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Insights on Pursuing Your Passion with Mark Frank, SonderMind Founder and CEO image

Insights on Pursuing Your Passion with Mark Frank, SonderMind Founder and CEO

S1 E5 ยท The Kickstart Podcast
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6 Plays4 years ago

If you've ever wondered whether that passion project really is entrepreneurial gold worth fighting for or a hobby that should just stay in your garage, this episode is for you. This episode hosts Mark Frank, Founder & CEO of SonderMind and Investor Curt Roberts, Partner at Kickstart and will explore:

How to decide if your idea is worth pursuing as a companyWhy passion is necessary for a startupHow to highlight company vision in a pitchThe importance of listening to your gut when making hires

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Transcript

Should passion projects become businesses?

00:00:00
Speaker
If you've ever wondered whether that passion project really is entrepreneurial gold worth fighting for or a hobby that should just stay in your garage, this episode is for you.

Introduction to 'Perfect Pitch' Podcast

00:00:10
Speaker
Today, we talk with CEO and founder Mark Frank of Sondermind and investor Kurt Roberts to give you both sides of a perfect pitch.
00:00:25
Speaker
What is Perfect Pitch, you ask?
00:00:27
Speaker
Well, it's a podcast from Kickstart that reveals the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
00:00:34
Speaker
Whether it's uncovering what everyone's thinking during a startup pitch or digging into exactly how entrepreneurs have managed their first major roadblock, Perfect Pitch is an honest, quick, and tactical guide to help you on your startup journey.

Meet Investor Kurt Roberts

00:00:48
Speaker
I'm your host, Karen Zelnick, and I'm excited to introduce you to today's guests.
00:00:53
Speaker
First, our investor, Kurt Roberts from Kickstart.
00:00:56
Speaker
He's a former CEO and Nike exec.
00:00:58
Speaker
And Kurt, how many pairs of shoes do you have at this point?
00:01:01
Speaker
Oh, 200 and something.
00:01:03
Speaker
Two closets plus a good portion of the garage.
00:01:05
Speaker
I personally just really think you can't have too many shoes, Kurt, just like you can't have too many hobbies.
00:01:10
Speaker
Besides his investment focus on consumer products, health tech, ed tech, and general B2B SaaS in the West, Kurt is also crazy about cycling, skiing, photography, and collecting rare antiquarian books.
00:01:22
Speaker
That's true.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I've seen his photography.
00:01:25
Speaker
His photography is amazing.
00:01:26
Speaker
So I think he should have a website up, but that's just me.

Meet Entrepreneur Mark Frank

00:01:30
Speaker
And then our CEO is Mark Frank.
00:01:33
Speaker
He's the CEO and co-founder of Sondermind, which is redesigning behavioral health to be more accessible, approachable, and utilized.
00:01:40
Speaker
You were an army officer for five years, is that correct?
00:01:43
Speaker
And you earned the Bronze Star during your time in Iraq?
00:01:47
Speaker
Yes.
00:01:48
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:01:48
Speaker
Anything else that I missed or that you'd like to cover?
00:01:50
Speaker
I suffered through a couple of years of investment banking with the Morgan Stanley.
00:01:55
Speaker
Okay.
00:01:56
Speaker
And...
00:01:59
Speaker
That's right.
00:02:00
Speaker
I had a tour of duty in the army and then a tour of duty post-business school.
00:02:04
Speaker
Thank you.
00:02:05
Speaker
Well, thanks for joining us both of you.
00:02:07
Speaker
And if you want to know more about Kurt or Mark or Sondermind, we'll have more info on our show notes at kickstartfund.com.

The Birth of Sondermind

00:02:14
Speaker
So let's just dive right into the discussion.
00:02:17
Speaker
Mark, I'd love to know what inspired the passion behind Sondermind?
00:02:21
Speaker
Like, why did you start the company?
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, so the founding story is an interesting one.
00:02:26
Speaker
I was running my first startup, my first company, which was a radiation oncology company treating patients with brain tumor, lung cancer, prostate cancer.
00:02:35
Speaker
And we were a management service organization as well called Next Oncology.
00:02:39
Speaker
And in the midst of that, the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, had been passed.
00:02:44
Speaker
And there was a lot of change going on in healthcare.
00:02:47
Speaker
But besides that, I was viewing my younger sister as a mental health provider and
00:02:52
Speaker
go into private practice.
00:02:54
Speaker
While she brought with her some clients, she was ultimately really dismayed at how difficult it was for her to start her practice, to continue to grow it, and build her client base and deal with all the administrative hurdles and things like that.
00:03:07
Speaker
And so I had this nugget in the back of my head.
00:03:09
Speaker
I had, like I mentioned, I was running Nexoncology.
00:03:12
Speaker
I had started Safe Image MD, which was the second company on the side at the time.
00:03:16
Speaker
And so I didn't have the bandwidth to sort of
00:03:18
Speaker
I'm trying another thing, but I had this sort

Challenges in Mental Healthcare

00:03:21
Speaker
of nugget of an idea.
00:03:21
Speaker
Fast forward a few years and I was in the space of needing to find a therapist.
00:03:28
Speaker
and went on the insurance directory, looked for a provider and put it in my zip code and put it in behavioral health provider and check the box because there was a little box that says accepting new patients and out puffs the list.
00:03:41
Speaker
I go, great.
00:03:41
Speaker
I'll just go with the first one and call her.
00:03:45
Speaker
She doesn't answer.
00:03:46
Speaker
I leave a message.
00:03:47
Speaker
I wait a few days.
00:03:48
Speaker
I don't get a call back.
00:03:49
Speaker
And so I call again and leave another message.
00:03:53
Speaker
We had a couple more days.
00:03:53
Speaker
Don't get a call back.
00:03:54
Speaker
Call the next person on the list.
00:03:56
Speaker
Same thing.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, I believe somebody I'm talking to.
00:03:59
Speaker
But the answer is, actually, I'm not taking clients anymore.
00:04:02
Speaker
And you know, the next one was like, I don't deal with those issues or whatever.
00:04:05
Speaker
I'm not in that office space anywhere.
00:04:07
Speaker
I'm now I'm now another part of town and just on and on it went.
00:04:10
Speaker
And it was so frustrating.
00:04:11
Speaker
And I remember thinking at the time, like, thank God I'm not, you know, in a place where it's like crisis.
00:04:17
Speaker
Right.
00:04:17
Speaker
And I remember thinking this is this was just so challenging.
00:04:20
Speaker
And oh, by the way, I knew the insurance system.
00:04:22
Speaker
Like we were a contracted provider.
00:04:24
Speaker
I had a billing manager and people in my company that dealt with insurance.
00:04:27
Speaker
I mean, I knew this better than the average bear.
00:04:30
Speaker
And it was still difficult for me.
00:04:32
Speaker
And even beyond that, you know, when we finally started seeing a therapist, the therapist was great.
00:04:37
Speaker
The clinical care was amazing.
00:04:39
Speaker
But the experience around it was still challenging.
00:04:41
Speaker
And I just kept thinking, why is this so hard for this really, really important facet of our healthcare system?
00:04:50
Speaker
And then I started thinking more about my sister's side.
00:04:54
Speaker
And, well, wow, they're struggling too.
00:04:56
Speaker
It's like you peel the onion and you peel the onion and you start going, wow, this really is a problem.
00:05:01
Speaker
And that's where it was like, there's a structural inefficiency in how we've been
00:05:07
Speaker
Dealing with mental health and behavioral health for the past 30 years, where ultimately there's this opportunity to kind of solve both sides of the equation.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, I love that you can just sense how passionate you are about solving this issue.
00:05:19
Speaker
Kurt, as an investor, was that passion clearly evident when you first met Mark?
00:05:23
Speaker
And is that one of the reasons that you were interested in the company and interested in looking and investing in it?
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, we really love entrepreneurs that have some sense of a cause behind what they're doing.

Investing in Passionate Entrepreneurs

00:05:34
Speaker
And there are some times where those causes are things that most people wouldn't particularly care about, where the cause is interesting to the individual starting the company, but wouldn't be interesting to most people.
00:05:44
Speaker
This was a case where not only was it a cause for Mark,
00:05:48
Speaker
But it's something that everybody should care that it works better and that organizations do a good job of making health care in a behavioral health setting more accessible, more approachable, better utilized and higher quality.
00:06:03
Speaker
And these were things that we saw in Mark and Mark's team that really drew us to the company.
00:06:08
Speaker
And there might be people listening who want to start a company, but they don't feel as much passion around their startup.
00:06:14
Speaker
So is that necessary?
00:06:16
Speaker
I can go first if you want, Karen.
00:06:18
Speaker
I think it is.
00:06:20
Speaker
I may have a different feeling about this than some investors, but I think it's a given that an entrepreneur is going to be someone who has a very high work ethic that is willing to work through obstacles, is willing to fight through difficulties, you know,
00:06:37
Speaker
not take no for an answer, those kinds of characteristics are a given.
00:06:41
Speaker
What's different about someone who has a significant passion about their startup is that that person ultimately defines himself or herself by the problem they're trying to solve.
00:06:55
Speaker
And I think in the worst of times, that's what gets that person through.
00:07:00
Speaker
I remember an experience when Mark and I were getting close to finishing

Mark's Commitment to Sondermind

00:07:05
Speaker
our funding round.
00:07:06
Speaker
We weren't quite ready to close yet.
00:07:08
Speaker
And I remember Mark telling me, and he's an extremely open person, which is something that I really admire.
00:07:14
Speaker
I remember him telling me that he was basically asking all of his staff to skip pay periods and to cut salaries and
00:07:22
Speaker
so that the company could make it through to the time when we would actually fund.
00:07:27
Speaker
That's the kind of thing, I think, that differentiates between someone who really cares about the thing they're trying to solve versus the person who just wants to be an entrepreneur.
00:07:39
Speaker
That's a difference that matters.
00:07:41
Speaker
I think that's very insightful.
00:07:42
Speaker
Mark, do you have thoughts on that too?
00:07:45
Speaker
I do.
00:07:46
Speaker
I think I would agree with everything Kurt said.
00:07:49
Speaker
And I would say that
00:07:51
Speaker
It's not necessarily the case, in my opinion, that you'd be passionate about the specific problem.
00:07:57
Speaker
I believe you have to have a real reason of why you're oriented towards solving the problem you're solving.
00:08:02
Speaker
But I also think that you can create your own passion from a kernel of initial passion.
00:08:07
Speaker
So you can build upon it.
00:08:09
Speaker
I used to have this idea that entrepreneurs always had this, you know, the light bulb kind of idea.
00:08:14
Speaker
And it was like, and then that just became their driving force.
00:08:17
Speaker
For at least for me, more often it's been this like,
00:08:20
Speaker
It builds and builds.
00:08:21
Speaker
And then at a certain point, you're like, oh, my God, like this is just the light bulb is more of the building in your face.
00:08:27
Speaker
And for me, that happened in 2013, 2014.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, I just want to maybe expand on that, though, Mark.
00:08:34
Speaker
There's an investor that I worked with significantly earlier in my career when I was just investing my own personal money and I wasn't part of Kickstart.
00:08:41
Speaker
So this was not my profession.
00:08:43
Speaker
And I didn't really know what I was doing.
00:08:45
Speaker
And I was talking to this guy who's done a lot of investing before.
00:08:49
Speaker
And he said to me once something that's never left my mind.
00:08:52
Speaker
He said, every startup goes through at a minimum two near-death experiences.
00:08:58
Speaker
When I heard him say that, I thought, okay, what gives an entrepreneur the drive
00:09:04
Speaker
to get past the first one and past the second one and possibly past additional ones that might go beyond that point.

The Role of Passion in Startups

00:09:12
Speaker
And if you're someone who just has three to four great ideas of companies that might be started, you might decide, hey, this one, honestly, we gave it our best shot.
00:09:24
Speaker
Let's move on.
00:09:25
Speaker
I've got another one that's really great.
00:09:27
Speaker
Right.
00:09:27
Speaker
And what intrigued me about your story in this one is that you had very, very personal experiences in your own family life that that spoke to me in a way that said, Mark will not give up until this is done.
00:09:45
Speaker
That made a big difference in my interest in kickstart investing in your company, especially given that when we started, at least, there were some complications in how the company was set up and some things we had to solve.
00:09:58
Speaker
And so I knew it was going to be a longer, more involved process to finish an investment than it might be with some companies.
00:10:05
Speaker
And that kind of gave me the drive to want to do that with you.
00:10:08
Speaker
I think that's fair.
00:10:09
Speaker
I'm a non-professional angel investor as well.
00:10:13
Speaker
And I haven't done much angel investing in the past three or four years.
00:10:19
Speaker
But for a little bit, I was making two or three investments a year.
00:10:22
Speaker
And the ones that have been successful marry with what you're saying, where there's some level of personal passion.
00:10:30
Speaker
I loved that.
00:10:30
Speaker
I loved that back and forth.
00:10:31
Speaker
And I think that was a really insightful discussion for those that are listening.
00:10:34
Speaker
And I think the next question I have then is, what is the litmus test?
00:10:38
Speaker
Or is there even a litmus test when passion will work to build a great company?
00:10:42
Speaker
Or if it should just stay a hobby or a garage project?
00:10:45
Speaker
Because Kurt, I'm sure that there have been people that have come and pitched to you and it's like, they're not going to give up on this, but it's also not a great startup idea.
00:10:53
Speaker
So what's the litmus test?
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:56
Speaker
Well, what I would say is that every company that we wish to invest in has to pass certain tests of being an attractive opportunity.
00:11:05
Speaker
The market has to be big enough.
00:11:07
Speaker
The solution has to be significantly better than anything currently available.
00:11:11
Speaker
There are all those things that you could read in any book or in any blog that would say, this is a company worth investing in.
00:11:19
Speaker
There's something about listening to that founder tell their story that gives you a sense that the person has some larger idea in mind on the assumption that it passes all the rest of the tests, right?
00:11:34
Speaker
We see probably 500

Overcoming Pitch Challenges

00:11:37
Speaker
startups per year and we fund less than 1% of those.
00:11:42
Speaker
And so for us, those small differences on the margin,
00:11:48
Speaker
make all the difference in whether we want to join that entrepreneur for the journey.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think so passion isn't always enough.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's not always enough.
00:12:00
Speaker
Everything else is a given.
00:12:02
Speaker
For me, it's that passion, that cause element is that small thing on the margin that says, okay, I am more willing to take this risk than I would be if that were not there.
00:12:15
Speaker
And now I want to segue a little bit because Kurt, you mentioned something earlier about like the initial journey with Sondermind being a little bit rough in the beginning.
00:12:23
Speaker
So it's not like it was like you found your passion.
00:12:25
Speaker
We knew it was a good idea.
00:12:26
Speaker
And then it was like smooth sailing.
00:12:28
Speaker
Could you both talk a little bit about what that was like for each of you on the beginning of the relationship there?
00:12:35
Speaker
From my perspective, Mark had immediate credibility coming into Pitch Kickstart because he was a classmate of Gavin Christensen, who's the founder of our fund.
00:12:45
Speaker
And so he had an advantage walking in the door.
00:12:49
Speaker
There were two things I saw after hearing the pitch, besides the fact that I thought it was a really interesting opportunity, that were two things that I knew we would have to deal with.
00:12:58
Speaker
One is the pitch itself was not great.
00:13:02
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:13:03
Speaker
Mark did a great job.
00:13:05
Speaker
I don't argue it.
00:13:06
Speaker
But you were very passionate.
00:13:08
Speaker
But honestly, the pitch itself had way too much content in it, and there was no clear story, and it was kind of muddled, and it meandered around.
00:13:17
Speaker
And, you know, most of the time for me, that's a sign that says, hey, this person might have trouble raising money, and maybe that's enough of a sign alone that we shouldn't fund.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:28
Speaker
In Mark's case, I suspected there was more to the story.
00:13:31
Speaker
And so it didn't feel to me like something that should be that I should ignore.
00:13:36
Speaker
The second thing was that Sanderman had started as both a real estate and a software company.
00:13:43
Speaker
And we had no interest in being part of a real estate company.
00:13:48
Speaker
So I had a decision to make early.
00:13:50
Speaker
Do I want to start a conversation with Mark about the difficult process of separating these two companies and figuring out how the ownership of those two will put us in a position where we can align our interests behind the software company?
00:14:03
Speaker
Sonner Mind understood that therapists oftentimes practice out of their living rooms.
00:14:09
Speaker
They don't have places where they can do private practice.
00:14:12
Speaker
And so the idea was to create a WeWork for mental health therapists.
00:14:17
Speaker
Great idea, right?
00:14:19
Speaker
I think it's a brilliant idea.
00:14:21
Speaker
We didn't want to fund that idea.
00:14:23
Speaker
We wanted to be behind the software company.
00:14:25
Speaker
Since those two were in a single organization, we had to make the decision of whether we wanted to invest the time to work with Mark to figure out whether those two could be separated and if Mark was willing to go there and go through the hard steps to get to that outcome.
00:14:40
Speaker
Mark, what was that like for you?
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, so similarly, my co-founder Sean and I had started the business with Mark.
00:14:48
Speaker
again, addressing this bigger problem.
00:14:50
Speaker
And the way we started it to current point was this kind of we work for therapy model.
00:14:55
Speaker
And actually, to add another complication around making it less VC backable, we structured it as a franchisor.
00:15:06
Speaker
The specific locations, generally speaking, would be owned by franchisees, which is, I still believe, is a great way to fund a capital-intensive business.
00:15:16
Speaker
It is.
00:15:17
Speaker
It's true.
00:15:17
Speaker
It is.
00:15:18
Speaker
But one that almost to a T, venture capitalists do not back.
00:15:25
Speaker
And so Kurt and I started really engaging in the time when, you know, we were just before we had legally separated, but we hadn't started the operational separation.
00:15:34
Speaker
And that took, you know, that took about a year, a little less than a year.
00:15:37
Speaker
You know, half of that time was post-Kickstart's initial investment.
00:15:42
Speaker
And so it was a step-by-step process.
00:15:45
Speaker
But it was this realization that while these two problems, they are definitely synergistic, they are also very different in terms of the type of capital that's needed, the ability to scale, and then just the people.
00:16:00
Speaker
I mean, that's one of the most important things in building a company is bringing the right people on board.
00:16:04
Speaker
And so the type of people you would recruit and hire...
00:16:07
Speaker
for building a mental health marketplace that's focusing on working with insurance companies and things like that and health systems.
00:16:15
Speaker
Those are very different people, generally speaking, than who you'd necessarily want to hire for a franchise or that is a WeWork for Therapists kind of offering.
00:16:24
Speaker
That was one of the areas where it was super helpful to have
00:16:29
Speaker
Kurt involved in that because there was an outsider point of view that was able to say, hey, have you thought about this?
00:16:36
Speaker
Have you thought about that in terms of how are you going to operationalize this splitting of the company?

Painting the Company's Future

00:16:44
Speaker
Thank you.
00:16:44
Speaker
So this has been really enlightening.
00:16:46
Speaker
And now what I want to ask both of you, because I think the people listening would love to know, what is something you wish you'd understood and known at the beginning of this pitch process?
00:16:54
Speaker
What do you wish you could go back and tell your earlier self, Mark?
00:16:57
Speaker
One of the things was to do a better job painting the picture.
00:17:02
Speaker
I was raising money in the midst of a transition.
00:17:06
Speaker
You're always in transition as a startup, but when you're literally in transition of completely changing the organization, it wasn't a pivot, but it was like, Hey, we have, you know, 3% of our revenue is the business that Kickstarter ended up backing.
00:17:21
Speaker
And 97% of the revenue is the thing we're getting rid of.
00:17:24
Speaker
We're like separating out.
00:17:25
Speaker
And so yeah,
00:17:27
Speaker
Trying to speak to that, what I could have done a better job of was really painting the vision.
00:17:31
Speaker
This is what it will look like.
00:17:33
Speaker
This is what, you know, as opposed to focusing on here's what it looks like now is what you're going to invest in is the thing that it's going to look like in six months, in a year, in a year and a half.
00:17:44
Speaker
I think I could have done a better job of that.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:47
Speaker
Kurt, do you agree?
00:17:48
Speaker
Yeah, I do.
00:17:50
Speaker
I would say entrepreneurs are always put in a difficult spot in the sense that they oftentimes get conflicting advice.
00:17:59
Speaker
I was on the phone with an entrepreneur this morning who's
00:18:03
Speaker
pitched us on his idea.
00:18:05
Speaker
And it's a really interesting idea.
00:18:07
Speaker
And I talked to him about the size of the investment round he was trying to raise.
00:18:11
Speaker
And I gave him some thoughts about how I would think about that.
00:18:14
Speaker
His comment to me as soon as I talked to him was, that's exactly the opposite of what other people told me.
00:18:21
Speaker
This is not an uncommon problem.
00:18:24
Speaker
And I think here's what each person that's starting a company and building a company has to decide.

Trust in Entrepreneur-Investor Relationships

00:18:33
Speaker
At some point, that person decides that he or she wants to cast their lot with someone that they feel can help them build the company together.
00:18:43
Speaker
And in Mark's case, that was a non-trivial choice because not only was he separating this real estate company from the software company, but I was asking him to make some very significant changes in the ownership structure of both of those.
00:18:58
Speaker
that with this co-founder, that they would shift stock between each other.
00:19:02
Speaker
And I knew those conversations would be incredibly sensitive and that those would have to happen before we actually close the investment.
00:19:10
Speaker
So I knew Mark was really placing a lot of faith in me that we weren't going to just ask him to do all these hard things and then bail.
00:19:20
Speaker
you know, at the last minute.
00:19:22
Speaker
That kind of a sense of your partner from an investor to the entrepreneur and from the entrepreneur to the investor is something that I think gets established relatively early in the relationship and it shapes everything that happens thereafter.
00:19:37
Speaker
And I think once that trust is established, really great things can happen.
00:19:42
Speaker
But lacking that trust, it's incredibly difficult to navigate that journey.
00:19:46
Speaker
Thank you both.
00:19:47
Speaker
I think those are some really amazing insights.
00:19:49
Speaker
And for those of you who are listening, hopefully you're taking notes and you'll come back to this episode and listen to it on repeat.
00:19:55
Speaker
Mark, I did want to close with a question to you.
00:19:58
Speaker
And again, for those listening, take some notes because Kurt has often described Mark as one of the best CEOs out there.
00:20:05
Speaker
So Mark, I would love to know if you could go back to your first yourself, back to your first startup, now that you've done four, what is something you would tell yourself about the process of entrepreneurship?

Insights on Hiring

00:20:15
Speaker
Wow.
00:20:16
Speaker
Listening to your gut, particularly around people, particularly around hires.
00:20:21
Speaker
To hire the right person, you have to spend the appropriate time to define what it is you're really looking for.
00:20:28
Speaker
And there's a great book called The A Method of Hiring or something to that effect that actually lays it out pretty well.
00:20:36
Speaker
But just in summary, it's make sure that you know that
00:20:42
Speaker
exactly what the problem is you're trying to solve.
00:20:43
Speaker
And I often coach some of my team members around, hey, it's great to think about what's the problem you need to solve now.
00:20:48
Speaker
When you're in a startup, it's like,
00:20:51
Speaker
There's a million problems to solve.
00:20:52
Speaker
So you can think of, I need to hire somebody to do X, Y, and Z because we need that done in the next three to six months.
00:20:58
Speaker
But typically, when you're hiring somebody, you're not thinking about that they're only going to be there for three to six months.
00:21:02
Speaker
You're thinking they're going to be there, and the more senior, the more important this is, you're thinking they're going to be there for two, three, four, five years.
00:21:09
Speaker
And so it's defining what does success in this role look like a year and a half out?
00:21:14
Speaker
And not just success, not just meeting the bar, but
00:21:18
Speaker
If I could just come up with the best, the absolute best person to fill this role, and how would they be the best at it?
00:21:26
Speaker
And then work backwards from that and shoot for that goal.
00:21:30
Speaker
That's going to do a lot for you in the hiring process.
00:21:34
Speaker
And then once you've hired somebody, the adage is often hire slow, fire fast, right?
00:21:40
Speaker
And that's something that I think you have to really, as an entrepreneur in a fascinating organization, you have to take to heart.
00:21:45
Speaker
Firing doesn't necessarily mean firing from the company.
00:21:47
Speaker
I want to make that clear.
00:21:48
Speaker
Sometimes you could hire the right person.
00:21:49
Speaker
They could be a great cultural fit and you put them in the wrong job.
00:21:52
Speaker
You put them in the wrong spot.
00:21:54
Speaker
So it's on you as the leader to make sure that you find the right role for them.
00:21:57
Speaker
So fire them from their current job, find another job for them in your company.
00:22:01
Speaker
We've done that with a number of very successful middle-level people in our company where we just didn't put them in the right place for success, but it boils down to for the entrepreneur,
00:22:11
Speaker
This is your vision.
00:22:12
Speaker
And you know better than anybody else, especially in the early days, what success looks like.
00:22:17
Speaker
And just trust it.
00:22:19
Speaker
If you're pretty certain that somebody is not the right fit, you have to make that call because it's really, really hard.
00:22:24
Speaker
But if you don't do that, the organization is going to suffer just materially.
00:22:30
Speaker
And you can't be afraid of making those hard decisions.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, I love that.
00:22:34
Speaker
I love that this speaks so much to your passion.
00:22:36
Speaker
Like we were talking about earlier, it permeates every aspect of it.
00:22:39
Speaker
It's not just the vision of the company, but it's your vision for the people in the company and hiring from the gut.
00:22:44
Speaker
And I love that.
00:22:45
Speaker
Thank you.
00:22:46
Speaker
And Kurt, did you have any thoughts on that?
00:22:48
Speaker
It's funny, to what Mark said, early in my career, I made the transition.

Building a Strong Team

00:22:52
Speaker
He made the transition from army to investment banking and
00:22:56
Speaker
back to managing teams and people.
00:22:59
Speaker
You know, I went from essentially nothing to a consulting position where you have responsibility for nothing other than trying to appear smart into managing a bunch of people.
00:23:10
Speaker
And in my case, it was hundreds of people.
00:23:12
Speaker
And I was scared out of my wits.
00:23:15
Speaker
And what I learned fairly quickly was that more than anything else, the key to my success in doing that was going to be in the people that were one layer below me.
00:23:26
Speaker
That if I got those people right, so many other things would take care of themselves.
00:23:32
Speaker
And I think Mark has done that very, very much at Sondermind.
00:23:38
Speaker
I don't just love great CEOs.
00:23:39
Speaker
I love great CEOs that hire for strength underneath them.
00:23:43
Speaker
And I think within the 90-plus companies that we have supported at Kickstart,
00:23:50
Speaker
The balance of the quality of people at one layer below Mark is among the best we have top five easily.
00:23:58
Speaker
And, you know, that solves so many problems underneath because great people figure out the solutions to big problems.
00:24:05
Speaker
So much can be solved by doing that right.

Reflections on Passion and Teamwork

00:24:08
Speaker
I totally agree with Mark.
00:24:10
Speaker
Well, Kurt, I think there's no better way to sum up this whole podcast on passion and coming together.
00:24:15
Speaker
And I know it's been something that I'm going to be thinking of.
00:24:17
Speaker
And I wasn't even joking.
00:24:18
Speaker
I will listen to this episode on repeat, even though I was part of recording this episode.
00:24:22
Speaker
There were a lot of great takeaways for me.
00:24:23
Speaker
So thank you both so much for being here and joining us today and sharing your insights.
00:24:28
Speaker
Thank you, Karen.
00:24:29
Speaker
Thank you.
00:24:30
Speaker
And of course, thank you for listening as we dive deep into what it takes to create the perfect pitch.
00:24:35
Speaker
If you want to learn more about our investor, Kurt Roberts from Kickstart or our CEO, Mark Frank, and what he and his incredible team are doing at Sondermine to make mental health care more functional, we'll have a link to the company and a longer bio in our show notes at kickstartfund.com slash perfect pitch.
00:24:51
Speaker
We'll be back next time with more insights from entrepreneurs and the investors who fund them.
00:24:55
Speaker
So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.