Founders: How to Negotiate Like Your Life Depends on It
Entrepreneurs are negotiating constantly, yet few are ever taught how
Last semester I was teaching negotiation to a room full of entrepreneurs. I asked them a simple question:
“Put your hand up if you think you are a good negotiator?”
At least 70% of them raised their hands.
“Keep your hand up if you think you are a master negotiator? As in — you could negotiate for hostages in a kidnapping.” About 40% of the founders identified as master negotiators.
As an entrepreneur, almost everything is a negotiation. From clients to partners, employees, services, infrastructure, investors, heck even with your own family. Negotiation is part and parcel with the entrepreneurial experience.
Yet, as I have been tracking startup teams over the last three years for my PhD, I have seen first hand that even those founders who consider themselves master negotiators have considerable room for growth.
I have hooked founding teams up to biometric sensors that measure their heart rate and galvanic skin response (skin sweat). I’ve run an AI algorithm on footage of their faces throughout team interactions to measure exactly how, what, when, and why people fail to negotiate in…
