Leadership Tips By Jacob Espinoza

13 concepts to understand before you lead a team:

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

1. Everything starts with trust

Your team needs to know you are competent and have integrity.

The easiest way to show them you have both is by doing what you say you will do.

- Write down your commitments
- Proactively manage expectations

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

2. Conflict is a Constant

Hoping conflict will go away by ignoring it is like hoping weeds in your garden will go away when you ignore them.

Your goal is not to hope conflict disappears because it won't. Your goal is to get better at managing it.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

3. Seeds Depend on Soil

You can create healthy soil in your organization by listening deeply to people at all levels.

Understanding their goals and obstacles will ensure you can provide the support they need.

Creating healthy soil will allow ideas to flourish.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

4. Clarity is Speed

Be ruthless about making sure all levels of your organization understand their priorities and Why their work matters.

Great leaders keep the vision visible.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

5. Focus on Strengths

The things that are recognized get repeated. Make sure your team recognizes the value they bring.

Your team will be more engaged and more likely to stay when they have a manager who focuses on their strengths.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

6. Develop a Coaching Culture

When you spend time developing your people, you save time fixing unnecessary problems.

Plus:

- More collaboration
- Better performance
Interested in creating a coaching culture?

Be the first to know about my cohort👇https://t.co/DiBfp0KJyf

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

7. Know Your Gaps

You can’t be good at everything. Develop a partnership with people who complement your strengths.

Side note: these are likely people you initially have a conflict with.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

8. Invest in Yourself

As you gain influence, working on yourself has a multiplying impact.

Improving your leadership skills will allow you to be more effective in improving the lives around you.

This is a big deal!

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

9. Be Urgent With Feedback

Don't wait 10 days for a conversation that will take 10 minutes.

Remember, the purpose of feedback is to help.

Be direct with feedback because you are invested in the success of others.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

10. Empower Decision Makers

Make sure your team understands the big picture and give them guard rails to work within.

When obstacles come up, you want them to be able to tell you why they made adjustments instead of coming to you for approval.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

11. Make it Easy to Talk About Mistakes

People are going to make mistakes. When this happens it's important for you to respond in a way that is aligned with your goals and values.

Creating a culture where people hide mistakes is expensive.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

12. Follow the 80/20 Rule

You need to know what 20% of your actions lead to 80% of your results.

Knowing this will make it much easier for you to say NO to the things not setting your team up for success.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

12. Protect Your Refresh Time

Know the things that keep you at your best, and don't let them become optional.

When you fail to stay energized, your team will feel it first.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) April 11, 2022

Most people fail on this one thing that is the easiest to do: sleep!

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 11, 2022

I've been developing leaders for the last 5 years.

Bad leaders all struggled for different reasons.

The best leaders all focused on these 7 principles:

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

The Flywheel

Building a great team is like pushing a flywheel. It's really tough at first but builds momentum with each push.

Take this approach with your team, do the hard things now that will make your life easier in the future.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

Radical Candor

Radical Candor means you care personally and challenge directly. It is how you build trust. (Shout out @kimballscott)

Care Personally by being empathetic and grateful.

Challenge Directly by being straightforward and sincere with your feedback.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

5 Steps of Execution

Step 1: Clear Communication
Step 2: Clarify Expectations
Step 3: Trust but Verify
Step 4: Coach to Opportunities
Step 5: Recognition and Accountability

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

Fail Fast, Fail Forward

Great leaders encourage their team to take chances and use failures as an opportunity to help their team grow.

Success is built on failures.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

Prioritize Developmental

Great leaders give their team space to grow, tools to succeed, and hold them to a high standard.

Effective Development requires all three of these components.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

Focus on Strengths

The best teams focus on the value each person on the team brings.

People who focus on strengths are 6x as likely to be engaged in their work and 8% more productive.

If you see someone being great, let them know!

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

They Focus on Outcomes

Great leaders make sure their teams understand the mission and connect their work.

Once your team understands the desired outcomes, give them guidelines to work within and impactful incentives so you can watch them be great.

— Jacob Espinoza (@MrJacobEspi) December 17, 2021

This was excellent. Thanks, Jacob.

— Misha (@MishadaVinci) December 17, 2021

Fundraising Tips From Chris Frantz

I just finished fundraising for @sendwithloops ahead of YC’s demo day.

Here are the unfiltered lessons I learned about raising money for an early stage startup.

This is a series of notes and observations from dozens of calls with some of the best investors in the world.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Stagger your cap. This is a bit of a secret. I talked to a handful founders fundraising right now that didn’t even know this was an option.

Here’s how it works:
1. Start fundraising for a preseed/seed round at a certain cap, 10m-15m is pretty common with web2 B2B SaaS

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

2. You get a few awesome angels to buy in at that cap (more on that below)
3. Then you complete your “angel round” and move on to raising funds from traditional VC’s but at a higher cap.

By “staggering the cap”, we were able to take a similar amount of dilution, but raise more.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

The best part? VC’s are used to this and expect it.

It also helps your Angels, the ones that initially invested, feel better about being the first check in.

If nobody told you about this before now, then…

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Find a deal Sherpa.

I stole this term from @zsims and I wished I had followed this advice more.

You want someone that will give you unbiased advice, make intros and be honest about how you’re coming off to investors.

Aside from @zsims advice, @JonDishotsky was a huge help.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Make sure to brag about yourself.

I would wonder why people passed on us. I would say "don't they know I've done x with y before?"

Then realize I hadn't mentioned it in the pitch.

You need to share your accomplishments with the Angel/VC, it's not up to them to read your mind.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Everyone is a partner.

You will talk to partners at VC firms, but things typically won’t move forward unless you speak with a General Partner. So here’s the general cadence of investments that I saw:

When a GP is on the first call, investment happened in 20 minutes.
However…

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

If there is no GP on the first call, you need to convince the partner, then have a second meeting with a GP to actually get the investment.

GP’s on the first call were usually interested or had domain expertise in the space. That was almost always a good sign for investment.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Don’t get upset when people pass.

The first person that passed on me wrote a very kind, 5 paragraph rationale on why they passed.

I wrote a 12 paragraph point-by-point rebuttal 20 minutes later at 1am from my iphone in the bathroom.

Thank them for their time and move on.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Watch out for smaller angels that don’t have a lot of experience investing.

I consistently got the worst advice and feedback from well-known Twitter “growth gurus”.

Just because they know the space doesn’t make them good investors.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

On the flip side, not every great investor is a founder.

I received hands-down the best advice from @grosen and am looking forward to running fundraising questions past him in the future.

Dude is underrated.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

There's a structure of lower-level "partners" at firms that are just spent.

They’re tense, their eyes are bloodshot and they're usually guzzling an energy drink.

Their entire job is scrolling through linkedin/accelerator lists and booking 12 intro calls a day with founders.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

They act as the front gate to the actual GP's at a firm, and you need to get past them to get in.

Answer questions quickly, while trying to act like a human as much as possible. Jokes are a plus. Smile, be confident and have fun.

If you see them relaxing, it’s a good sign.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Find your super spreader. You want one or two people, ideally Angels, early on that will back you and introduce you to VC’s.

We got lucky and ended up with 3:
- @SahilBloom
- @Austen
- @jaltma

(thank you!)

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Here’s a bunch of things you don’t need in a preseed fundraising round:
- connections
- 12 months of traction
- a deck
- an “investment memo”
- a “data room”

Here’s what you do need:
- confidence
- relevant founder backgrounds
- some type of traction
- answers to every question

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

so make some intros for me please https://t.co/ADxzpQtmHl

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 11, 2022

Nail your answers. You want to see nodding and eyebrows raising.

VC’s have a checklist. Don’t let them drop an X on any box of that checklist.

You need to pass all the basic questions before you can move forward.

Here are the typical questions I was asked.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

-What’s your key insight in this space?
-What does the next x years look like for you?
-What will you do with the money?
-What is your go to market strategy aka how will you get users?
-What is blocking you right now?
-How much are you raising?
-How much revenue do you have?

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Have answers for every one of these questions.

Tell the truth, but never say you don’t know.

Saying you don’t know the answer to a question causes the entire meeting flow to stop in its tracks.

Have an answer for everything.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Just because a “Tier One” VC books a call doesn’t mean they want to invest. In many cases, they will make a connection to invest in an A round.

If they want to invest in your seed, watch out for their ownership targets. Big checks come with big dilution.

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

And have to plug the tools we used.@clerkyinc - handled sending the SAFE’s (better DocuSign for startup paperwork)@pulley - beautiful + intuitive cap table management (better, purpose-built excel)

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Ok, hope that was helpful! I wish I had known this info before I started.

If you want to follow the next couple years of growth as we head towards a Series A, give @frantzfries or @sendwithloops a follow ✌️

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

Great insights for founders! Excited to support you.

— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) April 11, 2022

support me too! it's a good cause https://t.co/ADxzpQtmHl

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 11, 2022

Thanks Sahil 🙏

— Chris Frantz (@frantzfries) April 11, 2022

https://t.co/N6bweQzdFw

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 11, 2022