Matt Mochary, the CEO of Mochary Method, is a full-time executive coach who has worked with some of the biggest names in tech and finance, including investor Naval Ravikant and the CEOs of Notion, OpenAI, Coinbase, Reddit, and many others. He founded a successful internet 1.0 company called Totality and transitioned to coaching as a way to return to tech without the stress of starting a company. He’s also the creator of the Mochary Method Curriculum Document, which Lenny says is “the most practical, tactical, useful document I’ve seen in a long time.”
You can also see the episode transcript and Matt’s references:
Areas where even very successful founders struggle ▶
- Fear is the most common struggle, preventing founders from doing things that are difficult but necessary. Fear grips you and leads you to making exaggerated predictions. When feeling fear, check with someone not experiencing it to help create clarity and chart better courses of action.
- The most extreme is when a CEO isn’t transparent with their board about a problem in the business, particularly when there’s another fundraise coming up. The knee-jerk reaction is to not tell them, which always loses trust; on the contrary, telling them gains trust.
How to deal with anger in yourself and others ▶
- Anger is not a base emotion, but rather a cover for pain. Recognize that pushing pain onto others through anger damages your relationships, particularly with those closest to you. The real answer is just to allow yourself to feel the pain. “It sucks, by the way. It actually hurts. I’m just starting to practice this, and I’m still not good at it.”
- When someone is angry:
- Avoid accusatory language: Statements like “You’re angry” can make the person feel accused and increase negative emotions.
- Use “I” statements to express your perception: “I perceive you to be angry” removes judgment and focuses on your perspective.
- Allow the person to self-reflect: Providing feedback in a non-confrontational way helps the person to recognize their emotions and refrain from acting until they shift out of the negative state.
When and how to let an employee go ▶
- If an employee isn’t critical to the organization or there’s nothing left for them to do, let them go. Additional employees create information and morale overhead. Tesla got rid of LiDAR on their cars even though more sensors are theoretically better, because of the overhead. You have to think about the supply chain, the parts, the additional data, the chaos the data brings, and the cascading effects if the LiDAR stops working. As Elon says, “The best part is no part.”
- Show compassion during the process: Losing a home, spouse, or job are the three most stressful things that can happen to a person.
- Offer to become the person’s “agent”: Actively help them find their next job by reaching out to your network and recommending them for roles that align with their passion or skill set.
- Separate emotion from decision-making: People are bad at firing because they think they’re hurting the person they’re letting go. Instead think about what the customer would want to see happen—of course they’d want to see only the best employees. For the people who get hurt, think about what they really want and how you can help them, and do it actively, not passively. Spend a couple hours reaching out to people recommending the person. If the person is not great at their job, there’s still something they’re great at, and recommend them for that.
- Remote work doesn’t change anything when it comes to firing.
- Prepare them: Start it off with, “Hey, this is going to be a difficult conversation. I want you to take a few seconds and prepare yourself. You are not going to enjoy this.” If you give someone a few seconds to mentally prepare, they’ll be aware that they’ll be going into fear, anger, and sadness, and this awareness makes them able to look at their emotions and process it better.
- Let them release their emotions: “My guess is you’re feeling a lot of anger right now; fear, sadness. Is that true? And if so, would you be willing to share with me what you’re feeling and what you’re thinking?” Many times they do, and it’s important to actively listen.
How do you make people feel heard? ▶
- Encourage written opinions: During a meeting Matt will often ask people to write down their solutions to a problem or question, then go around reading it and saying, “Thank you, Lenny.” That makes the person know he’s at least read it.
- Repeat and confirm understanding: Say what they said back to them repeatedly until they say, “Yes, that’s it.” That’s how you know you’ve understood them.
- Reflect deeper thoughts and feelings: People sugarcoat their true feelings to avoid hurting others. Reflect back what you imagine are the thoughts in their head. “Lenny, I think what I’m hearing you say is, ‘Matt, you’re off, screw you, how dare you walk into the office and not even say hello to me?’ Is that close?” People will generally agree. But you still have to do something about it—that’s when you can either accept their feedback or, if you don’t, explain to them why by making them see your perspective.
Matt’s curriculum and why he has an accountability partner ▶
- Matt’s coaching journey began by reading business books such as High Output Management by Andy Grove and The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. “I was like, Oh my god, here are all the answers.”
- Top 3 ideas in Matt’s curriculum:
- On time: “We’re going to start our meetings on time and you’re going to show up, and if you don’t show up on time, you’re going to let me know first.”
- Top goal (concept from Greg McKeown, who wrote Essentialism): To make massive gains, figure out your top priorities and create time each day to work on them, even if it’s as little as 30 minutes.
- Fear and anger give bad advice.
- During his top goal time, Matt has somebody sit with him who prevents him from doing anything but his top goal. This is similar to how a gym trainer’s primary job is to motivate you and keep you focused, not teach you stuff.
- There are apps that are “insanely effective” where you can sign up to become accountability partners for each other. He uses one called Centered, in which he is also an investor.
- In-person is slightly more effective than remote.
- Matt created an organization to test his most radical and original ideas that nobody else would try. This organization also develops software to implement those ideas. For an example of a radical idea, have you ever let someone go and regretted it? If you haven’t, you don’t know where your bar is because you’ve never been close to it.
How do you approach mass layoffs humanely? ▶
- Companies he works with report becoming more performant after layoffs within 60 days. “The results have been phenomenal.” This is particularly relevant today, when challenging macro conditions are expected to last years.
- The biggest marker he’s seen between a botched layoff and a successful layoff is whether it’s done one-on-one. “At the moment someone hears that they no longer have a job, did they hear it from their manager in a one-on-one? If that’s when they heard it, it’ll be okay. But if they heard it in an email, in a group chat, in any kind of thing where they were sitting next to or they’re hearing it along with other people, it wasn’t personalized, it wasn’t one-on-one, that is terrible.” That’s when people become really angry, and they can’t even express their emotions because it’s in a group.
- When determining who to let go, have an inner circle including all managers in the company and assign each one a specific dollar amount or percentage that needs to be reduced. Allow managers to make the decisions for their teams, not somebody else, because they know their teams best.
- After the layoffs, hold an all-hands meeting with the remaining employees to address their concerns and fears. The questions are almost always around fear—if it’s going to happen to them, did the people even get feedback, does it mean the company is dying, etc. Address each one of these questions (and hopefully the answer is no). Assure them that “we cut deep so that we only cut once.”
- Follow up with individual one-on-one meetings where managers can listen and validate each employee’s feelings. This helps the team move forward together stronger. When done well, the company gets better in two weeks. When done terribly, it still gets better, just in two months. This is important to ensure an accelerated recovery and reduce the chances of people quitting, speaking ill about the company, etc.
How to innovate within a large company ▶
- Create a separate entity resembling a startup
- The entity has to have a founder-mentality person as head to just break glass and not stop until they run through the brick wall. That’s easy to find—the YC alumni whose startups failed are usually available, and now they want to join a company that’s actually succeeding because they realize how hard it is to create something on their own, but they still have the mentality.
- The separate entity enables faster iteration and innovation without disrupting core business processes and brand. They should report to outside of EPD, usually directly to the CEO.
- Some people go as far as to create a separate C-corp. He recalls talking to Wei Deng, who created five C-corps in two months and found fantastic results. Not only that, on each new product, two teams work independently. One could be more engineering-focused and the other more customer-relationship-focused, for example, and she just sees which one makes more progress faster.
- Monetary incentives don’t matter much, even though people will say it matters to them. What really motivates people is building stuff that gets used in the world; the feeling of grit, of not giving up; fear, which is an excellent motivator but also corrosive and extremely short-term; although joy, on the other hand, is long-term, consistent, and allows them to look back and go, “Wow, that was a great life.”
How to do an energy audit ▶
What we’re really good at is what we love, and what we love is that which often makes space and time disappear.
- Identify your zone of genius
- Zone one = Incompetence (fixing a car). Let someone else do that.
- Zone two = Competence. You can do it but so can somebody else (cleaning your house). Let someone else do that too.
- Zone three = Excellence. Something you’re uniquely good at, but you don’t love it, and you’re likely getting paid a lot of money for it. This is the danger zone. Other people want you to do it.
- Zone 4 = Genius. The thing you do that’s uniquely good in the world and you don’t even notice you’re doing it because you love it so much.
- Conduct an energy audit
- Observe how you move into the zone of genius. You don’t necessarily figure out what that is; you figure out what that isn’t and eliminate.
- Go through your schedule for two weeks, hour by hour, and label which tasks give you energy (green) or are energy-neutral/negative (red). Each hour ask yourself at the end of that hour, “Did I have more energy or less energy?” After two weeks, identify patterns in the red. For each red task, ask if it needs to be done at all or if someone else can do it. If not, think about how it can be made exquisite, enjoyable, or efficient. If it’s a group activity, often the group will agree what you’re proposing is better for them too. Keep doing this energy audit repeatedly until your calendar is 80% green. “Once that happens, magic will occur. All of a sudden, your life will become phenomenal and you will start to create massive value.”
This is a human edited summary of the podcast episode with Matt, by Adhiraj Somani (@adhiraj38). To listen to the full episode, go here.
