THE STARTUP CHAT

Steli : Hey, this is Steli Efti.

 

Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. And today, we’re talking about fire fighting.

 

Steli : Yes. So in the context of business and life, this is not like real physical putting out fires.

 

Hiten: Well, if anybody here has any – is a fire fighter, has anyone that’s ever been fire fighting, or knows somebody who is a fire fighter, I’d like to get their take on this episode because I don’t know anything about fire fighting. I just know what I see. And we’re going to use the analogy and probably butcher it, but it was the best one I had for something that I’m just always thinking about now.

 

Steli : Which is?

 

Hiten: Fire fighting.

 

Steli : Which means?

 

Hiten: There’s a bigger analogy here. But the simple framework here is like the weeds of a business, the trees of a business. Those are just tactical things that you’re doing.  That’s why they say you’re in the weeds.  You’re really deep in.  Or you’re looking at the trees, but you’re not looking at the forest.  So the forest is the higher level. So to me, fire fighting is like there are some trees on fire. And you’re coming in fire fighting, right?

 

Steli : Yeah.

 

Hiten: And if you’re constantly in that mode as a founder, CEO, leader of a team, manager, even a team member often times, and you can’t go up and see the bigger picture of the whole forest, then you’re constantly only able to attack what’s in front of you.  When a whole other part of your business, when your business is, let’s say, a forest, is totally on fire. You can’t even see it. You’re just not able to look at things holistically.

 

Steli : Yeah. It’s interesting.  So would we say then that when you are putting out fires as a founder, let’s say, in a start up that what you’re doing is you have to fix urgent and unexpected issues?  That may be a good framework of thinking.

Hiten: That’s what a fire is.

 

Steli : Right.  That’s what a fire is.

 

Hiten: Urgent, unexpected. Yeah.

 

Steli : Because it’s not problem solving.  It’s not the same as problem solving.  It is something that needs to be fixed right now and that nobody saw coming.  So that’s why it’s a fire. And if you do that all of the time, once in a while, I’m not sure if it’s completely avoidable. That’s an interesting topic.  Could you have a business where you have no fires at all times? And what does that mean?  What kind of a business is that?

 

Hiten: Yeah. If you’re not trying to change things, if you’re not trying to improve, then yeah, absolutely. You can have a business where you’re just happy with it.  

 

Steli : But everybody else needs to be happy, too.  So you –

 

Hiten: Oh, the people on the team, oh yeah.  Everyone just needs to be happy with status quo.  I call that status quo. If you’re not fire fighting, you’re just like I don’t care what happens. And there are businesses like that.  I ran one of my businesses like that for a while.

 

Steli : So if you have like let’s say a status quo business, right?  And you’re like we found a place we like, and we’ll keep doing what we’re doing.  You need to also be in an industry or market that doesn’t change a lot, at least not as frequently, because it’s hard to be status quo if your market changes all the time.

 

Hiten: But let’s say your service is business with 10 team members and 20 customers.  And you’re making money. And at that rate, you’re making some decent six figures.

 

Steli : The market might be changing, but the services market, the way that you serve clients and doing work for them that stays the same.  It’s different than when you are like a gaming company.  You’re building games.  You can’t just say whatever game we like, let’s keep the status quo.

 

Hiten: Well, you actually see it in the gaming companies, too.  So they find a pattern, and they just keep repeating it and don’t find a new pattern, whether it’s Farmville and then all of the other “villes”, Cityville, etc., it’s the same model and mechanics.  There’s nothing wrong with that if that’s what’s working. But I’d say that’s almost not having to fire fight. Not having to find new things, not having to try to improve something. It’s just like we’ll just repeat it.  We’ll stamp it out. Stamp it out is another way to think about it.  

 

Steli : So if unexpected, urgent matters come up frequently, that typically points that there is – I mean, any urgent and unexpected issue that comes up, there’s a deeper rooted question like is this really as unexpected?  What was the possible prevention that we could have done to make sure that this fire would have never occurred.  

 

Hiten: So one tactic, and I’m sure you’ve got a few, so we can go into that here, one tactic that I learned from Eric Reese is the five whys from the Toyota production stuff. And it’s like if you’re fire fighting, once it’s over, we can argue whether it was a good fire fight or not or whether you should be, but let’s not get into that. But let’s say you’re fire fighting, it’s over.  You just do a five whys of what root caused it, why did this happen. And then they have another step on that, which is find the next incremental step to prevent this next time.

 

So once you root cause it, find a way to solve that problem, the root cause of it, in some incremental, small step to make sure you’re at least mitigating the risk for the future. And often times, people don’t do that after they fire fight. They move on to the next fire.  

 

Steli : Yes. They move on to the next fire, or they kind of exhale, and they go let me just fucking relax and not –

 

Hiten: Relaxation, yeah.

 

Steli : The problem is that, potentially, that letting go of issues and just relaxing for a moment is what causes the next fire, right?

 

Hiten: This is true.  

 

Steli : It is what causes the next fire.

 

Hiten: It might be the hardest part of starting something or just running a business, which is like you don’t get to relax.  Honestly, I’m always waiting for the next problem. I’m just prepared.  I might have said this before.  I recall saying this. But I’d rather just be prepared. If that causes some burden on myself, that’s okay. I just want to be prepared because I know what happens if I’m not prepared for something bad.

 

Steli : At the end of the day, as an entrepreneur at a very high level, you’re a problem solver by default. If you’re any type of leader, you’re a problem solver by default.  So the reason why you’re in the position you are, is that you’ve solved more problems and that you deal with problems better than others because you’ve exposed yourself to so many more.  So where one fire or problem might overwhelm somebody, you go, oh, I’ve done this 1,000 times.  It’s uncomfortable. It’s never fun.

 

Hiten: I know it sucks. It’s not as fun as it looks like.

 

Steli : Yes. But your reaction to it is a different one.

 

Hiten: Absolutely. It’s a reaction. You’re right.

 

Steli : And that allows you to act in a different way and usually to put out the fire much faster than somebody that’s, oh my God – it’s the same thing like if a fire was to occur in this apartment right now, we will act probably. But there’s going to be some hesitation, some panic because we’ve never seen a real live fucking fire.  But if you’re a fire fighter, you’re prepared for that. You’ve done this a million times or many times.

 

Hiten: You’re like, yeah, let’s go find the exit. We’re out.

 

Steli : You still have adrenaline.  You still have some respect and fear.

 

Hiten: Your reaction is different.

 

Steli : Your reaction is different to it. It’s the same thing with a lot of the people that I talked to, when you talk to younger founders, but also, when you talk to employees on your team.  You can just tell that when a fire occurs for them, they still build that muscle up. And for them, things seem a lot more overwhelming a lot faster than they do for you typically. And they did for me as well 10 years ago, 5 years ago.

 

Hiten: This is partly I don’t want to call it fun, but the fun or the interesting parts of helping other people, other founders, other people going through it because you get to see this over and over again more than even yourself.  So it’s learn from others’ mistakes.  This one, I think it really applies. So I’ve had fun doing that.  

 

Steli : So I love the five why framework. Let’s not beat that up too much.  I think there’s a super small, three minute video on You Tube if you type in Eric Reese five whys, you’ll find it. So it gives good examples of this.  What are other frameworks to think about?  So one thing we said is after it’s out, fight the urge to let go, and relax, and forget about everything. But take the moment to do a post mortem of five whys. What? Why did this happen? How can we – what’s the smallest, incremental thing we can do to prevent this to happen again?  What’s another thing that business and founders can do to both put out fires but also to make sure that not as many fires occur?

 

Hiten: I still really love the analogy of let’s go look at the forest.

 

Steli : Yeah, let’s talk about that.

 

Hiten: And I think a big thing for me, which is probably another episode at some point, is common language. I know we’ve talked about words. But there’s like common language, which is extension –

 

Steli : Alignment was a big thing.

 

Hiten: Yeah. All of these things have come up, right? And so I think the common language around this for me, and I’ll just go into the explanation because it will probably help or frame, but I think when you’re looking at the world, especially the business world, some people are in space.  Everyone can be in all of these levels, so I’m not trying to get it twisted. But I would say that investors are usually in space.  Public market investors, venture capital investors, yeah.

 

Steli : This is not your status in the world or –

 

Hiten: No, no, not at all.  Yeah, let’s clarify it.

 

Steli : This is the way you look at things.

 

Hiten: Yeah. This is the way you look at things.  When you’re in space, you look at a lot of forests.  When you’re in the sky, that’s usually where a founder is on the highest level or a CEO or a leader is they’re trying to look at not just their business but a lot of other businesses, too.  And then when you’re in the forest, you’re in one of those businesses.  Usually, it’s yours, unless you’re helpful or something or have a friend and want to look at their business and help them out. And then there’s the trees, which is where most of your team members are. They’re just fighting around the trees trying to figure things out.  

 

Fix things so that you can actually just compete with other forests, I guess.  I don’t know, win battles, I don’t know. Make your forest bigger. I don’t know. I haven’t gone that far, right.  And I like using that because I think the next step is if you’re fire fighting, you’re in between the trees somewhere. But you have to come up and say, okay, there was a fire fight there. For me, it’s like if I fire fought, I’m trying to get to the forest fast. I might even go into space.  And the reason is I made the mistake. And I’ll give a quick story about this. But at Kiss Metrics, we had a really bad lawsuit by some technical stuff we did that implied we were doing some really bad stuff on the back end.

 

Bad stuff meaning like against people’s privacy.  The truth is we weren’t doing that. And we’ve proved it.  That made it so the business that I thought was venture funded and was designed for growth had to be designed for what my co-founder knew how to do, which was running a small business, or running a business that a venture capitalist would call small. Whatever way you want to look at it.  And so we ended up starting fire fighting from that day. And it was one big fire, which was this big lawsuit that took like two years to get done.

 

And in that time, we couldn’t do anything but fire fight the whole time because we were a very small company, just launched the product publically, and had to now fire fight. And what I was unable to do or realize was that I was fire fighting the whole time in that company until the day I left it personally from that moment that that big fire started. It was almost even worse because there were fires all around you, and you’re stuck. And so we couldn’t see the forest. So there are probably like a few things we could have done that were small regardless of our fire fighting that would have just changed the direction of the company. But I couldn’t see.

 

Steli : Let’s talk about these examples.

 

Hiten: Yeah, for sure.

Steli : You were able to get – now, when you say fires, I assume, I instantly interpret this that it was not just working on this lawsuit thing, but there were implications like people’s locations –

 

Hiten: Couldn’t raise money for two years.

 

Steli : Couldn’t raise money.  Employees being like intimidated.

 

Hiten: The team, I have to say, and I’m not trying to tout anyone’s horn or anything, and I don’t think it was me, but I just think the team was very resilient through the struggle. We had hired a VP of sales. His name is Ben.  You know him, right?

 

Steli : Data Nice.

 

Hiten: Data Nice, yeah. He started that after.  And he was our head of sales at the time. And I’m like, dude, you were just here three months. Like it’s okay. I’ll still give you a good recommendation. I like you.  You can bounce. It’s cool. He’s like, no, this is cool. Let’s go. And I’m like all right. Great.  But hopefully, it was a good decision for him.  Anyway, so the story there is like I’ll give one good example.  At the time, we were probably one of the first of the next kind of cohort of how data and analytics was going to be looked at by marketers specifically.  And we had a competitor mix panel.  

 

And we hadn’t decided whether we were going to stay with a free plan or go to a paid plan completely.  Our intuition was a free plan, as a lot of people know. But the second the lawsuit hit, we just had to start making money.  And we had a bigger problem, which is that lawsuit, the reason it was such a big deal is it was us and 24 of our customers. So we, essentially, got our customers sued.  So we had to fight it. Morally, ethically, my co-founder and I would not – we just had to go and fight it so that we impacted those companies the least because that would really suck.  I wouldn’t want a partner of ours like that to get sued and then screw us over completely because of it.  

 

So we tried to protect that.  So that sucked.  But, essentially, from the lawsuit on, the key thing was mix panel was free. We were debating free and paid. We went paid because we had to make money.  When, in hindsight, we should have gone free.  And that was one simple thing. I figured, personally, I debated it with the team, but it was my decision, at the end of the day, because we were in war then like massive just war and losing.  And they just got hit, right.  Taking over the castle, whatever you want to call it.  And so we were sitting there, and I was like I don’t think we can afford to go free.  

 

And I think I was wrong because that probably would have kept us way more competitive and kept that start up level we had because start up level in a SAS business usually comes from free.  If you want start ups to love you, make it free and give it to them. They’ll love you guaranteed.  So we just couldn’t do it.  And I couldn’t see the forest.  

 

Steli : Okay.

 

Hiten: Because I was trying to make sure the company survives through that because we had to fight the lawsuit.

 

Steli : But this is an interesting one, so I’m conflicted about this. Independently, from the example itself, and we have a past episode where we talk about freemium and people know closeout.  There’s no freemium. And we should do a follow up on that episode some day.

 

Hiten: Yeah, yeah.

 

Steli : But independent from the exact example, there are situations where you’re in a lawsuit. You know we can’t raise more money. So you’re No. 1 priority is how we’re going to make the business survive. And it still might be the right thing.  So I might not be as conflicted, but there are decisions that you need to make that are a bit more short term at times because you need to get from A to B before you can think about Z.  

 

So keeping the balance between being practical and not in the clouds and fixing the problem four years from now when you’re like drowning now, but then also thinking strategically and not making – that balance is so tough. How do you know to find the balance here?

 

Hiten: The context there is we went into survival mode when we shouldn’t have gone that far into survival mode.

 

Steli : That fast?

 

Hiten: That fast because we never got out of it.  Since I was at the company, we never got out of it, just couldn’t see that that’s what we were in.  So it’s like there’s a bunch of reverbing effects by even just saying we can’t afford to do that and a bunch of stuff like that.  So I think, in that specific case, we could debate freemium or not.  Everyone knows my opinion on it by now, and if they don’t, I loved freemium.  And we’ll probably do another episode on it.  But I’m sure because of what we had then and what we would have needed to keep, there were some things we could have done way differently.

 

But that’s all hindsight.  At the end of the day, the framework I use is I just couldn’t see the forest.  And I couldn’t see the other forest.  And I couldn’t see what the future looked like in an appropriate way because I was sitting there just fire fighting. I should have just found time to just come up for air.  And then we fire fought for however long it took.

 

Steli : Yeah.  That’s such an interesting challenge, I think, that we all have, which is where when things are really tough, you’re in such a reactive mode that it’s tough to switch modes to practice.  You’re so just responding, responding, responding, responding all day long, it’s very tough for you to act or take a moment and really gain clarity on what’s really going on right now? What is the big picture here? And this is maybe not just an entrepreneurship.  In life, in general, it’s a challenging habit to cultivate is the ability to step back from all of the noise and gain a little bit of clarity, gain a little bit of perspective and go what’s really going on here? What am I trying to do?  

 

And for me, I think we talked about this in the past, I’m pretty sure, but for me, when I fire fight in a nonproductive way, the framework of the language that I use that hits home with me is that I find myself being attached. So the way I react is one that’s very like clinging onto the problem, feeling like it’s very important. We need to do this. The fire is going to kill all of us. And I have a certain negativity, a certain stress, a certain attachment to the issue and the consequences of it. And when I feel that, the framework of saying don’t be attached, be dedicated.  Like it doesn’t fucking matter. So what.  

 

If this things burn down, whatever.  It’s okay. It’s one fucking part of the forest. The forest is big.  Life goes on. The universe is massive.  This is not the end all/be all.  And that just takes me out of that mind frame. And I go I still want to be dedicated to fixing this. It’s not that I want to close my eyes to pretend there’s on fire or pretend it doesn’t matter. But I don’t want to pretend it’s all that matters.  And it’s just realizing, detecting that inner state, the way the framework, the way I think, the way I approach things that makes me go, oh shit. I need to switch my mind frame here.  And that makes a big difference for me.  But I find it to be tough because there’s also –

 

Hiten: Well, fire fighting comes with a lot of emotions.

 

Steli : Yeah.

 

Hiten: I don’t know how fire fighters handle that because there could be bodies in there, people in there.  You’ve got to save them.  And I think that all of those things, there are equivalents when you think about it with this framework because one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this is this is the No. 1 thing we’re going to see going forward for a lot of funded companies, which is people are going to start fire fighting because they’re trying to cut staff. They’re trying to get capital efficient.  And here’s the truth.  If you’re not going to be able to raise more money, regardless, and I know that’s not all of our audience, but it’s a really good lesson here.

 

If you can’t keep your company running, then you’re going to have to take extreme measures. And that looks fire fighting for a certain amount of time.  Thankfully, this one, you can see coming, which is I’m not going to be able to raise money. I’ve maybe two, three, four, five, six, hopefully longer left, right?  And then you’ve got to figure out what to do.  So I’ve had a lot of conversations like that. I’ve had other conversations where there are certain types of people, personality types that are so go, go, go, if they get really good at just finding problems, solving problems, they get into fire fighting mode.  

 

And then it’s hard to come out and be like wait, wait, there’s a forest here. Let’s go look at all of the fires and pick the right ones at the right time instead of just attacking the ones in front of us.  It’s like you have to step back, right.  And I think you’re constantly fire fighting in a business.  So that’s another part of this that I just want to hit on, which is like you’ve got to get used to having that bucket and always having that because I think that’s what really moves the needle.  When you’re like where’s the biggest fire.  I’m like where is the biggest fire. That’s kind of a new thing I think about.

 

And to kick myself out of a current problem, it’s like is this the biggest fire?  Is there a bigger one somewhere? I look around.  Like literally, I’m like, all right, maybe I need to go up.  Then I’ll go talk to people. Hey, I’m thinking blah, blah, blah.  Is that the biggest problem right now?  I’ve done this.  Is that the biggest problem right now? And I do that especially when I think there are no problems.  I just try to think of what’s the biggest one.  And it’s almost like finding problems.  But I use that strategy a lot.

 

Steli : I like that because this is something I think that I struggled with in the past without being aware of it.  And I had this conversation once.  You know Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things?

 

Hiten: Yes, a great book.  And one of the people that work here was like we were talking about they had the framework of war time CEO versus peace time CEO.  And somebody was asking me, Steli , are you a war time CEO or a peace time CEO? And my response was I don’t fucking know.  I have never been to war with another company necessarily in my mind.  So I’m like I don’t know. And then one of my employees was like oh, Steli  is definitely a war time CEO.  I’m like why are you saying that?  He’s like because if things go wrong or there’s a problem, you snap into a level of focus and action.  

 

You know what to do, how to do it, and you get it done. It’s like you’re on.  But if everything is great, you’re maybe not as on. You’re not as intense.  You just relax a little bit. And I do think that, in the past, if there’s a big problem, I can thrive on that.  And I don’t panic. And that’s something where I can just step up to the plate. But when there’s not, I’m not necessarily always looking for what’s going to be the next big problem.

 

And also, with the fire thing, with the fire analogy, one interesting thing about this is that, if there was a tiny piece of paper that was burning, and you could tell it’s on stone, it’s on something that’s not going to – nothing is going to happen, some people I think habitually there’s fire, so you’re still going to give this all of your attention, although it’s tiny and irrelevant versus over there, there’s a gas leak.  And there’s no fire. You don’t see any fire yet.  But that’s really what is the dangerous thing.

Hiten: And to me, the gas leak is a fire already.  At this point, I’m just like fire, gas leak, fire already.  Someone is going to spark that thing.  

 

Steli : So being able to have the mind frame that – maybe another way of thinking of this is either you’re fighting fires, or you’re preventing them.

 

Hiten: It’s like preventative medicine.

 

Steli : Yes.

 

Hiten: I like it, I like it. Smokey the Bear.

 

Steli : So thinking holistically about what’s going on –

 

Hiten: Only you can prevent forest fires, Steli . I had to go there.

 

Steli : But it’s so true, right?  So do you want to spend your time putting out fires? Or do you want to spend more time preventing them so you don’t have to go there?  And I think when there’s no fire, it’s so easy to just relax and wait for the next one versus snapping to prevention mode and being like what’s going to be – what is the problem that I’m not seeing manifested yet but is about to go down?  

 

Hiten: And in business, it’s like they come from everywhere.  The fires come from everywhere. It’s like almost people throwing fire balls at you at times, right? And so I think I really like that attitude of trying to be preventative because, if you can solve all the ones you can find and see and all that and solve them before they happen, you won’t be so distracted when a big one comes because they come out of nowhere.  We had a class action lawsuit. The market, right now, is a big fire drill if not a fire literally for a lot of people, right?  

 

Steli : So let’s end with some tips. And here’s my question that will potentially make you give the tip, which is when people listen to us with this, especially somebody that’s less experienced, they might bet everything, but then the question that I get asked a lot of times is, cool, how do I get better at this without 10 years of experience?  What can I do in lieu of experience to get good at this?

 

Hiten: I like that question. And I think it’s a good tip, too, to even ask yourself that.  Am I good at this?  Am I good at fire fighting? Do I need to be good at figuring this out because some people just don’t?  Because they’re specialists or in a certain situation where it’s just more stable.  So I think identifying even if this is something you need to figure.  But for me, how do you get good at it? It’s as simple as recognizing it.  I come up with these frameworks like the space thing from other stuff.  There’s an earth, fire, wind, water thing and stuff that someone told me once. And I’m like that’s too spiritual. Let’s talk about how this applies to business, right?  

 

Steli : Yeah.

 

Hiten: And so I think just coming up with some way to think about it.  So for me, it’s like, again, just taking that analogy. It’s like you get better at it when you realize the difference between the forest and the trees, and the difference between the forest and trees and space because space is great.  That’s where strategy gets formed, right?  Or that’s where the raw material of strategy comes from, which is like what’s my market?  Whether it’s jobs to be done or personas, whatever you use, what’s the landscape look like?  What are alternatives? What are things people are doing? And then that, to me, is also a skill.

 

So it’s a skill. The skill and the thing that I try to think about is am I in the trees? Am I in the forest? Or am I in space? And another alternative to that would be where are other people around me?  The board is usually in space, and the board meetings, you bring them down all the way if you need to.

 

Steli : Yeah.

 

Hiten: When you’re fire fighting, you generally have to show them and all that. So that’s a whole different story. But, in general, the tip I would give and the way you get better is by just recognition.  

 

Steli : So my tip on this, I don’t know. I’m not sure about it, but one thing that I think if you are less experienced in putting out fires, working with fires, preventing fires in the business context, I think one just great way is to go somewhere and learn from somebody that’s great at that. Somebody that has five or ten years of experience.  And one thing is to just ask them to verbalize what had happened. Well, hey, right now, what’s the biggest fire in your business? How do you deal with it? That can teach you a lot.  But it’s, on a totally different level, if you work somewhere, and you pay attention to how they deal with real crisis.

 

And a lot of times, young people, and we have this episode of like humanizing your heroes when you intern somewhere, and you come into a new business, you idolize kind of the CEO and the founder so much. And what you’re looking for is perfection versus what you should be looking for is when things are bad, how do they act?  When problems come up, how do they act? The things that –

 

Hiten: Do they even recognize problem is the deeper one I can go into?

 

Steli : Yeah. Are they good at that or not?  If they are bad at certain things in this company, not just wow, they’re not perfect at everything, but do they choose to be bad at these things? Are they bad because it’s convenient?  Just because the powerful thing is you can be really involved in the business and be kind of in the middle of everything.  But you’re still removed from it.  It’s not your business.  You’re still just a new employee or an intern or something.  So there’s a lot that you can learn and can experience if you have that mind frame of observing things that way.

 

Hiten: Yeah. I’ll give one that’s an extension because many of us can’t work at companies or even observe them like that.  So I would say what I find interesting is when a business is in a crisis, what do they say?  Right now, Apple is in a crisis just right now. And I think Tim Cook is a very private person for all kinds of reasons.  But he’s a private person. And he runs one of the largest companies on the planet.  That will make you private.  But he just responded.  And he threw down. And he said we’re not doing this. We’re not doing what you want, and here’s why.  Just deeply, here’s why.  

 

Don’t mess with us. Here’s why.  You’re going to hit a lot of resistance here.  And I think that’s very educational.  There’s even, if you want to go to a different level, there’s like Evan Spiegel from Snap Chat, he’s written some public letters. I think Travis from Uber has written some public letters. And a lot of these are either crisis or when the company is under attack from something or somebody, what have they written. At Kiss Metrics, we had to write a blog – not we, I wrote a blog post. I had to discuss it with the lawyers. It took a week. But I wrote a blog post. So I study a lot of those, especially after having gone through that, I had to study them.  

 

So now, when I see stuff like that, it’s really educational, especially if you go back to Enron and all that and what they were publically saying versus the truth because I can probably give you an example of lies.  

 

Steli : This is fascinating. And you probably – 2016 is going to be a great year for observing a lot of these.

 

Hiten: Absolutely. It’s going to be great.

 

Steli : All these crisis communications.

 

Hiten: Just get other people’s mistakes, right?

 

Steli : Yes, crisis communications.  All right.  This is it from us. Make sure to join our Facebook group, thestartupchat.com/fb for Facebook. We share some of the best licks around entrepreneurships, startups led by the one and only, the best, the oracle of [inaudible] [00:29:04] and curation, my man Hiten Shaw.

 

Hiten: What about you, huh?  

 

Steli : And then also, if you enjoy the episodes, give us a rating.  That helps a lot.  Just go on iTunes.  Give us whatever rating you want, one star, five stars. Write feedback good or bad. We really enjoy it.  We learn a lot from it.  And that’s it from us.  We’ll hear you very soon.

 

Hiten: Later.

 

[End of Audio]

 

Duration:  30 minutes