The Surprising Habits of Backable People with Suneel Gupta

Key Takeaways

• Sometimes having a unique idea makes it harder for people to buy into the idea. Coming up with brilliant ideas is not enough, you also have to know how to get people to buy into those things.
• Stories allow people to buy into your idea, statistics back up your story. To be backable, you don’t only need substance - you also need a story.
• If you feel that you aren’t charismatic, don’t spend your time trying to be something you are not. Instead, use your natural speaking style and tap into the conviction you have in your idea to fuel your confidence.
• Four types of people you need in your backable circle: a collaborator, cheerleader, coach, and critic. You need to know who you need in different situations. Different circumstances call for different types of support.
• When you practice your script so much that it becomes natural to you, you are no longer tied to the outline. You become very adaptable and are able to be quick on your feet. You can now make your points in whatever way you want.
• Instead of asking “how was I” ask “what stood out to you the most”  or “how would you describe this idea to someone else”- this way, the person you are practicing with can give you richer feedback. You will also be able to gauge whether the things you wanted to stand out actually stood out or not.
• Don’t give everything up in your presentation. Leave something for discussion. Use this tactic to shorten your presentation time and elongate your discussion time. In discussion, people get involved and you can create stronger connections.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris Hutchins: Hello and welcome to another episode of all the hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money and travel all while spending less and saving more. I'm your host, Chris Hutchens. And I am excited to have you here. Okay. So today I'm talking to Suneel Gupta, he's the best-selling author of backable, a really amazing book about the surprising truth behind what makes people take a chance on you.

He is also the founding CEO of the nutrition coaching app rise, which was named app of the year by apple, before selling to one medical. He later ran for us. Congress served on the faculty at heart. And is currently an Emissary for gross national happiness between the United States and the kingdom of Butan.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds pretty cool. And

[00:00:49] Suneel Gupta: in this conversation. We'll dig into his background and the research that uncovered seven surprising changes. That course corrected his life and his career. By letting him go from being embarrassed to speak inside team meetings, to confidently pitching ideas inside the offices of people like Michelle Obama and Tim cook, we'll learn what it takes to have a seemingly mysterious superpower that lies at the intersection of creativity and persuasion, something he calls becoming backable.

[00:01:18] Chris Hutchins: Why is this important? Because we all have a brilliant idea tucked away somewhere yet. Most of us are afraid to share it and have it be dismissed. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Suneel Guppta

Suneel thank you for being.

[00:01:33] Suneel Gupta: Chris is just, it's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:36] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, I want to start with a fun story. I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, but back in 2009, I also had my own face of failure story and I got laid off and I started a conference called laid off camp. So I was doing everything I could to promote this conference.

I was just hoping that someone would write about it. People would learn about it and I kept striking out. And so one day I got this email from a reporter who asked if I could participate in a story. And I was so excited after the interview, I called a friend of mine who knew everyone in tech. And I said, Hey, this reporter from tech crunch reached out to me.

I did this story. I'm so excited. And he was like, who was it? I talked about it. He goes, yeah, that person doesn't work at tech crunch. I was like, what do you mean? We searched online. There wasn't ever a story that had been written by this person. And we concluded that I got totally. So my excitement, my excitement was like turn south.

And the next morning a story actually came out on tech crunch written by Leena Rao, who also happens to be your wife. So that's my connection to your family from way back. And my story of, of kind of recovering from failure.

[00:02:44] Suneel Gupta: Th this, this interview has already started out at a very, very metal level. It's it's unbelievable. Yes. I mean, I, I, I love that story and, I think, my, my failure, my failure story is that Yeah. I was out there pitching my company rise. I was getting rejected by every investor that ever took, ever took a meeting with me.

And, you know, I'd started a couple of a couple of companies before that, too, that didn't do all that well. And then I joined Groupon, which had had a little bit of a moment and then, and then sort of crashed as we know, it lost 80% of its market value within a few months. And so I get it, I get a phone call one day from a conference organizer and she's like, Hey would you like to be a keynote speaker at this conference?

And I said, that sounds wonderful. What's the name of the conference? And she says, Which stands for failure conference. And so I'm literally asked to be a keynote speaker for a conference on failure, and I, do it, and I didn't realize that there was a reporter from the New York times in the audience and, fast forward to this full length article on failure with my, my face as the cover of this article.

And, I don't know what happened with that tech crunch article that Lena wrote, but for, for this, I mean, Christmas, it was crazy how, how viral it went. And this was like early 2014. And I think failure, like the idea of failure was, was just starting to come into the zeitgeists. We were talking about it a lot more, especially in places like Silicon valley.

And so there was a moment where literally you could have Googled the word failure and my face would have been one of your very top search results.

[00:04:21] Chris Hutchins: I have to imagine that was, that's not like the, the moment you want, like, if you could dictate what your search results are, that's probably not the ideal one, how did that evolve to a place where you're now, you ran for Congress, you wrote a book about becoming backable.

yeah. You know, A good friend of mine gave me a piece of advice and I'll never forget it. And this is going to sound very, sort of. Buddhism focused, but you know, the parable that he shared with me is that, when you feel pain in life, you feel embarrassment.

[00:04:50] Suneel Gupta: There are two arrows that are fired. One is the arrow that punctures your skin, right? It's the, it's the arrow that actually causes you the pain. And and there's not much you can really do about that arrow. But the second arrow is, is, is the meaning that you ascribe to that pain, right? What do you actually do with it?

And for me, you know, I was,, I was embarrassed by, by all of this I, and I, and yeah, I thought to myself, gosh, I've spent all this time trying to establish myself as this sort of the face of success. And now every time somebody Googles my name. It failure. A list of my failures is going to be the first thing they see.

But you know what I decided to do with it as I started reaching out to all of these people who I admired from celebrity chefs to Oscar winning filmmakers, to leaders of big iconic companies. And I would, I would basically write an email. Hey as you can see from this link from this article, I have no idea what I'm doing, but would you be willing to grab some time with me?

Would you be willing to give me some advice? And I was just astonished by how many people said yes, I will. I will spend some time with you. And I was also astonished by. I think people's willingness to talk about their failure, especially in these private conversations. Because when you look at their bio, you look at their LinkedIn, you're, you're not, you're not seeing that side of the story.

You're not seeing all the misses, you're just seeing all the wins. And so a couple of things really occurred to me during that conversation. Number one, , we don't rewind the clock enough and see how failure wasn't necessarily the opposite of success. But failure was a pathway to success for most of the people that we find to be successful.

But the second thing is that, people who change things, they didn't just learn how to cultivate a new idea. They learn how to sell a new idea. They learn how to make themselves backable. And, and that was a key thing that continued to come up over and over again, because you can have a brilliant idea and you can still be.

All right. That happens all of the time. And sometimes the paradox, the trick of it is that sometimes the more unique your idea, the less obvious it is, sometimes the harder it is to get people to buy in. And so it puts us in a bit of a weird situation, especially if you are somebody who's trying to create change, and that can be as an entrepreneur that can be inside your own company, which is that oftentimes we are striving to do things that are different, right?

I haven't talked to a single CEO of a company who isn't like, we want to be doing things differently. We want to shake things up, but we rely on different. We need things to be different and yet different ideas are also the hardest to sell. And so you have to, in some ways, again, not just learn how to come up with these, kernels that are going to change things, but you also need to learn how to get people to buy into those things.

[00:07:38] Chris Hutchins: you mentioned a couple of examples of, of people with ideas, entrepreneurs, you and I have both been on both sides of that table as investors as founders, but it came to me that this isn't just about learning how to get people to back your startup with dollars, that this could really have lessons outside of that, which apply to anyone.

[00:07:59] Suneel Gupta: completely agree. You know, I mean, you know, you and I, both our, our, our fathers now and, and I, I think about sort of, what am I telling my kids based on my experience, what am I trying to share with them? And what's the outlook that I want them to have, and I have two daughters and, oftentimes we say to our kids, you can do anything you want.

Right. And that's like the thing that a parent will sometimes say, and I, and I catch myself sometimes saying that. But I feel like I, knowing what I know now, I feel like I need to be more nuanced about it. It's not, you can do anything you want it's, you can do anything you want. But remember that no one ever does it alone, right?

No, no, no successful product project, political movement career trajectory that was successful ever happened through one person just saying, I'm going to go do that and doing it alone. It was always the people along the way that invested in you, that hired you, that took a chance on you in some way, shape or form.

And yeah, that could be an investor for your startup, but it could be a hiring manager who says, you don't meet all the qualifications of this role, but I like your energy and I'm going to take a chance on you. It could even be friends and family, no matter what we're trying to do. And in our communities and our careers and our companies, we always need to have those people taking a leap of faith on us.

And so how do you do that?

[00:09:17] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, that's awesome. And if you think about people who just have jobs, they're not looking to get a new job. Are there some examples of how you can use these kind of back ability traits to get things done?

[00:09:30] Suneel Gupta: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I know you had a Tim Ferriss on the show, a few weeks ago, and one of the most important things that I think sort of surfaced in the book was, was what I call casting a central character casting, a central character. And, the way that this came up for me was when I was, when I was actually pitching my idea, though, I think that this is, this is something that can be used inside companies as well.

But I was pitching Tim on my startup rise. And what rise did was one-on-one nutrition coaching. And I had all of the sort of, I had the classic like Silicon valley pitch deck, right. It was like all the numbers, all the sort of trend lines. You know, I talked about the rising rates of obesity and hypertension and diabetes and, and how big this market was going to be.

And then literally during like Q and a Tim and I started talking and the story of my father. And the story of my father is that, when my dad was in his early forties, he had, he had a triple bypass surgery emergency. He was rushed to the hospital. He, he almost lost his life.

I mean, it was, it was, it was a really close call and what I remembered most about the experience and what I was sharing with Tim was that when we went to go pick him up and brought him home, they had given us a folder of paperwork. And I remember sitting in the backseat of the car, I was nine years old and I'm flipping through this paperwork.

And one of the pieces of paper was how to eat. Right. And then it had things like eat broccoli, eat brussel sprouts. And I remember thinking to myself, like we don't, we don't eat broccoli. We don't eat Brussels sprouts. Like we're Indian. Like we eat Indian food at home. Right. That's not just not part of our diet.

And I remember thinking to myself, like, I don't think this is really going to stick for my dad. And it did. Like he was in abuse back in the hospital within 60 days. And so uh, w w w it was when we went back to the hospital that they gave us the help of a nutritionist insurance kicked in and helped pay for the cost.

And, I believe that my dad is alive today over 25 years later because of the help of that of that nutritionist, because she was able to customize something that was able to make it really stick and work for our lifestyle, for who we are and how we ate. And so I remember telling Tim that story and he looks at me and he's like, why wasn't that part of the pitch?

Like, why was that, why was that like a footnote in all of this. And what I realized is that oftentimes when we walk into a meeting and we're trying to persuade people, we come in with the numbers and that's especially true, I think in places like Silicon valley or in New York, when we can be very incredibly numbers driven.

But sometimes we miss the story, the story of that one, that one, one person. Right. And what we found when we looked at the most successful pitches, both of, for startups or inside companies, what people tend to do. Is, they tend to take us into the, into the shoes of that one person that they're trying to serve.

Right. And then they zoom out and talk about the millions of people who are sharing that one person's story. So in the case of, rise in case of my company, I would walk in and tell the story of my dad. Right. I would tell them, I would tell investors that story. And then I would talk about the millions of people who are going through their own version of that same story.

Central character casting, one central character and marrying story with substance is I think one of the keys of a backable person, like stories bring us in, but substance keeps us there.

[00:12:51] Chris Hutchins: And so is that something that applies more throughout? Do you start with the story? Do you have the story embedded throughout everything you're talking about? Is it more than narrative? How do you, how do you actually apply that?

[00:13:02] Suneel Gupta: Yeah, I think you can try different. I think you can try different ways and there's not a fixed formula as to sequence, I don't think the story necessarily needs to come first. I personally do. I like the idea of walking into a room and saying like, let me, let me introduce you to this one person.

Right. And let, let me bring you in, in that way. And then let's talk about the substance. Let's talk about all the numbers that support all of this. And I think that that tends to be the way that, that?

most, I think successful pitches go. I mean, even if you use to look at like, let's, let's, let's zoom out of startup world for a moment and just look at like journalism, right?

Like a great story that's written and a journalist that wants to bring light to what's happening in a certain part of the world. What they'll typically do is they'll start with one person. Right. This so-and-so and they'll put you right there and then those zoom out. And they'll talk about the, the, how the magnitude of, of, of, of the story, right?

Like it's not just this one person, but how many people are suffering from the same thing. And I think it's a very powerful way to, I think, start with story and then roll into substance, but you can try it both ways. You can start with the data and the numbers, and then you can tell a story too. But I think the key is that you do both right.

Great story. Like I think we talk a lot about storytelling in the world of business today, and it's become kind of an invoke sort of term, but, storytelling in business, isn't, isn't sort of getting up in front of a room and saying, once upon a time, it, it it's, it's it's story plus substance.

You need

both.

[00:14:22] Chris Hutchins: Yep. And, and we're talking about an example where you're already ready to tell your story. What happens before that? How do you, I know the first step in the book was to convince yourself, and I think you mentioned something that I thought was really surprising, which is, you know, you think about someone in your mind, who's kind of falls into this criteria of backable.

And, I think charisma is something that you think of and you pointed out that, conviction is really more important than charisma. So where did you kind of come to that conclusion and how do you apply it?

[00:14:52] Suneel Gupta: Yeah, because when I first started writing the book, I thought that I was going to find a certain style to backable people. Like they were all going to speak with, you know, great annunciation. They were going to have great hand gestures and pacing and eye contact and just all of like the classic communication things that we learned and, you know, a Toastmasters or a Dale Carnegie.

But that just did that, that wasn't the case at all. What I found was that, there were certainly some people who were highly charismatic and that were backable, but there were plenty who are not. And, you know, if you want just a quick example of that, go back and watch the original iPhone.

Right. 2007. And we remember that as, as a, as an epic epic speech and it, and it was, it don't get me wrong. But if you look at Steve jobs, communication style, it's not, it's not the poster child of charisma that he uses the word. Over 80 times in the speech, he spends a good deal of time sort of staring at his feet.

Like he does a lot of the things that if you were, if you were to go see a public speaking coach, they would tell you never to do, but it was, it was an incredible, incredible presentation. It changed the world. And there are plenty of plenty of examples of that. What I found is that, backable people, it's not charisma that I think makes a person backable it's conviction, backable people, the common denominator is that they take the time to convince themselves first.

And then they let that conviction shine through with whatever speaking style it is that feels most natural to them. So, I mean, if you're a charismatic person, naturally don't change that. But if you're, but if you're not like you're more, you're more shy or, you don't have sort of these classic techniques.

What I would say to you is don't spend your time trying to develop those techniques instead, go to, go to the conviction that you have in the idea. And so one of the mistakes that we see sometimes is that people will spend a lot of time creating very slow. You know, Sophisticated PowerPoint decks, or keynote decks for their meetings, right.

They'll come up with an idea and they'll immediately go to the design and to the aesthetic of how they're going to present it?

but they don't spend enough time actually thinking about like, why do I believe this is true? Like what, what, what are the, what are the potential holes in, in my thinking, what answers do I potentially have for those holes?

And, again, what we're talking about here, again, whether you're a startup or you're talking about inside a company, these are new ideas. And so every new idea is going to have holes And it's okay to have that, but spending the time to understand why you're convinced and also knowing what you don't know is you're going to be much better off spending your time doing that.

Then creating a PowerPoint deck with a bunch of bullets, but then getting into a room and not really having the substance underneath those.

[00:17:31] Chris Hutchins: And what do you say to someone who's. You know, Maybe on one end of the spectrum where they have ideas and they're really good at picking them apart and kind of ultimately abandoning them. And I think that kind of is me. I think part of working in venture capital is saying no, a thousand times.

And so every time I have something I want to do, one option is just like, wait. And if you're still really excited about it for, you know, three days, five days, 10 days keep going. But I feel like I've probably had ideas that I picked apart too much. And didn't build the conviction in.

[00:18:01] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that, that's definitely, that's definitely the paradox of, of, of being smart in.

a particular area. Right. As an investor, you started to see the holes and ideas, and then you apply that to yourself. I, I was talking to an investor the other day who was like, he comes from a FinTech background and he's like, I have a I've passed on every single great FinTech deal, every single one.

Right. Because I just knew too much. And, and so I do think that sometimes we can be sort of, I think more rigorous on ourselves than others might be, which is why I think that it is important to get out there and get feedback from other people. Right. And I mean, I think that, I think that, for you, I mean, you, you know, look at how it looking, how far this podcast has come.

Right. And where you are right now. I, I think that potentially back in the day, when you were thinking about starting this, right? One of the things that might've been on your mind. Why does the world need another podcast? Right. And you definitely could have gone down the path of like looking at the numbers and saying like, why is this different and all of that.

And maybe you would have abandoned the idea, but, my guess is that you probably started talking to some folks and they said, yeah, like, this is, this is pretty good. And so I think it's a combination of a couple of things. I think number one is number one is, is, is starting to build what we call in the book, this backable circle of people who are around you.

And we can talk a little more about that. There are four different types of personalities that we found that people have in this backable circle that they could, they could always go to. And, and, and, and I call those the four CS. So the first C is your. And that's the person who, in your case, when you have, you have a podcast and you're like, look, I, this is my podcast idea, and this is somebody who's going to build on top of it.

And they're going to be like, yeah. And what about this? And they're using language like, yes. And then you almost feel like you're in a musical jam session with them. The second is your, is your cheerleader. And, it sounds a little sappy, but we all kind of need that cheerleader in our lives.

Right? It's it's somebody who can, who can, I think, give us that bit of juice that we need, even if, even if it's not a perfect idea, they're kind of like, you know, look, you're going to be able to, you're going to be able to figure it out. And what we found is that, people, people who are, I think the most backable, extraordinary people they'll have cheerleaders in their corner.

The third is your coach and your coach is different than your collaborator because your collaborator at wider collaborate is thinking about whether your idea is going to fit them. Or if it's a company that you're in, or if it's a team, your coaches really thinking about like, does this idea fit you, right?

Is this something that you are going to want to run with? And it kind of gets to your question, Chris, which is like, I don't think any new idea is going to is going to be without holes. Like if it, if it, if it didn't have holes, it probably wouldn't be a new idea. But you know, the question is, do you, or do you have enough emotional juice to get through the rejections to get through all the setbacks that are inevitably come up along the way?

Right. And you're only going to do that. If, if the idea makes you come alive and. One of the things that a good coach does is they know us intimately well enough to say, yeah, this is something that you're going to want to run with and keep getting back up. Every time you get knocked down, because you love this, like, this is what you do, right?

Like for me as a writer, I love, I love to write. But when I went, when I, when I went to my wife and I was like, look, I've got ideas for these books. She wasn't like, Hey, all these ideas are like home runs. But what she said is like, I know that you love to write, like, this stuff makes you come alive and no matter what happens, like you're gonna, you're gonna like want to fight through that.

And you need a coach who knows you intimately well enough to be able to do that. And the fourth, the fourth C is your critic, but I like to call this your ch your cheddar. And I call this person to cheddar because if you've ever seen the movie eight mile and then M is surrounded by a circle of friends in the movie, and they're all kind of building him up, but there's one friend named.

Who's constantly poking holes and m&ms ideas. And w w we find throughout the film is that it's really cheddar, that gets M and M ready for the stage. And I, I think it's the most underrated member of our circle because we tend to sort of push the Cheddars out of our lives. And it can be kind of annoying that no one likes her.

No one likes people who poke holes in their ideas. But what we found is that backable people tend to embrace their cheddar because they really find that it's cheddar. Who's going to bring them, you know, get them ready for a big moment.

[00:22:26] Chris Hutchins: I mean, it's funny as you walk through this example, I think of my wife. Who's probably like the, I was like, oh yeah, she's the collaborator. Oh no. She's oh, she's the coach.

Like I was like, can, can the same person fill multiple roles or do you need four distinct people?

[00:22:40] Suneel Gupta: Now the same person can fill multiple roles. But I think the key is you want to be clear with people about what it is you need before, before you go in and talk to them. So if you're about to go give a pitch, or if you're about to go to a big meeting, you don't need cheddar moments before that, right?

That's the last thing that you need in that moment. You need a cheerleader. Maybe you need a little bit of a collaborator. So the key is that, if you have one person who can play multiple roles, you say to them, look, or, you know, let's take the reverse example. You're early, early on an idea, right?

And you're trying to get, you're trying to become aware of what are all the blind spots of the idea. Well, then you call friends that, look, I need you to be a critic right now. I need you to be a cheddar. But if you're moments before that big moment, and you want to call somebody and say, I need a cheerleader right now.

And so just be very clear with people about what you need.

[00:23:31] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, I'll go and say, this actually applies to so many things. I uh, as many people listening know, I have a newsletter and I remember the first time I asked my wife for feedback. I said, Hey, can you give me feedback on this newsletter? So I sent it to her and she comes back and there's all these comments about all the grammatical mistakes I made.

And I was like, Hey, I really appreciate you helping me because I made a bunch of typos and edits and all that. But I really just wanted to know if it was a good idea

[00:23:58] Suneel Gupta: Yeah.

[00:23:58] Chris Hutchins: about this

topic. And so I, I, you could take that lesson and apply it far beyond just, ideas that become backable and that whatnot.

[00:24:09] Suneel Gupta: Totally. Totally. Yeah, no. I mean, at the same, same thing happens to me, by the way I had to be like, I'm, I'm working on a new book right now and, and, and, it's very, very rough. We're like in rough shape stage right now, I'm writing very, very shitty first drafts. And so I'll tell my wife, I'm like, and she's a writer, as you know, and, and she'll say, I'll say to her, look, skip all the stylistic stuff.

Like don't like, don't even touch that. Just like, tell me, like, does this thing flow? Does this thing even make sense at all?

[00:24:35] Chris Hutchins: I know there are a few other things that you highlighted the book, but before we get there, I want to jump back to how you learned all of this. So yes, you reached out to all these people were, I'm not even sure if you were thinking about writing a book at the time, but what, what kinds of people wrote back and what were kind of some of the lessons that were themes amongst them?

[00:24:54] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I started to put it into practice myself immediately and, I naturally am just a, I'm a note taker and, you know, I, I tend to sort of take, you know, when I'm in a meeting with anybody, who I'm learning from, I just take copious notes and, and I'm pretty disciplined about that.

And I would, I would leave every single one of these meetings and it was a broad range of people, it was, it was, it was military leaders. It was, it was celebrity chefs. It was, it was people who were producing films. It was a lot of people inside Silicon valley who were on both sides of the table, founders who had done well and investors who invested in founders.

And so I was taking my notes and I was compiling them. And I was starting to realize that a, I really loved having these conversations wanted to have more of them. And so I did, I just continued to do that, but B as I was putting these things into practice, It was working. It was working for me. And I started to share some of the nuggets and some of the wisdom that I was getting in these conversations with other people, people who were starting companies, people who were inside companies that were trying to get their ideas made and it was working for them?

too.

And so, I, I, it took a while. I mean, I started this process in 2014. I didn't start writing the book until 2017. And the book didn't come out until 2021. And so, it's been a long time in the making, the, the, the way that I sort of themed the book was I really tried to put a tight filter.

The obviousness, like there were a lot of obvious things that came out of these conversations too. Right. You, you need to do your research, you need to be prepared like there, all the sort of obvious things, but I try to just filter all that out because we already know that. And I try to really search for, what was not obvious, convincing yourself first to me, even though now I look at it and I'm like, yeah, that makes sense.

It was one of those things I never really, I never really did. And I noticed a lot of other people didn't either um, really taking the time to build that conviction. And, you know, in the book we go through very specific things that people do to actually build conviction. You know, One of the, one of the, one of the things that I, I, one of the other themes that came out of the book was this idea of playing exhibition matches playing exhibition matches, which I, I thought it was I think I still think today is really, really important one, which is.

You know, When we studied backable people, one of the things we found was that, they tend to almost have this improvisational style about them, right? Like when they speak, it's almost like they're speaking, like they're off the cuff. But the reality is that that actually is the product of lots and lots and lots of practice.

Right. And in fact, the average backable person that we studied was practicing about 21 times before they got into a big moment. So with any type of new content, any type of new presentation, new idea, it was 21 practice rounds before they, before they got into the real thing. Now like a couple of things to keep in mind.

Number one is like these practice rounds can be with. You know, Like Chris, I'm sure like your wife would be on that list. My mind would be on mine. Right. My daughter, my daughter, my nine year old daughter, we'll, we'll do an exhibition match with me every once in a while. Right. I just need somebody to kind of listen.

And it it's really important to, I think, do this over and over again, the number one, the number 21 might seem like a lot because it did to me. And I thought to myself, like, isn't that going to make you sound really scripted? Isn't it gonna make you sound like robotic if you practice something that much.

But what I found is that the opposite happens because once you've actually mastered material at that level, when you sort of understand what you're talking about at that, in that way, what it allows you to do is it allows you to drop your. script When you walk inside a room, right? You, you no longer are sort of married to the outline where you're like, Yeah.

I'm going to say this.

And I'm going to say that I'm going to say that, which is, it tends to be how most presentations are sort of given. I mean, very linearly when you have mastered your material at that level, what it allows you to do is be fully tuned in fully present and adaptive to what's happening inside the room. If something's resonating a little more, you can double click on that.

If you find that, there's a look of confusion on that person's face, well, then you can take the pause at the right moments and you can start to adapt and you can start to flow. And what we find is that, backable moments never really happened when somebody walks into a room and Yeah. Read the script and then like drops the mic and leaves like that doesn't happen. Right? It's a series of interactions. It's a back and forth. It's a, it's pausing. It's jumping around. Where are these like really productive meetings tend to happen. And so, mastering your material at that level allows you to have that kind of flexibility and fluidity.

Uh, One of my favorite quotes from the book is from Charlie Parker. Who's is great. He was great jazz musician. And he had just, not only was he just, great, great musically, but he had this incredible stage presence to him. And so one day somebody asked him, they said, they say, Charlie, like, how do you have such incredible presence on stage?

And Charlie Parker says, well, you got to learn your instrument. And then you practice, practice, practice. And then before you get up on stage, you forget all of that and you just whale. Right. And what we're really trying to do, Chris, I think. We're trying to get to that point where we feel confident, kind of just forgetting it, like forgetting all the stuff that we had been, where we committed to memory and just like going in there and just being able to whale.

Right. And the only way we get there is through lots of practice.

[00:30:21] Chris Hutchins: Yeah. Two things that come from this, that, that I'll share one. I always, if you look at a slide deck of any presentation I've ever given a stark contrast to many others, is that I try to put almost nothing on the slides, right? It's an image or a word or maybe three words or something, but, I don't have a lot of bullets and I've never really been able to articulate why I always see people's presentations and I'm just like, cut it out, cut it out and put small things.

But now I feel like I can actually articulate it based on what you said, which is. If you know the content well enough and you want to read the room too. You can't have a script sitting behind you, or you're kind of forced into a specific conversation. And so when you drop a lot of that, it gives you the flexibility to go wherever you want as, but it at least hones you to say, I'm still gonna make this one macro point, but I can make it in whatever way I want.

So I appreciate you sharing that because I, now I now can articulate why I do this thing. I do.

[00:31:22] Suneel Gupta: Well, add to that too. Cause I, I got, I love that. And part of the, one of the things that I think that, you know, back when people like yourself tend to do is that they tend to share what something could be, but not exactly how it has to be. They share what it could be and not exactly how it has to be.

And so by having sort of a high level theme, what you're, what you're inviting is a discussion as well. And it may be that off that one sort of, meta bullet that you have on that, on that slide instead of the seven. What you're going to do.

is you're going to prompt the room to start to start contributing to the conversation and that, and that's when, just like the best things happen.

One of the chapters in the book is called flip outsiders into insiders. So outsiders and insiders, right? You want people to ultimately feel like they're an insider in your idea. That's that's when people get interested, that's when they get excited, you know what Salmaan Rushdie who's one of my favorite authors had this quote and he said that most of the decisions that happen in our lives, most of the decisions that affect us happen when we're not even in the room. Right. And I love that because it's so, it's so true. Right. You go in and give a pitch like you were on the investing side, right. At Google ventures. When people came in and pitched you, even if you love the idea, your next step was to go talk to other people at GV. Right? You had, you had to start representing the idea.

So now all of a sudden this, the outcome for this. Is somewhat in your hands right there, not in the room anymore. You're the one representing their idea. And the point is that oftentimes we sort of treat these situations as we're trying to sell that person almost expecting like, that's the final outcome, but no, we're not just looking to create people who like our idea.

We're trying to try to create people who advocate for our ideas. Right. They have to go out and they have to sell their other people, sell their partners or their fellow colleagues or other members of the leadership team of whatever, whatever it is. And we can only do that if they feel like they are, they have the almost founder level passion over the idea, even if they didn't come up with it themselves.

[00:33:26] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, I love that. And it's something that if I look back fundraising, I tried to do, but I'm not sure I did it as well as I would. If I tried again I want to go back really quickly and just point out something that I know you kind of conveyed, but you didn't title one of the chapters. You need to do some research and prepare for meetings.

It was play exhibition matches. And what I took away from that, that was maybe subtle, but also important is that the type of preparation that you should be doing is very similar to the type of action you're going to have. So if you're giving a presentation, give the presentation and that is different than reading the slides, that's different from writing out the notes and practicing the notes.

So I just wanted to highlight and unless I got it wrong, that it's really important to match that medium and not just prepare, but actually do the thing you got.

[00:34:22] Suneel Gupta: yeah, yeah. Such a good, such a, I mean, I'm glad you brought it up because like sometimes I forget how important this is and, and it was impressed upon me many times from, all of the people that we studied, which is like, don't give the director's commentary when you're doing these exhibition matches when you're, when you're giving these practice sessions, give it as if you're in the actual room.

Right. So you're not saying, Hey, so here's what I'm planning on doing. I'm going to say this to them and I'm going to say that to them. You're just giving the actual thing, because what you're doing is you're, you're building the muscle memory that you're going to need when you're inside the real, the real situation, when I was studying for the GMAT, I still remember my, I was talking to my older brother. Who's like a whiz at, at like, standardized tests. And I was like, dude, how do you do this? Cause I suck at standardized tests. What do I, what do I need to do? And he's like, listen, what time is the test that you're taking?

And I was like, I was like at 3:00 PM. He's like, all right. Every day from here until the test at 3:00 PM, you take a practice test every single day. Right? I, I, I never would have done that. Like I never would've done that. I mean, it, it, it, it elevated my game, I mean, it was the best, it was the best standardized test I ever taken.

Like I did way better than I thought I was going to. And it was only because every day at 3:00 PM, I took that test. And so like applying that to like the world that we're in, if you are, if you have a big meeting coming up, with with the leadership team or you're pitching investors or whatever it is, right.

What time is that meeting? Is it at 11:00 AM? Well, then an 11:00 AM start giving these exhibition matches, start doing these practice sessions, like give a practice round every day at 11:00 AM, between here and there. And you start conditioning your mind, you start getting it ready for the, for the real moment.

And again, like, like you said, you want to do the, you want to do the real thing. The other thing that I, that I completely sort of, I, I, I am terrible at doing is like, I always ask the question after I give a practice session to somebody. I always ask them the question what'd you do. All right.

What did you think of that? Right. And what I realized is that backup, well, people never ask that question because it's just, it's such a low signal question to ask. You're not going to get the feedback that you need, because typically if you ask somebody like, what'd you think they're going to be like, yeah, it was pretty good.

You know, Like, yeah, I, I, I liked it. And that doesn't really give you the information that you need to be better. And so, especially if you're talking to somebody who is informed, the better question to ask is what part of all of that stood out to you the most? Right? Cause now, now they actually have to put some thought into like, they have to stack rank.

Like here's what the best stuff was. And it may turn out that like some of the stuff that you wanted to be the best and the point that you were really trying to make, didn't actually make that cut and that's really good information to have, or the other great question that I love to ask now is how would you describe this idea to someone. Right. And it's something that I do now is as I, especially when, as I was thinking about new book topics and I sort of have my, you know, two page, proposal proposal written is I would hand it to somebody and I'd say, can you read this? And then they'd be like, Yeah. it's pretty good.

And I'd be like, well, how would you describe this idea to a friend? Right. And what I've found Is that oftentimes some of my friends would describe my idea in a way that was much better than, than I ever could. And that ended up being the way that ended up framing the book.

[00:37:45] Chris Hutchins: Yeah. Is there a question that you can ask to find some of the stuff that's not good? Right. I think that that helps you rephrase and highlight what, what worked. And I'm asking specifically, because I usually ask guests at the end of this, after we stopped the recording, I say, I w I want to know what I could have done to do a better interview.

And uh, you know, I sometimes ask like, is there a question I should have asked? Or what question did I ask that really stood out those things, but I'm like, what could I have done better? Like, what did I do wrong? It's like, I'm, I'm always craving the, what did I do wrong that I could do better?

[00:38:18] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. well, I mean, I love it. I love it. You do that. I mean, one of the things that really impressed me, this is why let's answer your question is like when we were selling rise, so rise to a company called one medical. And one of the things that really impressed me from the beginning about one medical and the founder, a guy named Dr.

Tom Lee, was that he had sort of run his brick and mortar business in the very beginning. It was like, literally just him inside a clinic. And he was serving every role. He was the doctor, he was the nurse, he was the phlebotomist, he was the front desk. He was everything. But one of the things that he did when he was starting out is every time a patient would leave the experience, he'd say, Hey, look on a scale of, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate this experience?

And, If it was anything other than a nine or a 10, he would ask, what could I have done that would have made this a nine or a 10. Right. And I think that that's just like a very positive sort of way, I think, to, to ask that question, but what was really cool about his story is like, because he was serving all roles, he would literally take that feedback and he'd roll it right into the next patient visit.

So we had this just like, you know, almost like product development, iteration style clinic that he was running. And he continued to sort of fold this feedback in over and over and over again, until he finally ever find this process that he felt like it was ready, ready to scale. So I think, I think just asking people that, what, what would, what would it have taken to make it a nine or a 10

[00:39:43] Chris Hutchins: Yeah. And that's like, it's so funny. It's a classic thing that companies do. I'm sure everyone here has gotten a survey after buying a product online.

[00:39:51] Suneel Gupta: net promoter

[00:39:52] Chris Hutchins: well, it's an NPS score and it's so crazy, but people don't actually use that. Same if it's the best question that businesses use to ask, why aren't we not using it in our personal lives is, is kind of something interesting.

I'd love to jump quick back to what you were saying about bringing people in. And I'm curious, if you have tactics for bringing people into your idea, your project, I, I think you you've convinced me of how valuable it is, but how do you actually do it?

[00:40:17] Suneel Gupta: Yeah, I was kind of the person who would come into a an hour long meeting and I would have like 40 minutes worth of content. Right. Like I would have, I would have a pretty exhaustive slide deck and then I would use that 40 minutes to sort of like go through it and then I'd use 20 minutes for.

And what I found is that, that, that tends to kind of be sort of how most of those meetings go that 40, 20 split. And what I now do is I reverse that I walk in with 20 minutes or less of content, like just very, very high level and then open it up. Because I think these backable moments happen when you can sort of get people involved.

Right. And so that means sharing, counterintuitively, it means sharing less upfront, then you might otherwise share, right. It means, it means just really kind of like setting out what the high level vision is having a few of the details, but then having, the, having the recipe in, in backup, like be ready, be prepared to have the discussion.

And one of the misnomers, I think that people have. The misconceptions is that, that it takes more time to prepare for a presentation than it does to prepare for a productive discussion. That's not true. It actually takes a lot more preparation to prepare for a discussion, because with the discussion, you have to be able to ask the right questions.

You have to be able to pull out the right sets of information. You have to do a lot of research on the other people who are in the room because you know that they're all bringing certain perspectives in and you're looking to tap into those perspectives too. And it sort of bring people in. In a certain way and start weeding all of that together that they takes a, I think it takes the a higher level of preparation. well, one of the stories that I really enjoyed was I, I studied a designer who was remarkably effective inside big companies, companies like Microsoft and Google. And, it's hard sometimes as a designer because you are, you're really trying to steer lots and lots of people. And especially in bigger companies, when there's lots of red tape and lots of decision makers kind of be a frustrating role.

And, but this guy was remarkably effective at it. And I wanted to understand, like, what was his process? What was it like? And one of the stories that he told me was that when he was starting out, he would always take these really pixel perfect designs into, into these meetings. And he would present his vision.

He put them up on the, you put them up on the wall and people would sort of tear it apart. They'd be like, well, I don't like that. And I don't like that. And it turned out to be these very unproductive, frustrating meetings for him. But one day almost by accident, he, I mean, he forgot his bag. And so he didn't have his laptop, but the meeting was already scheduled.

And so he literally walks into a room, but he's not able to project these designs because he doesn't have them with him. So instead he, he literally goes up to the whiteboard and he begins to draw his design up on the whiteboard. So now instead of, pixel perfect colors, he's, he's black and white.

Right. And what he said was that people for the first time ever, like got up out of their seats, they like stood behind, stood with him at the whiteboard. They started drawing with him and he's like, we got more done in that one hour than I had in the previous few months, trying to get this design done because.

I was, I was, I was going to them and I was trying to get their buy-in rather than sort of bringing them in. There's a, there's this classic classic story of Betty crocker in the 1940s. And it, in the 1940s, Betty crocker introduced instant cake mix to the market. And there was so excited about instant cake mix because, they had done all the research.

They'd done all the focus groups and they felt like this was going to be a hit product. And so they, they, they put a ton of marketing dollars behind this. They, get instant cake mix on grocery selves, all around the country. And then they wait for the sales numbers to come in. And when they do they're shocked because they find, they find out that nobody is buying this instant cake mix and they cannot figure out why.

And so they hire this psychologist, a guy by the name of Ernest Dakota to go out into the field and start interviewing customers. And what data comes back with is shocking to the people at Betty crocker. He says, I think you have made the process of making a cake too easy, too. Because when a customer removes the cake from the oven, they actually don't feel any ownership over it.

They actually don't feel like they actually made the cake. So data is like, I have a recommendation for you. Why don't you remove one key ingredient and just see what happens? And so they do, they remove the egg. So now as a customer, you have to go out and you have to buy fresh eggs. You have to bring them back home.

You have to crack them into the mix. If the stirred in, and then you pop it into the oven and sales completely take off, right? Because now when the cake comes out of the oven, customers actually felt some ownership over that. Over that cake, they felt like they had made it themselves. And look, I mean, this has been, this has been proven out over and over again through different psychological tests.

There's a group out of Harvard that calls this, the Ikea effect, which basically says that we place up to five times the amount of value on something that we help. Than something that we simply buy off the shelf because, because we made it ourselves. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of people out there with poorly made futons and furniture, and they're never going to get rid of it because it's like, no, I built this.

I made it with my own two hands. And so what does this have anything to do with what we're talking about? I mean, I think that we oftentimes come in and we treat people like buyers instead of builders, right? What people don't want to be buyers people, ultimately, even if their job is to be an investor, the job is to be a producer, even their jobs to Greenlight ideas inside a company, people want to be builders.

They actually want to feel like they're part of something. And so your job is to figure out a way to turn them from a buyer into a builder. So by the time they leave the room, they actually feel like they have some ownership over this as well. They were able to crack their own egg into the mix.

[00:45:59] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, well, first off, I'll just have to say thank you to Betty crocker because I, my wife and I love to bake and she's, she's much better baker than I. I just don't think you can make a cake as good as cake, because like, it's just, it always tastes so much better. So first off, I'm just going to give a little thank you there.

But I totally love this theme of if you're anything you're doing, whether you're giving a presentation, whether you're building a product kind of taking a little bit less out of not trying to do the whole thing for the room, for the par partner, for the, the buyer and inviting them in, but I'll highlight you, you said something and I have a tactic to share, but still being prepared for that discussion.

So when I was fundraising, when I was out fundraising for my startup, I had a really short deck, but what I did was I thought of every question that I could possibly get asked. And my co-founder every time someone asked a question that we hadn't thought about. And every, for the next pitch, we had a slide that addressed every single question and this wasn't as easy, but I went and memorize the order of all the slides.

And I did an episode a few weeks ago about memory, if you want to kind of improve that, check that out. But I had an answer. And so someone came in would say, this was about financial advice. They'd say, well, how do financial advisors spend their time? And I was like, 32, boom slides up answer there.

We can have a conversation with data. But I didn't walk them through all the questions because I wanted them to be a part of asking and answering and thinking through whether this was a good idea. And the interesting thing I learned was that if someone asks me a question and said, do people really want to pay for financial advice?

And I answered, yes, they do. And here's why. Yeah, they kind of bought it. But if there was a slide that had my answer written on a screen, people were like Mo they bought the answer more and all it took was me thinking of every question, writing it up, same answer. There wasn't more data. It was just written as if it was prepared and by being prepared, it was like, yes, this is certain, this person's not just giving me the answer.

I want to hear. This was the answer they were going to give. No matter what, they're not ad Hocking, they're not BSE me. And so I always tell people, take that Q and a, and you might not use 75% of the slides, but write up a slide for every question you might get. And it just makes the answer. You give people so much stronger.

[00:48:18] Suneel Gupta: Yeah, I love that. I love that.

That's great.

[00:48:21] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, it was actually the only use case for the apple for like a while had this touch bar. And it was like, I could slide through slides and try to find them, but, know, it's a useless product. They got rid of it finally. In the, in the conversation of meeting people and trying to bring them in.

One of the things I think I, and probably many people struggle with is if you schedule a meeting, it's really easy to kick off that meeting. But what about when you are at an event and you're you see someone you're like, this person could add value. I'd love to bring them in. I'd love to bring them into be an insider and what I'm doing, but I don't know them.

And I'm walking up to this person. And some people have the ability to walk up to anyone and, and start a conversation and bring them in. And I know running for Congress, you did this thousands of times going up to complete strangers and trying to build that rapport really quickly. What advice do you have for someone who's, let's say at a conference, see someone much more senior than to them maybe runs another company.

Very successful, could add a lot of value. How do you walk up and engage that person? What, what are the backable traits of people that do that.

[00:49:27] Suneel Gupta: Hmm, that's a great question, Chris. And even after doing it, thousands of times, I don't know if I've mastered sort of that. I, I feel like I've never, I've never quite been great at small talk, which was, which is not great if you're running for political office. But what I would say is that, I think that asking good questions is, is such a, such an underappreciated art, right?

Cause, and I think that, one of the things that we tend to do is we tend to sort of. We use those precious key moments that we tend to have with somebody kind of just asking the same old stuff sometimes like, how are you doing, like of going? And, I think that they're, I think they're are oftentimes like much more precise things that we can ask people, and I, I think that any time that you are interested in getting somebody involved rather than going out and immediately pitching them, one of the things that I try to do is I try to put myself in information collection mode, right? Like w w like, what are they, what are they up to these days? How, like, what what's, what are they most interested in?

And, so w w one of the, I mean, this is one of the things I, I try to get from, from people is. You know, Hey, you know, what, what are some of the things that you feel like are working the best right now? Like, if it's an investor, for example, like, what are some of the things in your portfolio that you're most proud of right now?

Right? Like what do you, and, potentially even asking, like what, what do you feel like, you know, you thought was going to happen in and surprise you, right? W w what were the biggest surprises this year is a question that I might ask somebody, you know, but I, I really am trying to use those few moments not to sell myself, but really try to get some signal on, who this person is.

Right. that that's, that's one thing. The second thing I would say is that oftentimes we go in for the kill too quickly, right? Even even like running for office, like I saw people who were like, I'd love your vote, right? Like I walk up, like, I'm running for office. I'd love your vote. And it's like, it never works.

Like, I it's like, it's like it's too soon. And w what you wanna do is you wanna, you wanna, get to know this person, who are you, like, I'm talking to a voter. Like, what, what are the things you care? What do you, what do you care most about? What's, it, what is going to be the thing that.

matters most to you when you end up voting in.

Right. And the questions like that are questions that, let me understand who this person is. And I think that we need to sort of evolve from like going in for the kill to Mora, to think like the one-two punch or it's like the phase one is really learning everything you can about this person. And then phase two is, is setting up a follow-up meeting and saying, you know, I'd love to share this with you.

But then the thing that I think is like most important and almost never done is like, as soon as you go home or like go off to the side and like write down everything that you just learned, right? Like literally plot a plot note, plot, a note in your, on your phone and write down like the four or five things that you've learned from that conversation.

Because when you go back and talk to that person, you want to make sure that, that, that you're, that you're, you're weaving those into the conversation. Like you're reacting and responding to the information that they'd given you.

[00:52:34] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, I've Al I always get the email and I don't think I always write the notes down. And then three days later, you're like, gosh, what were we talking about? I met so many people, so I love the idea of, I leave the email in my draft, but I should go back and just add a few bullets beforehand. Even if they're not what I'll actually do.

[00:52:50] Suneel Gupta: I think people, no matter what at all levels, no matter who they are, I think at the end of the day, we all want to feel heard. Right. We all, we all want to feel heard. And, and it's, it's just so universal. It's so primal. And oftentimes we just, we just don't, we don't show people that we might actually even hear them, but we don't actually show them that we heard them, you know, like they're, they're people who I, people I studied inside bigger companies that were just amazing, amazing at navigating and like corralling people around them.

One of the art forms that they were able to sort of really get down with. That even if they disagreed with people, they would always sort of let them know that they had considered their feedback. Right. Like for example, there was an executive that I, that I sort of shadowed who would, what she did is she would, every time people had feedback for her, she would write it down.

Right. And then when she was coming back into the follow-up meeting, which he would do is if she put she'd start the meeting by putting all that feedback up, right. Like she would literally project all the feedback. And she'd say, here are all the things that I heard during our last meeting. And, here, here's what I ended up doing with that feedback.

And it wasn't always like, I respond, I responded to it. And now it's part of the, it's part of the new idea. But it was like, no, sometimes I didn't respond to it, but I want you to know that, like I tracked it, I heard it like you have been heard and Yeah, it doesn't make people feel a hundred percent when you have shared an idea and it's, and it, and it wasn't used, but it sure as hell feels a lot better than someone saying, huh, that's interesting.

And then doing that.

[00:54:20] Chris Hutchins: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it goes back to when you emailed people for advice, and you got such a great response rate, obviously, you know, you, you kind of got to show this, Hey look, the New York times called me a failure, have some pity on me, but I do think the message that probably worked and, and drove people to answer is you, weren't saying, can you do me a favor?

You were saying, can you share your, your learnings or your, I always, when I write those emails, ask people to share their wisdom, because I feel like wisdom is like a word that's like, Hey, I think you're smart. And I'd love to learn from you. And so, I go back and think that that's probably why you saw such a high response rate is because people want.

[00:54:58] Suneel Gupta: I think that's, I think that's totally right, man. I think that's totally right. And I think people want to share their, they want to share their story as well. And I, I think that if, know, if you're coming across as somebody who doesn't necessarily have an agenda it gets really, it's really, it's really important.

I think like there's a story in the book that I, I, I wish like I could have brought in sooner. Right? Cause it ended up making the last chapter of the book. And so I feel like sometimes people don't finish books and so it probably, it may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but it's the story of a guy named George Schaller and sheller was this primatologist who was just amazing at what he did.

And part of the reason he was amazing at like his work is that he was able to get closer to mountain gorillas than really anybody else. Like the, the way that he would approach them. They somehow let him in, in a way. They wouldn't let other people in. And so Shaller is at this conference one day and he's presenting his findings and finally somebody in the audience gets up and they're like, listen, Dr.

Sheller, I don't get it. Like, why is it that these mountain gorillas are allowing you to get so close? And he says, look, it's simple. I never carry a gun. No matter what, I never carry a weapon. And that confused everybody because they're like, well, okay, well, all right, we carry weapons, but they're in our backpack.

We're not like waving it around or anything like that. It's like, it's tucked away. It's, it's out of sight. And sheller's theory was, look, you can, you can hide your attitude. You know, You can hide a gun, but you can never really hide your attitude around a gun. And if you have it in this, in your backpack, you're always going to behave a little bit differently.

And there's that, that little bit of difference, that little energetic shit. That these gorillas can pick up on because it's just, it's so primal for us. And I think about that a lot, because oftentimes, when I, when I find, when I catch myself trying to sound smart, or I try to catch myself trying to come off it like with an agenda, a hidden agenda , I, you know, I realize that like, there's an energy that comes with that and, to become pure about it, like in your case, look, I just really just want.

to learn from you, I think is why people are responding and you're getting, I think you're getting, some really great guests, my myself not included, but some really great guests like Yohanis Marlo and Tim Ferriss.

And it's, it's really been an amazing show.

[00:57:09] Chris Hutchins: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we, we covered, so, I mean, first of all, everyone, there's so much more on each of these, in the book and I actually made it through the whole book. You're welcome. I didn't make it through the, through the appendix yet. But yeah, the, the one thing that we didn't touch on that I had had a question on that I want to jump to and you shared it.

It's about finding an earned secret and uncovering the information that that's not obvious that, and you just mentioned the, the questions people don't get asked, and you shared a great story about how you use that to get a job. But my question is, do you have any tips for finding those secrets half uncovering those things and maybe give a little bit more context on, on the chapter.

[00:57:49] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. sure. I mean, I, one of the people that I studied for this book was Brian Raizer and, Brian is a, is a legendary Hollywood producer he's, has over 130 MES. He has dozens of Oscars, but he also, runs large teams, runs large companies and he invests in technology companies as well.

And so, he's kind of, it was interesting when I went to go see him, this is before the pandemic and I'm in his waiting room. And in Beverly Hills, there are people that. Ready to pitch him on all sorts of things, from films to technology to, and to apply for jobs. And you could just tell that, like, it was really anxious inside that room.

Like people were really nervous. And so when I went back to see him, I said, look, Brian, if I could have given everybody out there, one piece of advice before they showed up here today on how to prepare for a meeting with Brian Grazer, what would that piece of advice had been? And he thought about that for a moment.

And he said, give me something that I can't easily find on Google. They gave me something that's not, obviously Googleable. And I thought that was so interesting because the more that I talked to, gatekeepers decision makers, people who are classic backers, what I found is that like great meetings tend to be based on an insight that.

The person who's doing the pitching went out and found themselves. Like they didn't just sit behind a desk, but they went out and like found something that may have been just a little bit like less obvious. It doesn't have to necessarily be watershed, but they really put themselves into the story and found something that maybe they wouldn't have found had they just done sort of the classic research, so that could be, that could be test driving a competitor's product that could be going out to a show, like literally attending a show or attending something that like maybe other people wouldn't have attended. It's like just taking, like, thinking to yourself. I like to kind of almost do a two-step approach to this.

I think to myself, like what would most people do to prepare for this? And then how do I put myself just one step further? Into that story. Like, how would I, what can I do to go one step beyond that? That takes me from behind Google and into the real world in some way. And it could just be called. It could literally just be calling a set of customers and asking them what they, what they think about this.

And I was talking to somebody the other day. I know we've been talking a little bit about like applying for jobs. And I was talking to somebody the other day, and this was after my book came out and she called me and she told me this story. And the story was that she was applying for a job. She was a mom and, you know, she was returning to the workforce and she was applying for a job at a social media company.

And the trick of it was like, she didn't use the. I think it was, it was very much like a gen Z focused product and she doesn't use it. And so, and she's like, she's like, so I was trying to figure out like what to do to prepare for this meeting for this role. And I was doing all my research. I was, I was coming through the, through the site and reading people's bios and doing all this stuff that we typically do.

But then she's like, you know, I need to do something more than this. So what she did is she decided to interview every single one of her daughter's friends, every single one of her daughter's friends, she interviewed them. And like, what, what do you like about the product? What do you not like about the product?

What do you wish? What do you wish would be different? All this stuff. And she accumulated all this research. And then she goes into this interview, which is, which is over zoom during the pandemic it's over zoom. And she literally like starts. Dropping all this like research onto this person.

Now, I don't know how much of it was different. How much of it that they didn't already know, but the fact that she had gone out there, like in done all this research and all this stuff that like people typically don't do this hiring manager was so impressed that not only did she get the job, but right in the middle of the meeting, he actually patched in one of their UX designers.

Who's like, Hey, like you need to meet this person. And I want the two you to spend time together after this because she collected a bunch of stuff that might be useful to you. So I just think that that taking yourself one step beyond what most people would do to try to find something that might be a little less obvious.

I mean, it just, it does wonders.

[01:01:55] Chris Hutchins: Yeah. I mean, find something that might not be obvious or even just do something that other people don't do.

[01:02:00] Suneel Gupta: Yes. Yes.

[01:02:01] Chris Hutchins: I've had people when I was hiring that. It's amazing how few people do that. Like the amount of effort you have to put in to stand out. As a job applicant as a presentation giver, it's low because so many people just do the minimum.

And so, I made a presentation. It was funny. I wanted this job at this hot startup back, probably 2010 and I made a presentation. It was, they were in the location space and I made a presentation about location services. I looked back right. And I got the job and I've looked back now.

And I was like, that presentation was horrible. I took some dumb market research report that had no relevance to what we were building. And I put it in a slide deck and I made some slides that were kind of silly. And like, it was a terrible presentation that added no value to the company. But the fact that I made it gave them some knowledge that I actually cared about the company, because I wouldn't have taken the time to do this.

So,

[01:02:57] Suneel Gupta: So they didn't ask you, they didn't ask you to make the

presentation. You just

[01:03:00] Chris Hutchins: No, no, no, no. I was like, instead of saying, Hey, I want to work here. I said, Hey, I made a presentation about the industry you guys are in. And I would love to share it with

[01:03:09] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Love

[01:03:10] Chris Hutchins: And I want to work here. Now, the funny thing is there were no unique insights in this presentation. The unique insight was maybe that here's a person who cares about your company.

So if I could have found a unique insight, it would have been even more valuable. I'll just say that even without the unique insight going above and beyond can add a ton of value.

[01:03:28] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the, one of the parts of, of, I, one of the reasons I think investors started to like lean in on, on my, on my idea for rise was when they found out that I was, I was going out to weight Watchers meetings and I was standing outside of WeightWatchers meetings. And when people were walking in, I'd be like, Hey, I've got this prototype for a new app.

Would you, could I, could I give you a demo and look, the vast majority of people said no, but, but every once in a while somebody would say yes, and I never really shared that. Yeah, because I, I, it was kind of embarrassing for me. And also, like, it's not one of those sophisticated sort of Silicon valley ways of acquiring customers.

Right. I was very, I was a guy on the street. And so, but somebody asked me, and one of the, one of the early meetings, somebody asked me, like, how did you find your first customers? And so I told him the story and that turned out to be the part of the pitch that he loved the most. He, like, I love that.

And so I started playing that up and then, yeah, and that turned out to be the part that like investors love the most. It's like putting yourself out there. There's a story in the book about this publisher named Jonathan Karp, who really wanted to get Howard stern to write a book. And I talked to Jonathan and he was like, I had been pursuing Howard stern for 10 years to write a book.

He never would be. And, and his answer to me was, look, look, I already have a couple of bestselling books and writing a book takes a lot of time. Like, I don't want to write another book, like leave me alone. And finally, Jonathan carp was like, look, what do I need to do in order to get him to say yes, he thinks about it.

And he's like, the vast majority of what Howard stern would write about is actually kind of already out there right now it's in his interviews. Right? Because what do you probably do in this book is he probably be writing about like these, most of the most interesting people that he's interviewed for the show.

And so what Jonathan carp did is he literally took transcripts of all these interviews and personally called those down into something that was very readable. Then put them in a leather bound cover. And he shows up at Howard Stern's apartment and Howard stern. Huston's like, look, I told you, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to write this book.

And Jonathan Carswell, here's the book like literally hands it to him. And what Howard stern said is like, in that moment, he was so intoxicated by the. That Jonathan carpet put into the process that he could not say no.

[01:05:43] Chris Hutchins: That's amazing. Maybe one day I'll get there and somebody is going to write my book for me and just hand it to me. That'd be, you know, that's how, you know, you made it when someone out there writes a book for you.

[01:05:52] Suneel Gupta: Well, in the meantime, we're looking forward to you writing your own book, Chris,

[01:05:54] Chris Hutchins: Yeah. So I feel like that story comes back to where we started about, having the conviction to get out there and believe in your idea and get in front of other people.

I want to, I want to wrap with a few things. Is there, is there a story that didn't make it in the book that you wish.

[01:06:10] Suneel Gupta: Um, Yeah. There was a theme that I had been really playing with and, and I, and I really wanted to, I wanted to make it work, but, you know, I felt like it wasn't wasn't ready, but today I definitely do feel like it is, which is that, you know, when we walk into a room, we are a combination of both the information that we bring and the energy that we bring.

And oftentimes when we prepare for a meeting, we're preparing for the information, but we're not really preparing for the energy. Right? Like one of the things I think about before I walk into a room now is like, what, how do I want people to think, what do I want people to do? But most importantly, how do I want them to feel as a result of this meeting?

Right? Like what's the feeling that I want people to have because, I think Maya Angelou said it the best, which is like, people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but they will never forget the way that you made them feel. And the reason that this is important is that. We are living in such a back-to-back world now, especially like, for those of us who are like working remotely, it can be very easily easy to sort of just jam your schedule with, with these, with meetings and go back to back to back.

But I think it's become so, so important to just take a few minutes in between these meetings, right? To literally just schedule 55 minute meetings instead of 60 meetings, 60 minute meetings in order to give yourself like that five minutes that you need in order to receive. In order to kind of like reset your energetic state because we know the information we want to bring to the next meeting.

But if all we're doing is compiling sort of like the, the energy decline. Then by the time we get to some of our most important meetings or moments, we might actually be bringing the wrong energy into the room or to the space. And so what I, what I think is extremely important right now is to have, what I call rhythmic recovery.

And, you know, again, the way that I think about that is like for every 55 minutes, I take five minutes to just like recover energetically, right. And that could be doing a breathing exercise that could be doing pushups, but just something to kind of reset my energy so that when I'm bringing to my next meeting, isn't just like, you know, accumulation of like the negative stuff that's been happening throughout the day.

[01:08:18] Chris Hutchins: I love that. I'll, I'll add one interesting thing that someone told me once is you might be in a situation where you just have to bring the negative energy to the meeting. You're 10 minutes late. Your last meeting was horrible. You're you got to go. Someone once I can't remember there was kind of like a stoplight methodology, but it was basically when you come into a meeting, if you have negative energy call it.

[01:08:39] Suneel Gupta: Yeah.

[01:08:40] Chris Hutchins: And sometimes that can change the dynamic. You can say, Hey guys, I just want to let you know, my last meeting was really terrible. I'm not in a great mood, but I'm really excited to be here. So if that comes across, just know that it has nothing to do with this meeting. And you can kind of, I use this a lot, even in presentations, call out the thing that might be a problem, Hey, I don't have data on whether my customers will do this, that you use this product.

If that's a problem, I can just stop now. And you kind of like shove aside, whatever it is, negative energy or a part of your business or your proposal that doesn't work and lay that out at front. So

people kind of

get to take that off their kind of mind throughout the

[01:09:22] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, Reed, Reed Hoffman, told me a great story. He's founder of LinkedIn. And he was telling me about how in 2003, he was, he's pitching, he's pitching the company that this is like shortly after the.com bubble had burst. Right? And, and now he's got this company that isn't making a dime of revenue and all investors want, are companies that are making money.

And, and so he's out there and he's pitching, he's pitching LinkedIn. And one of the things he said that really saved him during that time is that he would steer into the objection. He steered right into the objection of not having, not making money so upfront. He would say, listen, before we, before we move into like all the strengths, all the, all the reasons I think you should invest.

I want you to tell, I want to tell you upfront that we're not making revenue right now, but you know, further on, I'm going to talk about three ways. In which I think we might be able to over the next few years, right. I'm gonna share three, three ideas I have. And so, these three ideas were not Bulletproof.

They, they, they weren't, they weren't, they weren't completely solid. But what he said is just by sharing that upfront by steering into the objection, what that did is it bought him a lot of credibility. Right. Because he was willing to sort of put that out there himself. And then to your point, Chris, like, because he did that, that objection, stop nagging at them.

Right. Because if he hadn't said that, then like the idea that they weren't making money would have nagged at them the entire time. So he could have been talking about the cool product, the cool features, all of the cool things they want to do, the network effects. And yet at the same time, like they would have been nagging at them the whole time.

And now that he already put it out there, they could actually tune into the stronger parts of his pitch.

[01:10:59] Chris Hutchins: a fantastic, okay. I feel like if you want more content like this, just read the book. I'm not going to dig any deeper. It was fantastic. I actually listened to it. I heard you were the narrator, which was a, it's a little weird. I'm hearing you tell stories. I'm like, man, I've heard this story, but no it's cause I heard you read the book.

Not because we talked about it. So I just want to know, you wrote the book, it came out earlier this year. What's next? What are you spending your time on now?

[01:11:24] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the next book that I'm working on with Harper Collins is all about all, about energy. You know, It's all about how to, how do we get more energy? And I'm trying to do the same thing that I did with backable, which is like, skip the obvious, skip the obvious diet sleep, and start going into sort of what are some things that are hidden.

And what I'm finding is that it's taking me not only into just modern science, but it's also taking me back to like ancient wisdom, things that we have lost along the way, the art of, W w what we might know is cheesy or what the Hindus called . And there's, there's a lot of things that we sort of have just kind of lost that we, that we I think in, in a busy society, we don't, we don't think about, but there are certain people who I think have become just masters at being able to manage their energy, not just their time, but their energy that, have done incredible things for the world.

So I'm studying those people. I'm studying these techniques, I'm studying the science, and the idea is to bring it all together in one coherent book that anybody can use and how to, how to boost their energy.

[01:12:28] Chris Hutchins: That's amazing. , you know, you said last time you started doing these interviews and it was, years before the book came out. I do. How long might we have to wait to read this,

[01:12:36] Suneel Gupta: this one's going to be a little quicker. It's going to give you a quicker. I mean, I've been, it's something that I've been thinking about for a really long time. And I sort of just, even while I was writing backable, I was, I was, I was collecting research. It's just, it's always been a fascinating topic for me, you know, especially, I mean, I don't know how you feel about this, Chris, but like, I certainly feel like, I have less energy.

Than I did 10 years ago. Right. And yet the demands on my energy are so much more right. And I think most people feel that way. If you asked most people like, Hey, do you feel more energy or less energy now than you did 10 years ago, most people would say less energy, but then you ask them like, what what about the demands on your energy?

Are they more, are they less than, than, or more? Right. And, and so it's no surprise that, that people burn out, very quickly. And it used to be that you hear about people who burnt out in their forties and fifties, and now it's like, people are burning out in their teens and twenties and it's happening much sooner.

And so I think uh, I think we just need, we need an answer to this. And so there's urgency. So I want to get it out there, obviously do do the real work and go really deep, but the idea is get out there, next year, if not early the year after.

[01:13:42] Chris Hutchins: Awesome. Well, I can't wait. Is there anywhere people can follow along as to what you're working on and what you're up to until then?

[01:13:48] Suneel Gupta: Yeah. You can go to my website. It's just dot com or, check me out on, on, on social, I'm, I'm, I'm senior gift on Instagram at Suneel on Twitter. I'll see you there.

[01:13:59] Chris Hutchins: Awesome. Well, there's going to be a lot of show notes for this, so please check those out and thank you to Neil. Thank you so much for being here.

[01:14:05] Suneel Gupta: This is great, Chris. Thanks so much for having me on,

[01:14:08] Chris Hutchins: That was so fantastic. Thank you so much for listening. I can't wait to start using some of Neil's tactics as I keep growing everything I'm doing with all the hacks. If you have thoughts questions or just want to say hi i'm chris@allthehacksdotcomandpleasecheckoutthenewsletteratallthehacks.com slash email finally thank you so much to block fi and day one for sponsoring today's episode that's it for this week see you all next week