You will receive a lot of advice from many people about what you should look like. The problem is that some advice will be good, some advice will contradict other advice you receive, and some advice is completely wrong.
It’s really confusing, as a startup CEO, which advice you should listen to and which advice you should ignore. Let’s start with…
Why is it so hard to know which advice to listen to?
Let me start with a quick story. I was in a board meeting for our startup. Three days earlier, I had just updated one of our two investors, Donald Donald Ventures, about our progress.
DV's partner Raul, the DVS partner leading the deal for DV, gave me the following feedback on my presentation. My partner felt you should be more animated (when you present). However, I liked the fact that you weren’t trying to be a performer.
Do you see the problem? In the same meeting with the same material, I received completely different feedback. What should I do?
Now, that feedback was about my presentation style. What’s worse is that you are raising funding and you are getting conflicting feedback about your strategy. So what do you do?
For example, there is a CEO, Ray Ray, whom I worked with when he started his company. When Ray was raising his initial funding, many investors wanted Ray to focus on market B instead of market A.
In fact, many of these investors told Ray that they would fund him if he shifted his focus to market B. Ray wouldn’t budge and the investors continued to pass.
What should Ray do? That’s the challenge you face when you are fundraising.
The investors felt they were right. On top of that, they controlled the money, so without their funding, there’s no company for Ray to build. I will come back to this later.
That’s the dilemma you face as a CEO. You are under pressure to get your funding and you may be asked to change something in your plan to get that funding. This leads directly to your next challenge.