Mah: Investing in personal life boosts strategic creativity for scaled CEOs
Jessica Mah · 20VC: inDinero's Jessica Mah on Why Angel Money Is Better Than Institutional Money and Boards Should Work For Founders · Jun 3, 2016 · at 22:24
Jessica Mah, CEO of inDinero, argues that founder exhaustion hinders strategic leadership once an executive layer is present.
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“I'm not going to be as creative. I'm not going to think of the right things to get us to the next stage in our business. So today, I don't think that's the case. I think investing in my personal life today is possibly one of the better things I can do to improve my business.”
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More from Jessica Mah
Mah: inDinero would be half as successful if she had self-funded
“This is incredibly valuable, I believe, and I'm a hundred percent certain my business would not be half as well off if I had the money just sitting right there ready for me.”
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“When you put institutional money into your seed round, and they don't lead an A round, it really sends a horrible message.”
Mah: Founders will never find patient capital from early-stage institutional VCs
“It's just harder to do that if they're not super patient capital, and you're not going to find patient capital with these early-stage institutionals. That's just not going to happen.”
Mah: Less charismatic CEOs tend to outperform highly charismatic ones
“There's an HBR study about this, how actually less charismatic CEOs tend to outperform the more charismatic ones, and you've seen this in the Jim Collins books, right? Like I think Good to Great wrote about this.”
Mah: Founders must view fundraising as a core skill, not a chore
“Like, I think we have to change this attitude, thinking, oh, fundraising's a chore, it's a waste of time, it's not value-add, to thinking, actually, fundraising is really important, and we need to start accepting it as being Something that's, like, fun and ful…”