Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
a16z | Frederic Kerrest | Apr 21, 2022
This is an excerpt from Zero to IPO: Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Frederic Kerrest, pp. 164-171, (McGraw Hill, April 2022). Kerrest co-founded Okta – an enterprise identity management company – in 2009 and currently serves as its executive vice chairperson and chief operating officer.
I carefully guard my family time. I am home for dinner with my wife and children every night (unless I’m out of town). I put my phone on our foyer table when I arrive home, and it stays there until the kids go to sleep. I don’t take work calls on weekends unless it’s an absolute emergency. It’s easy to take family for granted and allow yourself to get pulled into never-ending work demands.
It takes discipline to switch gears and focus on your partner and children. But the work demands will never ever stop. And your family time is both precious and fleeting. So I invest time in the upstream work – hiring really great people, establishing clear goals, and giving the team the autonomy to execute as they see fit. That way, when I come home, I don’t have to worry that the company will collapse if I step away for a few hours.
All founders need to create strategies to stay fit. You don’t want your company to implode simply because you never carved out time to exercise or sleep.
In competitive auto racing, they teach drivers to “focus on the road, not the wall.” Look at the wall and you’ll crash. To win, you need to keep your eye where you want the car to go. I share the same principle with new founders: Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing or how they’re performing. Just focus on your own road, your own race.
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