Startup Founders in Cars Getting Coffee: Founder Origins with Dr. Sherry Walling - MicroConf Remote

0:00[Music] this is a 2017 volvo xc90 the xc90 is a mid-sized luxury suv manufactured and marketed by volvo cars since 2002 and now in its second generation both generations of the xc90 have won motor trends suv of the year award in their debuts this particular vehicle is rarely washed and comes fully loaded with cups books papers and other items long since abandoned by my children the xc90 has three rows of seats perfect for carrying a lot of gear a lot of kids or both the tachometer goes to 8000 rpm and the in-dash computer never fails to play the best crunch tunes of the 90s welcome to our remote edition of

0:42microcomp remote we're not live on set but we're actually driving around it's startup founders and cars getting coffee we're truly remote am i going to get coffee out of this no it was just an expression that's like such false advertising i thought you were actually just inviting me for coffee so i rented this maserati here this is your volvo so we could drive around paris yeah no this is great thanks so much for for joining me for a few minutes to chat about founder origin stories can i get like a rain check on the coffee rain check on the coffee rain check on driving around paris in a maserati

1:17you made big promises this is amazing and the entire microcomp community now has my back on those i hope can we add an editor can we cut that part out so this is my lovely wife dr sherry walling and she is the founder of zen founder she's host of the zen founder podcast and she and i co-founded our family and co-wrote a book called the entrepreneur's guide to keeping your together and what we're going to talk about today is actually a piece about founder origin stories that made it into it really is the second chapter of the book understanding where you come from to optimize where you're

1:54going and i think to set the stage um you know as a clinical psychologist someone who who works with founders high performing executives ceos how does someone's story or their origin impact how they operate day to day and how they run companies and i think the real question is like why should a founder listening to this care about how they were brought up about how they were raised about their family system yeah i have a lot of conversations about this actually and i think because most of us who are entrepreneurs are so um either future oriented or very present oriented we kind of live in the

2:31moment we're planning for the future we're building something working towards something it can be easy for us to overlook the importance of reflecting back on our past but a lot of the science that's coming out really in the last 10 or 15 years really speaks to the importance of understanding how your early life narrative might shape things as simple as your relationships your capacity for trust or even the way that your body responds to stress the adverse childhood experiences study is was a really really large sales scale study conducted in the us that looked at like health data for something like 17 000 people and found really really strong

3:10relationships between early life adversity and things like depression suicidality things that you would expect but also things like heart disease um a number of times and types of cancer diabetes obesity things like that so i guess um maybe a long-winded way of saying it is that your past matters a tremendous amount to your relationship to your body and to the way that you solve problems the way that you manage stress the way that you really respond to the life that you're living right now yeah and i think that holds certainly holds true for me i know that the way i was brought up in the way that i was taught to deal with

3:43conflict or adversity or manage anger or all that is or anxiety is something that i have to manage on a day-to-day basis right as a founder yeah and it's even it's even more um maybe nuanced than what you were taught or what you observed it's really what got encoded into your body and the way that your dna responded to the kinds of environment that you were exposed to as a kiddo right and so as part of zenfat the zen founder podcast which is what on episode is it 250 or something at this point like yeah more than that 254 255 something like that you know you did a series of interviews for that

4:19where you talked to us actually multiple rounds of interviews over the course of a couple years it was kind of my summer project yeah so over the course of the year we would put out new episodes during the year and then over the summer i would sort of do a bunch of interviews at once and then have them ready to release throughout the summer that they were all founder origin stories so i did a really deep dive into lots of microcomp speakers actually sally fd patrick mckenzie jason cohen um lots of folks that we know well in the community and um shaw reuben gomez yeah yeah

4:49yeah they became really interesting conversations to just say hey tell me how you grew up like what were your first experiences of entrepreneurship what shaped you and what made it hard for you to get to where you are now yeah and and as part of that you pulled out four patterns or four kind of commonalities that a lot of the founders shared these ambitious um high-achieving founders who had achieved success and i'd love to run through those now and in addition i think one of the perhaps even the more interesting part is you then pulled out these four archetypes these founder archetypes um or would you call them founder

5:21archetypes sure yeah and it's it's they're pretty cool like to tease them it's like the golden child the loner the pleaser the survivor and so i'd love to dig into those in in just a second because you have some kind of risks or like pros and cons and how to if you fi if you find that you resonate with this like this is probably how you operate and and ways to kind of optimize you know who you are and how to how to get the most out of things right yeah i think one of the things that i really wanted to drive home in the course of doing these interviews

5:51and i didn't have to make the point the interviews made the point themselves is there are lots of ways to become an entrepreneur it's not like you have to have a certain kind of background or a certain type of life experience that makes you successful or not successful and so by by looking at the interviews um kind of thematically and pulling out different archetypes it i think it really helped me to see how people can be successful and then also have you know have shadow sides or have risk factors have downsides to really whatever kind of upbringing they experienced cool so what were the before we get into the archetypes what

6:22were those four um patterns or commonalities that you found across a lot of the successful founders that you interviewed for this founder origin series yeah i found that um of the folks that i interviewed almost all of them had some kind of early life adversity um the death of a parent a big transition a big move maybe right when they're going into junior high some really big shift a parent with cancer um the loss of a sibling you know mental illness mental illness a parent with substance abuse so these are the things that might show up in that adverse childhood experiences study that i mentioned earlier things

6:58that really disrupt the trajectory of your childhood but in the case of these founders the key thing that we know really from the field of psychological research which really bore out in my conversations with entrepreneurs is that that high adversity was accompanied by a high level of support so there was someone in that kid's life who maybe it was a teacher maybe it was a parent an uncle an aunt someone who saw something and just encouraged and supported and helped make kind of a safe place for that young person to continue to develop so high adversity you know we tend to be okay we can tend to be resilient if we

7:38have a helpful supportive adult around so that's what i found in a lot of the interviews was that trend um so high adversity but high support right that combination had to exist together and i definitely found totally true to the entrepreneurial story is that people just had an inherent need to blaze a trail like these were kids who these founders were children who weren't necessarily super content to just roll with the rules as they were presented to them they were people who were either trying to break the rules in sometimes like a pretty problematic way um you know dan martel tells some stories about breaking rules that got him in big

8:16trouble um but they were just people who weren't super content with the status quo and wanted to you know go off trail a little bit yeah and that pattern persisted even once or really began when they were young children the third is that these were folks who were self-taught and self-led like um patrick mckenzie i love the story about him he really was interested in coding he loved video games he wanted to write video games and make video games but he didn't have a computer so he went to the library and checked out library books about coding and started writing out code by hand so he learned to code from books and

8:55then would just do the mental exercise of coding of compiling i'm writing it despite longhand right so that's that's a unique trade and that's kind of the entrepreneurial secret sauce is somebody who can get themselves going is self-motivated and is going to teach themselves yeah i actually did that as well although i had a computer but when my brother was coding i would write it out on binder paper i know it's like it was like when's my turn what's my turn time sharing you know when i didn't know what that meant so that was the third what's the fourth the last one in this one oh man was so

9:26important for me to reflect on as a parent um the last one is time all of the entrepreneurs that i talked to or the vast majority of them had extended periods of time to tinker um so one my favorite example of this is heath and shaw his dad would take him out as a physician he'd take him to the hospital in the evenings when he was doing paperwork or whatever and he'd basically had him a screwdriver and let him loose in the in the like it room like with all of the machines and just be like hey entertain yourself essentially so heathen had all of this time to just

10:06i mean frankly like probably take apart computers and look at circuits and just problem solve and and i think the thing that um you know is so dangerous for us maybe in our era of parenting is that a lot of kids that i know are really really structured their days are really full and they don't have this expansive time to just kind of mess around in the basement and tinker and write code by hand or listen to their own imaginations so i thought that was a really important take home about that that road to entrepreneurship involves time to just sort of mess around in anger the first is the golden child second is

10:39the loner and then there's the pleaser and the survivor you want to maybe talk through the the golden child being mindful of time as our time is is running short but talk through that and like i don't know what you have advantages disadvantages things to watch out for whatever it is you want to add context to just what you know what the golden child kind of archetype is yeah so archetypes take a little bit more time to explain but i'll do my best um so as you're hearing this realize you're hearing this very sort of redacted version of this so forgive me if it feels over general there's a full

11:06book chapter too it's like four dollars on kindle the entrepreneur's guide to keeping your together chapter two is basically the expanded version of this if you want to dig in deeper so um in the course of these interviews i realize that a lot of people come to entrepreneurship and in different ways so one way is is this sort of golden child upbringing experience and this is like probably what all of us strive to provide our kids as parents lots of support lots of stability lots of um capacity to go deep in your own interests like these are the parents that are out on the soccer field

11:42like just cheering you on bringing the snacks like all invested in you and i think um this again highly supportive very enthusiastic lots of resources and this is great for people in their entrepreneurial journey because they really i think develop this deep sense of confidence this deep sense that uh what they think how they see the world that that matters and that it's something that's worth sharing or that people will generally be responsive to when they share it so that's one of the best um you know aspects if you're going into this sort of life of entrepreneurship which can be pretty hard is that you know you have this great

12:18foundation of support and belief in yourself um the downside of this is that sometimes people just have very limited experience with failure i mean you think of the the it kid the student council president or the high school quarterback or the head of the cheerleading squad these are these are kids who really have a lot of support maybe a lot of coddling even and they just haven't had to fight super hard which can be a downside when you're an entrepreneur and you you know you have you have things that don't work well that you have to sort through right how about the second is the loaner

12:51yeah the loner is you know is maybe the kid who's in the library handwriting code this is someone whose way of seeing the world or their interests didn't necessarily align with a an obvious peer group maybe when they're teenagers and so much of the development of who they became and what they cared about happened within their own you know their own autonomous time okay there's someone in the middle of the road taking a picture of a baldy eagle in a tree so that's that's minnesota moment for you right now so if the camera catches and there is a bald eagle yeah okay so the loner i mean in some

13:26ways this is a great advantage because you're used to hearing your own voice you're used to cultivating your own ideas you spend a lot of time in your own head in a way that i think can really yield a lot of ingenuity and again a sense of confidence and a way of just knowing yourself well and trusting your own creative process but of course this is a downside because as much as we like to think that we can be successful in a vacuum networking and our relationships and our connections are incredibly important no matter what we're doing as entrepreneurs so the downside potentially of the loner

14:02is that those early life skills in terms of how to really connect with other people um how to really build a network and as a sort of a bunch of different relationships may not be as intact or as well practiced it could be helpful and this is the one that resonates the most with me with my upbringing because we lived out in the middle of nowhere we had books and computers and with no internet because it was the 80s when i was growing up and i thought that my whole deal when i first started doing software right doing products was like i'm going to do it all

14:32on all i don't have to answer to anyone micro solo it was all about being a song no network i didn't build that and then at eventual areas i realized oh i was just never taught that skill and i i've learned that over the past 15 years but it was it was a detriment to me at the start for sure how about the third yeah the third um i call the pleaser and this is um this is the kiddo who's growing up in a context where maybe they have a pretty hard driving parent a parent that wants them you know to be that high school star athlete but

15:00they're really more of a chess playing kind of kid this is where you know you think of like the person who's kind of trying to overcompensate for that parent who pushed them really hard who maybe they felt like they were just never successful enough and i think this is in some ways it's a tough upbringing but in some ways it really helps you develop these skills of learning to read what people need like this is a great customer skill right you're learning what your customers need and how to respond in ways that um really fit their needs this is the kind of entrepreneur who will over

15:33deliver who's somebody who really um kind of understands the emotional context of what people will pay for and what they want and what they need um but this is not necessarily someone who is able to set good boundaries for themselves for their family or for their business this might be the person who's always like yes yes yes but that drives themselves into the ground because they're not actually thinking about what's most important for them or for the growth and well-being of their business they're other oriented in a way that's both helpful and problematic the survivor is the last archetype that i came across and this is the kiddo who really dealt

16:09with a lot of maybe aggression violence instability chaos in their early life experience and this is somebody who has potentially lots of street smarts who really knows how to get what they need and provide for themselves even in really really sort of difficult situations um so great entrepreneurial skill and like this is the person who doesn't get up give up rather this is they don't give up they're a fighter there a strong strong sort of mental game um but this can be problematic in the sense that um this kind of upgrading tends to either lead to a path where people are pretty shut down emotionally like they're just

16:50kind of machines or they're pretty reactive emotionally they may experience a lot of anger or not necessarily have had calming experiences that help their body regulate well when they're under a lot of stress or distress so again really hard driving forceful powerful but maybe not always know how to wield that power in helpful positive productive ways the bottom line is that no matter what upbringing you have there are strengths and there are liabilities in that so it's worth the time to just do a little bit of exploration around what you're coming to this point in your life with what are the lessons that your upbringing taught you what are the

17:36things that it maybe didn't teach you so well that you might need to supplement um and i give some more we give some more tips and tricks and strategies in the book if you're needing to just fill out your early life experience with some counterbalancing growth yeah i mean one of the biggest pivot points or changing points for me as an entrepreneur are when i started realizing my weaknesses and really honed in on on my upbringing but it was both my strengths and my weaknesses and how i handle stress and how i handle certain situations that was a big point of growth again probably about 15 years ago was when

18:13that started you know and really culminated maybe five years ago i'm sorry about 10 years ago where i was like okay you just finished growing at that point no but i finished i i knew a lot more about myself like it was a dramatic you know increase so thank you i'm giving you a hard time but i do think it's helpful to realize that this kind of growth process is ongoing like you do some of the growth you do some early childhood stuff and then there are times when you have to revisit it because your perspective on it changes as you grow as your kids grow as

18:41different factors around your change sure thank you so much dr walling for joining us today you owe me a coffee oh you a coffee and a maserati it sounds like she is i'm sorry at zen founder on twitter and you host the zen founder podcast if folks want to uh to keep up with you all right have a great microconf y'all thanks so much for joining us founders and cars not getting coffee i enjoyed that if you're interested in the book we kept mentioning it's called the entrepreneur's guide to keeping your together and chapter two of this book is in essence an expanded version of the

19:15conversation that you just heard

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