The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten podcast.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about lies founders tell themselves and others.

It’s common for founders to unknowingly tell themselves and others lies about the state of their companies. And not realizing that what you may be saying to yourself about your company can lead to the lack of growth of your company or worse.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about the common lies founders tell themselves, how to realise that you’re telling yourself these lies, how to prevent telling these lies and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About the topic of today’s episode

00:35 Why this topic was chosen.

01:30 The most common lie founders tell themselves and others.

02:27 Why your belief in the success of your product is a lie.

03:40 Why you should use your belief of success to figure out how to make it happen.

04:34 The second most common lie founders tell.

05:47 Why this lie is a way of covering up the truth.

06:57 How things aren’t going well for startups most of the time.

07:39 The third most common lie founders tell.

08:07 The fourth most common lie founders tell.

3 Key Points:

The number one lie is telling yourself that this is gonna work.You wouldn’t start something if you believed it wasn’t gonna work.Things never get easier, they just get different.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Boom. Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:04]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:05]

Steli Efti: And today on the startup chat we're going to talk about founder lies. The type of lies that founder tell themselves and others, how to prevent them, how to realize that you're telling yourself and others, things that might not be fully true or are completely untrue. And who better to actually talk about this topic that you hitting. I mean, we've both been entrepreneurs for almost our entire adult career lives.

[0:00:35]

Hiten Shah: Yep.

[0:00:35]

Steli Efti: We have so many founder friends, we've adviced, we've invested, we talk to founders to every day. And if there's one of the major themes of our podcasts in general has always been, have self awareness and we've talked about self awareness in many, many different versions. And I think this topic really fits into that theme as well. Being aware of the lies that you tell yourself and others. Right off the bat. Let me ask you top of head, what is the most common lie that you have observed founders tell themselves and others?

[0:01:18]

Hiten Shah: This one's interesting because a lot of it has to do with the idea that, to start something, you're essentially starting something from scratch, like in doing the impossible, right? And you have to have a lot of belief in yourself, belief in so many things that you don't control in the beginning. And so I think the number one lie is a really weird one that I would say. And the lie is this Steli, it's, this is going to work.

[0:01:55]

Steli Efti: This is going to work.

[0:01:58]

Hiten Shah: This is going to work. It's going to work Steli. It's just got to work. And you start your business with that lie. Like let's just put it out there.

[0:02:09]

Steli Efti: [crosstalk].

[0:02:12]

Hiten Shah: How could you start it if you didn't believe that?

[0:02:15]

Steli Efti: True. But why is it a lie if you believe it Hiten?

[0:02:19]

Hiten Shah: You don't know. You're lying to yourself. You don't know. You started with no conscious understanding of, if it's going to work. And I'm talking about day zero, like you start, you're like, I don't know, right? Truthfully you don't know, but the mind, you have to convince your mind that this is where it started. And the way you do that is by saying this is going to work. You wouldn't start something if you believed it wasn't going to work,