David Kidder: Grow As A Person To Grow As A Founder

As David tells his sons, “Don’t fix yourself, don’t be excellent sheep, find your need in the world, and just do that.”

We often underestimate the overlap between our personal life and our professional career. ?Through my fascinating and in-depth discussion with David Kidder – Co-Founder and CEO of Bionic, four-time successful entrepreneur, advisor to Fortune 500 leaders, and an active angel investor with more than 40 investments – ?he shared some valuable realizations that help him tremendously in business that were derived from personal mindset shifts.

David and I discussed the not-so-comfortable responsibility of a founder to find and replace people in key positions, in his own words, “Putting people in the right seats for the right amount of time.” ?This responsibility is important because of an interesting phenomenon David calls the Timberlake Years - in each stage of your business, you have cultural alignments and mindsets, and as you progress, you have to leave some of them behind. ?Nostalgia is the enemy in a way because even though someone could have flourished under certain conditions, they might have the wrong instincts or wrong experiences that would prevent them from performing at their full potential at your company - and as a founder or a leader it is your role to ensure that not only your business is at high functioning capacity but that people working with you are equipped for success.

David also has a rule for his companies called the Seven to One rule: ?“Do extraordinarily more good than we do bad in that ratio - which is literally statistically impossible, and that’s the point, which is we believe in high standards, but no one will ever truly reach them.”

“We want you to try, we want to do excellence but assume that when we make mistakes that our default state to you is to forgive you so we can look at the problem shoulder to shoulder, not across the table.”

That high benchmark forces everyone to strive for excellence, but it also comes with a personal aspect of being understood as a leader.?“We want you to take risks,” David says.?“We want you to try, we want to do excellence but assume that when we make mistakes that our default state to you is to forgive you so we can look at the problem shoulder to shoulder, not across the table.”

As a serial entrepreneur who has achieved repeated success where most founders struggle to take off even once, David believes that being a successful founder means having the ability to quickly learn the solutions to the challenges of building a business and an obsession with solving a problem. ?Just as many esteemed entrepreneurs agree that no new idea is truly new, David has applied that thinking to conclude that no new solution is truly new either. ?

In our discussion, David and I discussed the crunch of time as time costs money, and a business out of money is out of business, and how it is fatal to be plagued by a problem for too long. ?To avoid failure, founders need to be humble and curious so they can borrow other people’s solutions to solve their own problems quickly.?

Through his many endeavors, David has developed a philosophy that he calls Becoming - focusing on who you are becoming. ?Money is deeply rooted in our society and unavoidable, but David believes it is not a good enough motivator. Instead, he has learned that joy in the work is self-discovering, knowing yourself, knowing your team, receiving the wholeness and experience of growth, and learning to be in a state of being because you’ve risen to a place where you can.

This article is based on my interview with David Kidder, the Co-founder and CEO of Bionic, four-time successful entrepreneur, author of The Startup Playbook and internationally renowned NYT bestselling series The Intellectual Devotional , advisor to Fortune 500 leaders, and an active angel investor with more than 40 investments including notable exits in Tapad - a global marketing technology company, MileWise - a travel planning company, and KidPass - a new way for parents to discover kid activities. Listen to the full episode here .?

You may also enjoy other episodes on In Search of Excellence , which can be found on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts , Overcast , and YouTube .

Randall Kaplan is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, and podcaster. He is the founder and CEO of JUMP Investors , a venture capital firm that has invested in more than 80 early-to-late-stage technology companies, including Google, Seagate, and Lyft. Randall is a Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies , a publicly-traded technology company that has 8,000 employees around the world and earned $3.8 billion in 2022 revenues. He is also the Founder and CEO of Sandee , the largest provider of information about beaches in the world with over 100 categories of information for more than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries.

Randall is the host of In Search of Excellence , a podcast designed to motivate and inspire others to reach their potential and achieve excellence in all aspects of life. Randall’s guests have included Mike Tyson , Mark Cuban , Kevin O'Leary , David Solomon , Bob Pittman , Sharon Stone , David Rubenstein , Steve Case , Orlando Bravo , Sammy Hagar , Sam Zell , Rachel Zoe , Tim Draper , Kliff Kingsbury , and Eric Garcetti , among many others. Randall is also a dedicated philanthropist – he is the founder of The Justice Ball which has raised more than $8 million for a non-profit legal clinic that aids more than 12,000 poor, sick, elderly, and homeless residents of Los Angeles each year, and is the Co-Founder of The Imagine Ball which has raised millions of dollars and is dedicated to ending the cycle of poverty and homelessness in Los Angeles.

Read Randall's full bio at www.randallkaplan.com .