If you want find greatness, you have to improvise to beat impossible over and over again. There is no course or framework to teach you how to do this. Instead, you must never surrender to any fear or obstacle you face.
Osman Rashid:
So there are so many of those crazy moments that when you really look back, and say, "You know what? How the hell did we get through?"
Mike Maples:
Have you ever seen that 1980s TV show, MacGyver?
He works for a secret government organization. He's a genius. He's proficient in applied physics, multiple languages and numerous bomb disposal techniques.
MacGyver's persistence and ability to improvise, make him nearly impossible to defeat. He comes up with crazy solutions, like patching a faulty radiator in the middle of a jungle with egg whites, fixing an acid leak with chocolate, using sticky tape to get fingerprints off a champagne glass.
Well, you get the idea.
MacGyver is now often used as a verb, as in, "We have to MacGyver our way out of this problem."
So what's the point here?
Well, it turns out that when you're a startup founder, sometimes you have to channel your inner MacGyver. Osman and Aayush from Chegg personified this perfectly. So let's break it down.
First, channeling your MacGyver means harnessing observations. others rarely notice. If you listen to my interview with Steve Blank, you might remember how we talked about seeing things below the surface. The logo on the coffee mug, someone's favorite sales rep, how a customer finds out about new technologies.
None of these signals will help you close a sale right now, but you never know when something you noticed will reveal a breakthrough escape route from an impossible predicament.
One of my favorite examples is from my own personal experience at Motive where I was a cofounder. We had just filed our S-1 to go public and suddenly we had a problem, a deal fell through with just one hour left in the quarter. We were $1 million shy of our target with one hour left.
Scott Harmon, who was Motive's cofounder and CEO, MacGyvered to crazy move. He called the CTO at a company where we had an awesome relationship, but unfortunately an order stuck in purchasing that was pushing to next quarter. He got no answer. Straight to voicemail.
So he left a genius message. He said, "This is Scott Harmon from Motive. I will send you a bottle of 1973 Macallan single malt scotch if you call me back in less than 10 minutes."
Sure enough, the CTO of this company was British and had mentioned to Scott at dinner years prior that this was his favorite drink. He called Scott back with that British accent of his and laughed and said, "Guess what? You just got to the front of purchasing." Motive closed a $1.5 million order with six minutes left to go in the quarter.
The more awake you are to noticing things, even the smallest details, the better position you will be to create strategic luck when time is running out and it seems like there is no escape.
Second, channeling your inner MacGyver means doing something unconventional. No business knowledge, playbook, or framework will truly prepare you for the MacGyver moment. They don't teach you how to do what the Chegg guys did in crazy situation after crazy situation, not at business school, or any school for that matter. I mean, who the heck spends $3.5 million on textbooks on their Amex card?
How does it even occur to somebody to do that? That it's an option? The answer is you do it when you can't raise capital or debt in Silicon Valley. You MacGyver another answer because you have to. Failure's not an option, and realizing this simple fact has a way of broadening the options you'll consider to avoid failure.
Third, channeling your inner MacGyver often requires you to talk your way out of tricky situations. When American Express asked Osman, "Why are you buying so many textbooks?", Aayush said in the background, "We're building a library."
Or when they shipped books to customers from Amazon instead of a Chegg warehouse, they backed up the claim. "We will get you the books." Even if they didn't actually have any books, and even if they didn't actually have a warehouse. And what the Chegg guys did to channel their inner MacGyver didn't stop there.
Remember how Osman knew all the names of the Amex customer support people? He did that to build rapport and caused them to hesitate even if for a half step, before shutting him down. Because without credit cards, there was no Chegg. In the end, he just kept finding ways to get the benefit of the doubt.
You might also remember in an earlier episode with Steve Blank, when Epiphany was about to lose a sale to a startup competitor, he withdrew from the competition. That's because he knew that losing to another startup would demoralize the engineers on his team, and he simply could not afford to let this happen, especially with a team that had made such sacrifices and had taken such a risk. So we withdrew. Yes, he was sending a message to the customer, but he was even more cognizant of the need to avoid a conversation he could not have with Epiphany's developers at that juncture.
Finally, MacGyver gets better under pressure rather than folding under pressure. Great founders are anti-fragile. The more challenges you throw at them, the better they get. The more impossible the situation, the more focused they get. The fact of the matter is, most people would have let their fears get the best of them. In the situation that Scott Harmon was in, he had one hour to find a million dollar. Many would be thinking, "How am I going to explain this to the board if I missed the number? Will we still be able to go public? What will the employees say?"
The same was true of Osman and his predicaments, or Steve Blank as well as so many others. When you're in MacGyver mode, you have to quiet your mind and focus. You have to call up your talent at will and excel.
Scott knew that there were only two thoughts that mattered. Who in the world has the authority to sign more than a million dollar purchase order in the next hour? And what do I have to do to get them to pay attention to me and act right now? All other thoughts in that moment are wasted thoughts.
In my toughest moments as a founder and startup investor, and there have been many, the thing I like to say is, "The enemies have surrounded us again, those poor bastards."
So what does that mean for you and your startup?
Maybe you face a MacGyver moment right now. I hope you'll remember a few things.
First, this is part of entrepreneurship. Everybody faces it, including the all time greats.
Second, when you face a MacGyver moment, you must clear your mind. Eliminate the negative self talk. You don't have that luxury. You need to get clear about what has to happen and how you can make it happen.
And finally, great founders realize that getting out of a jam involves a different mindset when it comes to obstacles. The great auto racers say that the best way to drive fast is not to look at the pins, but to visualize a path through the pins. MacGyver moments are a lot like that. You can't be fearful, because if you're afraid, then the fear you visualize will more likely materialize around you and become real.
But while risk is real, fear is not. Fear is a choice. If you're facing such a moment right now, I hope this episode encourages you and helps you avoid the fear. Risk is real, but you can conquer your fears always.
So what do I say to myself or to great founders when they're in that crucible?
Three words.
You've got this.