Transcript

Dan Pace (00:00)
Hello Dan Pace with Genuine Technologies with a new guest to explore the personal and unique journey of getting started, whether a business or mission driven purpose Although this journey is both personal and unique, ends up sharing many common themes which we explore in this conversation. So let's get started. So starting a business or a new venture is hard, stressful and emotional.

My guest today, Richard Belsky, the founder of Crivo, a business coaching agency, knows all this all too well. And he uses his past experience from a multitude of things like practicing law, several venture backed startups with a successful exit, and even professional poker, which has been pretty interesting. So Rich combines these skills to help founders find their breakthroughs without breaking down with their mixture of emotions and the vast amounts of unknowns that come with entrepreneurship

I'm a strong supporter of someone that's helping the founder find their way and when I met you, just a few months ago, I knew immediately I had to get you onto this podcast, to, know, deliver some of these messages that could really help out some of the listeners break through without breaking down, as you said. So thank you for being here. And the, first topic I would like to get into is possibly the most interesting that I've found myself.

I've noticed in my own and others businesses through these interviews that they seem to never start from a place of comfort. It's usually from a place of pain, a place of stress, uncertainty, to name a few emotions. Not many are in a good spot, comfortable, and then decide to throw all of that away, all the peace away for that craziness of starting a business. So I'm wondering, do you think there's some truth to that? As in, you almost need some feeling of pain, stress, discomfort to drive you forward into this journey of creating a business.

And also has your business or businesses started like that or similar.

Rich Belsky (01:37)
Well, first off, Dan, thank you so much for having me on. I really love the work you're doing and what you're doing to bring out these important concepts of entrepreneurship. So really appreciate you having me on. That's a great question to start with. I do believe that most startups begin from a place of, I wouldn't necessarily say like pain or trauma, but they're often developed because the entrepreneur finds something wrong.

or something that needs to be fixed. And they're viewing the world from their particular lens, which like, as all of us, we all have our traumas, our triggers, and we see things from the view of that, and we desire to change it and to improve it. Sometimes that comes from a place of trauma or pain. Sometimes that comes from a place of passion. But the way I like to think about it is most entrepreneurs come into their business with a bit of a chip on their shoulder.

to show the world something, to change something, to fix something. And it's powerful. I do think that there's a concept I came across recently, clean energy versus dirty energy. Dirty energy is often that trauma-based entry into entrepreneurship where you're running on this high and this adrenaline of like, prove it. Like, I wanna prove something.

I want to make something happen because something was done to me. And that type of energy can be really powerful, but often can lead to burnout. Once that the realities of entrepreneurship come into play, that energy starts to fade down a little bit. And it can be really hard to carry forward energy that's based in, you know, some sort of negative or extractive purpose. Whereas clean energy,

which I do believe dirty energy can morph into clean energy, Clean energy is that chip on the shoulder, that power and that passion that comes from desiring to see something better in the world and coming to it. maybe initially from a place of dirty energy, but changing that into passion for change. whether it's helping people.

or having people have more fun, do more work, do better work. But to your original question, yeah, I do think that most people come to entrepreneurship with a bit of a chip on their shoulder. And I've had a bunch of different companies over my tenure and a couple of different examples. So my biggest example of clean energy is also the geekiest. My tech startup, Rolltech,

was a tech startup in the bowling industry. And I came to that because I have been a bowler since I was really young and I wanted to have more fun for myself and my community while I was bowling. So developed an app that gathered all of the data from the scoring systems inside of bowling centers, put it into an app. Now this is like 2012, so things were quite different back then.

Dan Pace (04:39)
Okay.

Rich Belsky (04:40)
and created a quantified self app to track your scores, your stats, to play against other people. And then layered a real money gaming network on top of it so that you could be playing for real money like online poker, but using your physical skill. And I came into that space, it was clean energy, but I also had a chip on my shoulder because the industry itself was a bit obstinate and resistant to change. And so I wanted to get in there and be

Dan Pace (05:05)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Belsky (05:08)
like the tip of the spear to effectuate that change in the industry. And the combination of passion and the chip on my shoulder to be able to effectuate that change definitely kept me going. So that was an example of clean energy.

Dan Pace (05:23)
It's kind of like a why almost. I feel like the clean energy, you're

almost saying you have a good why, whereas the negative energy is I just want to show you. I remember seeing all of these posters where you'd see like, they told me I can't, so I did, like that sort of thing. It's like the dirty energy in a way. But yeah, eventually I kind of said this stuff is hard, it's stressful and it's trying. And even when you see some sort of mission that's so clear as day to you that this is a need that market's kind of hesitant to change. And then that's frustrating. And then how do you keep going when you're so damn frustrated in what you love to do?

It's tough thing, right?

Rich Belsky (05:54)
It is and especially in entrepreneurship, right? So one of the primary things I'm working on now, which to your question comes from a place of trauma. My focus of my coaching business is, as you said, working with entrepreneurs and founders. And also my push lately is I want to change the narrative that comes from the investment world. As an investor myself.

deeply ingrained in this community and this world. And often there's this narrative that like investors invest, they expect nine out of 10 startups to fail. And if you fail, so be it. And if you're not cut out as a founder, well, then you weren't cut out as a founder. And I just think that that narrative is misguided. There are so many incredible founders out there.

that come to entrepreneurship with a little bit of that dirty energy or some sort of trauma or trigger that when not properly considered through the entrepreneurial journey causes failure that could be addressed with the proper structures in place earlier. And for me, the deep passion around this area comes from the loss of four community members across my entrepreneurial journey to suicide or drug overdose.

And those hit me really, really hard. One of those, I came up in the Las Vegas ecosystem and Tony Hsieh was a dear friend of mine and my first investor in my company. And it's a tragic story for just an absolutely incredible human being. And I watched the spiral that happened there. And that, in addition to the other friends that I lost, showed me just how challenging

the various phases of entrepreneurial development and leadership development can be, but also how cyclical they are and how if you can identify them and work inside those systems, you can make a real difference in the ability of an entrepreneur to be a great leader and to stay healthy. And so I believe that it's just necessary to think about these things and to understand

Dan Pace (07:45)
Yeah.

Rich Belsky (08:04)
that there are different motivations for coming into the space, but whatever the motivation is, there are tools that you can put into place. There are people that can help support you. And as I said most recently, that investment support can really alleviate or address a lot of the stress and anxiety that founders and entrepreneurs feel.

Dan Pace (08:24)
Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you for sharing that part. mean, that's kind of part of the question. me did. Was there some sort of stress or pain point that really started, you know, your business? And yeah, obviously that kind of was. it's a major portion of why I started this podcast. emotions I was going through to make this work, as you know, put it simply, guess. And I just also seen that.

everyone just about everyone if not everyone went through something similar and then these you know podcasts these interviews have really been showing like it's even though it feels so different so personal so unique it's actually very cyclical and very shared and there's a lot of resources that are you know both making their work to do it like you are or even just people that have been there I mean any business owner knows other business owners it's pretty much impossible not to and if they've been doing this for a while they have some sort of emotions that they've shared that you you're going through as well it's it's

There's a lot more health than you would expect. It's lot less lonely than it feels to actually, it's a way to put it too.

Rich Belsky (09:19)
Yeah, you make it a great point. Loneliness and isolation are two of the top drivers of the mental, spiritual, energetic unwellness of entrepreneurs. And it's not really something that you can understand until you've been through it. Because it seems like, well, talk to your team, talk to your family, talk to your investors. The challenge is, yeah, the entrepreneur is in that situation. And I've been here, you know,

Dan Pace (09:41)
Not our business.

Rich Belsky (09:46)
too many times the name where you're going through one of the cyclical challenges and it can even be after a good thing. Like Paul Graham talks about the trough of sorrow, which is like after a raise coming into that trough where it's like, okay, now we have to scale. Now we have to figure out all the growth issues. We have to hire all of these things that happen after a good one.

Dan Pace (10:08)
the best feeling followed by the worst I have it. Yeah, it's almost like the know, steal that line from Blow the movie. Yeah

Rich Belsky (10:13)
Yeah, right. Exactly.

And so, you know, whatever the cause of it, as you said, there are resources out there and particularly for the loneliness. the challenges, right, the entrepreneur, they don't want to freak their team out. They don't want to seem weak in front of their investors. And to bring it home to the family just compounds the challenge because now you're passing it on to your support system. And in that is

a lot of times shame, which is really deeply powerful and something often felt in the entrepreneurial experience. The number one thing that I have seen to address like the root underlying challenges that are embedded in the journey, particularly with isolation and loneliness is talking to other founders, to other CEOs, which seems challenging, right? You have like IP issues and can it be confidential? And those are, those are, you know, relevant.

But I learned a methodology when I was in Vegas from my mentor whose name was Jody Sherman. Unfortunately, Jody was one of the people that took his own life, which was devastating for our community because while he was teaching these things and the methodology was called Lonely at the Top, which was a circling methodology for other CEOs and founders in the community, deeply powerful for all of us. But Jody was a victim.

of the very thing he was trying to solve, he felt like he had nobody to talk to. His business was going through one of those cycles. His business was called EcoMom. And so, you know, going through one of the cycles of like needing to raise money and not sure how to scale. And he didn't really talk to anybody about it. And he was living in deep isolation, even though he was surrounded by people that cared about him and would have been there to support him. And so it's a foundational piece in my life to remember.

that even though you have people around you, even if you're surrounded by people, if that door isn't open where you feel comfortable sharing with other people, particularly those that are going through what you're going through, you can still dive into that loneliness and depression and isolation. And so it's critically important to find a community, to build a community if you don't have one, and to reach out.

particularly to other founders and CEOs or even those you don't know, and open up dialogue. It's one of the things that I do through my coaching practice is I do circling methodology with founders and CEOs for this very reason. And it's deeply powerful and can really head off a lot of the deep spirals that can happen in that place of loneliness.

Dan Pace (12:46)
Yeah, think having some employees, I guess, that are entrepreneurial in themselves because they can kind of understand what that boss or that executive is going through. can know like why they're going crazy in the head or at least coming off that way. They understand it a lot better than the typical employee. Yeah. So having some of them around that can understand that like you're stressed or even lonely and then maybe kind of be that.

that person to talk to in the team that's always around you that might help a lot. And I feel like that's not everyone, not every business is doing that. Not every business is putting in the, the entrepreneurial staff. And we're just trying to get the people out, be in the seat where they need to take the call and things like that. So yeah, it's a kind of interesting, way to take your business and growth and go and take it back to the investor side of this, the venture investor. I mean, what's the ROI on your founder, you know, leaving the business and then let's say to put it lightly, of course, you're saying leaving the business much more abruptly than that. I mean, the ROI and that's very bad.

So, and that's just the, uh, you know, the most, you know, the farthest you could take that too. So I'm just having that unfocused or the lack of focus or not being able to talk to people, having the, uh, the stress and the emotions that are keeping you from doing what you need to do and doing it as well as you can and as fast as you can, which is the ROI that investor wants. yeah, it all makes sense that the investor should be looking at. Lets just call it the mental health aspect of, being a founder of, of, you know, starting a business.

it sounds like you probably have a lot more you'd want to share on that part, part of that. So yeah, if you want to go and let loose on what the investors, should be including, guess, or why they should be included in some sort of mental health aspect to their founder and to their investment and that it actually drives money, it drives the return

Rich Belsky (14:05)
Sure.

Yeah, great question, Dan. And I will say the investment community is starting to open up a bit more around this topic. You know, the LinkedIn algorithm has caught me and I am seeing so many accelerators, funds, family offices. There's much, much more conversation around this. part of a men's mental health group called the Real Mental Health Foundation. Incredible organization doing great work, it's full.

of entrepreneurs and investors of all types that are focused on the mental health challenge, particularly for men. The research has been harder to come by. It's hard to draw a direct line between founder support and increased ROI. But there is some really interesting research recently out of Harvard Business School. Noam Wasserman, one of the longest tenured professors at Harvard, released a study that

indicates that about 65 % of startups fail due to human dynamics issues. So we're talking founder burnout, isolation, anxiety, communications issues. And this typically happens within the first five years. And so you kind of see that it jives with this 9 out of 10 startups fail in the first five years concept. And so you start doing the math and

You know, nothing is going to solve all 65 % of those startups failing due to the human dynamics issues. But if you can begin to address that, you directly increase success rate. And so with 65%, right? If, if an investor listening to this looks at their portfolio and notices a 65 % leak somewhere, even if theoretical, my guess is that

100 % of them are going to go take a look at that leak and take steps to address it. Right? And so 65 % in addressing that leak.

Dan Pace (16:06)
Yeah, that's significant.

Just seal up

10 % of that, seal up 20 % of that. You're making a major change in your business, yeah.

Rich Belsky (16:16)
huge ROI change. If you could address all of it, you're changing that nine out of 10 startups fail to about three and a half percent or 3.5 startups fail out of 10. And addressing it, it's not rocket science. You know, there are many people out there like me that have chosen to work in a space where of course early stage startups were not doing this because like there's a trillion dollar TAM in there.

Dan Pace (16:22)
Mm-hmm.

Rich Belsky (16:44)
We're doing this, most of us, because we have been in that seat. We understand or have experienced the challenges or seen it in others, and it drives a passion, right? It's that clean energy driven by the initial trigger or traumatic experience to then help grow healthy companies and to model the behavior. so addressing that 65 % is not challenging. There are resources, there are tools, there are coaches, there are so many opportunities to

Spend some resources from your operating capital in most cases a rounding error from the operating capital of a large fund and at least offer the opportunity to have the founders have support and I can tell you, you know in my experience so far It doesn't it's not therapy. It's not medical assistance. Oftentimes it's really good listening really good question asking

some good methodology infusion, and then the application of those things into the daily life of the entrepreneur. And the results, they're immediate. mean, one opportunity to listen to a team member in a way that allows that team member to feel heard can change everything in a company. I've had this experience. Yeah, yeah. And also,

Dan Pace (18:04)
huge. That turns a team

member from passive to like they're actually on and actually wanted to do something that's for the business that they, you know, could change the business, not just like keep it running in the way it's going. Yeah.

Rich Belsky (18:14)
It's a core human need

to feel seen, understood, and heard. But oftentimes CEOs, particularly first time founders and CEOs have this idea of what a CEO is supposed to be. I had a client who was convinced he had to be a wartime CEO all the time, but that wasn't who this guy was in his heart, in his, the rest of his life. And his whole team saw right through it.

saw through that mask and that inauthenticity and he had to face a coup from his team. And we did a lot of great work together and explored his authenticity and the reasons why he was acting and communicating in this way. Did a lot of work around it. And when push came to shove, his team supported him and he beat back the coup. And it just is a testament to how important it is to have

clear view into your motivations, into your responses, and to feel encouraged to go beyond the mask, to go beyond the thing you think you're supposed to be doing, tap into that authenticity, and then express that to the world. It's a concept of power versus force, to use some terminology from Dr. David Hawkins. Power is leading with truth and integrity and consciousness, whereas force,

is often by extractive behavior or aggressive behavior forces like having to come up against something. And that's often where, particularly in communication styles, where leaders run into friction with their teams.

Dan Pace (19:52)
Yeah, that's probably the easier choice to force something in, then find the power to do it in a way. There's two things I wanted to touch on though with what you were saying. From the nonprofit work I used to do, I still do, and some nonprofit conversation I had with Paul Hulse, who a CEO of Just Believe, helps homeless people find housing and a lot of resources.

But we talked about just the power of that conversation, like talking to someone for a half hour or hour about just what's going on and even nothing actually getting done to like solve the problems. makes a huge difference in their perception of everything and that, know, receiver of it all. the point where they can be on their voice and their actions and their activity, like it all changed for them. Just that conversation, just being heard, being seen. It is amazing how much power that has and how also how often

It doesn't happen. How often people don't talk to others or have someone to listen to. I think that's the more important part of it all. I also want to touch on what causes businesses to fail. To break it down as simply as possible. The only way to fail or have a business stop is that person quits the business. There's two. There's one you run out of money, but you can always find more money and come back to it or you quit. And when you quit, that's fine. You're done. You're not coming back to this thing. And what causes people to quit is that burnout or

that, mental exhaustion or that lack of support, even though if it is there and this can't find it or can't develop it or didn't develop it, know, there's, like I said, there's lots of ways that you can do it if you're conscious that it's happening,

Rich Belsky (21:20)
Yeah, that's a great point, Dan. So a couple of things. And I want to be clear, for any venture capitalists out there listening, I am not advocating for the position that founders must have perfect work-life balance. It's not realistic that you would come into being an entrepreneur of a venture-backed company and not work 60 to 80 plus hours a week. It's not trying to avoid that.

Dan Pace (21:22)
Mm-hmm.

No. No.

Rich Belsky (21:49)
It's working efficiently and healthily inside that paradigm. That is what happens. You know, people come in, entrepreneurship, and they're like, my God, like, look at all of this stuff, all of these things I'm responsible for, people's livelihoods, all of that stuff. And that's where the anxiety and pressure starts to build. Why would we not show people how to operate better in that paradigm?

I like to use the athlete analogy. Like athletes all the way down to high school have support. They have trainers, they have coaches, and then you come up into collegiate and professional, right? You look at professional athletes. they're trained to get their muscles strong. They're coached by a cadre of coaches. And then when there are challenges on the wellness side,

there are therapists and doctors to support them. And they are people that have millions of dollars invested in them. So it's not even questioned that, of course, they're going to have support, right? But what's the difference between a plus, a million dollar athlete and a startup founder that an investor puts a million dollars into or $10 million into? Yeah, I found it. I find it so interesting that

You can spend weeks in a data room doing due diligence on a company and financials and structure and how much time is spent doing diligence on the human side, the operating system behind the entire company. It's not very much, I can tell you. And that's the paradigm we're trying to change. Get to know the humans involved, understand where their capacity is and provide support for a company that's otherwise

set up well in the rest of the data room. I find it so fascinating that, you know, that it's, there's this gap and it's so logical, right, to want to support your investment like you would in any other thing, like an athlete, but there's like this weird stigma maybe because it has to do with mental health. But again, as I, as I'm saying, that's starting to change as mental health and wellness become more

freely discussed and there's less of a stigma attached, naturally, know, millions of dollars in investment in a human and the performance of that human in a leadership capacity is going to get easier to talk about. And I'm really glad to see that that conversation's getting a lot easier.

Dan Pace (24:13)
it's just excited. It makes sense. It just makes sense. Let's talk a little bit, get off of, I guess, the investor, the venture capital, let's talk a little bit more about the founder, and also Crevo So a big pillar of Crevo that you shared with me that, and I just loved how it rolls off the tongue. was that growth happens in the space between stimulus and response, you can react in compulsion, or from a place of growth, choose growth.

So I mean, I'm sure you can go off for a while, from the startup days with RollTech or having now with Crevo and your new ventures. And, you know, how you've used that stimulus, recognized it, and then choosing your response and how you use that to, you know, more focus.

on what you're doing

Rich Belsky (24:50)
so the quote, comes from Victor Frankl's work. Victor Frankl wrote man's search for meaning. and the quote goes in between stimulus and response. There's a space in that space as our power to choose our response. And in that response lies our growth and our freedom. It's a, it's a quote and a concept that drives not just my coaching and my business, but my life. it's, it's applicable universally.

and the idea is that we often receive a trigger and We have we don't create any space. We just emotionally respond and that's a reaction not a response and oftentimes that reaction is not the thing that we would choose to do had we created space and so in entrepreneurship the triggers are rapid-fire there every day all the time and

It's often the case that the leader is reacting and it might be that they think that they're reacting intuitively and that they're really good decision makers. And sometimes that's the case, but oftentimes, as I said, the response that you would choose is not the reaction that you had in the moment. And so it's, it's the foundation of what I teach because in there is, you know, the three parts, identifying the trigger, the stimulus,

Creating the space. So what do you do in that space and what type of response will facilitate growth whether it's personal growth or business growth And there's so many examples of this in my own life both successes and failures But to kind of wrap it back around since I use the example of the coup I'll kind of touch back on that

So this particular CEO, as I mentioned, was leading from a place of force. That's what he believed he had to do. when he initially found out about the coup attempt, which was led by his former COO, his initial reaction was to go nuclear, was to fire him, to take all of these super aggressive steps.

And luckily we were kind of deep in our work at the time. And so that's a pretty easily identifiable trigger, right? Your COO is basically waging war now. And instead of going nuclear and firing him, and you can imagine the effect that that type of reaction would have had, both in the team's perception of him and also from a legal standpoint and from a

you know, what does this look like to their investors and their ability to raise money, this type of gigantic dynamic crack. And so when this happened, you know, we, were able to identify the trigger and what did we do in the gap, which I call the response gap in the response gap. We actually took time to understand what the impetus was for this.

action by his COO. And it really is tough to do, right? It's very hard to look at yourself. That's why a really good coach can be life-changing. So we were able to take a look at the reasons why the COO and some of the team members were feeling this way. And he was able to really understand it. And with that understanding came authenticity.

Dan Pace (28:03)
you

Rich Belsky (28:18)
And from that place in that response gap, the response that we chose was vulnerability. And what it turned into was an expression to the team of the places that he was falling short as a leader and the commitment to moving forward in a different way. Maybe it's imperfect and maybe it's messy, but he recognized what was happening.

expressed his desire to not quit and to continue on. And that response garnered him the loyalty and trust and support of his team, which as I mentioned earlier, was able to then support him through the coup attempt. It didn't make the COO super happy and the COO ended up leaving of his own accord, which was the best possible scenario considering the coup Yeah.

Dan Pace (29:07)
Yeah, was about to say it's probably...

Rich Belsky (29:09)
considering legal and structural investment, all of those types of things. So that's, that's a really powerful example that I like to use of what can happen when you just take the time. I mean, cause you can go the other direction. Like what would have happened if he had gone nuclear? It would have been a mess. It might've sunk the company. The team might've quit. I mean, there's so many like paths you can go down to think about like what might've happened there. so that's, that's yeah.

Dan Pace (29:33)
Yeah, you make me, um, it makes

me think of those, you know, Sam Altman kind of getting kicked out of open AI too. Like there was no horizontal tabloids everywhere. And I was wondering like, what is going on over there at open AI? And like, no one wanted to touch that company or the 10 foot pole as far as investments and stuff go. Like thank goodness, I guess they sorted it out over a couple of weeks and, uh, it made it seem a little more appealing, But yeah, like I said, that type of high level what's happening over there, that, you know, reaction at going nuclear doesn't look good.

Rich Belsky (29:49)
Right. Yeah.

No, no, and not only does it not look good to your internal team, like here's the funny thing, right? we don't support our entrepreneurs and our founders with training or whatever it might be to help them. And then when a mistake is made in that vein, then it's all the blame on the founder. And sure, it is technically the fault of the founder or the leadership team.

Dan Pace (29:59)
No, it doesn't look at all.

Rich Belsky (30:23)
they haven't been trained or supported in this attempt in this high pressure situation to not be that way, to understand how to be a healthy leader, to lead from a place of power and not force, and to not allow those situations to proliferate. And so you make the mistake and then you're punished for it. And I think that, you know, a lot of times that's probably necessary. If a founder can't lead,

then an investor is going to want to probably replace them. But if you can build that leadership capacity, then you avoid these types of situations altogether. you're going back to the reason startups fail. So had the CEO taken that action and the startup failed, they would have been one of those numbers of this nine out of 10 that fail or the 65 % that failed due to human dynamics issues. But he took

the response based action and they didn't fail. So that right there, like you see,

how the addressing of these human dynamics challenges, at least in this very specific case, worked out exactly as it should.

Dan Pace (31:26)
if you had a small example of that Like most of us don't have a COO yet. So what's a little more relatable version of that? I mean, even something that's, you know, personal, what you were doing with RollTech maybe a real life situation or both you've done through RollTech that's, that before you kind of, kind of came across that sort of ethos for your, for your life and your business doing RollTech

Rich Belsky (31:44)
it's authentic to me and I was coming up in Tony's ecosystem in downtown Vegas. And so it was very service oriented and community oriented. so being in that community, building my business and being around the other entrepreneurs and investors in that community, it's kind of just like imbued into us.

Dan Pace (32:04)
You kind of did it naturally,

less intentionally. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Rich Belsky (32:09)
for sure. It became intentional over time. And then as RollTech grew, it became kind of an example to other companies that then came into the fund. And so it started off by being natural, and then it became honed into application across the community.

I think on a more personal kind of less gigantic level, I can talk about the very specific thing that often happens, especially inside of tech companies. We were making a decision on our tech stack and we had our CTO and we had our lead developer, both incredibly talented. And I remember we were sitting at lunch, just like a normal lunch in our conference room, having a discussion on

Dan Pace (32:40)
yeah.

Rich Belsky (32:54)
which tech stack we were going to choose, we ended up choosing .NET. This is 2011, 2012 time period. We had a normal discussion and it became a little bit heated because our lead developer and our CTO had differing views and differing opinions. It turned into an all out battle royale. mean, yelling, raised voices, threats to quit and

my reaction at the time, because it also bled into significant disrespect and inappropriate workplace behavior by the lead developer, my initial reaction was to fire him. The level of reaction and disrespect was really a fireable offense. However, I recognized that developers are passionate. They want to be heard.

They want their choices to be heard. And so I decided to step back and apply this response gap methodology. And so we simmered the situation down and I pulled my developer to the side and we had a conversation and all I did was listen. I wanted him to feel heard. And his biggest issue was that he really didn't care one way or the other. I mean, he cared, but it wasn't what caused his reaction.

the choice that we made, it was that he felt he was being disregarded, that his deep experience in the space and his work on the project weren't being heard. And then his voice was just getting drowned out by the rest of the team. And that was it. That was all he wanted to happen was to feel heard. And so I listened to him. We brought it back together the next day and we all were able to share and express from a place of

openness to hearing, hearing his reasons, hearing his rationale, explaining the other side. And from that place of communication, we all healed and repaired the rupture. We're able to move forward and build a successful company with him involved. So that's an example where you can also think about like, what would have happened had I just fired it? You can apply almost the same like down the line thinking as with the coup attempt. You know, what would that have said to the team?

Dan Pace (35:05)
Yeah, then.

Mm-hmm.

Rich Belsky (35:11)
what would that have done for our technology? Would we have lost a key piece of our infrastructure development? I there's so many different ways it could have gone. But what ended up happening, we kept him, but also we modeled that behavior for the rest of the company. And that became kind of a core ethos of the company was transparency and open communication. And so, that's just kind of one like in the weeds example, but like,

Dan Pace (35:17)
Yeah.

Rich Belsky (35:38)
Think about this as you're making your way through your life. Somebody is driving slow on the highway or driving too fast. You can really apply this, like, what is my reaction versus creating a space and then choosing a response to every area of your life. But it's particularly impactful when it comes to the rapid fire decision making in entrepreneurship.

Dan Pace (35:45)
yeah.

Yeah, especially the traffic one. That's always an easy way to practice this.

Yeah, definitely great point. also that misunderstanding or wanting to being in some sort of decision making like type of a conversation and your decision, didn't get picked and you're to be upset by that. Was it at least heard? Was the reasoning heard? That's the major point of it's not the direction. They went fine. You can live with it. But was I taken seriously as I think the part that gets people upset and it's actually goes back to, you know, customer service. Like they say the customer is always right. Not true.

But one of the, I've had an interview question way back and I nailed this answer. Cause as know, as a customer I was like, no, but they must always feel like they're right to feel the way they feel. Which is kind of like him being heard that they must always feel their right to be heard. You know, that they have right to have that opinion. And yeah, if that's not shared, then yeah, they're going to be pissed off. we've probably all been there too. So when we're in that situation, we can kind of get there ourselves if we take that space.

Rich Belsky (36:29)
You

appreciate you, you know, inviting me on. Obviously, you can tell its an area of deep passion for me. And it's not the easiest area to maneuver because I do feel that it's still a bit of a challenge to open up this conversation, especially with the investor side of things, but more conversations like this, opening the door for understanding.

and the recognition that making these changes can truly drive velocity and ROI is going to really make a difference. And I'm really proud of the work that I and a lot of others are doing to change this paradigm and also help develop companies that deliver higher ROI for investors. It can all work together.

Dan Pace (37:33)
And even just, even I'm just bringing it to this point now, but even their customers, you know, they can be more present, be more focused on their customers, which gets them to, know, hear them out a little better too.

Dan Pace (37:41)
so we talked a lot about what you were doing with Crevo what's the next steps Where's that moving to? And can you touch on how you use poker and your legal and all that, you know, past life experience that's been accumulating to get this coaching that you've been doing now?

Rich Belsky (37:55)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So starting, starting with law, I earned my law degree from the university of Pittsburgh. I specialized in intellectual property and technology law. And then I did what every aspiring young lawyer wants to do. And I moved to Las Vegas to be a semi-professional poker player. And also I was a feature writer and a magazine editor for the biggest media company in the industry at the time, Card Player Media. And I,

Dan Pace (38:05)
That helps.

Rich Belsky (38:20)
went to a World Series of Poker, a World Poker Tour, I traveled the world, I interviewed players, I did tournament reporting, I did live video interviews, I interviewed a lot of the famous people that would come through the various tournaments, a lot of fun stories there. Oh God, so many personalities, like actors, and I mean, there are a lot of stories there, And as I was making my way through that part of my career, a lot of the players found out I had a law degree,

Dan Pace (38:33)
lot of personalities.

Rich Belsky (38:46)
So they would ask me to help them with contracts and things like that. And so I ended up forming an agency and working with some of the top poker players in the world at the time. It was really a special time of life, just traveling the world, working with players, representing them, writing about them. It was really unique and special. And I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and life in my time in the poker world.

And, know, there's so many specific things, but one of the things that really struck me was community, and it's parallels to entrepreneurship because people think that poker players are these individual isolated people. for, you know, to a large extent they are. But when, especially when you get to certain levels, the community really supports each other. So at the same time as you might be trying to like, make the person across from you go broke, if you did that, you might be the same person to then.

put them back in the game. And so there's really a community around high stakes poker players in particular that allows them to not feel like it's a zero sum game. Just like in entrepreneurship, you think like somebody else wins, that means that somebody else has to lose. And if you're looking at the strict numbers of it, then that's the case. But if you look beyond it at what keeps people going, it's community and the supportive community. And that always...

struck me, especially as I made my way through entrepreneurship. And it's something that I really try to instill in the work that I do. And in addition to that, there's a lot of specifics in the poker world that would apply to entrepreneurship, like working with incomplete information, having to make decisions with incomplete information based on like best judgment and responses, and having to make them repeatedly, with like the best information that you have available.

that's directly applicable to the decisions in entrepreneurship, like on a day-to-day basis. so that's law and poker. And taking it fast forward now, you know, I've had, did Roll Tech and after Roll Tech, a bunch of different startups leading into My current startup, which is a supplement company based around a plant called kanna

is a succulent that's grown in South Africa. It's been used for centuries for mood support, ceremonial dancing, things like that. And this project actually started, you going back to our earlier part of the discussion, you know, from a place of trauma and trigger, myself and my co-founders in that company have all been impacted by the opioid crisis and the fentanyl crisis in some way, and decided to try to do something about it.

And I believe, you know, partying and changing your mindset is ancient. You know, it's drinking wines in the Bible. mean, it goes the ancient Greeks. I mean, it just goes back and to stigmatize something that's just part of the human experience, I think is the wrong way to go about it. But offering a safer alternative for changing your mindset, whether it's for therapeutic purposes or for recreational purposes, is something that should exist. And so we work with the plant called kanna We have developed it into several formats.

Dan Pace (41:38)
.

Rich Belsky (41:43)
And we launched that company. We've been, we've been formed for about three years, but we just launched onto the market recently. And it's really helping a lot of people provide a safe alternative and mood support primarily, but it also has other benefits you can read about you can drop the link, but it's the website is walkwithlife.com. That's our wellness brand.

Dan Pace (42:01)
Yeah, definitely the

links.

Rich Belsky (42:07)
hvppy dot com spelled with a V. So get HVP Puy dot com. And if anybody's interested, you can use my last name. Belsky has a code and you can try it for 30 % off. so that's

Dan Pace (42:17)
Yeah, that's

kind of like a full encompassing then. you have the core part of it with your legal, Then you also have the community. found that really interesting where you were kind of saying you want to make this guy go broke on the one side, but the other, it's a community and you want him to be there and actually be a competition too at some point. And even like share strategies, share modes and methods and ways to get around and get...

get to, guess, your foothold in that community, right? And grow it and then make the next generation too. Cause that's kind of important, especially in industry. I kind of recognize that as I was getting into podcasting too, cause I know like several podcasters and I didn't really want to take from them. cause they know I liked them. They're like friends of mine But then I looked at our mutual friends on LinkedIn. I saw like we have 80, you we each have like a thousand, some followers and we each have like 80 that are mutual, maybe a hundred.

Rich Belsky (42:43)
Exactly.

Dan Pace (43:00)
I'm like, wow, they're really not on top of each as much as we kind of expect or thought. Like this pie is a little bigger than we think, than we expect in a lot of cases. So I mean, maybe it is a zero sum game in some respect, but it's a big pie that we're all sharing. So I'm never going to discourage competition. You won't see me doing it. And in fact, like, yeah, I encourage it. Like get out there, get started.

Rich Belsky (43:08)
sound.

Yeah, I'd say.

a firm believer in rising tides raise all ships and there's plenty of pie out there for everybody. It's only in the mindset of extraction that we believe that there's only enough for us. And that's part of the mindset that I'm trying to change, especially in the investment world as it relates to entrepreneurship, that there's plenty of resources available. We just have to work to make them available for.

for people to make use of and that's also something that another project I have going on This is just coming out of stealth now is With my co-founder who it comes from deep deep venture capital background. He and I are working on Forming and funding a venture fund called warehouse It's a fund. That's also a residency a 12-week residency that

cohort comes, lives in a house outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, a big mansion, and goes through 12 weeks of community forming and getting really tight with the other companies learning from each other. And then there's also an element of guidance, coaching, and programming that focuses on a lot of these things we talked about, communication, anxiety and burnout, the cyclical nature of the challenges of entrepreneurship.

mindset capacity, all of those types of things so that a lot of the stuff we talked about is at least addressed and that there are tools made available and some practice made available so that when they go back out of the residency, they have some of a funding from us, but then they also are ready to face what comes on the entrepreneurial journey, which I really believe gives them an advantage and a higher likelihood of making it through those first five years without failing.

So that's something I'm really excited about. That's like the most direct application other than Crevo and my coaching and speaking and all that. That's the most direct application of what's next is really forming a fund that like walks the talk that I'm doing right now. Really viewing.

Dan Pace (45:19)
Yeah, it's like a direct

case study of it all. know, Thanks for sharing that part too. That's what's coming up. Did you have a brand or anything around that as well? Something I can share about that? it's just coming out of stealth,

Rich Belsky (45:22)
Exactly.

Yeah, just coming out of stealth. The website is warehouse. I think right now it's just a landing page with an opportunity for more information, but we'll be expanding that and opening it up at the appropriate time for startups. It's going to be.

It's going to be a really, really cool experience. There are other funds and that have residencies, but what we're really trying to do is like, do the thing that we're talking about, which is bring people together, have them learn, have them apply, gain the skills and the proper perspective and expectations necessary to give them a better chance of success on the entrepreneurial journey and a better chance of returning higher ROI for their investors, which would include us.

Dan Pace (46:19)
That's, overall the end goal. mean, to get this process started in a way that's, you know, sustainable at the end of the day kind of brings a return in some point. That's excellent. Um, and I did want to touch on, since you were talking about kanna too, cause I think that's, uh, pretty important actually add like that the supplemental aspect to the, the keeping focus and to like that mental health and to the sustainability of everything you're doing.

And it's something I do more and more too, because I have a background in fitness. I used to do a lot of protein type stuff, lot of, know, creatines and the caffeine, all that But I've been trying to get a little more plain raw diet, but at same time, I'm seeing myself going back to those proteins, going back to the extended caffeinated pills to keep myself going longer.

cause I kind of need to, I need to find ways to get that edge to do more and, in a sustainable way, before we wrap up anything you want to.

you didn't touch on, I think we touched on quite a lot in this

Rich Belsky (47:07)
Yeah, man, you got kind of the whole show, which is very, very cool. I think that the primary message, especially to founders, is you're not alone. There are resources out there, myself included, and the things you're going through are normal. And pretty much every startup out there goes through them at some point and at some...

level of impact. And if you're going through something like that with your company, please reach out, you know, myself or someone else. There are lots of us out there that want to work in this space and want to support early stage founders and teams. So reach out, don't wait. There is a lot of help and a lot of resource out there. So my site is crevo.com, C-R-E-V-O.com.

You can email me at [email protected]. I'm available. think that that's the most important thing. The, the, the major ethos behind what I do is service and help. this is what I want to do for the rest of my life is be of service to leaders, founders. I want to teach and just get this information out there so that I'm doing my part to develop the next generation of healthy leaders that can then model that behavior for the people around them.

It's deep passion and deep purpose for me. So please reach out if there's interest along any of those lines.

Dan Pace (48:31)
Well, thanks for coming on here to share the story, share the mission and show that end result of it all. And most important part of it all is that we're not alone doing this, which is definitely what I've been, you know, coming across more and more it's very personal and unique, but it's a lot more similar than we'd expect.

at the start of it all. So thanks again for coming on Rich, appreciate it

Rich Belsky (48:47)
Yeah, this was awesome, Dan. Thank you so much for having me. And maybe we can do it again. So always happy to join you and thanks again.

Dan Pace (48:55)
That's the beautiful thing about people getting started. They never stop getting new things started. So I'm sure I'll see you around Take care.

Rich Belsky (49:00)
I'm sure

you too, Dan.