Lessons - Core Values Drive Success | David Hauser - Startup Culture Architect ($175M Exit)

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