Preserve start-up spirit at scale: Techstars' Maëlle Gavet

This episode delves into how organizations can maintain a start-up mentality even as they grow significantly in scale, featuring insights from Techstars' CEO, Maëlle Gavet.

1. Entrepreneurial Spirit at Scale: Gavet emphasizes that large companies can maintain agility and innovation by adhering to start-up-like values.
2. Leadership and Values: The importance of consistent, value-driven leadership that respects both heritage and innovation in scaling businesses.
3. Gratitude as a Guiding Principle: Gavet shares how a deep-seated sense of gratitude, instilled by her grandfather, informs her leadership and business practices.
4. Asking "Why": Continuously questioning the status quo to understand and improve business processes and decisions.
5. Cultural Sensitivity in Global Operations: Insights into adapting business practices to fit the cultural and operational landscapes of different regions.

1. Introduction: The Startup Spirit

An overview of how organizations can keep their start-up edge as they scale. Gavet shares her personal background and the foundational experiences that shaped her. Maëlle Gavet: "Nothing worth doing is ever easy."

2. Building Ozen: Scaling in a Challenging Market

Discusses Gavet's challenges and strategies in scaling Ozen, an e-commerce platform in Russia, emphasizing the balance between innovation and operational challenges. Maëlle Gavet: "You have to fight for what you believe in."

3. Techstars' Philosophy: Investing in People

Gavet talks about her role in Techstars, focusing on mentorship, investment in people, and maintaining a founder-friendly approach. Maëlle Gavet: "We live and die for the founder."

4. Leadership Lessons: Learning from the Past

Gavet shares lessons from previous roles and how they apply to her current leadership at Techstars, highlighting the importance of learning from each experience. Maëlle Gavet: "The best investors are those who invest in misunderstood opportunities."

1. Embrace Core Values: Identify and consistently apply your core personal and business values.
2. Maintain Agility: Keep the agility of a startup even as your company grows by encouraging innovation at all levels.
3. Foster Gratitude: Cultivate an environment where gratitude is a common practice, enhancing team morale and appreciation.
4. Engage in Constant Learning: Promote a culture of continuous learning and curiosity within your organization.
5. Build Strong Networks: Invest in building and maintaining robust professional networks that can support business growth.

Maëlle Gavet is the CEO of Techstars, a pre-seed investor focused on early-stage entrepreneurs. It boasts a market cap of $111.6 billion, and supports founders in programs that span from Tokyo to Lagos to Alabama. Maëlle champions hard work, gratitude, and a questioning nature, qualities her grandfather imparted while she was growing up in France. She has carried her curiosity through a wide-ranging international career, in start-ups and scaled corporations. We hear lessons drawn from her vast experience, including the transformation of Ozon — the "Amazon of Russia" — in the early 2010s, to leadership roles in global travel and real estate. And we get a sample of the advice she often shares with Techstars’ founders, about how to balance their values and the needs of their company, always with an optimism about entrepreneurship as a force for good.

People

Maëlle Gavet

Companies

Techstars, Ozen

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

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Tucker Ligursky
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When I travel for work, I often find myself caught in a blur of meetings and hotel rooms and I miss out on what the city I'm visiting can offer. Im sure you can relate. Thats exactly why I wanted to recommend a new podcast from our team that changes this paradigm. Its called Offsite adventures. It turns a simple work trip into an unforgettable adventure.

In each episode we reveal hidden gems in the most iconic business travel destinations. Just search for offsite adventures in your favorite podcast player. The show is produced by the same team behind Masters of Scale and presented in alliance with Capital one business in France. We have a lot of holidays. I would spend most of my holidays at my grandparents house and every morning my grandfather, who was always waking up early, would come and knock on the door and I would just get up.

Mayle Gavet
It was still pitch dark. That was the exciting time. It's like you didn't know what was going to happen.

We would have a piece of bread with a piece of cheese to start the day and then we would go to the garage, pick up our bags. My grandfather would be leading the way and we would bike across the countryside. And then by the time the baker would open, which is usually about 7730, we would go there, pick up a fresh baguette and then bike back home. These bike rides were basically my childhood.

He would talk to me about his past. He was born in the south of France without a father as what we call a norland farmer. So someone who basically had only his two arms to work and from the age of twelve started working to support his mother and his siblings. And then World War Two happened and my grandfather decided when he was 16 to go into the resistance and he lost part of his right hand when he was not even 18. He went on working three jobs to sustain a family.

He had this incredible set of values that really resonated with me and that I carry to this day. He would talk to me about all the things that matter in life. He would be like, nothing worth doing is ever easy. He talked about why. He saying, you should always ask why.

Because if you ask why five times, you're going to get to the bottom of whatever it is that you're looking for. You need to understand why someone is asking you to do something or why you're doing something. My grandfather used to say thank you is the most important word, so merci in French. And for him, this thank you was more than you saying thank you because someone holds the door for you. It was more like thank you for the opportunity that I have to be alive.

Thank you for the fact that I have amazing grandchildren. Thank you for the fact that there was fresh bread today. And so I feel like that gratitude, that way of looking at the world in a glass half full type of way, is so important to me. As an entrepreneur, I see a lot of the decision making that I follow use this set of values that my grandfather drilled into my brain. That's Mayle Gavet, CEO of the global startup accelerator Techstars.

Jeff Berman
The wisdom Mayle absorbed from her grandfather Pierre when she was a girl in the french countryside became the foundation for a remarkable career. Shes a founder, an entrepreneur and a longtime C suite executive. Miele was recently named to the list of barrons 100 most influential women in US finance. She helped scale the russian e commerce giant Ozen, raising the largest ever venture round in Europe at the time. And she has held executive roles at massively scaled companies, including the real estate firm Compass and the Priceline Group.

Miele became CEO of Techstars in 2021. Techstars is a pre seed investor and accelerator program for early stage entrepreneurs. Miele embodies the spirit of entrepreneurship and is remarkably savvy when it comes to navigating large companies. It's that mix that makes her story so rich to explore on masters of scale. You gotta have incredible talent at every position.

It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it. You're such an idiot. And then you go back to the this is totally gonna be amazing.

Mayle Gavet
There are so many easy ways I'm supposed to know what to do. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake, but you. Have to time it right. Oops.

Jeff Berman
Working out of a three bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nutballs ten years later. Well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it.

This is masters of scale.

We'll start the show in a moment. Afterward, from our premier brand partner, Capital one business.

Aparna Saran
I woke up in the middle of the night because I had this nightmare that we were front page news that we've done the stupidest mistake of our life by making the spirit. That's Aparna Saran, chief marketing officer for Capital one business. And she's recalling a moment from her previous position at Capital one when she was heading up a team designing a new business card. We had just made the decision to go all in and sunset the prior version of the product, which was honestly the cash cow for our business. When we made that decision within a senior leadership meeting.

As someone who had been on the journey to build this out for five plus years, it was really exciting. But by the time the weekend hit, I started to feel the responsibility and the pressure. We are taking this big bet on something that ive built. Perhaps youve been there. Youve made a pivotal decision.

And then panic sets in. How would Aparna calm her butterflies and steer her team through this pivot? Well find out later in the show. It's all part of the Refocus playbook, a special series where capital one business highlights stories of business owners and leaders using one of Reed's theories of entrepreneurship. Today's playbook insight have multiple plan B's.

Jeff Berman
I'm Jeff Berman, your host. Our guest is Mayel Geweh. I've heard Mael share her expertise with young entrepreneurs and with seasoned corporate leaders. That made me eager to know her full story. From France to Russia and now the US, Miele has shown her ability to stick to steadfast principles, demonstrating gratitude and perseverance amid great change and uncertainty.

I began by asking Mayel how, as a young woman from the south of France, she landed her first CEO role in Russia. I was working for the Boston consulting group, and I had just moved to Moscow because I was preparing to become a partner. And my very last project was for Ozone, which at the time was a small e commerce company, probably one of a dozen e commerce companies in Russia. And so I did that project, which was a very short project, probably six weeks. And I had this aha moment where I thought, oh, here I was working for that company as a consultant, and I was like, I wonder what it would be to work for such a company.

Mayle Gavet
And the CEO at the time approached me at the end of the project, and he was like, we're looking for sales and marketing director. I think you'd be awesome. By the way, in about a year and a half, I'm going to leave Russia, and I'm looking for my successor. And I want to be clear, there's three other candidates internally. So I'm not telling you here's the job, but if you're interested, that's something that you could try to get.

And there was a moment where I was like, what do I have to lose? And so I basically went back to the office and sat down with the senior partner at the time and was like, I think I'm gonna quit. And I joined ozone. I became the sales and marketing director, and then a year later, I was promoted to Cu. That's how I.

What happened.

Jeff Berman
In that moment? Minutes away from becoming a partner at BCG, which is a dream career trajectory for many people, you're presented with an opportunity where there really are no guarantees. Had you been a sales and marketing person before that? No, but I had been an entrepreneur. And when you're an entrepreneur, you wear every single hat on the planet.

Mayle Gavet
And I think you developed this capacity to make things happen. At the age of 16, she started her first business, organizing childrens birthday parties in France. She then aimed to get into an elite college to differentiate herself. She learned Russian, not exactly the easiest path one could choose. As a teen, Majel visited Russia dozens of times to volunteer at an orphanage, and by 20, shed founded an event planning business in Moscow.

Jeff Berman
Miele had been through the entrepreneurs zero to one phase, building something out of nothing. So when the opportunity to lead Ozen presented itself, she was excited because the zero to one part was done. But the company still had the energy, the attitude, and the unlimited potential of a startup. I can work in an entrepreneurial company without having to go through the zero to one because I had been an entrepreneur three times before, and every time I was like, oh, my God, the zero to one is so excruciating, and it feels so lonely, and you have to build so many things from scratch. And so I was like, look, this CEO, which I admire, which I think is very smart and very thoughtful, strong iq, and Eq, thinks that I have a shot at it.

Mayle Gavet
So, yeah, sure, let's go and do it. But for me, the most important feeling, it was not even rational. It was like I felt fear and excitement at the same time. And that, in my life, has always been the signal that there is something I should be doing. Not everyone leans into fear.

Jeff Berman
So what was that about for you? Not just fear. Fear and excitement. It's the combination of the two. Because there are also time where I'm, like, fearful, and I'm like, okay, let's just step back and think about it.

Mayle Gavet
But as a former entrepreneur, it was this moment where I was like, I am excited because I see something that could be really big. I thought that this company had a real shot at becoming the largest e commerce company in Russia and had all the basic infrastructure that leveraged properly would help them get there. And at the same time, there was a little bit of fear, because I was like, it looks really hard. It looks really complex. When I feel that combination of, like, there is something big and maybe I'm not going to get it, that, I don't know, maybe my inner competitive double is like, yeah, sure, let's do it.

Let's just prove to the world that this can happen. Miele was willing to work hard, and that enabled her to savor the challenges. She knew that by taking them on, she would learn and grow. But the work meant growing an e commerce company in a country where half the population wasn't online, where more than 80% of transactions were cash on delivery, where no one paid in advance, and where branded delivery trucks or uniforms could lead to armed robbery. Miele says the country was eager to develop back then, in 2009.

Russia at the time was a very different environment than what it is right now. I worked in Russia at a time where the country was very open to the outside world. Foreign investors were coming and investing. You could feel the desire for the country to modernize. It was very cosmopolitan.

There was a lot of big hope and big vision. I'm a relentless optimist. I believe that there is always a way to make things work. Thanks to my grandfather, I had a very strong compass in terms of what I'm okay to do and not okay to do. When I was talking to him about why he decided to go into the resistance, because we all know, not all french people made that decision.

He was like, you got to fight for what you believe in. And so when the board of Ozone talked to me about joining them, we had a very open conversation about, maybe you'll be the next CEO I had a very direct conversation with them. Just to be clear, this business has to be squeaky clean. There's no other option. I would not be running a business if I had to pay bribes.

That was a non starter and I would fight for what I believed in. And that included running a really, really clean business. Miele stuck to her principles and she succeeded. Whether you run a billion dollar a year retailer or a small neighborhood shop, we all have difficult choices to make, but they can be made with greater clarity if you're guided by values and boundaries that you will not cross, no matter the pressure. Under her leadership, Ozen raised a venture capital round of $100 million at the time.

Jeff Berman
In 2011, that was the largest of any company in all of Europe. By 2015, Ozen had reached a valuation of $1.5 billion. And perhaps more importantly, Mael had helped build Russia's first nationwide retail delivery network. Part of the success of Ozone, by the way, came from the fact that we built the first nationwide private delivery infrastructure. And so we were able to deliver books and toys and mobile phone to places where within, whatever, less than a week.

Mayle Gavet
Especially if you were to go all the way to Vladivostok. Vladivostok, more than 5000 miles from Moscow on the far eastern coast of Russia. In a place where sometime delivery was not even possible, or it would take like a month, two months, three months, five months. The key differentiator was that we were able to build that nationwide delivery system. And I sometimes joked, but I don't know if it was a joke.

I do think that Amazon did copy some of the things that we were doing because we invented pickup points, 2000 plus pickup point across Russia, because at the time, in Russia, it was all cash on delivery and we had to figure out a way for people to get their goods and pay us at the same time. And so we created these pickup points. And then a couple of years later, Amazon launches their own pickup point. At the core, Mael and Ozen were simply responding to a logistics problem. Ozen didn't become the largest retailer in Russia by simply deploying technology that was already available in other countries.

Jeff Berman
Their solutions were specific to Russias population and its vast geography. I think technology is an amazing opportunity, but the challenge is to find the right balance. I think in Silicon Valley there is this tendency to look at everything through the lens of technology and forget the human. And then in other companies theres a tendency to look at everything through the eyes of the human and forget that technology is actually a great way to complement and enhance human. And so its constantly finding this balance between high tech and high touch difficult.

Mayle Gavet
But when you hit that right balance like thats where magic happened. But larger forces came to bear on Mayels success with ozen. In 2014, Russia attacked its sovereign neighbor Ukraine and it annexed Crimea. The world responded with widespread sanctions and the russian government placed even more restrictions on online services. Miele decided that her time in Russia was over.

I have not been back there since I left. Was it hard to leave? Um, a little bit. What was hard about it? It, it um, it felt that there were so much more that could have been done and so it was, it was just, it was just a little sad because I wanted to do even.

Jeff Berman
More, but I, well, you'd built so much and if there was so much more to do, how hard, I mean, how incredibly difficult to then walk away? Yeah, a little bit. As my grandfather was saying, nothing worth doing is ever easy. You gotta fight for what you believe in. Which means that if the right decision is option a, even if there's a cause for option a, go with option a.

After the break, Mael embarks on her next chapter in the United States, where she continues to deploy her grandfathers life lessons to extraordinary results.

Well be back in a moment after a word from our premier brand partner, Capital one business.

Aparna Saran
There was panic that set in that night because I didnt want to let people down. Were back with Aparnas Aaron of Capital one business. She was recalling the time she woke up in a cold sweat, terrified that the new product she had been working on might fail. So the next morning she sat down and wrote an email. It was Sunday morning and I said, you know what?

Im going to just like share this with my peers. It was very emotional. It was like sort of a cry for help. Aparna realized that if the new product didnt take off, she needed a plan b, preferably multiple plan bs. Im inviting them to be the thought partners so that we are mitigating as much risk as possible and we have contingency plans in place.

As wed make this move youd write something like this and your heart is pounding. Should I send this? It was a super vulnerable moment for me, but then I was like, I'm going to just send this. Like, what's the worst that will happen? It can't be worse than being on the front page of the newspaper.

So she held her breath and hit send. What happened next would surprise even her. We'll hear about that later in the show. It's all part of Capital one business spotlight on business leaders following Reed's refocus playbook.

Jeff Berman
We're back with Mayel Gavay, CEO of Techstars and longtime friend of Masters of Scale. You can watch our full conversation and more on our YouTube channel. Before the break, Mayle was telling us about the difficult decision to leave her post as CEO of the largest online retailer in Russia. She had several options for her next move, and she wound up in the United States. When you left, how did you decide what to go do next?

Mayle Gavet
I wanted to see a very big company, and I wanted to see a public company because I believed that at some point in my career I would be taking a company, whether it would be my company from the ground up or a company that I would be hired to manage to that unprecedented scale. And I wanted to experience it from the inside. And I was approached by the Priceline Group, which is now called Booking holding, which owns Booking.com, comma, Priceline.com. Obviously, thanks to William Shatner, everybody knows Priceline, Opentable, kayak, rental cars, Agoda, and I can't remember a few others at the time. They were already, I think it was $70 billion market cap company.

I had a ton of respect for the chairman of the board, Jeff Boyd. I've never seen someone run a public company board as efficiently as Jeff. He had this uncanny ability to have this great relationship with the CEO, but also with every board member, while at the same time being very, very directive in the way the board was supposed to function. And he seems to intuitively always understand that balance of being friendly and being demanding, being open and being directive, encouraging people to participate into an open debate and yet close the debate. When we've been around the block a few times, we're good, let's move on.

And so I think this incredible EQ around how to manage the dynamic of a board to make it really effective. And I saw Jeff Boyd do that regularly and seamlessly, and like to this day, remains the benchmark for me in terms of what an outstanding chairman looks like. Knowing when to continue debate and when to stop and make a decision, that's a critical skill for anyone in business. Miele rightly admired the chairman, Jeff Boyd, for his balanced leadership. She also admired the priceline group's nimble culture, allowing the brands it acquired to maintain their unique pre acquisition qualities.

They were big, and yet they had kept this entrepreneurial spirit. Most of the brand were still being run by the founder slash the original team. So Steve Afner was still at Kayak and he was still going around and making his interesting jokes on stage. But also running the business from the inside. And the group had figured out a way to create commonality and a camaraderie spirit, and yet keep them independent.

So the founder would still feel like that was their business and they were still running it. It was still a company made of entrepreneurs who were figuring out new stuff every day on big thing and small things. Why aren't more leadership teams at big companies who are doing the acquiring, looking at the priceline booking model and saying, that works, we should be doing a version of that. I've seen countless times. Big company buying a small company and not using these words, but basically having that attitude of like, I own you, you're mine.

And so when that happened, inevitably things are shifting step by step. It's like, oh, you decided to spend how much? On what? Why? I would never have done it like that.

And it's one thing when you're just looking at it from the outside, but when you own that business and they just announce to you that they're going to spend a few million dollars on something that you personally believe is completely silly, it becomes really hard to be like, let me look the other way and let them go. And I think the strength of what the Priceline group booking holding were doing at the time and as far as I can tell, are still doing was, it's okay. Yeah, I would have done it differently, but I trust a founder from the Priceline group. Maille was hired to be the chief operating officer at Compass, the largest residential real estate company by volume in the US. Leading operations at an american real estate company may seem as far as can be from delivering books to Vladivostok.

Jeff Berman
But Mael found parallels in accountability. They're a public company. It's a business where ultimately you have to show people houses and apartments. It's a people first business. It's a lot on the relationship.

Mayle Gavet
And so finding this balance between, we want to have a platform, we want to leverage data, we want to be a tech company, and yet we also are a people first business. And they had to figure out this interesting hybrid model where you both a tech company, and Robert Rifkin, the founder of compassion, was very adamant about this business is for real estate agents. Everything I do is to help them be better and make more money, and they are my customer. And I saw Robert making dozens of phone calls every day to the agents in the network to wish them a happy birthday, a happy anniversary. Hey, I heard one of your kid is sick.

Is everything okay? And so that personal relationship was absolutely critical to the business and a lot of agents just came for Robert. And this is why the compass experience, which itself came from the ozone experience where I had to run an e commerce business, but also 2000 physical pickup point. And so that hybrid approach was always. Really critical with leadership jobs at household name companies, Mayel's latest move was not perhaps an obvious one.

Jeff Berman
In 2021, she became the CEO of Techstars. It's an accelerator that puts early stage founders through a course of mentoring and fundraising preparation. Again, she considered her options before taking the role. But her motivation to say yes came from a very deep and very personal place. I come from a family where we never used the word entrepreneur.

Mayle Gavet
At the dinner table, no one explained to me that venture capital exists. No one walked me through a p and l and a balance sheet. And so I didn't have the connection. Like, I didn't know how to raise money, I didn't know where to find my customers. And when I finally understood what tech stores was providing to entrepreneurs, because I did my homework, after two calls with the founder, I was like, I wish I had that when I was an entrepreneur.

I wish I had people who deeply cared about my business and had this unbelievable network and would be a safe space for me to talk about all the crazy stuff that I have to deal with. Because let's face it, being an entrepreneur is basically a marathon full of crazy stuff happening one after the other. Miele's first task was to ask a lot of questions. She wanted to know why Techstars did what it did. Techstars was at the time, very focused on developing local communities, but the company didn't really think of itself as an investment business, which was very interesting.

So we had at the time, 280 employees. And I talked to every single employee, one on one, with the same set of questions, including one which was, what is Techstars? What is our business? And not one told me, Techstars is an investment business. And I heard everything.

I heard we're a marketplace, I heard we're a SaaS business. I remember going back to some of the senior leader and be like, so we raise money and we deploy money into early stage startup. We're basically a pre seed investor, right? It's like, yeah, but that's not how we see ourselves. And so the biggest change internally, and that informed a lot of the strategy decision that we took after I joined, was to look at ourselves as an investment business.

Who is there to help founders be successful? The founder is still absolutely critical. Like, we, we live and die for the founder. We take common shares in the company like we are with you in the trenches no matter what. But what we're optimizing for is for you as a founder to be the most successful that you can be.

And sometimes it's going to be painful, but like, remember, nothing worth doing is ever easy. Techstars expects the founders they work with to put in the effort, especially during the initial three month program when they work with mentors, develop networks, and begin connecting with investors. Over 70% of Techstars companies raise capital within three years after the accelerator program, more than any other global accelerator. Successful Techstars grads include zipline, the drone delivery service. Also classpass, which delivers access to the world's largest network of fitness courses.

Jeff Berman
From Birmingham to Minneapolis, from Lagos to Tel Aviv. Techstars operates more than 40 programs around the world, and nearly all of the companies they work with are from outside of Silicon Valley. Talent and ideas are distributed evenly, but opportunities are not. And part of what we're trying to do is to bridge that gap. Not because it's the right thing to do, though it is absolutely the right thing to do, but because it's a good investment case.

Mayle Gavet
The best investors are the one who go and invest in things that everybody else is misunderstanding. And so for us at Techstars, it's a lot about, hey, there is this entire group of founders who are completely overlooked by pretty much everyone else. We think that there is an opportunity there. One of Techstar's key components is mentorship. Miele's own journey is full of mentors, from John Boyd at Priceline, to Robert Rifkin at compass to her grandfather Pierre.

Jeff Berman
And anyone who's had a strong mentor, much less several of them, feels rightly compelled to pay it forward, imparting invaluable life lessons to others. When you think about the wisdom your grandfather imparted and what you've learned in your career, what are you telling CEO's and what are you doing? When you're faced with decisions about when to speak up or when to take a position on something happening in the world? The conversation I usually have with founders is around. Okay, first of all, what are your values?

Mayle Gavet
Not the values of the company, though. When you're the founder, usually the value of the company and your value do tend to overlap, almost like a perfect Venn diagram. But what are the things, where do you draw the line? What are the things that you're okay to do and not okay to do? It's really interesting to see that most people actually have never done the exercise of actually writing, what are the values that they follow in their life?

What are the lines that they are not ready to cross? And also what are the things that they are very comfortable ways, even though maybe the rest of the world is not. And so my conversation with our portfolio companies around this topic always starts with, tell me, what are your values? And write them down for me. Your personal values, your personal values.

Then the next conversation, or the full on to this question is, tell me, what are the values of the company? Usually, again, if it's a founder, they tend to overlap, but not completely. And then I look at the, I help them think about the decision they have to make through that lens. So there are events in the world where your company, in one way or another, is going to be impacted, is going to be linked to, and in that case, you should use this value as a framework about what you want and don't want to say. But if it's a topic that has nothing to do with your business, I generally advise the CEO to not talk about it.

Which doesn't mean that they're not allowed to have their own opinion. But I try to have them separate. The two, because if they do talk about it, it is assumed they're also speaking on behalf of the company. Exactly. Exactly.

And so whatever they say, whatever they do, it basically is a reflection of the company. I think everybody at tech surge, myself included, deeply believes that entrepreneurship is a force of good, sometimes misused, but generally a force of good. And when you empower and support entrepreneurs, you create a better civil society, you create a better economic environment, you create jobs, you create everything that makes the life of everyone better.

Jeff Berman
May Elgive's journey demonstrates the importance of having a strong support system as an entrepreneur, looking for opportunities in overlooked communities and maintaining an unwavering set of principles. By sticking to what we know to be right and true, we not only do better in business, we do better in life. If that isn't motivation, I don't know what is. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.

And now a final word from our brand partner, capital one business.

Aparna Saran
Throughout the day, text messages and emails kept pouring in. Whatever you need, just let us know. We're back one more time with Aparna Saran of Capital one business. She was telling us about a Sunday morning email she fired off in a moment of panic. Minutes later, her inbox was overflowing and the support she found wasn't just emotional, it was practical.

We talked about detailed contingency plans and we created our go to market strategy before we are in full rollout mode. We had stage gates so that we could test and quickly learn and iterate. And within a matter of six months, as we were rolling things out channel by channel, those stage gates would allow us to pivot if we saw something that we didnt like. That day, Aparna learned a lesson that stayed with her having multiple plan BS doesnt just expand your options, it gives you new opportunities. The best way to pivot is actually open doors for thoughtful conversations, because humility in knowing that you actually dont know everything, as well as the empathy in knowing that disruption is always drastic and abrupt, helps you go through that pivot with other people in a very different way.

Capital one business is proud to support entrepreneurs and leaders working to scale their impact from Fortune five hundred s to first time business owners. For more resources to help drive your business forward, visit capitalone.com businesshub. That's Capitalone.com businesshub.

Masters of Scale is a weight watt original our executive producer is Eve Tro. The production team includes Chris Ota, Tucker Ligursky, Masha Makutanina, and Brandon Klein. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is lital Milad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our email newsletter.