's served me very well.
5:53
Things like weak body language, a hesitancy to speak up,
avoiding interaction, or being indecisive are a few.
There might be other elements of fear of failure, of a hesitancy to trust,
of some measure of seeking external validation or motivation.
They can play roles as well, so it's important to recognize some of these
self-confidence traps, and to take heed at some of these pitfalls that we may face.
6:24
We also want to stress the importance of why it's understanding a personal
confidence that's very important.
Entrepreneurs must have some measure confidence in their own judgement
particularly when things are difficult.
Or when your decisions might be unpopular or different from what others may advise.
What we find too is that entrepreneurial opportunity discover is constrained if
there's limited confidence or discomfort at being at odds with the majority.
7:10
That you may feel that taking the advice of others or
going with the mainstream is popular and easy thing to do.
But it's going to take some measure of confidence to do things that
are innovative, that by definition are fairly unprecedented, and
that are challenging and difficult to do.
And it's also that measure of confidence that's going to be Influential of
others in their opinions of you in your venture.
And so we want to have a high measure of confidence as it's related to talking to
investors, to recruiting prospective partners or co-founders,
to bringing other employees on board as well.
And so, we want you to be mindful of that and
we're going to talk later about the integration of some of these ventures