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The thing that What the best and brightest entrepreneurs have in common is their ability to inspire their customers, employees and investors.
I’ve worked with top founders like Marc Lore of Jet (sold to Walmart for $3.3 billion in 2016), Brian Long of Attentive Mobile (valued at over $11 billion in 2021), and Jennifer Hyman of Rent the Runway (IPO). gone in 2021). 2021), who share this power, and they leave all their key stakeholders equally eager to tackle their markets.
It is a common misconception that this ability to inspire is the same as charisma. There are many examples of people who are popular and well-liked, but are unable to rally those around them around a common mission.
For startup founders, especially in the early stages, the ability to inspire is all about the ability to show others the world the way you do. In general, this means not only articulating a compelling vision of the future, including a problem you’re trying to solve, but also clearly laying out the concrete plan for how you’re going to get there.
This is why inspirational leadership can make all the difference for your early-stage startup, and it’s important to note that it’s something to put into practice, and not a trait inherent only to some people. In this piece, I explore ways this skill applies to all aspects of building a business and share insights into how any founder, regardless of personality, can develop this skill for themselves.
Practice articulating your vision
The ability to inspire mainly comes from your own conviction – in your mission and in your vision. Often, discovering that vision is less a matter of creating and more an act of remembering: What was the thing that drew you to the life of an entrepreneur in the first place? What is the unique problem in the universe that you think you and your team can uniquely solve?
For startup founders, the ability to inspire is all about the ability to show others the world the way you do.
Once you can clearly and concisely articulate both that problem and your solution, you need to work on the ability to get other people as excited about the mission as you are. Founders need to practice describing their vision in a clear and concise way so that their stakeholders can see a future that doesn’t yet exist. It’s a matter of not only selling your mission, but also your confidence in achieving it.
This ability to inspire plays a key role in recruitment, especially for early-stage startups. Like Steve Jobs’ legendary call to Pepsi’s John Sculley, your ability to recruit the talent you need depends largely on whether you can get them as excited about the opportunity as you are.
Take it from me: In my own entrepreneurial career, as co-founder of ProfitLogic, my co-founder and I were faced with a scenario in which we were actively scouting an engineer just before he graduated from Harvard’s computer science program. The problem was that he had three other very lucrative offers on the table from brand companies, including Microsoft.