The taste of a banana

A few days ago I was talking with an investor here in San Francisco.

Somewhere in the middle he said something about the field I work in. It was beside the point. Then he told me it was our biggest mistake. Not as a question. He said it like a fact.

I didn't argue with the point. I asked him three questions instead.

Have you ever sold software to an enterprise? No.

Have you ever put an agent inside a company and let it do real work? No.

Have you ever sat inside a company while it changed the way it works? No.

So I asked him where the comment was coming from. What knowledge, what experience. He backed off right away. Sorry, he said, I didn't mean it like that.

I believed him. I'm still thinking about it.

What I am not complaining about

I'm not blaming him for not understanding what we do. Very few people do in the first hour. That's normal, and fixing it is my job, not his. If he had said I don't follow this, explain it again, that would have been a good meeting.

The problem was a different one. He had an opinion on something he had never touched, and he said it with full confidence and nothing underneath.

And I have to be fair here. I do the same thing. I have opinions about industries I have never worked in, and sometimes I say them out loud, to people who work in those industries. So I know this from the inside.

But I was in the room too. If he walked out with the wrong picture, some of that picture came from me.

Describing a banana

Try to describe the taste of a banana to someone who has never eaten one.

You can say it's sweet. You can say it's soft. You start comparing it with other fruits, and that is the whole trick, because every word you have points at something they have already eaten. If they haven't eaten anything close, the words land on nothing.

He had never eaten the banana. He told me it tasted bad.

The same thing happens with a customer, with a partner, with anyone you need to be understood by. You can be as good at your work as you want. You can explain it as well as you want. What matters in the end is not what you did or what you said. It's what the other person understood.

Simple is half the job

There's a piece of advice every founder hears. Anyone should be able to understand what you do at a very simple level.

I agree with it. But it's half the job, and people treat it like the whole thing.

Because nobody in these meetings is actually trying to learn my job. An investor wants to know how big this gets and whether it scales. A customer wants to know what it is worth to him, in his department, with his people. Those are the real questions, and a simple explanation of what I do doesn't answer either of them.

Simple doesn't give a person a taste they never had. If he has eaten a mango, I have somewhere to start.

The hour we talked about something else

Here is the rule I follow now. I do not start a meeting before I know what the person across from me has already eaten.

In practice it's a few questions before the real ones. What he has seen. What he has built or bought before. Who sat in this chair before me, and what they promised him. It takes a few minutes, and it changes everything I say after.

I got this from a customer, a while before I had any rule.

He ran a company and knew nothing about AI. So I did what I always did back then. I sat across the table from him and started explaining how much this would change the way his company works. What it does inside a department. What happens to a process. Where the people go. I was maybe five minutes in and I had a lot more ready.

Then he asked me a question. It had nothing to do with anything I had said. The question is his, so I'm leaving it out. What I can say is that it was about him, and you could see it was the thing he actually wanted to talk about.

So I stopped talking about work. We talked about his question, and about him, for the rest of that hour. I never went back to my explanation. Not that day.

He is a customer today. That's a separate story.

What I still get wrong

I'd like to say I always do this now. I don't.

I still walk into rooms and start describing the taste before I've asked a single question. Usually I catch it around the third sentence. Sometimes I catch it on the way home.