The Cheat Code

by Brian Wong

  If you do it right, it has a weird way of seeming considerate, but also confident and authoritative at the same time.

  The very act of announcing something confidently somehow endows it with legitimacy and validity. People usually just assume that because you’ve thought it over, it’s probably a brilliant idea, or at least they become deferential to your intent. It’s wild! It’s a cheat I use all the time.

  It’s way more effective than just doing something without announcing it first. Surprises are what piss people off. They think you don’t care about their opinion, and for all they know, it’s something you just pulled out of your ass, without thinking.

  I learned this through Kiip’s board meetings, where I’m dealing with some of the smartest people in business. These people hate surprises. Why shouldn’t they? Nobody likes to have something shoved down their throat without having a chance to consider it. So I try to talk to every one of them before the meeting, over the phone or over coffee, and run through the agenda, so that when game time comes, they aren’t caught off guard.

  I do it deferentially because these people deserve respect, but note that I’m not asking for their approval. If they have good input, I listen. But I’m not asking for permission; I’m telling.

  As a result, the board meeting is literally me repeating what I already told everybody separately, and that’s okay. Everybody feels in the loop, and the meeting is smooth. People have ideas and I consider them, but there’s never any drama, because everybody knows what’s coming.

  The golden rule of Kiip board meetings is: no surprises.

  I carried this cheat over to meetings with my own team. They all get the agenda before the meeting, so everybody’s comfortable with it and feels like we’ve got a good plan. If somebody has ideas to make the plan even better, great!

  Try it out. You don’t need to be a CEO to use this cheat. You can use it with your colleagues, with your clients, even in your everyday life. Next time a line in Starbucks feels like it’s turning into a fossil, just move forward and say, “Excuse me, I’m just gonna grab something and get out of your way”—and do it. What can they do? Call the hall monitor? People are understanding if you give them reason to be.

  Or when you’re crowded into an airplane ramp and need to make a call that distracts other people, say to somebody loud enough for others to hear, “Sorry, I’ve gotta hop on the phone for a second.” Your small rudeness becomes politeness, and nobody’s shooting eye daggers your way.

  When I give speeches, the event coordinator usually says something along the lines of “Don’t go up there and pitch your company.” I’m always like, “Well, I’m planning to talk a bit about my company and what I do, since that’s why I’m here, and then I’ll talk about other stuff.” They know it’s too late for me to change my speech. That ship has sailed. So I give the speech I came with, making sure I do a good job, and the coordinator is happy—way happier than if I hadn’t warned him I was going to mention my company.

  When you tell people what you’re going to do before you do it, they won’t be surprised when you do it. And nobody likes surprises. You’ll get a better outcome every time.

  One of my most valuable assets in business is my ability to feel very comfortable and confident in front of an audience. That’s essential for success, because no matter what business you’re in, audiences are everywhere, from the main stage at Cannes Lions or SXSW (or the equivalent for your industry) to a boardroom where you’re pitching clients or having a meeting with your own team.

  I had no idea when I first developed this ability that it would someday be important. That happens all the time: New skills seem trivial. In reality, no skills are trivial.

  I never set out to learn how to be a good business speaker. I learned it inadvertently, by taking a number of speech arts classes in school. That’s where I got accustomed to performing and thinking on my feet. It’s one of those things that is scary at first (surveys show that public speaking is the most common of all phobias) but ends up being fun and extraordinarily rewarding. (Bonus cheat: Master something that most people fear.)

  An even better training ground for public speaking, I’ve found, is a background in improvisational acting or comedy, even if it’s just in a college class. Over time, I noticed that almost all the great salespeople I hired had done at least a little improv at some point. Now that’s one of the things I look for when I hire. It seems to make all the difference.

  When you put somebody with improv skills in a sales meeting, you can see those skills come out. They’re animated, interactive, charismatic, and clever, and they clearly come up with things on the spot. It’s insane to watch some of these guys pitch.

  I seriously believe that acting or performing gives you a better grasp on how to act in the moment and how to express yourself in all kinds of situations, both in business and outside of it. It turns the action of persuasion into an art, and the act of communication into a seamless dance.

  Ultimately, all drama, whether it’s onstage or in a business meeting, is about communication—communication so attuned that it moves others toward your perceptions and beliefs. In other words, communication is central to the art of getting people to buy in.

  Whether in the boardroom or the comedy cellar, performing starts with reading your audience and getting so far into their heads that, ideally, you feel like you’re them and they feel like they’re you. Once you’ve captured their wavelength, the rest is gravy. Stated most simply: You put yourself in their shoes.

  Once you feel like you really know whom you’re talking to, you need to carry your message to people—or carry people to your message—by evoking powerful feelings and emotions, like surprise, happiness, trust, and hope. You need to know when to pause, whom to look at (and whom not to look at), what words to stress, how to make eye contact, how to fake eye contact, and when to shut the hell up.

  Most important of all, you need to know how to evoke. The end game of acting is not to show the audience the emotion that you feel, but to subtly bring them to feel it.

  There are lots of ways to do that, such as by underacting or by using body language that triggers feelings subliminally. That prompts the audience to, in effect, fill in the blanks with their own hopes and dreams.

  A central principle of acting is: Let the audience do the acting.

  Get up there, win their hearts and minds, and then step back and let them do the rest of the work. When somebody tells you, “Your product is so good it sold itself,” just smile, agree with them, take a bow, and get off the stage.

  Then go back out and do it again and again. The show must go on, and when it does, the role starts to feel so real that it’s not even acting.

  In my opinion, the six hottest schools for entrepreneurship are, in order of excellence:

  1. Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

  2. Harvard Business School

  3. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington

  4. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University

  5. Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago

  6. The School of Rock

  I’m fucking with you. But you probably didn’t know until you hit the School of Rock. That’s how brainwashed so many of us can be.

  Now that I’ve pissed off everybody who’s connected with all of the above—except maybe Jack Black—please allow me to piss people off even further by saying that for the most part, an MBA is a colossal waste of money.

  I think college is an excellent investment for a business career, but entrepreneurship—as a specific realm of business—is extremely hard to teach, much like the performing arts or high-level athletics. Sure, a certain amount of teaching helps, but in general either you have the X-factor for those things or you don’t.

  College and MBA programs in entrepreneurship are the hot new thing now simply because of demand, not because of their proven value. As long as students want to pay exorbitant tuitions to be taught t
o be entrepreneurs, schools will be willing to take their money.

  But the reality is that one of the best educations for an entrepreneur is just learning the basics of business—economics, finance, accounting, marketing, human resources, organizational behavior—and a few other skills, along with a healthy dose of arts and sciences.

  Even a basic business education, though, can produce mixed results. The problem is that business school education is optimized to produce cookie-cutter grads, because that’s what the big companies want. A school’s incentive in the greater scheme of commerce is to be a factory for accountants and other standard business professions. They pump students in and pump them out, and then the big companies hire these kids for a dime, sell their services for a dollar, and everybody feels like a winner—except for the students-turned-bankers, who end up $100,000 in debt and never get a chance to figure out who they really are or want to be.

  A lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds decide to study business because they think, “Well, I don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up, but I’ll choose finance, because I’m going to graduate and make $100,000 as a banker. Then at least I can implement the banker’s 2/4/2 System of Success: Borrow money at 2 percent, loan it at 4 percent, and be on the golf course by 2:00 p.m.”

  Even before these kids can legally buy beer, they quit being themselves—which is a messed-up way to wander through life (unless you were born to bank—or play golf).

  My advice is to study what you love at a school you can afford. True, a top-notch school might force you to work your balls off. But as discussed in Cheat 1, in today’s world of limitless free information, you can also force yourself to learn your balls off—without paying $45,000 a year in tuition.

  You just need to commit to learning to be great at something, and pay close attention to exactly what it takes to make money from your mad skills.

  If you think business school is the right fit for you, then go for it. Just don’t think that you can enroll in a curriculum that will make you the new Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin or Larry Page, because those jobs are taken. Learn to be you.

  If you’re good at it, you can monetize it. If you’re excellent at it, then you already are, in a very real sense, an entrepreneur. By that I mean you’re the world’s first you. Get good enough at that, and people will line up at your door, whether or not you have a fancy MBA.

  The founders of start-ups often make the mistake of fearing rejection from investors, as if the investors hold the keys to the kingdom.

  But the people who invest in you are just people, and the sooner you realize that, the better your life will be.

  Think of investors like this: They are people with the money.

  Think of yourself as this: You are the person with the idea.

  If that isn’t a fair and equal exchange, there wouldn’t be any exchange at all.

  When somebody invests money in you, they don’t do it to make you rich. They do it to make themselves rich. Why else would they do it?

  If you know that, you won’t bend over backward and take a beating during either the negotiation phase or the operational phase.

  During the negotiation phase with investors, you don’t go into any meeting thinking that this is the be-all and end-all. You go in thinking that these are just a few of the people who are lining up to give you money. That’s not arrogance. That’s reality.

  Lack of reality comes from your own fear that you’re not worth the money. If you’re really not worth it, though, you shouldn’t be in that meeting. Wait until you are worth it, and then come back. Or just wait until your fear subsides enough for you to see that you are worth it.

  Everybody has some green in their pocket these days, so it’s not like one rejection is going to kill you or your business. If one of the investors you meet doesn’t want to make a deal, you’ve still got a thousand more investors to meet.

  In fact, you almost never convince the first potential investor you talk to. I lucked out with my first venture capitalist (see Cheat 53), but that was extremely unusual. I’ve been turned down by many other investors since then. I just closed an incredible deal with an investor, but before that, about forty others rejected the same offer.

  Being turned down is not the end of the world, unless you make it feel like that. In fact, rejection can often be a good thing; it not only helps you build resilience and grow a thicker skin but also often comes with information that can help you improve your pitch.

  Another important thing to remember about your investor is that he’s not really risking his own money from his own pocket. No matter what trappings of wealth he might display, the person you’re talking to is rarely the one who makes the ultimate decision. He might not even be working directly for the person who makes the decision.

  Kiip, at this time, has been involved with seven venture capitalists. Each one of them is part of a fund that holds hundreds of millions of dollars, and none of that money is theirs. They are the investment managers.

  Some funds are even larger, in the billions of dollars. These funds aggregate the wealth of a vast number of people and include huge holdings such as pension funds.

  The funds manage these enormous amounts of money in an extraordinarily macrocosmic manner. They’re like, “Let’s give this company $50 million so that we can check off a venture capital box, diversify our investments, and make sure that we keep our internal rate of return at the level we want it to be this fiscal year. Or maybe $75 million.”

  The person you talk to has partners—probably a number of them—and has to talk to those partners. Ultimately somebody reports to a limited partner, who makes the decision.

  That doesn’t mean that the venture capitalist you talk to isn’t brilliant, or doesn’t have great responsibilities and authority. It just means he’s not your Warren Buffett. He’s playing with somebody else’s money. Just like you.

  That doesn’t make it less serious. Just less scary. It also makes his rejection more endurable.

  A similar Cheat Code principle to make rejection not sting so much is this: Realize that nobody gives a shit about you. In short, a turndown is nothing personal.

  If they actually did care about you, that would really suck.

  This is true for any rejection you might receive from any powerful business person, whether from an investor, a potential client, or a boss. It isn’t personal, and they aren’t God.

  So after a rejection, just go back to your office with a smile on your face, set up more appointments, and remind yourself that your project really is the shit, no matter how that investor saw it. After all, if everybody could see everything, nobody could get rich.

  So don’t worry when you get rejected. You’re not alone. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. These are just people—it’s not the word of God.

  You’ll either love this cheat or hate it.

  You’ll think it alone is worth the price of the book—or you’ll think it’s so obvious that it shouldn’t even be in the book.

  I am of the opinion that the first attitude is correct, because I once had no idea this cheat was possible, and now I use it all the time.

  It’s a cheat you can do anytime you’re in physical proximity to any high-level executive whom you’d like to be able to reach at will but who’s surrounded by layers of people who screen calls, emails, texts, and anything else that might be a distraction. You ask for the number.

  I do it at all the conferences I go to, like South by Southwest and the Consumer Electronics Show. You just go up to somebody, introduce yourself, shake hands, chat for a bit, and get to know each other. Then you get around to talking about their event or their party. They tell you that they can make sure that you can get in even with the line outside. Then you say, “What’s the best way to reach you?”

  They hardly ever give you the number of their call screener or gatekeeper, because they don’t know it. They usually just say, “Call me or text me at such-and-such number.” It’
s the only one they know: their own. They’ll usually suggest their phone number because it’ll be the most convenient way in the moment.

  Why shouldn’t they share their number? They can see you’re harmless, it would be rude to just blow you off, and it’s the easiest thing to do.

  That’s it. The whole cheat. Easy, right?

  Larger lesson: Whatever you’re trying to do, try the easy way first.

  The scariest person at a poker table full of veterans is not the man in the cowboy hat, the guy wearing sunglasses at night, or the guy in the tuxedo who’s casually stirring a martini with one hand and riffling through his chips with the other.

  The scariest person is the one who doesn’t know the rules of poker as well as the others.

  If you’ve read all the books about poker, watched all the online tutorials, and heeded all the expert advice, and then you sit down to play poker with the pros—you’re going to get wrecked. Because the pros know the rules and conventional actions and reactions better than you ever will, and they know what you’re going to do. When you follow their rules and play their game, the odds are stacked as high as a mountain.

  But if you sit down at that poker table blissfully unaware of the rules, you’re going to terrify those veterans. They can’t read you. They can’t calculate your actions. You’re bringing something new to the table, and they don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s crazy, maybe it’s dangerous, or maybe it’s the future.

  Business—especially tech—is a lot like a poker game. There are some seriously talented individuals at the table who spend all day hearing amazing ideas from brilliant people. They are veterans of the pitch. If it seems like they’ve heard everything, or feels like they’re constantly calculating, it’s because they have, and are. They know the odds backward and forward.