Accountability Coach

I've been meaning to write about the benefits of an accountability coach but Silicon Valley royalty Ryan Hoover has beaten me to the punch with this excellent writeup of his accountability experiment.

This gives me the benefit of being able to piggyback on his findings so herewith my thoughts:

1. Despite the experiment being about accountability, Ryan quickly gets to a tactical bottleneck (hiring). Fine for Ryan (he's an ex-entrepreneur) but for most coaches there's a hard line between whats inside their domain of competence (coaching) and whats outside (tactics). I believe the best coaches for founders are ex-entrepreneurs because the BEST coaches need both the coaching skillset AND the tactical knowledge;

2. I've found coaching solo-founders to be much different from coaching co-founders. I'd be interested to run a similar experiment for co-founders;

3. The $500K ARR number speaks mostly to Ryan's reach and reputation but there's evidently latent demand;

4. The person that says they'd pay $30/month! - I suspect some folk are just not open to the idea of paying for accountability. I wager that the percentage of those people will decrease over the time and that in (say) 20 years, accountability will be as common as (say) health, financial or legal support;

5. I'm not surprised that Ryan found some founders to be seasoned (one at $20m ARR). I've found open mindedness and the desire to improve are the main drivers for coaching, not scale;

6. Wrt hiring I will say this; there must always be a reason why a talented person would join your company. The precise reason doesn't really matter (or at least can vary from startup to startup) but it'll probably somehow relate to some sense of respect and status (mission, freedom, money, prestige, travel, intellectual curiosity, difficulty) and you should probably know which of these it is;

7. I totally agree with Ryan's point about having an outsider on your side. As I wrote in the TMA launch post, the relationship between founder and investor is complex and it leads to difficulty being yourself for fear of being judged/graded. But the outsider MUST be trusted, if they can't be trusted then the same problem of inauthenticity will emerge;

8. I promise never to share music with founders even if they request it;

9. I will take the opposite bet to the point about AI. I wager that as AI becomes ubiquitous, people will crave human connection more than ever. This is an area where people will win.

If you'd like to put me to the test I will offer founder or co-founding teams 3 coaching sessions, after which if you don't see meaningful improvement I will give you your money back.