Navigating the Highs & Lows of Being a CEO with Adam Slutsky

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend Adam Slutsky. Adam is the founder of Gather Ventures, with a long career as CEO or co- founder or president of lots of companies, Moviefone, where Adam and I work together, Tough Mudder and Mimeo among others. So Adam, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Adam Slutsky: Nice to be here. Thanks. Good to see you, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so here's my question for you. You've been a founder and you've been CEO of a couple scaling enterprises a couple of times, and you've seen what I always refer to as the highs and lows of entrepreneurship or the highs and lows of being a CEO. And what I always tell people is that the problem isn't that the highs are high and the lows are low. The problem is that they frequently come on the same day, and you have to be kind of attuned to that to really be a strong leader or a strong CEO. So I know you've lived through a bunch of those. My question to you are, what are a few techniques that you developed or you advise CEOs on how to deal with that kind of high and low at the same time all the time?

Adam Slutsky: Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that. That was not a lob, but I'll deal with that one. So first off, I'd say a couple of things come to mind, and we see this now even with Gather Ventures, when we're investing in others businesses as opposed to driving my own. I think it's a good idea for most people to have a co- founder when they're starting a new business, or at least what I'll call a leadership team that's known to you. And so that would apply to someone like through the Bolster world is probably coming in lots of times as a new senior member of a team like the CEO. It may not be the founding day, but it's certainly a day where they're going to probably put their perimeter on the company a bit. And it's probably good to have someone that you've been with before that on that journey stand next to you. For that someone who's starting out his own business, especially the first time, I just lived it time and time again and see it time and time again. You talk about ups and downs. When you're having a tough day and you have someone sitting next to you or two people sitting next to you that are mission- aligned, passionate, probably giving up short- term compensation for a long- term gain, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they're more likely to be able to be someone to bounce your happiness and sadness off of. And I would say even more importantly, it's very rare when you have that big up that your founder, co- founder is feeling quite as big up about it. Likewise, when you're feeling like something just went sideways. We had something in one of our portfolio companies today go sideways, and one of the founders was really concerned about it and the other one only saw the opportunity in it, right? These things help to balance each other, and so much of what we do is frankly deep within our core emotions. So I think it's really good if you can, or if you're leaning towards it, get a co- founder when you're starting your first business and even others, because you'll have someone to basically balance things off of and or commiserate with. And I think it'll just be extraordinarily helpful.

Matt Blumberg: Right. That's a good one to start with.

Adam Slutsky: Okay. A second one?

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Adam Slutsky: A second one. Okay. Just give me a second. I'm thinking a good one. Well, another one that's somewhat related to it, but it's all about the struggles, is maybe having kind of an internal perspective compass. When we sold Moviefone into AOL, I was reporting into a guy named Ted Leonsis, who many of your listeners will probably know of, or now they know of him as an owner of a lot of sports teams. But Ted's an amazing, wonderful guy. And I'll never forget one day I had some really good news about something, and I went into his office, and he said, " Yeah, that is really good." I said, " No, that's great." And he said, " Reminds me of something." I said, " Why?" He goes, I think it was exactly this line. He says, " Well, when you think things are really great, they're usually not quite that great. But the good news is when you think things are really bad, they're usually not quite that bad." And I was like, " Genius." It's true. We get very excited about the good news and we get very depressed about the bad news, and we have to remember for ourselves that, I hate it, frankly, when some of the entrepreneurs that I'm looking to invest in and they look like they're not as excited about something as I think they should be. But I always think about that in the back of my head, remembering maybe they actually have absorbed it all and they're balanced enough to know that today it looked great, but it may not be that way tomorrow. But what I think is great isn't even a term sheet yet, let alone a deal that's done. And so I think that's a good thing. And related to that-

Matt Blumberg: That's good. It's like have your own damper pedal.

Adam Slutsky: Yeah, for sure. And then related to it, it's all the same topic, is the idea of what I'll call the company's perspective, not your internal perspective. So similarly, when we have a problem and executing something and we're failing on that tactically, or when we see our strategies got to change and we got to pivot or anything like that, the company has to recognize that everybody has heard the phrase, right? It's not a sprint, it's a marathon, or some version of that. And that's hugely important too, because so many times you are going to trip up through forces you could not control on an executional matter, and you just have to say, " Is this really affecting where we're trying to steer the boat?" Because if it's not, then we just have to tack a little differently and we have something here to think about that might actually, might actually put us in a better place than we thought we were going to be if the original thing was going to happen. And remembering that no one step, rarely, rarely, one step, derails the potential of the prize, but it also can be frustrating. So you have to learn and to think of it and to remember, and it goes a little bit with things are never as great and they're never as bad, but it's a little more focused on always going forward. You're always going forward and you're going to take some steps and they're a little bit of a misstep or someone moved the stone from under you when you were about to step there, and that's okay. Keep focused on the longer- term because it's just never a quick run. And if it was a quick run, it's beyond lucky, and everybody should have some luck, but that's not how it's going to generally play out. Those are my three.

Matt Blumberg: Great advice for founders and CEOs on keeping sane with the barrage of highs and lows. Thanks, Adam.

Adam Slutsky: No problem, Matt.