Backable
Suneel Gupta is the Founder of RISE and is on faculty at Harvard University. Using the seven steps inside this book, Suneel went from being the face of failure for The New York Times to being the “New Face of Innovation” for the New York Stock Exchange. His ideas have been backed by firms like Greylock and Google Ventures. He has invested in startups including Airbnb, Calm and SpaceX. He also serves as an emissary for Gross National Happiness between the United States and the Kingdom of Bhutan.
I’d love to hear a little bit more about your own story of origin. You could go back to childhood or school. It’s always interesting to see what got you to where you are now.
Why don’t we pick a moment that always stands out to me? It is the basis for this book that came out called Backable. The moment was in 2004. I am working as a junior-level speechwriter for the Democratic National Committee. I’m at the 2004 convention, which was being held in Boston that year. I’m backstage. The convention draws the who’s who crowd to be there and give speeches. Backstage, there are the Clintons, the Gores, the Liebermans, the standard faces of the Democratic Party. There was one face that I did not recognize and that was Barack Obama. I didn’t know who he was. A lot of people didn’t know who he was. While he gave his speech that night, that changed his career and I would argue changed the world. I got to watch that speech from backstage.
It was interesting because while it seemed like the world was watching Barack Obama, I got to watch the world. What I saw was this tidal wave of energy just ripped through the stadium. I became one of the millions of young people that night who became interested in his story. I started to dig deep into, “What is this guy all about?” What I realized surprised me. Four years earlier, he had run for Congress, not for Senate, not for president. He had run for Congress and he had lost. He had lost by a big margin. What surprised me more, John, was the way that he was received during that campaign. People described him as boring, stilted and professorial. There was a guy named Ted McClellan, who was a journalist who covered the campaign. He said, “Barack Obama is so dry that he sucks all the air out of the room.” Four years later, in 2004, he is this bastion of hope, inspiration and charisma.
The reason that story stands out for me, not only for my career in the way that I view the world but also this book that I wrote is because it turned me on to the power and possibility of human transformation. We can always change and reinvent ourselves. I have become obsessed and fascinated by how people do that. What happened in those four years between 2000 and 2004 for Barack Obama? What happens when we take the stories of all of the people that we admire who we now are looking at the chapters 14, 15, 16 in their story? If we go back to chapter one, what does that look like? Where did that begin? How do they evolve over time? That’s what makes me tick.
In your own story, you were called out by The New York Times, “The Face of Failure.” You weren’t the only one. You and Barack share that similar history of being called something that’s not exactly positive and something that most people would say, “You’re never going to recover from that label.” The face of failure, in this case or in Barack’s case, sucking the air out of the room or the opposite of charisma. What’s the story? What happened? What did you do that caused The New York times to say that?
I was an entrepreneur at the time. I was pitching every investor I could find on this idea called RISE, which was one-on-one nutrition coaching right over your mobile phone. I was passionate about the idea and felt like it should exist. I could not get any investors to say yes. I also had a checkered past in terms of success and failure. I’d been part of a couple of startups that didn’t go anywhere. I’d been on the other side of canceled projects, missed promotions and missed opportunities. One day, I got a phone call from the organizer of a conference called FailCon, which stands for Failure Conference. She said to me, “You have been nominated twice to be a speaker at this conference.”
John, it’s a humbling experience when somebody calls and says, “I’m running a conference on failure. We would love for you to be the keynote speaker.” The reason I accepted that is because I thought, “Maybe there might be some investors in the audience, people who I can get on board with this new idea.” It turned out there wasn’t but there was a reporter in the audience from The New York Times. Fast forward to sitting in my apartment one day in San Francisco, my wife turned to the newspaper. There was a full-length feature story on failure with my story as the photo up top. That article went viral. It went viral to the point where for months you could have Googled just the word failure and you would have seen my face as one of your top search results.
That’s some SEO challenge in there.
I bet it’s still there. It’s still probably on page 1 or 2. When something like that happens, you have a couple of choices. One is you can pretend that it doesn’t exist and move in any direction. The other is you can embrace it. I had spent my whole career trying to paint this picture of success. Now, I’m the poster child of failure. I decided, “What would it look like to embrace that a little bit?” The way that I thought about there were all these people that I was trying to get coffee with and get advice from. I was cold calling them. I was reaching out to them the same way that anybody else would. “I’m living here in San Francisco trying to break through into tech and entrepreneurship. Would you grab a coffee with me?” Most people would say no or disregard the email. Now, I changed my approach. I sent them the article and I would say, “As you can see from this New York Times article, I have no idea what I’m doing. Would you be willing to spend a few minutes grabbing advice?” People loved it.
One bullet breaks through the clutter. It’s self-deprecating and clever. It’s the fact that The New York Times covered it, not just you saying it. It works on so many levels. You could be an ostrich and bury your head in the sand or you could be the peacock and say, “I’m owning this.” This story continues to get better. After all those noes and getting labeled that, you did get some funding. It was eventually acquired by One Medical. The full circle to your opening story about Barack is, in 2016, Michelle Obama partnered with RISE to bring this coaching to low-income communities. Nobody could have predicted the outcome of the story. I love that story. When a story has a twist like this, it is fascinating to hear. We all have the hero’s journey of like, “He’s down or she’s never going to recover from this.” Recovering might have been, “We finally got some funding.” It probably went beyond your wildest dreams when you started it, to get the first lady involved with it.
John, you and I both love Joseph Campbell. We both love the hero’s journey. We know that one of the components of the hero’s journey is like, “Along the way, there’s an insight, learning, something that changes your worldview.” For me, through these conversations that I started to have, creativity and persuasion are two different things. Oftentimes, we think about them as one. We all know that you can have a great idea, be a great candidate for a job, have a beautiful product and still be dismissed. We see it happen all the time. That’s what I was feeling. Many of us have felt that way.
One of the stories that always pops for me especially is the story of Alexander Fleming, who came up with penicillin. Penicillin, to date, has saved nearly 200 million lives, yet it took him ten years to get people to buy into it. He got dismissed over and over again. Brilliant, game-changing ideas aren’t always met with a room of people who are going to support them. All of that got me interested in this idea of backable people. These are people who tend to be able to go into a room whether that be an interview, an audition or a pitch and they tend to shine. The trick of it is that, oftentimes, it’s when they aren’t the obvious choice. When they don’t have a fully baked product, we still feel like we want to take a chance on them. I wanted to understand like, “What is that quality? Can it be learned?”
Following up on this New York Times article, I started to have these conversations with people and said, “Let me have more and more.” Eventually, I found myself having hundreds of conversations with backable people from all walks of life including Oscar-winning filmmakers, Michelin Star chefs, military leaders, founders of iconic companies and fast-rising community initiatives. What I found was that being backable is not just for celebrities and CEOs, it’s for all of us. Being backable is not something that you’re born with but it very much is something that you can learn.
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