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How To Make You & Your Ideas Backable with Suneel Gupta

Lace Gilger
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In this episode we bring on innovation expert Suneel Gupta to discuss how you can make yourself and your ideas backable.

Suneel Gupta is a teacher of innovation at Harvard University and is the author of the upcoming book, BACKABLE, where he explores how to get people to believe in your ideas. Suneel’s ideas have been backed by firms like Greylock and Google Ventures, and he served as an Entrepreneur in Residence inside Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The New York Stock Exchange has named Suneel “The New Face of Innovation”. He has personally backed startups including Impossible Foods, Airbnb, 23&Me, Calm, and SpaceX. In 2019, Suneel established the Gross National Happiness Center of America in partnership with the Kingdom of Bhutan.

  • Find yourself in all kinds of situations where you're trying to convince people of an idea

  • Most people were not born backable, there were a set of skills and techniques they developed

  • Obviously backable things

    • Trust & Perceived Trust

  • Seven surprising factors of being backable

  • One of the most surprising findings was the idea of "conviction"

  • Backable people don't necessarily have incredible charisma, they often tend to have really strong conviction about their idea.

  • "ITs not charisma that makes someone convincing, it's conviction."

  • If you don't fully believe what you're saying, you won't be as backable as you could be.

  • Most great ideas where already inside companies, but they are often neglected or lose steam in casual and informal settings.

  • Take "incubation time" to more fully flush out your ideas.

    • Draw things out.

    • Talk things out.

    • Write ideas out, journal them out.

  • A few key principles for building conviction when you're incubating an ideas.

  • Backable people are much more likely to fall in love with a PROBLEM than with a SOLUTION.

  • Spend 20 minutes coming up with 8 alternatives to your idea.

  • Allow yourself to WANDER and don't get too locked into something.

  • Street into why the idea might be objectionable, figure out the biggest reason why people may object.

  • It's OK not to have perfect answers. Ambiguity creates conversations.

  • Backable moments are very rarely a monologue.

  • "I don't think you can be 100% convinced of anything"

  • Create an earned secret - "give me something that I can't find on google."

  • Great pitches, great interviews, great presentations are often built on a hidden insight.

  • How do we find that hidden insight? Part of it is putting yourself into the story. The founder of AirBnB rented their own apartment. The founder of Lyft drove their own cars.

  • Generate hidden insights by going the extra mile, putting yourself into the situation, and getting creative

  • What would most people do in this situation?

    • Go AT LEAST one step beyond that.

    • Talk to customers, interview

  • The "IKEA Effect" - we place 5x as much value on something that we help build vs something that we just buy.

  • Come up with great idea -->> hidden step -->> execute on it

  • Hidden step: Give the early team members a piece of the vision, let them "Crack their own egg," and get them bought into the idea.

  • We all want to know that we made a difference, we all want to know that we made a mark on something.

  • The way we approach most audiences is to tell the story of ME - backable tend to the story of US, how my idea and your idea come together to create something BIGGER.

  • I have this great idea, but the one thing I'm missing is what you're an expert in, if we were to combine efforts we could bake a cake together.

  • Share "just enough" to get people excited - share the high level perspective and let the creative energy of the room fill this in and create buy in.

  • It takes MORE preparation to have a dialogue than a monologue.

  • Don't treat the first conversation as the sales conversation, get to know the person, ask them questions, etc.

  • A lot of times we think that backable people are "naturals" - but in most cases they were the product of lots and lots of practice.

  • Ask: "what stood out to you the most?"

  • Ask: How would would you describe what you heard to someone else?

  • The average backable person does an average of 21 exhibition matches before their big pitch.

  • True mastery, innovation, and improvisation comes AFTER you've mastered the basics. Learn the rules to forget the rules.

  • "Be willing to be embarrassed."

  • "Long term success comes from short term embarrassment."

  • But that embarrassment does not have to come from high stakes situations.

    • Embarrass yourself in front of people you trust.

  • Backable people surround themselves with four types of personalities

    • Collaborators

      • "Yes... and.."

      • Build on top of your ideas with you.

      • Is your idea good for the market?

    • Coach

      • Is your idea good for YOU?

      • Does it fit who YOU are?

    • Cheerleader

      • Someone who you can turn to who will build up when you're feeling down.

    • Critic "Cheddar"

      • Cheddar gets Eminem ready for the final stage.

      • Skeptic who is willing to poke holes, has your best interest at heart, but is not afraid to point out your blind spots.

      • They can be kind of annoying, but are super valuable.

  • What is often holding us back? The idea that "I'm not ready."

  • Studying hundreds of successful people the biggest commonality was that almost universally they were NOT READY.

  • Homework: Play the game of now. The opposite of success is not failure, it's boredem.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet, bringing the world’s top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fabel.

[00:00:16] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet, with more than 5 million downloads and listeners in over a 100 countries.

In this episode, we bring on innovation expert, Suneel Gupta, to discuss how you can make you and your ideas backable.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we brought on one of the fathers of decision-making psychology to discuss several fascinating takeaways about how to make better decisions with our previous guest, Robin Hogarth.

Now, for our interview with Suneel.

[00:01:32] MB: Suneel Gupta is a teacher of innovation at Harvard University and is the author of the book, Backable, where he explores how to get people to believe in your ideas. Suneel’s ideas have been backed by firms like, Greylock and Google Ventures. He served as an entrepreneur in residence inside Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. the New York Stock Exchange named Suneel, the new face of innovation, and he's personally backed startups, including Impossible Foods, Airbnb, 23andme, Calm and SpaceX. In 2019, Suneel established The Gross National Happiness Center of America, in partnership with the Kingdom of Bhutan.

Suneel, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:09] SG: It's great to be here, Matt. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:11] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show today. You have such an incredible background, and have done so many interesting things. I'm really excited to explore that and dig into some of the lessons from Backable.

[00:02:22] SG: Fantastic. Well, now, hey, I'm a big fan of the show, and looking forward to digging in with you.

[00:02:28] MB: I'd like to start with just given all of the fascinating things that you've worked on and been involved with, tell me a little bit about the genesis of Backable and how you really started to piece this idea together?

[00:02:43] SG: Yeah. Well, I've found now that authors tend to start from one of two points. Either you have a solution, or you have a problem. I certainly had a problem, which was that I found myself in all sorts of different situations, where I was trying to convince people of an idea, or to take a chance on me personally with the job opportunity and just not having any luck. At the same time, I was finding that there are people who I now call backable people, who tend to be able to walk into a room, and they convince us to take a leap of faith on them. Even when they're not the obvious choice, even when they don't have the obvious idea, we tend to want to rally around them.

The reason that I became very interested in this topic at all came together in a moment, where I was asked to be a speaker at a conference called Fail Con, which stands for Failure Conference. Let me just tell you, Matt, it's a humbling experience when someone calls you and says, “Hey, we're doing this conference on failure, and we would love for you to be the keynote speaker.”

I accepted the role, and I'm on stage, and I'm giving this talk on all these things that I had messed up in my career. I didn't know this at the time, but there was a reporter from the New York Times, who was in the audience. Fast forward to a little while later, I'm in my apartment, and I open that day's New York Times to a full-length story on failure with my face is the cover of this story.

[00:04:09] MB: That's amazing.

[00:04:10] SG: Yeah, and this is 2013 timeframe. That story goes viral, because failure was a topic that hadn't really been talked about as much up until that moment, but it was really starting to enter the zeitgeist. That article became one of the ways that it did. It became so popular that literally, there was a time when you could have searched for failure on the Internet, and my face would have been one of your top search results.

I think, when something like that happens, you have two choices. You can either hide from it, or you can embrace it. A friend of mine convinced me to embrace it. The suggestion that he had was, why don't you start emailing this article out to people who you're trying to get meetings with, who have been up until now, unresponsive? Use this as an icebreaker and see what happens. I did. I started emailing people. I would say in the email something like, “Hey, as you can see, I have no idea what I'm doing. Would you be willing to grab 15 minutes with me over the phone, or grab coffee?”

The response rate, Matt, to that email was insanely high. I found that people not only were they willing to chat with me, but they were willing to open up to me. These were honest conversations. That really laid the foundation for this book, which was spending now, the past five years studying backable people from all different walks of life, from Oscar-winning filmmakers, to celebrity chefs, to military leaders, to founders of iconic companies, and really starting to realize that in the vast majority of cases, none of them were born backable.

There was a set of techniques, a set of adjustments that they made to their style. That's good news, because that means that any of us can make specific, tactical adjustments to our style to make ourselves more backable.

[00:06:02] MB: You touched on something just now and earlier as well, that is such an important piece of this, which is that being backable, when you see maybe your background, or even just the title, you think initially about raising money for startups. At least, personally for me, that's the immediate thing that came to mind. Really, this is a universally applicable skill set. I mean, in any field, anything you're doing with your life, you can exponentially increase your ability to be successful, by getting people invested in you and what you want to achieve.

[00:06:34] SG: Yeah. Such a good point. I really think it comes down to change. Whatever type of change you're trying to create, that could be with your own career, that could be with your community, that could be with your company, whatever type of change it is that you're trying to create, we never do it alone. We need teams, we need colleagues, we need hiring managers, we need bosses, we need investors, we even need friends and family. How do you get people to see in your idea and to see in you what you see in yourself?

[00:07:06] MB: This likely dovetails with this, but I'm curious, what were the people you started to study and uncover and see across a wide spectrum of activities and industries, what were some of those commonalities that you witnessed around what made them backable?

[00:07:23] SG: Yeah. What I tried to do was run everything that I was seeing through the obviousness filter. There were certain things, like you need to be somebody that people trust, for example; something that somebody has perceived trust, at least. That's an obvious quality, and I tried to really focus on the things that surprised me. Ultimately, it came down to seven surprising qualities. What I did in the book was I really tried to break those into specific steps then, specific techniques.

For example, one of the qualities that surprised me early on, was this idea around conviction. What I expected to find when I started researching this book is that backable people in large, were going to be charismatic folks. They're going to have a high degree of charisma. The more that I dug in, the more people I spent time with, who were extraordinary, the more I realized that that's really not the case.

Sure, there are people out there who are highly charismatic, that are backable, but I was finding that actually, the majority of them were not. Many of them were shy. They were introverted. By the way, if you want a quick example of that, just very quick, go look up the number one most popular TED Talk of all time. What you might be surprised to find is a very unTED-like presentation. It's a guy named Sir Ken Robinson. The talk has over 65 million views. It's an incredible talk on education.

He has one hand in his pocket. He meanders on and off script. He naturally walked with a bit of a slouch, but it's an incredibly powerful talk. What I found is that it's not charisma that makes a person convincing. It's conviction. Backable people take the time to convince themselves first. Then, they let that conviction shine through with whatever style it is that feels most natural to them.

The fundamental idea of being here, Matt, like if you don't believe, they can't believe. If you don't fully believe what it is that you're saying, then no PowerPoint slide, no hand gesture, no level of eye contact is going to make up for that.

[00:09:30] MB: Such a powerful insight. I'm curious, how do we start to either uncover conviction within ourselves, or get convicted about something that we're not sure about?

[00:09:45] SG: Yeah. Well, I think, it really begins in a moment that I think a lot of us are very familiar with, which is that you're with friends, or you're with colleagues, and all of a sudden, an idea strikes. You get inspired by something. Typically, what ends up happening in that moment is that we end up blurting that idea out. Then we look around, and we realize that no one is quite as excited about that, what we just said as we are. When that happens, it can be very deflating. Can be a very deflating moment. Most of us what we find, we’ll then take that idea, we'll put it in a mental drawer, and we'll walk away.

One of the things we found when we were looking inside big companies back to your point, this isn't just for entrepreneurs, but we were really interested in how do ideas really flourish within larger organizations? One of the things we found is that most great ideas, I mean, the ideas that companies and organizations regret having not done, were already there. They're already floating around the companies. They weren't killed inside the room, they weren't killed inside formal meetings. Those ideas tend to be killed inside the hallways. They get killed inside parking lots. In casual conversations, where you share it with somebody who's friendly and they don't give you the reaction. You get deflated, and you walk away from the idea.

Getting back to that moment, when you start to think about this moment of inspiration, what backable people tend to do is they almost form this very, very simplistic decision tree in their heads, which is, “Okay, I'm inspired by this. Is this an idea that I have high conviction for, or a low conviction for?” One way to think about it, is this a peanut M&M, or is this a chocolate M&M?”

A peanut M&M is not a piece of steel, but you can squeeze it, and it won't crack immediately. Or as a chocolate M&M, you squeeze it just a little bit, and it cracks. You don't want to share a chocolate M&M with people, because it's going to crack immediately, and it's going to be a deflating experience. What backable people tend to do is they say, if it's a chocolate M&M, I'm going to resist the impulse to share this idea right now. I'm going to take what we call in the book, incubation time.

Now, incubation time is where you put the peanut inside the idea. There are lots of different styles for how people like to spend their incubation time. Some people like to draw things out that are more artistic. Some people like to talk it out with literally themselves through a recorder, or they film themselves in their laptop. I'm a writer. I like to write my ideas out. I literally start out with just blank pieces of paper. I know, you're a journaler as well, Matt. I am, too. I literally just tried to just start writing my idea.

There's a couple of key principles, I think, when you're spending this incubation time for building conviction. One is that you want to allow yourself to wander a little bit. Oftentimes, when we're at the early stages of an idea, we tend to fall in love with a solution. What we found is that backable people tend to fall in love with a problem, not necessarily falling in love with the solution. If you fall in love with the problem, what that allows you to do is it allows you to wander in different directions.

As you start to journal your idea out, you may end up finding that it morphs into something else. If you're rigid about your solution, you're going to shut those patterns off. You're going to shut those possibilities off. If you're in love with your problem, you're going to follow those through. What we find over and over again, is that most great ideas were a morph of something that started out. It started out a little bit different. Usually, not a lot different, but a little bit different.

IDEO, the company will go into their consulting arrangements with companies. One of the first things they'll have people do sometimes is they'll say, “You know what? You guys have an idea right now. Why don't we come up with eight alternatives to your idea?” Typically, their client is like, “No, no, no. We have the idea. We know what it is.” They'll say, “Yeah, yeah. Let's just spend 20 minutes coming up with eight alternatives to that idea, and just see what happens.” Finally, they do. What they say is that, almost always, one of the eight ideas ends up being the thing that the room gets most excited about, even though they came in with a very different concept. Again, allowing yourself to wander.

The second thing is that you want to not just during this incubation time, you don't just want to steer into why this idea is exciting to you. You want to also steer into why this idea might be objectionable. In the book, I call the steering into objections. Taking off your excited hat, putting on your critic hat, and thinking to yourself, “When I ultimately share this with my colleagues, or my friends, or whomever I'm going to share this with, what are going to be the top two or three things they're going to bring up?” You want to write those down, and you want to start to answer those.

Now, most people are afraid to do this. The reason for that is because we know that we won't have perfect answers. The reality is that when you're trying to create something new, you're very rarely going to have perfect answers to those questions. There's always going to be open questions. If there weren't, it probably wouldn't be a new idea. Just the ability to have a back and forth, just the preparedness of like, I have thought through what they're going to bring up, then I'm able to have a conversation about it, gives you that level of conviction that you need to walk into a room. On the other hand, if you walk in crossing your fingers, hoping they don't bring something up, you can never have the conviction that you need to create a backable moment.

[00:15:13] MB: Those are great insights, and especially, this notion that we should have, be okay, that our answers aren’t perfect. To me, that's so important to really understand, even in the early genesis of an idea that you have to have some level of comfort with ambiguity, to be able to bring something into the world.

[00:15:35] SG: Yeah, absolutely. In some ways, I have found that that ambiguity is what creates conversation. Because these backable moments, whether it be a pitch, or a presentation, or an interview, they're very rarely a monologue. You don't walk in, recite your resume, and walk out of the room. It's a series of interactions. It's the ambiguity that ends up creating interesting conversation, where again, it's not just you reciting your idea, or your resume, it's you engaging the other side of the table. When there's some ambiguity, you actually have something to talk about.

[00:16:09] MB: Yeah. I really like that insight a lot. In some senses, doing that a little bit of that work in advance almost reminds me of the concept of a pre-mortem, or even the military conception of red teams that essentially, beat ideas up and try to figure out why things are going to fail. Just those concepts, I find to be really fascinating ways to improve your own thinking. As you said, if you're falling in love with a problem, instead of falling in love with the solution, you create more space for yourself to not have your ego be tied up in, whatever the definitive outcome may be, if that makes sense.

[00:16:44] SG: Yeah. No, totally does. I love the way you phrase that too, because it is about you go. Oftentimes, we come up with an idea, and then we get married to it, and then our identity gets wrapped up in it. Then anything that starts to even bend it a little bit, we resist that. It's amazing how quickly that can happen. All of a sudden, we almost feel married to something.

I do think it takes deliberate practice. It's so important, which is to say, is almost in some ways, to catch yourself in these moments of excitement and say, “All right, but let me just unwind this a little bit. What was the problem that I was trying to solve? What exactly am I trying to get at here?” Just allowing yourself to have the space and flexibility of knowing that your answer, that thing you're excited about is probably one of many different ways to tackle that. Maybe it's the best, but maybe it's not.

[00:17:40] MB: This is a corollary of that. How do you think about the balance between being really convicted on an idea, versus having the intellectual humility to change your mind, or abandon it and move in a different direction?

[00:17:56] SG: Yeah. It's such a powerful question. I don't think that you can be a 100% convinced about anything. I think, well, I don't find that backable people usually are. I think, what they're convinced about is that there's a real problem to solve here. They're convinced that the insight that they have found is solid. One of the chapters that we talk about in the book is this idea of finding an earned secret, finding an earned secret.

I'll tell you a quick story. I was in the waiting room of a guy named Brian Grazer, who's a Hollywood producer. He's won a 130 Emmys, dozens of Oscars, but he also invests in companies, and he runs large teams. As I was sitting in his waiting room, this is a couple of years ago, I was surrounded by people who were there to pitch him on all sorts of things. You could just tell that the anxiety in the room was really, really high. People were nervous.

When I went back to see Brian, I said to him, “Hey, you have a roomful of nervous people out there. If I could have given them one piece of advice before they pitched you, on how to pitch a guy like Brian Grazer, what would it be? What would that one piece of advice be?” He thought about it for a moment. He said, “Give me something that I can't find easily on Google. Give me something that's not easily Googleable.” I thought that was so interesting, because as I talk to more and more backers, more and more decision makers, what I realized is that great presentations, great pitches, great interviews tend to be based on in a hidden insight. They tend to be based on an earned secret. It's something that you have gone out into the field, and you have found, and you realized like, “Hey, this is something that is somewhat surprising. Most people in my shoes don't really know this. I'm going to bring that into the room. I'm going to build my idea on top of that.”

Getting back to your question about conviction and humility, I think, what we're talking about is really conviction on the problem, but leaving the solution somewhat flexible, so that the people on the other side of the table can really get involved. One of the concepts, Matt, you and I were talking about before the show was this idea of flipping outsiders into insiders. That's where that comes in.

[00:20:06] MB: I definitely want to dig into how to flip outsiders into insiders. Before we dig into that, I want to unpack a little bit more this idea of earned secrets and hidden insights. How do you think about – when I think about just for myself, if I wanted to create an amazing pitch, or presentation, I would love to always have a hidden insight. How do you think about sourcing those, or finding them, or earning those secrets in some sense?

[00:20:35] SG: Well, when we unpack what an earn insight is, it is an insight, but I think half of it is the charm of your story, and how you put yourself out there. When I talked to people who invested in Airbnb early, Brian Chesky, the co-founder, and his co-founders didn't necessarily come up with anything that, I think, was mind blowing. I think, part of what it is that really charmed investors was that they were renting out their own apartment, and they were actually having real people stay at their place. They were understanding what that experience was like, and how it could be better.

If you look at TaskRabbit, Leah Busque the founder was cleaning homes and collecting insights. If you look at Lyft, the founder of Lyft was driving passengers around. Logan Green was carting the first passengers around himself, then he was taking notes, and he was bringing those notes into the meeting. I don't think it necessarily always has to be earth-shattering, but I think half of it is you putting yourself into the story. You didn't sit behind a desk. You didn't do research the way that most people would. You went above and beyond.

I'll tell you, I'll give you an example that's non-founder, non-tech-founder-ish, which is that a few weeks ago, someone had approached me, because she was applying for a job at a social media company. She was a mother, and she was returning to the workforce. She was trying to figure out what this company was all about, because she didn't actually use the product. She did something really interesting that most people in her shoes would not do, which is that she interviewed every single one of her daughter's friends.

All her daughter's friends use this product, and so she interviewed all of them. She asked them what they liked and what they didn't like, what were these moments in their experience that they found most compelling. Then she did something. She had them sent her screenshots of these moments in their experience. Then she goes to this interview, which is over Zoom, and she pulls out her phone in the middle of the interview, and she starts showing this hiring manager some of these insights that she collected, this gallery of screenshots.

Well, this hiring manager is so impressed that not only does she get the job, but he actually in the middle of the interview, patches in one of their UX designers to look at some of these insights that she's collected, these moments that may not actually be on their radar, these little opportunities. I don't think it takes a lot. When I asked her like, “How much time did all that take you?” She's like, “Less than two hours. Less than two hours of research.” I don't think it takes a tremendous amount, but I think, it begins with being willing to go do things, again –

The way that I would approach it is really, two steps. Step one is thinking, what is most people do in this situation? What would most people do? Then the second is going and doing at least one step beyond that, that could be talking to customers, that could be test driving a competitor's product, that could be attending an obscure meetup online, but doing something that most people in your shoes would not do.

[00:23:28] MB: What a great story. It really showcases that it's all about just putting in a little bit of extra effort, going one step further, and you've shared some great examples of that already. I think, that that really crystallizes how you can start to generate these personalized and unique insights that can help take something that may have been one-dimensional and make it three-dimensional. Let's come back to the concept of flipping insiders to outsiders.

[00:23:57] SG: Yeah. It's really interesting, and I think, people, book came out a few weeks ago, and this has been one of the concepts that people have gravitated to the most. One of my favorite stories from the book is about Betty Crocker. Betty Crocker in the 1940s, introduced instant cake mix to the market. They believed that instant cake mix was going to be a smash selling product. They were stunned. The executives at Betty Crocker were stunned when they found out that instant cake mix just was not selling, and they could not figure out why.

They hire a psychologist named Ernest Dichter to go out into the field and start doing interviews with customers. Dichter comes back with a recommendation, or an insight that was really, really surprising. He says, “I think, you have made the process of making a cake too easy, too simple. Because all the customer has to do is pour water into a mix, pop it in the oven and voila, there's a cake. When the cake comes out of the oven, they actually don't feel a sense of ownership over it. It actually don't feel they really made that cake.”

Dichter had a recommendation. “Why don’t you remove one ingredient, one key ingredient and see what happens?” They do. They removed the egg. Now as a customer, you have to buy and crack and mix in your own fresh egg, and sales completely take off. Because now, when the cake comes out of the oven, people felt they had an ownership over it. Look, researchers and scientists have unpacked this theory over and over again and proven it in different ways.

A group of economists at Harvard called this the IKEA effect, which basically tells us that we place up to five times the amount of value on something that we help build, than something that we simply buy. There are a lot of people out there with poorly made futons and furniture that they're probably not going to get rid of, because they built it themselves. What does this have anything to do with creativity, or innovation? Well, we've been told that it's a two-step formula. You come up with a great idea, and then you execute on it really well.

There's a hidden step in between. That hidden step is where we take early employees, early colleagues, early partners, just early friends, and we make them feel like it's their idea as well. We give them an egg, and we allow them to crack that egg into the mix, so that by the time the cake comes out of the oven, by the time we reach execution phase, they actually feel it's their cake as well.

Believing in trace, any successful organization, any successful political movement, any successful product initiative, back to that hidden step, where it was never just one person. Oftentimes, we will give the credit to one leader, but the reality is when we unwind the clock, and we go back in time, when we look at how it was really formed, it was a group of people who felt the same founder level passion over that idea, as the person who came up with it in the first place.

[00:27:02] MB: How do we practically start to think about getting those early team members bought into the vision, and telling a story that's collective, as opposed to about you and them, if that makes sense?

[00:27:15] SG: Yeah. By the way, I love the way you frame that, like the collective story, because that's exactly what it is that we're doing. One of the people I talked to for the book was the head of the MacArthur Foundation, which gives the Genius Grant. The Genius Grant is a $650,000 grant to some really amazing people, like Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton is a Genius Award recipient.

I asked him like, “How do you go about selecting people for a grant like this?” One of the things he said that was really surprising to me is that if you are somebody they're considering, and you are already on a very, very clear path to success, to achieving what it is that you want to achieve out of life, that will actually make you a less likely candidate for the grant. Less likely, not more likely. I was like, “Why?” He’s like, “Well, as a foundation, we want to have some influence on your success. We want to actually know that as a result of what we did for you, as a result of what we were able to provide for you, you are more likely to achieve what it is you were trying to achieve.”

He was offering me this perspective from the foundation. He was saying, “Look, I mean, this is really how we operate as human beings. Don't we all want to know that we made a difference? Don't we all want to know that we made some mark on the things that we're getting involved in. It's true. Yet, if you look at the way that we approach most presentations, or pitches, the way we approach most audiences, we very much, the most of us, very much like to tell the story of me, the story of my idea, the story of my resume, the story of my vision.

Whereas, what backable people tend to do is they tend to tell the story of us, how my idea and your idea, or who I am and who you are come together to create something bigger. One way to think about that practically, is look, if I have an idea that I'm selling, I have most of the ingredients this idea. As it turns out, the one thing that I'm missing, or that a couple things that are missing happened to be the areas that you are an expert in. If we were to combine together, if you were to crack your eggs into this mix, we would make this really, really beautiful cake together.

Again, most of the time, we don't approach it that way, because we feel we need to walk into these meetings with bulletproof answers, or a bulletproof plan. When we do that, we often shut people out of the creative process. One of the very specific things that we talked about in the book is how to share just enough. Don't overshare, at least not in the beginning. Oftentimes, I'll see teams walk into meetings and they'll share 90% upfront, and then they'll save 10% for Q&A.

My advice is now to reverse that. Share the 20% to 30% upfront. Share just enough, where you can get the, again, the problem that you're trying to solve a high-level of the vision, and then open it up to the room for this conversation and let the creative possibilities that come up get folded in. Now, that doesn't mean by the way, Matt, that you come in unprepared. It doesn't mean that you've only prepared 20% to 30% of your presentation. You're going to wing it for the rest.

As it turns out, it takes a lot more preparation to have a discussion, than it does to have a monologue, or to have a presentation. You need to be able to react to what's coming up. You need to have studied all corners. You need to be able to engage in questions, which as we know, it's much more difficult to ask the right questions sometimes than it is to give the right answers. It's an engagement, a back and forth. It all begins with sharing just enough and not too much.

[00:30:59] MB: What a great perspective on that, that it takes more preparation to have a dialogue than a monologue. That's a really good and slightly counterintuitive frame that really shines light on this idea. I think, broadly, this whole perspective is a really cool way to think about applying the IKEA effect in a methodology that I'd certainly never thought of, prior to you unearthing in some sense, this notion of giving the people that you're pitching, or engaging with some method to get buy-in into the conversation. Give them some space to contribute and feel they're a part of it, as opposed to just having a one-directional conversation.

[00:31:42] SG: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm sure – I mean, look, when you were in the process of acquiring companies that you acquired, and in doing all the work that you've done, I mean, I'm sure you have a ton of perspective on this. I mean, you were engaging with lots of different teams. Did you ever find that that was the case, that certain teams that would come in and engage you and say, “Hey, Matt. Based on the experiences you've had, what would your advice be? What would you do in this situation?”

[00:32:07] MB: Yeah. Even just thinking about that, I mean, it almost makes me more bought into the conversation, just thinking about it right now. You're totally right. This in some sense, is almost a corollary of another idea that I find to be extremely powerful, which has various names, but I typically refer to it as Socratic influencing, which is basically, the idea of, instead of trying to convince someone of something, you just ask them questions to get them to come up with the idea themselves. You see massively more buy-in from somebody if you approach it that way, versus just trying to tell them outright that XYZ.

[00:32:43] SG: Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I love that. One of the most common things that I saw backable people do very practical, but it's interesting how seldom I see it done by others, is that not treating the first conversation as the sell conversation. Instead, having that intro conversation with people, where you're just simply asking them questions. What is it that they're interested in? What are the biggest problems on their mind right now? What's keeping them up at night? Then saving the sell for the second conversation, right?

I mean, I see founders do this with investors all the time, where it's like, “Hey, we have this perspective on healthcare, but I'm interested to hear what are you finding right now? What's fascinating to you?” Then, then taking some of the insights, taking some of those things, and folding them into the follow-up conversation. “We heard you say this during the last conversation. We did some research on that. We agree, and here's what we found.” Instead of jumping straight to the sale, almost treating it like a one-two punch.

[00:33:45] MB: I think, you can even apply that in a single conversation, in some sense, which I'm a huge fan of. Whenever I meet somebody new, I almost never want to introduce myself first. I'd much rather hear them introduce themselves and ask all kinds of questions. Then once I have all that context, I can really way more effectively tailor my, whatever my introduction, or parts of my background that are the most relevant, or personal experiences that tie in with that. Without that context, you're just blindly stumbling into the introduction. You have no idea what's going to be the most helpful pieces of yourself to bring to that conversation.

[00:34:23] SG: I love that. The other day, I spent time with a sales leader, who was talking about this product that he's been out there trying to sell. He's like, it's this product that has lots of different features to it. The way that he would approach his presentations to potential buyers is he would talk about every single one of these features. It was basically, a 40-minute presentation, talking through each and every feature. He would just realize that by the end of those 40 minutes, I mean, people's eyes were glazed over.

Instead, he took a page, I think, out of your playbook, which is in the beginning, he'd have them start talking. Then he would ask them, “Hey, we have five different things that we're hearing, five different types of problems that we're hearing in the market right now. I just want to go through those five very quickly. He’ll list them off and they'll say, “Which of those five resonate the most with you, if any?” They'll be like, “Well, number three, for sure. We hear that all the time over here.”

Instead of going to every feature, he'll jump right into number three. He'll talk about how the one specific feature addresses the problem for number three. Now, it's a 15-minute presentation, as opposed to a 40-minute presentation, saving a bunch of room for dialogue. He's gone straight into responding to what it is that they're telling him is their biggest pain point. He's like, it became a night and day result. The number of people who ended up saying yes, was just way, way different than it was before.

[00:35:51] MB: Great example. it's such a simple shift in perspective, but it can really transform the way you interact with people. I want to explore some other themes from the book, because there's so many great lessons here. one of the sections that I found to be really, really insightful was the notion of playing exhibition matches. Tell me a little bit about that.

[00:36:13] SG: Yeah. I love exhibition matches as well. it's one of my favorite chapters. basically, exhibition matches are low-stakes practice sessions, before you get into a high stakes situation. What I found, after studying hundreds of backable people is that oftentimes, we look at them, and we feel they're naturals. They're just naturally gifted speakers, and some of them are. In the vast majority of the cases, they were the product of lots and lots and lots of practice.

The reason that that's so deceiving to us, the reason we don't think that it's a lot of practice, is because they almost come off as extemporaneous. They almost have an improvisational style to them. We assume that they're coming up with it on the spot, when again, it's typically, because they've practiced so much, that they are able to have that natural style. I'll tell you a little bit more about that. These exhibition matches are again, they can be played – There's a few rules, a few ground rules. Let me walk through just a couple of them for you, how to play good exhibition matches.

The first is that no venue is too small. When you're practicing something, you can practice with anybody. It could be a friend, it could be a colleague, it could be a family member, it can really be anybody. When you're doing a practice session, you don't want to give the director's commentary version. What I find that a lot of people will do is they'll be like, in these practice sessions, they'll say, “Hey, so when I go in the room, this is what I'm planning on doing.” Then I'm going to go through this, and then I'm going to go through this section. They're given this almost editorial director's commentary. You don't want to do that.

The reason you don't want to do that is because you want to build the muscle memory, the exact muscle memory of what it's going to be when it's in the room. You can only do that if you're giving them the real version. That's one really important thing. The second thing is that it's critical when you're doing these exhibition matches, to get good feedback. The only way you can get good feedback is if you ask good questions. The question that I think is useless, that a lot of us tend to ask is, we'll get through a presentation, or a practice round, I will ask the person, what did you think? What did you think of that?

Most of the time, especially if we're dealing with friends and family, they're going to be nice, and they're going to say, “Yeah, it was pretty good. I like that.” That's not very helpful. A much more precise question to ask, is what stood out to you the most? What of what you just heard stood out to you the most? That's going to give you a much more precise sense of what's landing and what's not landing.

Another way to frame that is asking, how would you describe what you just heard to someone else? I love that one, because what ends up happening is if I'm talking to somebody like you, Matt, who's much more articulate than me, you're going to end up coming up with a way to explain what you just heard in a way that's more compelling than I ever could. I'm going to use it. When I was starting to write Backable, I would go to other authors and I'd say, “Here's my idea,” and I would explain it in this really sloppy way. Then brilliant authors, like Dan Pink, for example, would be like, “Well, here's how I describe it.” I'm like, “My gosh. That's so much better than mine, and I would use it.” Asking people, how would you describe what you just heard to a friend is a really important thing.

Now, getting back to the number of exhibition matches, because this is really important. What I found really surprising, which is that the average person that I studied, played about 21 exhibition matches before they got into the room. 21. Which I thought was crazy. I thought, sounded way too high. The thing that I worried about was if you're practicing that much, isn't that going to make you sound really robotic when you get into a room? Aren't you going to feel very scripted? What I found by putting this into practice myself was that it does the opposite. Because when you have such a high-level of mastery, when you've gone through something 21 times, like a new pitch, a new idea, a new presentation 21 times, you can drop your script. You have it committed to memory.

You don't have this background process running, where you're like, “Well, I'm going to say this, and I'm going to say that, I’m going to say that.” You can drop all of that and you can be fully tuned in to exactly what's happening in the room. That's when backable moments happen; when you are completely adaptive to how other people are reacting. You're picking up on signals of what's landing and what's not landing.

Charlie Parker, the great jazz musician had this quote, which basically sums up my entire book. It's super annoying, because he was getting off the stage and someone asked him this question. In 30 seconds, he gave a summary, which basically, encapsulates what I tried to do in 200 pages. What he said was, somebody asked him like, “Charlie, how do you have such incredible stage presence?” Charlie Parker said, “Well, you got to learn your instrument. Then you got to practice, practice, practice. Then before you get up on stage, you forget all of that, and you just wail.” I love that, because in order to forget yourself in that way, in order to fully put yourself in the room, be completely absorbed into what's happening, and completely with the people that you're sharing this idea with, you have to have practiced enough to put yourself in that state.

[00:41:36] MB: It's such an important concept. I really love that you brought in jazz, both because I’m a fan of Charlie Parker and jazz more broadly. Also, just this notion of learning the rules before you can break the rules. This idea that once you have mastery, then you become an incredible improviser. Until you do, it feels rigid and stiff, or scary if you're breaking out of your formula, or framework to start to improvise. Once you have that level of mastery, it's almost beautiful, your ability to on the fly, adjust and change and pivot little parts of the conversation to tailor to exactly what the situation requires.

[00:42:17] SG: Yeah. It’s so well put. I mean, because it's this idea of practicing in order to become a natural, doesn't feel right. It feels a little counterintuitive. You don't practice to become natural. The reality is that you do. It's when you master things, then it opens up to this adaptability and this improvisational quality that like you say, jazz musicians have.

[00:42:40] MB: You see it across any field, where someone has true mastery. I think, you see the same manifestation of that broader principle. One other element that I found really interesting around the idea of exhibition matches, which we've touched on briefly, but was also this notion of being willing to be embarrassed. Tell me a little bit about that.

[00:43:01] SG: Yeah. We tend to want to save, I think, our stuff until we feel we're good at presenting it, we're good at explaining it. That doesn't give us the practice that we end up needing. It's amazing how many times I talked to founders, I camped out at a venture capital firm for a while, a firm called Kleiner Perkins. I would talk to founders after they left the pitch. Oftentimes, after they gave a pitch that was a little bit lackluster, then I ask them about their preparation. What do they do to prepare? Oftentimes, I found that they were giving that presentation for the very first time to us.

Part of the reason for that is because, we want to not be embarrassed. What I found is that backable people tend to have this mantra, which I really try to bring into my life now, which is that long-term success comes from short-term embarrassment. Long-term success comes from short-term embarrassment. That embarrassment doesn't necessarily need to be in high-stakes situations. You don't need to save that embarrassment for that person, who you absolutely need to say yes. It can be in front of friendly people. It can be in front of colleagues. It can be in front of friends. You might as well use that.

I found that backable people tend to embarrass themselves in front of people who they trust. In particular, when I say in these backable people, they seem to surround themselves with a circle of people and four distinct types of personalities. I call these the four C's of your backable circle. Four different types of people that backable people tend to have. Those four C's are, number one is your collaborator, your collaborators. This is the person who's, like we brought up jazz. This is the person who's almost riffing with you. They're using language like, yes, and. We all have a collaborator in our life, right? Somebody who when we bring an idea to them, they're building on top of it with us.

The second is your coach. Your coach is different than your collaborator, because while your collaborator’s really thinking about whether your idea is good for the market, or good for the company, or a community, your coach is really thinking about whether your idea is good for you. Does this really fit who you are? Because the reality is that there are plenty of great ideas out there that are great for somebody else. Are you going to want to spend the next several years really sticking with it, and going through all the doubt and rejection and setbacks that come with trying to create anything new? That your coach who's going to be able to give you that truth serum of like, “This is a fit for you.”

The third is your cheerleader. It may sound a little bit sappy, but we all need someone who we can turn to, and they're going to build us up. They're going to give us that last bit of juice that we need before we walk into a room. One of the people I studied for the book was this woman named Ellen Levy, who Fast Company Magazine named the most connected woman in Silicon Valley. I asked her, you have members of congress in your Rolodex, you have Fortune 500 CEOs, who do you call before you walk into a big moment? She said, “That one's easy. I call my mom. I call my mom before I walk into a room.” Your cheerleader.

The fourth is my favorite. It's the, I think, the least appreciated of the circle. It's your critic. I like to call this person your cheddar, your cheddar. The reason I call this person your cheddar is because, if you've ever seen the movie, 8 Mile, Eminem is surrounded by a circle of friends. They're all building him up through the movie. There's one friend named Cheddar, who is always poking little holes in his ideas. What we find through the movie is that it's really Cheddar that gets Eminem ready for the final stage.

I think, the same thing is true in our lives, which is that we all have someone who is more of the person who is willing to poke holes. They have our best interest at heart, but they're not afraid to point out our blind spots. The truth is that that person can be annoying. A lot of us will push that person out. We know now that backable people really, really embrace their cheddar. They know that it's cheddar that's going to get them ready for that final moment. Those are the four C's.

[00:47:18] MB: Great. Yeah, all four of those are fantastic. I can even just see in my own life, both people who fit some of those buckets and maybe gaps, where I could shore up one or more of those personalities and surround myself with. I'm curious, zooming out a little bit, for somebody who wants to start to put some of these ideas into practice, what would be one action step from anything we've talked about today, that a listener could take today and start to apply it to make themselves and their ideas more backable?

[00:47:47] SG: Yeah. Well, I think, it's important for us all to just look at where we are right now. I think, so many people are coming out of the pandemic with ideas. The thing that I'm hearing more often than not now is a realization that what we were doing before may not necessarily be what we want to be doing going forward. I think, for those of us who have been lucky, the pandemic has given us a little bit of a pause. I mean, for many people, it just made their lives so much busier.

For some of us, I think it's actually given us a bit of a enough of a pause. We can actually have that moment of self-reflection. I think, it's really important then to really think about, what is it that's holding us back? I think that it tends to be three words, more often than not. Those three words are, I'm not ready. I'm not ready to run with that idea. I'm not ready to speak my mind. I'm not ready to step into that leadership role.

The thing that I would leave you with, Matt, is that I have now studied hundreds of extraordinary people. I did it, because I had a problem that I was trying to solve. I really went deep. I understood what made them tick. The thing that I found that was common amongst all of them is that none of them are really ready. Three friends from design school were not ready to start Airbnb. A mid-level talent manager wasn't ready to create SoulCycle. A 15-year-old from Stockholm, Sweden, wasn't ready to build an environmental movement. Today, Greta Thunberg is Time magazine's youngest person of the year.

Yeah, there were setbacks, and there were failures, and there were mistakes along the way, but they all tend to play what I call in the book, the game of now. In the game of now, the opposite of success is not failure. It's boredom. I think, it begins with understanding what it is that really makes us tick. Using, I think, maybe a little bit of this pause that we've had to find ideas that really make us come alive, and then really, recruit good people to join us along the ride. Because I mean, if nobody's ever told you this and you're listening, let me tell you, you are ready.

[00:50:02] MB: What a powerful and in some sense, freeing perspective, that we're both simultaneously never ready and always ready. We just have to take the leap and start.

[00:50:17] SG: Yeah.

[00:50:19] MB: Well, Suneel, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all this wisdom. Where can listeners find you and Backable online?

[00:50:30] SG: Yeah. Just go to backable.com. There's some free content out there. It will be a way for us to connect together and come check it out.

[00:50:41] MB: Well, thank you again, so much for coming on the show. It's been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it.

[00:50:46] SG: Matt, I really enjoyed that. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of the show.

[00:50:50] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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