My Coach & My Scorecard

I aspire to be a great CEO. I want to be on list with Elon and Branson and Bezos and Jobs. And if I play my cards right this may kill two birds with one stone and get me into the running for "The Most Interesting Man In The World".

Assuming I'm not there yet means I need to get better - so long story short, I went out for dinner the other night with one of my advisors to figure out how far away I was. I asked for feedback, something I am now convinced we should all be doing more of (this article was my inspiration) and Paul was nice enough to invite me over, cook me dinner and sit and talk with me about where I was, where I could be, and what I need to be doing better.

Essentially he gave me a no-bullshit scorecard based on what he could see. And it looked a little bit like this....

• Relentlessness: 90
• Vision: 90
• Financing: 90
• Recruiting: 90
• Marketing: 0
• BizDev: (no score)
• Evangelism: 50

Not terrible... But there is some areas that definitely need improvement. For starters fuck marketing. I didn't say fuck acquisition. And I don't undervalue the need for growth, acquisition, or any of the activities that create inbound interest in your product. Its just not me. I've spent time with some of the best and worst web marketers ever to exist, and I can see what makes the great ones great. I just don't love the analytics, the tweaking and the blind persistence that make it work. If I were an artist I'd probably paint with a power washer. So I/we need help...

[Plug] Upverter is actively hiring an incredible startup marketer / growth hacker. [/Plug]

Now, with that out of the way, I need to talk about Evangelism. A completely subjective 50 out of some undefined denominator (probably 90). Fuck. And he is probably right too. This is something I need to fix. If I do anything to elevate Upverter over the next 3 months, its going to be making damn sure engineers understand why we have been killing ourselves for the last 2 years. Its going to be talking about what hurts, why it hurts, and what we've learned about how to make it hurt less.

Talking with Paul about evangelism also made me realize that what I was doing in and around the Toronto startup ecosystem was a half-assed attempt at evangelizing Toronto startup founders. This is something I will need to write more about too, but there is much work that needs to be done here too.

Not really sure how to end this... get ready to give a shit.

Read some useful shit here: The Art of Evangelism (Guy Kawasaki)