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Lessons - Core Values Drive Success | David Hauser - Startup Culture Architect ($175M Exit) · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore the role of mindfulness and entrepreneurship and how extreme
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  focus can be a superpower. Learn why high achievers often take an all and nothing approach,
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  and how to channel that intensity for success. Understand how yoga and meditation can enhance
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  decision-making, clarity and resilience, and discover the biggest mistakes founders make when
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  scaling a business. Why is that out of all the different things that you could take on in terms
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  of health and wellness? Is there a particular reason that you seem like a very logical,
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  regimented, uh, process-oriented guy? So like there's a there's a reason why you're doing everything
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  in your life, and this is probably why you've been successful in business, and you've allocated time
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  for your family, and you've built a beautiful family as well, like everything is done very
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  purposefully. So why yoga? Why Pilates? What are the what are the reasons? So so like I've tried
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  all sorts of things, right? Like I did triathlons, I did marathons, and I'm a terrible runner,
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  so just pull this forward like I did those things really because a friend said like you could you
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  can't do it. So I just did it. Um, I think my downfall or maybe, you know, my mom always says that
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  this is one of the things that's bad about me. I think it's one of the good things about me. Like
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  I'm very all-in or nothing, right? Like not just black and white, but like extreme, right? So like
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  take yoga, like I went to a yoga class, or whatever it was, uh, eight, 10 years ago, I'm like I like
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  this. So I went every day the next week. I'm like, okay, I still really like this. So um,
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  then I did a 200 hour teacher training the next month, right? So like pro, pro to 60 very quickly
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  and all in. Um, but really what I found for me was that 60 minutes a day was one of the few times
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  where my brain stopped thinking about other things, right? And I think that that's what we really
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  look for in meditation. And we try so hard. We're like, we have this monkey brain and we just keep
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  thinking and thinking. And as entrepreneurs were like, what's the next thing? What am I doing? What am
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  I concerned about all of these problems? And I find it hard to sit, but in yoga, the movement
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  was the breath gives me the ability to calm the mind and have that not full 60 minutes,
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  but close to 60 minutes every day where I'm not thinking about those other things.
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  I love that. And just just a point, you know, your personality, I think that's a very common
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  personality in highly successful entrepreneurs, high achievers, where they just, it's almost a
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  blessing that that personality is correlated with business building because that same personality
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  of doing things to an extreme is probably not that different from somebody who gets addicted to
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  really bad shit too. You're just focusing that in a more positive way, but it is this like wild
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  obsession. And then it ends up being a very net positive in your life. But there's a certain kind
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  of personality that's like a little bit outside of what I think most people call normal for
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  an entrepreneur to actually commit so much of their life to building this thing and you've done it
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  several times and you work with, you know, tons of different people that build it in your
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  in your portfolio company. So you see it again and again and again and again. But I just think
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  it's an interesting personality quirk and I don't think it's that uncommon. But, you know, I think
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  my parents sometimes say the same thing. Yeah, my mom still doesn't like it. Yeah, people to live with.
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  So my girlfriend probably doesn't like it either. But I think the other thing I noticed too is
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  if I look at some of the best programmers and developers inside of our companies,
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  yeah, similar traits that are applied differently, right? So like they're extremely,
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  you know, connoisseurs of coffee or beer or something, but it is extreme, right? And I think
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  those people also perform the best from a development standpoint because they're just as extreme
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  when it comes to testing, when it comes to what they're actually producing. So
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  finding ways to apply that obsession in a healthy way is probably good for a lot of people.
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  And it comes out in different places, right? Yeah, I think that's 100% on point.
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  You started this mindfulness portion of your life after you were building grasshopper. I'm
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  assuming, right? This is the yoga, the Pilates. Was this at a later stage? Or was this during?
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  It was, but so like if I look back at the history, so when I was building grasshopper at the very early
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  days, I was tremendously unhealthy working, freezing up hours, overweight, eating crappy food.
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  Like that wasn't a priority. I did shift pretty early in that journey, probably call it two years
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  in. I'm like, I remember the day I'm like, you jeans don't fit it yet. I'm like, this is a problem.
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  I don't feel good about it. So I'm going to do something. Yeah. I did a different extreme thing
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  at that time, which was I ran the Boston Marathon from never, never running more than like, you know,
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  outside for fun, right? Like just playing games never have run for a period of time.
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  Train through the winter in Massachusetts and ran the Boston Marathon. Not fast. No, but good for
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  you. And thank God you didn't have the heart attack jumping into something like that.
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  I didn't went out there and said, okay, like, I'm just going to go all in on this. And I started
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  doing graph lines. I did a half Iron Man in Austin. I kept doing those things. So I was able to
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  lose weight and probably be more healthy than before, but I was killing my body. Like that extreme
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  amount of activity was probably not good. I didn't really find yoga and a mindfulness practice
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  until probably two years before I sold grasshopper. So I had more mind space. I'm also really lucky
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  and happy when I found it. It helped me through the sale. Well, I was, I was at this other follow-up
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  question was how does that change your ability to make decisions and how does that change your
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  ability to think and your clarity of thought and your reasoning and your creativity? Because I
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  think that that's a, that's a hack. Like people just, people just go balls to the wall when they're
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  building and like to your point where you let your, your physical, your mental health go, that's
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  pretty unfortunately normal, especially first first time entrepreneurs. And super curious as to
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  how this practice has informed basically everything you built, including that sale grasshopper,
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  which is obviously incredible sale. Talk about that. Then all the other decisions you've made
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  going forward. Yeah. So I think kind of skipping forward in the story a little bit. The grasshopper
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  sale, while very successful, monetarily, we can talk about how we got there and all those things
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  was actually really difficult from a mental and personal perspectives, right? Taking
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  something that I've been building for 12 years and then just being gone, right? Like for 12
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  years, I was the grasshopper guy, right? Like that's what I did. Like you told my family new friends,
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  like, and then I was just gone and losing that part of your identity is really, really hard. And
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  I think without a mindfulness practice, and for me, like that focused time in the morning,
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  I don't know how I would have gotten through it like because their mind just continues to race more
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  and more and more in those scenarios. And that common every day on a routine, I think allowed me
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  to slow down and make better decisions about what am I going to do next? I'm not going to rush into
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  something right away, like things like that, but also to be able to sit with the discomfort,
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  right? Like I think if prior to that, I would just want to run away from it, right? And filled it
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  with something else, a different exercise, you know, a different company, a different thing,
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  right? And filled that gap rather than sitting there with that discomfort and saying, you know what?
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  It's okay to be uncomfortable right now. It's part of this journey and part of this process.
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  Very, very smart. I'm curious. After you, you know, you went through this process and you sort of
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  cleared your mind to a degree for the sale of grasshopper. And if I'm not mistaken, you sold that
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  to Citrix for, this is on record 175 million, correct? That was the, that was the sale price.
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  Is that, yeah, okay, perfect. Okay, so that was a great exit. You built after this,
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  chargeify. That was also acquired by battery ventures. And then you've also invested in,
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  I don't even know how many startups, like I'm sure 50, 60 plus different startups. I've heard
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  that you've invested in a whole bunch of other types of business as well. I heard you on
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  Bradley's podcast talking about a restaurant, you lost money. So you've done a whole bunch of
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  different types of investments. But the question is looking back at how you built a grasshopper.
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  In the last two years, you adopted some super healthy mindset things. And then that probably allowed
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  you to think clearer for the companies that you built after the companies that you invested in after.
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  What would be the, because I don't want to go through the whole grasshopper store, but I would say
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  it's interesting to understand what you did with grasshopper that you probably shouldn't have done.
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  What were the things that after starting chargeify, growing it, exiting that company,
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  working with 50 different founders, what are the lessons now that you tell people like, hey,
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  I did it for 12 years. It didn't have to take 12 years or it could have been way easier.
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  Yeah. So I actually loved that it took 12 years and it should have been easier. But really,
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  what I learned at grasshopper and we built chargeify at grasshopper. It was a lab project. We built
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  all sorts of things. The biggest mistake we ever made was doing this. And it's kind of weird to
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  see that right because chargeify came out of it and was very successful and we exited it. But as a
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  whole, it was a terrible, terrible idea of building these things within grasshopper. Like chargeify
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  was successful. Yes. But there was lots of them that weren't. We wasted a million dollars of capital
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  that we could have invested in the company to do things. We lost our time, the team's time and focus
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  rather than saying like, let's sell more of the thing we're doing. We're like, no, we're going
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  to identify this opportunity. We're going to build this thing where it was terrible, right?
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  I think the most important learning for me from that was besides the distraction,
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  like that was a bad thing. What we really should have understood was we need to be the
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  customer ourselves where we failed every single time is when we said, oh, we're going to
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  identify this market. We think that this market operates this way, this customer operates this
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  way, but we're not the customer, right? And for grasshopper, we worried the customer. We were
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  a small business owner that needed the phone system for chargeify. We built it for ourselves
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  of the building system for us, right? Those that's why it was successful. The things that weren't
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  were different customers with different needs. So then we had to do this like market research,
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  like all these things happen. Yeah, super time consuming, super expensive.
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  links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.