Can’t Is Almost Always a Choice

Richard Lowe: Hello, this is Richard Lowe and this is the Leaders and Their Stories Podcast. I am here with Yaron Vorona, who is a fascinating person. He coaches the CEOs of deep tech startups through the stretch between seed and series A, which is where companies outgrow what one person can carry, however sharp that person is. You learned this by failing at first. He co-founded 2 cybersecurity companies, raised money for both, ran teams of five and then 20, and made most of the mistakes he now helps founders avoid.

When he moved to the other side of the table doing diligence for a venture fund and then trying to raise his own, which reached 10% of target before he wound it down. Earlier than any of that, he chaired a Washington policy committee on rare earth metals and spent four years arguing that the West had handed China the supply chain for its own energy transition. He’s also the father of four. And it’s easy to father a child and hard to be a good dad. And the same sentence works if you swap in founder and leader. The second part of the sentence is the real job. Welcome to the show.

Yaron Vorona: Thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be here with you, Richard.

Richard Lowe: Well, thank you. It’s a pleasure to have you on here. You were in cybersecurity for a while. That’s actually one of my fortes. I was a cybersecurity person at Trader Joe’s for 20 years. So I’m fascinated by that.

Yaron Vorona: I kind of fell into it. I was at that think tank working on energy and security policy issues. And we’re doing a project with NATO’s Energy Security Center of Excellence on the risk to critical infrastructure. And that’s when I fell down the cybersecurity rabbit hole, realized that as long as we have bodies, we’re going to need doctors to take care of them. And so long as we have computers, we’re going to need cybersecurity to protect them.

And so yeah, I fell victim to My first mistake as a founder, which was to focus on what I call the big P problem, cybersecurity, world hunger, gun violence, the big P problems as opposed to the little P problem in terms of who is it that has the pain and what is it that they will really pay to have solved.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, that’s something I’ve learned the hard way too. And that’s what I coach people on on the writing coaching side of my business is you can’t write a book for everyone. You have to write a book for an audience. Otherwise, it’s not going to sell. I mean, unless you’re Frito-Lay and have $20 billion to spend on marketing, and even then you’re still shooting for a special certain demographic or certain type of person or a certain area, whatever, you’re not doing everyone. That’s very interesting that you brought that up and that’s the truth that I found over life. It seems you have too.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah, indeed.

Richard Lowe: So you went from cybersecurity to founding a company. How did that go? How did that work out?

Yaron Vorona: Well, the cybersecurity part was founding this cybersecurity company. I’ve never been a cybersecurity practitioner. I’ve always been the business strategist. So, you know, I did a search within my network for somebody that I thought had a unique approach to cybersecurity, developed a lot of relationships. And I guess that’s when I made yet another one of those mistakes that we make, which is I found some people who on paper, they were exactly the right kind of person.

And then in practice, when I brought them in, when I started to work on them, that’s when the core thing that needs to be aligned in a business started to produce cracks. And that’s the values and the expectations were not aligned.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. Explain that a little more if you would.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah, I think that You know, ultimately, and this is part of the core work I now do, there is this moment when you’re speaking with someone who has expertise or they have money or they have power. They have something that you want. You begin to approach it as a supplicant. It’s, you know, they have something you need. In this case, they had the credentials of working in a major cybersecurity lab of developing unique technologies. And I fell into the role of I need them in order to scale my company.

And that allowed for a very unhealthy power dynamic where they began to dictate the wrong direction that we would go in from a technology led perspective as opposed to a business strategy led perspective.

Richard Lowe: Okay, interesting. Interesting. So you’ve run into many founders, it sounds like, who are really good builders, but have never been taught to lead. And this shows up a lot during what you call series A, which is when people move from, hey, I got a company to holy crap, I got to actually do something with it and I need people. If I summed it up right.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: So tell me about that particular or tell us about that particular thing.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah. So, you know, you and I, we are probably, I think you are, I know I am a sole practitioner. It’s me. I’ve got my assistant who helps me out. When you found a company, usually there’s, you know, the hacker and the hustler, the guy who does the computer coding. and the girl who does the leadership and they work together as the team and they can both be in every meeting. And then you start to onboard your engineers and your salespeople.

And there comes a point where it’s impossible for a leader to be in every room, to be making every decision, and they actually need to start to lead. And it’s a very different a very different skill set that’s needed there. It’s a lot more about managing and creating emotions in the people around you, in yourself and in your team and your customers and your investors. And that’s a lot of the things that I work on with my founders is how do you manage and create emotions in order to achieve the goals that you set.

And of course, properly setting those goals and holding them to account. One thing I don’t do, and I recall from a prior conversation you had, was tell them where they’re wrong. Well, sometimes I’ll put on my advisor hat and say, that’s BS. But usually it’s about helping them discover what’s wrong, helping them discover the solution for themselves. Guiding them through and then holding them to account, making sure that they do what they commit to doing.

Richard Lowe: Right, right. Yeah, when I work with executives on their books, I call it Socratic method where I’m asking questions and leading them to the answers that they need to have in their book. When I was at Trader Joe’s and at the various other companies, same thing. And I got better at it because when I started managing, I had no management background at all. This is back in the 1980s, no management background, no training, no nothing. I was a coder. The next day I was a VP of consulting and wow, talk about a change. And I was pretty rusty, pretty bad, but I survived and so did my people. And we knocked a few heads both ways and made it happen. And I guess I learned under fire.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Which is one way to learn. It’s not the best way to learn, but it’s one way to learn.

Yaron Vorona: I mean, there’s that old expression, fool learns from their mistakes, the wise man learns from the fool’s mistakes. So I’m proud to have been able to make a lot of really bad mistakes so that my wise clients, CEOs, the founders are scaling can then learn from them. And that, you know, the Socratic method of, you know, what do you want to do next, what do you hope to achieve? And then helping to guide them through that. That’s actually one of the ways that I developed it was my fun side thing, which is I’m a professional Dungeons and Dragons game master.

And so what you present the situation, you ask your player or the founder, what do you want to do? And help them to create the outcome that is satisfying to them.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. I used to be a Dungeon Master too back in the 70s and 80s. on the original Dungeons and Dragons game and chain mail and all that stuff sold them on an eBay but I shouldn’t have but I got a few got a few bucks. Nice. I had Arduin Grimoire and Metamorphosis Alpha and all the early ones first editions and things it was quite a collection. I still have about 3,000 miniatures that I’ve painted. Wow. Fantasy miniatures you know dragons and things.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: I have the entire Grenadier collection before Grenadier got bought.

Yaron Vorona: It sounds like that was a real passion of yours. Why did you give it up?

Richard Lowe: Well, I’m ADHD, so things just give go, they just go away. I get focused on it and I do it for a few years or a few months or a few days and then I’m on to something else.

Yaron Vorona: Squirrel. That’s actually the same reason is why I’m the dungeon master, the game master is to sit and wait patiently while other people talk, I’ll end up falling asleep. But with game mastering and with coaching, it’s almost the same where, you know, it’s actively listening, it’s thinking about the next moves, it’s some preparing in advance, looking up in real time in order to help create the impact that you want.

And that’s really what I’m about, especially on the coaching side is Each one of these founders are building technologies that have the possibility of massively changing the world. I’m a sci-fi geek as I know that you are as well, right? And so I grew up watching Jean-Luc Picard traveling around a galaxy with abundance, right? He had infinite energy, infinite, make whatever you want instantly. with you know the replicators travel faster than light explore and there’s that bright future of abundance of peaceful coexistence in front of us or there might be that dystopian Blade Runner Terminator 2 future that is also a possibility and I am dedicating to work dedicated to working with those founders who are helping to bring about at least bring us closer to the brighter future of abundance.

Richard Lowe: Well, that’s a good goal. That’s an excellent goal because we’ve sure got enough people who are working towards the other side now, it seems. But then, you know, when people tell me the world is awful and it’s all going to hell and we’ve never had this kind of thing before, I said, yeah, you guys weren’t born in the 60s. I remember Kent State. I remember all these various other things. Kent State was a shooting in schools that was done by the National Guard.

And very, very big thing. The Vietnam protests and tanks on the street, literally tanks on the street, race riots and things like that where they got serious. I mean, the race riots you see now are nothing compared to what I saw in the 70s. And, you know, everything, every time, every century, every century, every year is different. It just moves forward. And what we have now is social media that magnifies everything. So that little things seem to be big and we focus on the negative. Stop focusing on the negative and do some positive as my attitude.

Yaron Vorona: And you know, the interesting part about what you just said is we get to choose our focus. We do. And it can be hard if we allow ourselves to be open to anything. The truth is that sure there are problems and there are cycles of worse and better But the history of the world has shown us to be more like the stock market where those step backs, those difficult times are always still way better than the historical good times in ways. And that’s something that I see continuing.

They say that history doesn’t repeat itself, it just rhymes. So are we heading towards a future of more instability? perhaps there are always counteracting forces and all we can do is take care of ourselves and our attention. I spend a lot of time on that. You know, all of the awful things that you see, crime, disease, war, we’re living at the most abundant and most peaceful time in the history of the planet right now. But that unfortunately doesn’t sell newspapers.

Richard Lowe: Of course. It doesn’t make social media blow up.

Yaron Vorona: Newspapers. I’m dating myself now. What’s a newspaper?

Richard Lowe: It doesn’t get you hits. Yeah. One of the interesting things is when Donald Trump was running for the election, the new my thought was just don’t you don’t want him elected. Just don’t put him in the news. Don’t don’t even show him. I mean, you know, they got these newspapers that tend to lean left. Don’t even put articles about him. Just ignore him. He won’t be elected then because nobody would know who he is. But no, why do they why do they do all these articles about somebody that they despise? Because it gets hits.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: That’s why. Because they’re not, they don’t care. They’re interested in hits because hits make money. And that’s what they were doing. They noticed that I read a study on this every single time they put in an article about Trump, they got more hits. Article with somebody else, they didn’t. So Trump got a lot of press that if they were really against him, they shouldn’t have done. It’s my opinion. Not to get political here. Don’t care about. No, no.

Yaron Vorona: I mean, it’s a case in point where, you know, my father, God rest his soul, said, speak of me good, speak of me ill, but speak of me.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Yeah. Any press is good press I’ve also heard, which isn’t quite true, but like most platitudes, it’s not always true. But still, it does have some truth to it.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: I’ve written a series of eight books called The Enemies of You, which go into a lot of this stuff. And one of them is The Enshittification of America and The Emasculation of America and all other ones that just go into what’s going on now and why is it going on and all the various things that are happening.

It’s going to be 20 volumes when it’s done. But they’re one of my most biggest projects of my own. Just fun to write. Don’t care if it sells a single copy. It’s just fun to write.

Yaron Vorona: Well, that’s what I was going to ask you is, you know, what is the goal? What do you hope to achieve by writing that?

Richard Lowe: If one person reads it and can understand it and get something from it, that’s fine. That’s what I want. One person at a time. It’s aimed at people. If you understand why a lot of why McDonald’s and Burger King and Arby’s and all those things look exactly the same now and have the same food, which is what Enshittification goes into, then you understand something about how society works and you maybe you can do something about it.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Because that that all of the YS Southwest and all these other companies having so much trouble, it goes into that. And then there’s some what do you do about it? Buy from companies that don’t do that as one of the answers. Put your money where your mouth is. You know, you think if you’re against slavery, then why are you buying certain kinds, I’m not going to name the manufacturers, but certain manufacturers’ products because they’re made by slave labor in China and in South America, not South America, Africa. Virtually slave labor. You could call, I mean, it’s not technically slave because they are paid pennies, but still.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah, no, I understand that. And I, you know, my career started long ago. I did a double major in business and physics. Again, love the combination of technology and business. And then after working for a few years in electronics manufacturing on supply chain, I hated it, but very much accounting style role. And again, referencing the ADHD thing, ADHD and accounting only works for people with ADHD who love accounting and for everybody else. So I went, I quit. bought an around the world plane ticket and I went backpacking around the world for a year.

It took me ultimately seven years to move back to Toronto, Canada, where I am now. But you know, after a year of backpacking, I got a consulting role in China working for a manufacturer, researching and implementing corporate social responsibility audit procedures into their supply chain. So figuring out the environmental employment and ethics practices, figuring out how to review those, monitor those, and then implement them so that they can work with their suppliers to create an improvement over time.

Richard Lowe: Right? Sounds very fun. Sounds very interesting. Sounds like you’ve had a fun career. Yes. Now you’re working. You’re running a cohort program called this series, a step up starting In a few months.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: So tell me about that a little bit.

Yaron Vorona: For sure. There’s, and you alluded to it at the beginning of your introduction of me, but there’s this point in a venture’s evolution and I’m not sure how much you and your audience might know about early stage venturing, but once you’ve founded the company, you’ve grown, you raised a bit of outside capital. That first outside capital is usually called seed stage. And then you get into growing and proving that there’s product market fit.

And that usually happens at series A. But what’s interesting about that series A on either side of there is that moment where that leader can’t be in every room, in every discussion, making every decision. They really need to lead and magnify their force. And so this cohort that I’ll be running is for those early stage founders on either side of the series A who really need to step up and deal with the sticky issues. Maybe it’s approaching a fundraising event.

And so what are the right mindsets and emotions that you need to create your investors? Maybe, if not fundraising, then there’s somebody that you have to fire and You know, going back to my experience of bringing on the wrong person because I thought I had to. It’s something I see over and over again where founders struggle to fire the person who needs to be fired. And so working through the fear of what could happen and getting to a commitment to create the change, understanding why the pain of not changing is going to be so much more than the pain of the change.

Or maybe it’s just dealing better with the board and avoiding the fights, managing the relationships between those who hold the CEO accountable. It’s my role to help hold the CEO accountable before the board has to. And so often I’m the guy the VC calls when they start thinking about whether they need to professionalize their executive.

Richard Lowe: Gotcha. Reminds me of a story. I’ll tell a little story. I worked at a company and I was working on SCADA systems, you know, those things have run fluids through like water, oil, things like that. And this one was, it was a $5 million project. I might have the numbers wrong because it’s been a few years and it was 1.5 over budget. And Four years late, semi-government, so that wasn’t unexpected, but the company I worked for was getting very frustrated.

So they hired me as the white knight to save it. They didn’t tell me that, of course. They just hired me as that. So I came in and spent a few weeks looking at the project and stuff, and I said, you want this project to get done and get, you know, yeah, we want it done. We definitely want it done. It’s killing us, blah, blah, blah. You need to fire that person. And my boss said, well, I can’t fire that person. Every few months we’d have the same conversation.

What do we need to do? You need to fire that person. I was consistent. Finally, I listened. He says, I can’t fire that person. And so I looked at him. I said, you mean you can’t fire that person? Nope. How about putting me in charge of that person? He said, okay, you’re promoted. I walked out of the room and said, you’re fired.

Yaron Vorona: I’m curious what was stopping him Why was he saying he can’t?

Richard Lowe: He had a he had that problem where he some managers have where they just can’t confront that kind of thing. He I don’t think he’d ever fired anybody in his life and he simply couldn’t do it mentally, physically, you know, just got he couldn’t do it. But I could. I didn’t have any problem with that. We finished within a few months and we were done after that because the thing the person who was interfering with the project being done, he was just playing.

And he was the project lead. And when he was gone, no more playing. We got it done. Everybody was tired of the damn thing. And it was a very interesting thing to finally I listened. What do you mean, you can’t fire him?

Yaron Vorona: It wasn’t that you can’t fire him. It was that he couldn’t fire him. It’s interesting. Two things jump out at me about that story. The first is the word can’t. Unless it’s a law of physics, can’t is almost always a choose not to. But I feel powerless. And that’s really that can’t fire him. We as leaders will violate our values, will cede our power, will sacrifice our identity because we think we need to in order to achieve that thing that we think we need to achieve.

And the opposite is true. When we declare our identity powerfully and we name our values and set boundaries around them respectfully, but focused on ourselves, then the results that we can see are truly exceptional. I did this with one founder who he spent six months pitching VCs over and over and over again. Same thing, pitch, second pitch, agree to some diligence, VC called the customer, then nothing. And we worked on his core belief about his company.

He finally understood that he has the power because he’s unique, whereas all of the VCs are the same. Every dollar is fungible with every other dollar and create the belief that he had something different and unique and then approached it with a process that I used for fundraising that got him within six weeks with the Christmas vacation in the middle of it, got him to four competing term sheets at twice the valuation than he wanted from where he was, you know, spending months and months and months at a time chasing being that supplicant. who is powerless in the face of the person with power in quotation marks.

Richard Lowe: What I have found in life is with the exception of things do happen to you, like you happen to live on the edge of a volcano or there’s an earthquake or something like that, or there’s a drunk who hit you, and you know, those kind of things happen to you. But generally in life, it’s under your control and you decide where you’re at. You may not understand how you got there, but if you walk backwards, You’ll find the decisions that got you there.

The decision to start drinking when you were in high school. Now you’re an alcoholic and you get in a drunk drive and you get in an accident. Oh boy, it’s not my fault. Da da da da. You started drinking when you were in high school. There’s your decision. And you continued, even though you knew up here that it was wrong, you still did it. Primitive example, but it’s true.

Yaron Vorona: It illustrates the point that we are always one decision away from a completely different life if we so do them.

Richard Lowe: Yep. So I’ve made a decision last year, about a year ago, to find every single issue with my life that I’m not happy with and change them all. And it’s funny how life changes when you do that. Okay. I want to, I’m always worried about this particular bill not being paid off. We’ll just pay it off. is an example. Or I’m worried about this thing. Well, just don’t just fix it. Don’t worry about it anymore. Where it’s gotten to little stuff. This clock ran out of battery and now I need to change the battery. Well, then why did you let it sit there for six months worrying about the battery?

Yaron Vorona: But Richard, that’s not helpful. Wondering why you did something. One of the worst questions that I’ve had asked of me in the past is why would you, why did you, which is always an accusation of blame. And the question is more given what you know now, what are you going to do?

Richard Lowe: That’s really the question that I was asking. Here’s what can I do presently that doesn’t need to be that.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: If that makes sense. I’m worried. I’m worried about taxes. Well, make sure your taxes are up to date.

Yaron Vorona: I’ll challenge your trying to fix everything that’s wrong, which is it’s good to identify what isn’t working. And I would say And then, and also think about not what you want to change for the better, but what would you create from scratch that isn’t better or isn’t based off of the past, the thing that isn’t working? How would you phrase it as its own thing?

Richard Lowe: Well, I did that in 2013. I decided I no longer wanted to work for corporate. Terrifying decision. I’d always worked for corporate. I’d had a job. That’s that was the American dream. Get a job working your job till you die. That that was that was what I was born under. Had a job was there for 20 years. I looked around and thought, you know what? I do like the work. but I don’t like the job. I don’t like being a corporate.

I don’t like working for somebody else. Great. What’s the alternative? I don’t know. But it’s not this. realized that I had a bunch of money in the bank and thought. I don’t need to do this. I got plenty of time to find something else. So I quit, moved to Florida, and then spent some time figuring out what I wanted to do. Finally did try this, tried that, tried this, tried that, even tried doing a little corporate thing that didn’t work.

And then said, you know, I can be a writer, writing book, selling books is hard. And it doesn’t really fit with my ADHD personality. But writing books for other people, ah, Now I’ve got the, I found it and did it. And I created it from scratch. Scary as hell. It was different. And I didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. I just made it happen.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: And I don’t know if that fits the model you were just saying, but it was kind of like, it’s just time to jump off the cliff and do it.

Yaron Vorona: 100%. It’s the purpose. Let’s go really deep. The purpose of life. The purpose of life to me is to live each day with joy and leave the world better than you found it.

Richard Lowe: Yep.

Yaron Vorona: You talked about the things that happened to us and it reminded me of Viktor Frankl who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, very well known book. He was a Holocaust survivor and wrote this book book in his head. He was a psychologist who wrote this book in his head and published it as soon as he got out. And it really was the idea that you cannot choose what happens to you. The only thing that you can choose and the real power that no one could ever take away from you is how you choose to respond to what happens, your power to response. And between that the stimulus of what happens and your response in that space lives your whole power to choose.

Richard Lowe: Right.

Yaron Vorona: And you chose to create a life of joy writing. And that’s amazing.

Richard Lowe: I did. And I was able to make a better living than I was making working for corporate, which amazed me, still does. But now it’s become, and you know, I had the problem in that I didn’t know how to network. I didn’t know how to market. I didn’t know how to sell. I was a tech who became a leader, became a manager. And I had to learn all that stuff on the fly and made a lot of mistakes. But it was like, you know, and then all the financial stuff behind it, you know, all the stuff to worry about.

But I’d already made the decision and it was a good decision because Doris wrote her book. Doris is one of the most wonderful customers I’ve ever had. One of my early ones. She came to me just she just found me out of the blue. I have no idea how she was local. So we met at the local Panera Bread with her whole family. Now, Doris could have would have been totally at home in some little town with 30 people in the desert, you know, and a bunch of trailers with park, you know, kind of stuff.

She’d have been totally at home there. In fact, she lived in a trailer. And I walked in and I think, you know, I looked at the family and you know how you judge things. There’s no way she’s gonna have the money for writing a book. I’m just gonna have a good time, talk to her, be a good person and find out what’s going on. She wanted a book. She had plenty of money. She had retirement fund. Duh. And she wanted a book. Through her whole life, she had recorded her dreams on pieces of paper, little handwritten notes.

Yeah, those had to be transcribed. I let somebody else do that. And wrote her book, novelized all of those into a book. It’s called Gators in the Soup. When I delivered the book, she held it in her hands and she said, this feels almost as good as when I held my firstborn daughter in my hands, crying and the whole thing. We were both crying. And then I knew why I’m doing what I’m doing.

That’s why. And I’ve seen that over and over and over again on clients when they hold their book in their hand. I mean, there’s the ones who do it just for business and they don’t have that reaction. They’re happy they got a book. But the ones who really, really want it, and they have to want it because I’m not on the low end. So I get that reaction a lot and it makes it worth it. It’s what I deliver to them. They finally were able to get their message down.

She passed away three months later from COVID. But she was happy because she’d finally achieved. She knew it was coming. She’s 78. She knew that she didn’t have long. She’d achieved her goal. And I was happy to have helped her do it.

Yaron Vorona: I think there’s the similarity between our two work, which is, you know, ultimately we’re helping the people that we work with to flourish and truly create the thing that they want to create. And the satisfaction that you described getting from handing her her book that you helped birth into the world, I would imagine is very similar to the joy that I feel when I see my coaching clients flourish and grow. And when the leadership challenge that they faced last month comes up again, and they’re able to handle it without me.

And they tell me the results. It’s the best. I’d imagine it’s what an Olympic coach feels like when their athlete wins gold because it’s not the coach who wins, it’s the athlete. There’s that pride in having created something truly meaningful for somebody else.

Richard Lowe: That’s precisely it. And you can’t feel that kind of pride helping manage the machines that get put bread on the truck so that it gets to the store every day. It’s a different kind. I mean, there’s pride in that, but it’s a different kind of thing. I’m not when I’m doing the computer stuff or corporation, I’m not affecting things in that same manner. I’m having an effect, but it’s more like a cog in a wheel, more like a gear.

You know, I’m a gear in the whole thing. When I left they they noticed for a day or 2 or a week, you know, whatever. But probably a few times when I wish Richard was here to help with that. But there was no no, nobody missed me, and nobody ever will. That’s that’s not part of the game.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah. that’s hard. You know that feeling of being able to really make an impact, make a mark. Ultimately, humans are meaning making machines. We need to make the meaning in our lives and choose what is our goal, what is our purpose. And I think what you do, being able to give people the words to express what they wouldn’t otherwise be able to on their own is a beautiful gift.

Richard Lowe: It’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. One reason why I chose it If I can do this, unless I lose my mind, I can do this all the way to my deathbed. And that’s what I want to do. I don’t, it doesn’t depend on anything else but me being able to write. And I can always use this if I lose my hands. I do use this a lot, believe me.

Yaron Vorona: I feel the same way about coaching. You know, it took me a while to come into it. I came the funny way around of having Having failed or partially succeeded as a founder, working as a VC through it all, I’ve continued to do a lot of coursework focused on my own emotional, spiritual, physical, mental growth. And now being able to bring that to others means that I can live. I too want to keep working at this until I’m physically unable to do it anymore or mentally unable to.

And I think that will help prolong my life. It’s people talk about these talk about lifespan. You know, lifespans are getting longer. And I saw the impact as my father aged. He lived to 94, but he didn’t have health span. And so people talk about health span now and how long can we live, but how long can we live in a healthy way? And I think that also there’s so much abnegation that can go into it. Something I thought of and then found out it was already out there is joy span.

How long can we live healthily and with joy, with meaning and purpose and impact so that every day when we wake up, we like, if today is the day I die, Richard, it’ll be a great day.

Richard Lowe: I know, although it sounds a little brutal, I know what you mean by it. I’m doing what I want to do and I’m doing it well. And I’m making a living at it, which is even better. And I’m not hurting anybody. And I’m learning a lot as I go. I mean, writing some fascinating books down. I learn a little more about people every time, because usually my books are about people and their lives. Sometimes they’re technical, but usually they’re out people. And it’s what I do. And then I got the hobbies, you know, the miniatures, the model kids and stuff like that, and the cat who tortures me. Keeps me on my toes.

Yaron Vorona: That means your cat’s doing its job correctly.

Richard Lowe: She is doing her job. Her name’s Zaya. She’s doing her job. She’s probably the one of the second best cat I’ve ever had. I wrote a novel called Buttercup. I wanted to write a memoir of my wife who passed away. And I decided it would be too sad writing it from her point of view. So I wrote it from the cat’s point of view. And the whole book is from the cat’s point of view without anthropomorphizing.

It’s just You hear the thoughts of the cat, but the cat’s not acting like a human. It’s acting like a cat. And it came out pretty good. By writing that I’ve written my books, I write them because it’s fulfilling. I don’t write them to make lots of sales. I’d be happy to make sales, but I’m too busy ghostwriting. I’m not going to be spending a lot of time marketing my books. Marketing is hard, and I’m doing enough of it for ghostwriting.

Marketing is hard for ADHD mindset. I mean, my God. But does hard doesn’t mean undoable. It just means it’s a little bit of a wall to go through for me every time I do it. And but I’ve got a lot of books and I’ll write a lot more because they’re fun and they’re not intended to sell lots of copies. They’re intended to entertain people or inform people or to learn something. Yeah.

Yaron Vorona: You know, I wish I was as good a salesperson and marketer as I am a coach.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, me too. Same kind of thing. It’s it’s it’s not my forte. Fortunately, I’ve chosen a career where I don’t need a lot of customers. I need six a year. That’s a lot better place to be in than needing thousands. Yeah. And six a year. That’s doable. I don’t think I could do thousands. My mind just would be boggled. A good man knows his limitations. Good person.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Knows the limitations. So with all this stuff behind you, I assume that’s not virtual?

Yaron Vorona: No, that’s not virtual. You know, got my kids and my dad up there, my Dungeons and Dragons set, my startup book, my philosophy books. uh some pictures and stuff that I gathered from traveling around the world.

Richard Lowe: Looking at this little thing to your other side that looks like a tree or something metal that one.

Yaron Vorona: That’s uh one of my kids made this art nice nice on a rock it reminds me a lot of this picture right here uh which I took in Cambodia uh at Angkor Wat nice.

Richard Lowe: Nice. I was thinking it was one of those little gem trees that you can get. Those are always pretty cool.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: But it looks whoever did it did a good job.

Yaron Vorona: I’ll let them know. You know, ultimately, I spoke about that future, the sci-fi future, and that started, obviously, but before I had kids, I am so selective in the clients that I choose. Ultimately, my kids are my life. I love them dearly as one should. And every founder that I take on, I think to myself, I look at them through the lens of, are they what they building? Is this making the world for my kids better? You know, I’ve got one founder I’m working with who is working to save lives against gun violence in schools and religious institutions.

I have another client who’s making cyber security easier for more people to adopt. I have another client who is eliminating waste in retail. while making it more profitable. These are all things that the impact is clear. People who are working on new ways of producing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s less harmful to address conditions that would otherwise go unaddressed. These are the things that keep me going.

Richard Lowe: Cool. That seems to work really well for you.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: And I choose clients that are similar. They’ve got a good message. They’re good people. I’ve had bad clients, and believe me, it’s worse than a bad boss.

Yaron Vorona: What makes the client a bad client?

Richard Lowe: Toxic. They’re carping. Every little word is questioned. And they don’t treat it as a collaboration. They treat it as a partnership. They treat it more as a master slave relationship. What what I the best ones to produce the best possible book. It’s a collaboration. I work with the person. We do lots of interviews. We’re working very closely together, finishing one up now that’s gone that way. He’s thrilled. He’s happy.

He’s getting the book he wants. He likes it. He’s been involved at every step. So when the book’s done, it’s done. I don’t have to read, don’t have to do 15,000 revisions and. That takes more effort than most ghostwriting. I have to spend a lot more time with the client, but they get a better result. And we’re all both very happy with it. And I’m happy to, you know, they’re happy to put my name in the acknowledgments and I’m happy to put it on my website and I feel proud of it.

And that’s the point is something that I accomplished. It’s good, not just a book. And I’m not interested in the toxic type, turned down a mafia informant. What do you call it? CI. And he was going to write a book, tell all with names about all of the mafia people and the cops and things and how corrupt everything was and stuff. And he promised to keep me secret. And I said, dude, you’re telling the names of everybody. You think I’m going to trust you to keep me secret? You’re a moron. I told him, go away. I didn’t tell him that. didn’t tell that.

Yaron Vorona: I had an opportunity. It’s very similar. I had an opportunity to invest in a founder’s new venture. His prior role was in, we’ll call it offensive cybersecurity. And his customers were governments enabling them to leverage particular vulnerabilities to create certain outcomes. And sure, he was helping governments rather than selling it to the bad actors, then governments themselves are not always the best actors. And the way that this technology would be used could be used, the philosophy behind it, I’m thinking, and he was doing something similar where it’s like, you know, finding vulnerabilities, but now for corporate clients to protect themselves.

I couldn’t possibly invest into that because that to me wasn’t making that world a better place. And ultimately, if you’re mercenary, if you’re only going to sell to the highest bidder, are you really going to be making an impact and can you be trusted as a person of integrity?

Richard Lowe: Right. Exactly. Integrity is the name of the game. And I value that a lot more than I value money.

Yaron Vorona: Our words is straight to what you do for a living. Words have power. When you put words on a page, it has power. When we give our word, when we honor our word, it has the power to change the world. And when you don’t have integrity, when you don’t honor your word, you then become powerless.

Richard Lowe: Right? That’s one thing. A guy named Larry Winget, he wrote a book called People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It. And he’s in your face all the time. He curses. He’s one of those kind of coaches. And he says something like, if you make a promise, you have to keep it. He says, if you tell your kids, I’m going to smack you, if you do that, you have to smack them.

If you just made a promise to the kid, if you let it go and say, oh, well, you know, well, we’ll give you one more chance. You just told the kid some really important information that you’re not going to follow through on your promises. First of all, you probably shouldn’t make that kind of promise.

Yaron Vorona: That’s what I would say for sure.

Richard Lowe: But if you do make that kind of promise, you need to keep it.

Yaron Vorona: I disagree. I’ll tell you why I disagree.

Richard Lowe: Okay.

Yaron Vorona: Because stuff happens. We cannot control the world around us. What we can do, rather than keeping our word, our promise is honoring our word or our promise, which is when you realize that whatever you said you’re going to do, the moment you realize you can’t do or you won’t be able to do whatever you said you’re going to be doing, you then admit the problem, you recognize and apologize for the impact that it has on whoever that promise was to, and you recommit in a way that still has impact.

Richard Lowe: I would agree with that. I would agree with that. In the smacking example, if you decided, you know what, I’d rather not be smacking my kids, then you probably need to have a discussion with your kids about that and back off from it and say, you know, we’re going to do something different. You’re going to have this punishment instead. But you still have to have the punishment because you promised it.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah, there needs to be the thing that I try to teach my children is that if you let go of something in midair, it’s going to fall and hit the floor and it may break. Our actions have consequences. Every action has a consequence. You may not always see what the consequence is. And when you do something that you shouldn’t do, there’s a consequence for it, whatever it is.

Richard Lowe: Right. And it’s usually better to own up to it if something happens that you didn’t quite plan on, even if only to yourself, than to let it go. Oh, yeah, whatever. Mom will never find out. You know, it’s probably going to be a lot better for all of you if you tell mom you broke that saucer and spilled the milk all over the floor and then offered to clean it up.

Yaron Vorona: It’s the same kind of skills that I work on with my clients, with my founders. You know, one of the things I work on them is what’s called. A therapeutic apology or how to really apologize for something. In order to repair the relationship and then improve on it.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, the worst apology of all that I think is I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. That’s not an apology. Not apologizing for anything. You’re actually blaming them for having their feelings hurt. Yeah. That, yeah, I hate. When I get those, I know I’m dealing with somebody who has no responsibility level or very little.

Yaron Vorona: Or empathy or, and this is important. Some people just don’t know. You know, I like the thing never ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity.

Richard Lowe: I’ve heard that and it’s true. It’s true. Yeah. It’s very, very true. Although having learned I didn’t believe in conspiracies at all until I learned about cigarette companies and what they did and why they did it. What’s the whole special in a couple hours long. It’s just amazing that they conspired to, you should just look it up. The conspiracy of cigarette companies is incredible where they knew it was causing these problems and they had a, they got together and decided to do this.

The little things on the side of the cigarette that says, This will kill you if you don’t take this. They put it on there because it relieved them of liability. If the guy’s too stupid to not see the label, then you can’t sue us because he’s stupid. They actually conspired to make that be on this package. It’s not some do good group. It was like cigarette companies that $300 billion settlement. They demanded that covertly because it relieved them of all the liability.

And we’re watching that special. It was like, wow. Okay. So occasionally, I guess there are conspiracies because it was a nasty one. It was back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. When I was growing up, it was quite common to see doctors smoking in the middle of while he was seeing on you. And looking back, I’m horrified. I wouldn’t allow that now. I don’t smoke. I wouldn’t allow a doctor to smoke while he’s looking me over. That’s just dumb.

Yaron Vorona: A good proof that we are at a point now in society, not perfect, still a lot of problems, still a lot of inequities that need to be resolved. But we’re doing better now than we ever have. And I really do prefer to see the world from a place of abundance rather than a place of tragedy.

Richard Lowe: Agreed. Agreed. There’s so many things that we have. For example, And we’ll wrap this up pretty soon because we’ve been going a long time. But for example, we don’t suffer from smallpox. Tetanus. Look up tetanus on the Internet. Holy crap. Give me the give me the shot. You know, I mean, that was a nasty disease. Smallpox, nasty. And something like what, 20, 30% of people had it. People were dying like crazy. The plague. I could go on and on.

Open sewers, you know, we don’t have that problem in. in the United States and Europe and things and all these problems that people used to have we don’t have anymore we have other problems like oh I lost my cell phone you know yeah get a new one we don’t we we simply don’t have the kind of problems that they were having back then we have different problems some of them are bad let’s look at the how hot it is lately maybe there’s a reason for it but um Maybe not.

Yaron Vorona: And that’s why we go to the top of our discussion and we talk about business strategy. Yes, it’s important to be mission driven and think about the big P problem that you want to change in the world. And ultimately the most important advice that I work on with the earliest stage founders is make sure that you’re while you’re pursuing that big P problem, make sure that you’re also looking at the little P problem is like not the corporation, but really the person, the individual, the role, the vice president of engineering or the CEO, whoever it is, understand really what is the pain that they’re experiencing and work towards solving that if it’s in line with your big P problem mission.

Richard Lowe: I had one of those. I had an employee, I was about ready to fire him. Oh my God, he was the biggest asshole of all. He didn’t pay attention in meetings. He was falling asleep. And finally we had his review and I didn’t give him a raise. And he was shocked. It’s like, why didn’t I get a raise? And he said, well, quite frankly, you’ve been a piss poor performer lately and I’m getting ready to fire you. He’s like, what?

I’m a great employee. And I said, look back at how you’ve been acting. I mean, look at it honestly, we had a good talk. And he said, what? And I said, so is something going on that I should know about? Good question to ask. And he said, his child’s sick.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: And I said, oh, he says, yeah, he has to take off early and come in late and stuff like that because of the child in the hospitals and all that kind of stuff. I said, okay, I understand now.

Yaron Vorona: And you’re making, you’re making, if I can just quickly, two important points that are really important leadership lessons. The first is annual or semiannual performance reviews are awful. They’re Bs.

Richard Lowe: They’re horrible. They’re horrible.

Yaron Vorona: A performance review should be something that’s happening constantly, both noticing what’s going well and dealing with what’s not. And the other side of things is that. as you said, what’s really going on is to. you know, every meeting should begin with let’s get present to who is here. Let’s make sure that we’re showing up prepared. And now let’s connect with who each of the people are as people to make sure that we’re all aligned and we’re all coming from the right place.

And if somebody is facing, God forbid, a sick child or some other disaster in their personal lives, let’s help them fix that, improve their lives so that As one of my clients, I love this guy. His mission, aside from having his company’s impact, is to create a company where people can do the best work of their lives. That’s amazing. I want to help you do that.

Richard Lowe: And I was able to rescue him. And even though I left, he just retired. just this last year even though I left many many years ago and it was quite fascinating to me because we just we just talked it out and came to a way that he could he could provide this is before remote and stuff and the company didn’t allow remote anyway um where he could still do what he needed to do with his child and the only thing is just let me know I mean barring emergencies I understand emergencies just the child was chronically ill just let me know When things come up, give me a phone call, text me.

Can’t take that much work. And let’s make sure we’ve got some workarounds and people backing you up and stuff like that. And it was fine. And child’s okay, he’s okay, everything’s fine now. And one of my success stories, I think, just a minor one. I mean, you think about it, it’s just a minor, I had a conversation, but it probably saved his job because-.

Yaron Vorona: It stems from you really caring about the human being.

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Yaron Vorona: And that is truly the secret of leadership is leadership is about really caring about the people that you’re leading. Even if it’s investors or customers, you’re still their leader as well.

Richard Lowe: Well, I think that could easily have gone the other way. He could have been flip it. He could have said it’s none of your business. He could have said any number of things and then he would have been out of a job. But he didn’t. He opened up and because of he was he was Spanish, he had this concept that he didn’t want to talk about his personal life at all, which is why he withheld it until his job was in danger. And then it was fine.

Then we worked it out. We never talked about it again. There was no need. And he still had the same problem of being late and stuff, but it was because it was known, it became a different thing. Very different thing to me as his boss. Now I know what’s going on. Now we can work with it and we can come up with a solution together.

Yaron Vorona: Yeah. Well, you have a, a very well named, well named show for exactly that reason.

Richard Lowe: Well, thank you. Thank you. And that’s a good cue to wrap it up. So is there anything finally you’d want to say?

Yaron Vorona: You know, I think it’s clear what my mission is to create that future by helping founders and CEOs to create that future. And so for any of your audience that’s listening, find me on LinkedIn. My name is in the box here, Yaron Vorona. easy to find yaronvorona.com. And you know, let’s talk about what is it that you wish to create in the world and for yourself. And I’m here to help you make it happen.

Richard Lowe: Very good. Very good. Well, this has been leaders in their stories. Richard Lowe, and it’s been quite a fascinating discussion here. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. And until next time, thank you very much for coming.

Yaron Vorona: Thank you, Richard.

Quotable moments