Chapter 9 - How, and Why, to Ask for Help
To read:
Founding Brothers: Creating the United States from 13 colonies required a combination of remarkable, collaborating men, argues Joseph J. Ellis in this book reviewed by the Guardian.
Startup Nation: The transformative experiences faced by Israelis are key to their nation’s success as a hub of innovation suggests this excerpt from the seminal the book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
Asking for help: It’s easier than you think, argues Wayne Baker, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
Chapter 9
How, and Why, to Ask for Help
“Don't be afraid to ask questions. Don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.”
— Barack Obama
A quarter-century ago, though it feels like last week, I was a young, hungry, and earnest entrepreneur in my first semester at the Wharton School. Word circulated that Farhad Mohit, an up-and-coming entrepreneur a couple of years ahead of me, who had founded one of the first online shopping search engines, was giving a talk on campus. I was eager to go, and all-ears when I arrived.
It was a small group of perhaps 20 people in the audience. And I was rapt as I listened to his tale of living in squalor in Los Angeles, dining on cheap ramen as he struggled to get Bizrate.com — later expanding into Shopzilla — off the ground. He spoke of the pain of watching fellow Wharton classmates prosper in big corporate jobs and the constant fear of failure. And then he got to the point in his presentation when he described securing his first serious funding. His face lit up. Whatever doubts I was having about my decision to leave corporate comfort for business school suddenly disappeared. We chatted briefly afterward. I asked for his general advice. He was patient and generous. And I was hooked. I thanked him profusely. We kept in touch, and a couple of years later when we were launching Coremetrics, Farhad and Bizrate.com became one of our first partners.
These days, I ask for help weekly. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 13, How to Leverage Advisors and Investors, I send out a comprehensive report on the company every week without fail to this entire extended team. And I always include areas, issues, and pending initiatives on which I ask their help.
No entrepreneur is without a similar story, or set of stories. No one succeeds alone. We all stand on the shoulders of someone who has gone before us. And learning how to ask for help, guidance, and advice is as critical as any technical skill you’ll bring to your entrepreneurial journey. Just as important, maybe more so, is learning to “pay it forward” and help those coming up behind you to their own summit of success.
So while you don’t want to be presumptuous, you do want to be systematic. This is the lesson I learned from serial entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, whom I got to know in San Francisco in the early days of Coremetrics. He was then the CEO of BridgePath, which he was to sell a few years later to cloud computing company Bullhorn, and our offices were next to one another. I was 26, and Auren was just 24. But he was the consummate networker and he had organized a very popular lunch club for the Silicon Valley elite. There was always a compelling speaker; one of the first ones I met there was the CEO of Exodus Communications, one of the world’s first Internet Service Providers and a very big deal at the time, reaching a $32 billion valuation at its peak. Auren invited me to join him regularly at these, and we were usually the most junior entrepreneurs in attendance.
After joining several of these gatherings and being amazed at the networking opportunities at each, I felt compelled to ask Auren over lunch one day, “How the heck do you do it?” He told me about how he was fearless to reach out to anyone — but he shared that he did so in a particular way. Instead of approaching them with a typical, “Hi, I’m a young guy and would like to learn from you,” he was deliberate and would do his homework. He would approach them with a very informed perspective and knowledge of their business. He’d be prepared to discuss something they had said or written, an organization they were involved with, or a cause to which they were devoted. This required more research, but it was very effective. It worked because of Auren’s passion and genuine desire to connect, and his ability to make it clear he was not wasting the other person’s time. It wasn’t just cursory research. It was an authentic interest in what he had learned about that person and their business.
Some years later, I learned that Steve Jobs had a similar philosophy. In a video I share on the Digital Companion, Jobs describes how he reached out to HP Co-founder Bill Hewlett when he was just 12 years old: “I’ve never found anybody who didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help,” Jobs explained. Not only did Hewlett give the young high school student spare parts for a device he was trying to build, but he also gave him a job the following summer working on the HP assembly line.
Wayne Baker, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business has argued this well in an essay I include on the Digital Companion. He notes that while self-reliance is a celebrated virtue, it’s also self-limiting and people frequently underestimate the willingness of others to help. That said, like Auren, Baker makes the case that you need to know what you want to ask.
“Here’s something you can do to prepare…” he writes. “Focus on a current project and write down your goals for it. Take the most important goal and list the action steps and resources you need to achieve it — materials, information, data, or advice. You’ll then have a series of needs that you can frame as questions…”
Baker also emphasizes that those who are open to helping others, and have a reputation for doing so, also are more likely to get help from others. Helping others also gives you a psychological edge when reaching out. You’ll feel more comfortable asking for help when you have been helpful.
Personally, I’ve found various ways to do this. In addition to capital, advice, counsel, and mentoring is a big part of being an angel investor. I’ve been the Entrepreneur-in-Residence numerous times at my alma maters, the Wharton School, and the University of Texas at Austin.
In one of my early efforts to give back, I was serving at Wharton for a few days in the mid-2000s, shortly after we had launched Bazaarvoice. I was holding office hours and in walked a young undergraduate named Boris. He went on to tell me how had built the #1 sports app on Facebook and he shared with me the stats on the incredible amount of usage he was getting. But he was pained, wondering whether to jump into social media with both feet or continue toward his degree. Because of Bazaarvoice, I was really steeped in the emerging trend of social media at the time and I was very impressed with what he was doing. While most of the time I advise students to stick with their undergraduate program and earn their degree, I told Boris that he should go on a one-year sabbatical to take this to its logical conclusion. We talked about the unique time we were living in for social online. It was not obvious at that moment, but I could feel it in my bones and I shared my views about how important I believed Facebook would become. He said he would think about it and ask others as well. And that was the last I saw of Boris. For a while.
It was several years later that I was again back at Wharton, this time accepting a Wharton Entrepreneurs award at the school’s annual entrepreneurial alumni gathering. I gave a speech on how others had helped me on my journey, and of course, I referenced both my Wharton professors and alumni, including Farhad. After I finished, I started to mingle with the crowd. Up walked a young man and much to my surprise he re-introduced himself as Boris. I certainly remembered him, but I was in a bit of heightened anticipation, very curious whether my advice of years before was sound. It turned out as Boris explained, he had indeed taken that sabbatical. He’d become a young millionaire after selling his sports app to another company. He also went back to finish his degree. To say I was elated is an understatement. Knowing that I had helped him in a way that changed his life forever was incredibly satisfying. And now he is paying it forward himself.
But beyond these insights, I believe there is something more at play here. I really believe that mutual help, support, and reciprocity are embedded in the DNA of our culture as Americans. Think of the 18th and 19th-century tradition of “barn raising” in rural America, when 90 percent of Americans lived on farms. Barns for storage of grains and livestock were critical to the livelihood of farmers, but also expensive and needed much more labor than a typical family could afford or provide. But people knew they could ask for help: Barn raising met the needs of the community — and the economy — by enlisting neighbors, unpaid, to assist in the building of a central feature of the rural economy. We are mostly a self-created country and a young one at that. And yet we represent about 16 percent of the world’s total GDP with a little over 4 percent of the world’s total population. This, I truly believe, has much to do with this spirit that is at one with our identity.
An exceptional account of this trait in our culture is to be found in the book Founding Brothers — The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis. I include a review on the Digital Companion, but the major takeaway for me was how, despite their differences, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and others relied on one another, collaborated even amid rivalries, and ultimately helped one another — and the new nation — succeed.
Much the same could be said about Israel, a much younger nation that, as I finish this book, just concluded its 74th anniversary. A decade ago, Debra and I made our first visit there, which coincided with yet another eruption of conflict. It was amazing to see how the Israeli people around us rallied. They worked around the clock to get the missile defense system, known as Iron Dome, in place to protect Tel Aviv. Israel’s origin story in the wake of the Holocaust is, of course, well known and turned on amazing feats of courage and self-help, much rooted in the spirit of the kibbutz, the original communities of the Zionist pioneers that were founded on principles of mutual aid and cooperation — not unlike our tradition of barn raising. But less well known outside of Israel is its success as a nation of entrepreneurs, now the world’s standout center of innovation outside of the United States. A book that explores this dimension of Israel’s economy and development is Start-Up Nation, by Daniel Senor and Saul Singer, an excerpt from which I include on the Digital Companion. When we returned, I had an interesting conversation with my friend and fellow Austinite, David Bookspan, who founded the business incubator DreamIt Austin.
“Isn’t it amazing how much Israel has prospered entrepreneurially given its surroundings?,” David reflected. To which I responded: “Israel has prospered entrepreneurially because of its surroundings. It has a mission that is too important to fail!” David and I agreed.
Understand that you can’t go it alone. Learn both how to ask thoughtfully for help, and how to graciously accept it. Always be willing to pay it forward, and help others on their journey at every opportunity. I’d be tempted to leave this chapter at that. Except for one thing.
As I was finishing this book in the spring of 2022, I was working in my hotel room in Vancouver, British Columbia, where I was attending the annual TED Conference. I picked up my phone and sent a message to Farhad via the TEDConnect app. He too was in Vancouver, attending the same conference. Soon we got together, and I connected him to two people that were interested in his latest endeavor, GoodParty.org, which I’ve collaborated with him a bit on before as a political centrist. Same story, 25 years later: Two entrepreneurs gathered, trying to find ways to be helpful to one another.
In short, no matter how experienced you are as an entrepreneur, you need all of the help you can get.
“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”
— Sir Winston Churchill