Emma Grede

Those people, they made me better.

They made the business better.

And it takes a certain type of humility to welcome that.

Your instinct as a founder is to surround yourself with as many people who believe in your vision and those that come to execute it.

But I write about this in my book.

Founders can be too close to what they're making to invest it in their own point of view.

And the result gets colored by emotion and attachment and it ends up totally missing the market.

That happens a lot when people don't have enough people on the team that feel emboldened

to tell you the truth.

That's the real culture fit test.

Not do they agree with me, but will they tell me when I'm wrong?

Are they brave enough to push back?

Because if they're not, you don't have a team.

You have an echo chamber and echo chambers kill businesses.

Now, I posted a reel recently about something that I wrote in the book, that if somebody wants something from you, they need to make it worth your while.

And I got a lot of feedback on that too.

Some people loved it.

Some people thought it sounded just a bit too cold, transactional.

And I want to talk about that.

I want to talk about that word especially because I think that we need to rehabilitate it.