“Be Nice or Leave”

Feedback, humility, empowerment. The feedback loop.

Fred Wilson recently wrote a blog post “Be Nice and Leave” based on the hypothesis that being nice and doing business can go hand in hand. This got me thinking about empathy. I have never considered myself an empathetic person. People who know me would say I am highly critical and full of judgements. Yet as my company SOLS has grown, and as I’ve grown with SOLS, I find myself becoming increasingly empathetic with fellow founders and consumers, both online and off.

The first time it happened to us was on a Gizmodo article shortly after announcing our seed financing. Someone forwarded me a comment and asked: “Do you want to respond?”

I’m not going to lie; I saw red. The comment was barely malicious in retrospect, but when the internet is attacking your startup, your gut response is to pounce.

When you operate in a highly volatile, emotionally charged product category, negative feedback is inevitable. You must learn to separate yourself from your startup, to compartmentalize your feelings, and to think rationally in visceral situations.

You do not exhale on a fire that is burning.

Seven months and a successful Series A round later, we’ve been lucky that the internet’s gut response has been in our favor, but keep in mind that this reaction is not something to which you’re entitled. As a company, it is your job to treat every individual as a market of one and to ship the best product you can possibly ship. If you don’t do this, your customers will keep you honest, I promise.

As an individual, the internet empowers.

As a founder, it teaches you humility.

It is a megaphone for everything that is right and everything that is wrong with your startup. It is full of contradictory opinions — all of which are both right and wrong. It is a temptress, flattering your ego, clouding your judgement calls.

I don’t think unfiltered critique is ever something that ever becomes easy to swallow, but you do learn to see even the sharpest of anonymous comments as fuel to do better, rise higher, and speak louder.

You learn that the world is full of differing opinions. That it’s less about right and wrong, and more about what’s right for your product, in your market, at the time the decision was made.

You develop a newfound curiosity for the alignment of product and market regardless of who that market is.

You question what makes customers tick.

You learn to separate yourself from your market. You learn that product design is a dance. A menage a trois between market, need, and possibility.

As a customer, every product, every billboard speaks to us. We forget that resonance is in the eye of the beholder. That the Jameson ad isn’t good, and the Budweiser ad bad, but rather they speak to different people, with different tastes and different needs.

As entrepreneurs I feel it’s our job to critique — not condemn — that which we don’t understand. To, as Fred Wilson suggests, be nicer in the face of negativity. To feel empathy where we once felt judgement.

After all, Uber wasn’t always a billion dollar company.