Metasys Technologies

"I want to switch careers, but I’ve invested 5 years in the path that I am on and I fear that if I switch now I am going to have to start over. How would you think about this?" Most people idealize careers as clean linear trajectories. They are not. They are windy, messy and filled with ups and downs. This is not uncommon. What is common is every person thinking *they are different.* Why is that important? Well when you think you’re different in this situation, you get stuck: You don’t want to go backwards and are crippled by some combination of FIRE (fear, insecurity, resistance and ego): - Fear: “I feel like I am going to fail. I don’t know what I’m doing” - Insecurity: “I’m not where I am supposed to be at a certain age” - Resistance: “Am I going to fit in this new environment? Maybe it’s not meant to be” - Ego: “I know too much and am too good to start over” But if you internalize this as a common pathway - that careers have peaks, valleys and all sorts of elevation in between - you understand that it is normal to go down to go up. It’s a really freeing insight. Understanding this at its core removes artificial constraints and barriers from your thinking. More importantly, it focuses you on the right variables to consider in this situation. If I were making the switch I’d ask four questions: - Peak: How high can I go? If I make the switch, what is the potential upside of this new direction? How does it compare to the current direction I am headed for? - Velocity: How fast can I get there? If I make the switch, am I set for a slow and long grind or is it a curve that will require deep learning and familiarity, but once I am up to speed I will be able to accelerate on? Another consideration when you’re thinking about velocity, is consider compounding. At five years into your path, you’re likely just getting to a stage where the benefits really compound. Year 6-8 is not going to be a linear ascent; it could be exponential - so make sure if you’re switching you understand this. - Endurance: How sustainably can I get there? Will you personally endure the path for a long period of time? Building on the point about compounding, real gains come when you’re 5-10-15 years into a journey. Now whenever I think of my involvement in anything - I try to think about if it’s a journey I can see myself lasting on. It turns out you are sometimes your biggest competition. - Personal Fit: If I get there, how do I feel? Envision you’ve climbed the mountain top! High fives all around, you’re the man! (or woman!). Do you feel great or do you feel empty? This is something people spend too little time on in my opinion. The worst thing in life is playing the wrong game. Make sure you give some thought to how you might feel if what you set out to accomplish came true. **** If you liked this breakdown, subscribe to my newsletter: romeensheth.com/ Every week, I share practical tips, frameworks and learnings from bootstrapping my business to $60 Million.

Early career years are painful. You feel like an idiot 98% of the time - lost, confused and insecure. I wish I had a cheat sheet of principles for my first job. So I put one together. Here are 20 (non-fortune cookie) things about building a career I wish I knew sooner:

Distraction. Traction. Action. I love this framing and chronology. 1. Distraction: Too often we associate distraction with a negative emotion. In my experience, distraction is a great starting point and is critical - it's the source of an open canvas and widened aperture. 2. Traction: To make progress, you have to move from distraction to traction. Identify what's working. Narrow the focus. Double down on your effort. 3. Action: To accelerate your effort, you have move from traction to action. For startups this is best described as moving from "product-market fit" to scaling. For individuals, it's best described as extending the surface area of your impact. I've found that the best opportunities come from distraction, are realized through traction and scaled through action. Each of the 3 play an equally important and complementary role in achieving a strong outcome.

I talked to a super smart 20 year old this week. All the potential in the world, but had a major major flaw in his thinking. This flaw is becoming the most common mistake I am seeing young people make early in their career. Let's break it down:

Don’t compare yourself to others. As you get older, the likelihood that you will have an amazing friend that doesn't get the credit they deserve and a soulless person that gets ahead is pretty likely. It doesn’t matter. Play your game and focus on yourself. (Pic Credits: @ wisdommadeeasy on Instagram)

The most underrated element of success: Consistency Most people hit roadblocks and give up. Successful people understand roadblocks are a part of the journey. When you hit a roadblock - embrace it, work through it, celebrate, and then “re-rate” your baseline.

There are 2 paths to success: - Be Top 1% in the world at 1 thing - Be Top 25% in the world at 3 things Top 25% is achievable by most people. The problem is most people focus on being Top 1%. Work on combining “3 pretty goods” and stay at it. It’ll pay off big.

How to Choose Where to Work: I’m a firm believer that one should evaluate career decisions with the same degree of rigor and thoughtfulness that investors apply to their investment decisions. In companies, we talk a lot about product-market fit. When choosing where to work, I like to think about 3 other kinds of “fit.”   I. Company-Market Fit: Is this company going to win? When you work at a company, you are an investor. Just like all of the other investors. The difference is while they may invest their capital, you invest your time. A more precious asset. You should gain both a quantitative and qualitative understanding of the company’s business. Ask: - Metrics: How is the company doing? - Vision: What is the strategy for how this company scales?  - Business Model: How does the business make money and is it sustainable? - Competition: Who are the private and public competitors; why are they better or worse?   - Customers: Why do customers buy? Do they love the product/service? II. Person-Company Fit: Am I in a position to succeed? Most people early in their career overvalue position and undervalue contributing to a winning team. Getting an additional 20%+ compensation at a flailing company is always worse over the long term compared to joining a rocketship. High growth companies unlock opportunities - they are the opposite of zero sum environments. That said, what you do in the short term matters. You want to be in a position to succeed. Ask:  - What is the day-to-day responsibility of the current role? - Who is the team I will be working with? - What are the other teams I will be interacting with? - What is the attrition rate of employees? Is the company a leaky bucket? - Why do people love working here? III. Person-Problem Fit: Am I in it for the long term? Career gains are inversely correlated with career hopping. You should imagine spending the next 5 years working at the company. Knowledge and skill accumulation comes from staying past the honeymoon period (0-12 months). After that is when you get pushed, have to make tough calls and live with the repercussions of your decisions. Ask: - What skills are particularly valuable to this domain? - Is this a problem / industry I care about? - When it gets tough (it always does), am I motivated / excited enough to stick it out? - Do I believe I can uniquely excel in this domain? The best way to bring rigor to your decision is to write a “Career Memo.” The exercise includes analyzing each opportunity you have across the 3 vectors and then comparing the full opportunity set. Choosing the right place to work is an important first step in setting yourself up for success. You may not have perfect information to make your decision; but you should have perfect intent. That is fully in your control.

The Downside of Leverage and Importance of Sweating The Details: A business principle I frequently see obsessed over today - especially on the internet - is the idea of leverage: - “Hire as quickly as possible!” - “If you need Sales, go get someone!” - “Need Marketing? Outsource it!” Everything can be delegated. But can it? Should it? I think - like most things in life - this statement is more nuanced and should be interpreted carefully. It is true - leverage is the only way you can get scale. As you progress as a leader, your sole job should be to be world class at 3 things: (1) strategy, (2) recruiting and (3) culture - Strategy: Set the vision for where the company is going - Recruiting: Hire and attract the best people to execute this vision - Culture: Establish an environment in which the best people can do their best work Leverage too early on, however, is a recipe for disaster. In the early stages of your business (and your career), you should be doing the opposite. You should be sweating the details. Very few people do this. Why? Most people hate messiness; they avoid it like the plague and follow the path with the least resistance. But the details are where the impact lives. If you let the details go, you slowly chip away at the core. Doing 1% more consistently makes achievement inevitable. Some tactical examples of this: - Sit next to your junior most employees and observe what they do in their day - Ask your leaders what is the most challenging thing for them at this stage and help them problem solve it - Visit your customers to check in on them - Be a part of the brainstorming, not just the end review of a deliverable - Sit shoulder to shoulder with your senior leaders and help them think through the business Importantly, here’s what sweating the details is not: It is not burdening yourself, micromanaging, conflating roles and responsibilities or overcompensating for someone on your team. Rather it is channeling your own individual energy as a leader into your organization and finding opportunities to bend the will of the world your way. In a world where everyone is looking for leverage and how to “work smart, not hard”, I think sweating the details is a deep competitive advantage. There’s no replacement for getting in the weeds and putting in the elbow grease.

Ikigai: How To Find Purpose While Staying Practical I am not a fan of fluffy sky-in-the-pie frameworks. They don’t actually help you take action or move the ball forward. Ikigai is as pragmatic as it is elegant - it is single-handedly the most helpful framework I have come across to help untangle how to find purpose while staying practical. The reason I’m such a big fan. Let’s break it down. Ikigai has four major vectors: - What you love (motivation) - What you are good at (ability) - What the world needs (market pull) - What you can be paid for (market push) True success and fulfillment boil down to nailing the core of this framework. As you can see from the diagram, if you nail two of the four vectors, you get closer to the inner elements - you solve for passion, mission, profession, or vocation. If you nail three of the four vectors, you get even closer to the core, by getting to a cross between two of the elements. One of the things I firmly believe in is to succeed in your career, it’s just not about being good at what you do; it’s about finding something in which you can endure. That’s equally hard. There are two common mistakes I see people make in trying to find fulfillment: 1. A lot of people trick themselves into thinking they are motivated by money, status and/or accolades. Those can be great short term motivation drivers, but it’s really hard for those to be enduring motivating drivers. Why? It turns out those things in and of themselves are pretty hollow. They are proxies for momentary voids; they don’t provide lasting fulfillment. 2. A lot of people get the chronology wrong - they overvalue passion in the early years and undervalue vocation and profession. I would recommend the opposite - when you are younger (or if you are transitioning careers), you should focus on skill accumulation and being in a fast growing market. If you are good at it, a significant number of opportunities will open up. And when great opportunities open up, interesting things start to happen. Early in your career (or at the moment of a career transition), look for what the world needs + what you can be paid for. If you get good at it - you’ve solved 3 of the 4 vectors. There’s a strong possibility that those three will lead you to finding something you can develop a love for; nailing all four vectors is the answer to enduring fulfillment.

One of the most common business tropes I frequently see online is the idea that: “Nobody knows what they’re doing.” I think this is a highly incomplete statement and a dangerous idea for people to misinterpret. That said, it's also a very powerful statement if you understand it fully. Here’s where the statement is correct, where it's incorrect, and how you should internalize it: *** Most successful people (and companies) I know are extremely thoughtful and intentioned. Their growth is a function of carefully selected strategies, well-considered tactics, and insights gleaned from experience. These people (and businesses) are focused, highly iterative, and have high agency. *** That said, a lot of great business success is a function of pure luck. I have seen countless examples of people and companies that could have achieved orders of magnitude more (or less) if that ball bounced a few ways in either direction. • They were in the market at the right (or wrong) time • A customer gave them a break they weren’t expecting (or ended the relationship) • A partnership unexpectedly formed (or did not come to fruition) *** To go from nothing to something takes hard work, intent and skill. To go from something to amazing takes the same, but it also takes luck. If you are lucky enough to be great, take it with a dose of humility. And if you are looking up to greatness, take it with a grain of salt. *** The right lesson to takeaway from any success story is to ask: “What put them in a position to succeed?” (e.g thoughtfulness, agency, intent, work ethic, persistence). The wrong lesson to takeaway is any overly simple deduction, e.g: “Nobody knows what they’re doing.”

This was a bunch of fun - thanks for having me @SMB_Attorney and @KHendersonCo

The world's most valuable skill: Clarity of thought. The problem? There's no school for this. It takes time, patience and a lot of early career fumbling. Here are 10 cognitive distortions I faced early in my career and an insight on how to break through each one:

I came across this wonderful piece from @marcrandolph, Co-Founder of @netflix, the other day. Highly recommend reading it and internalizing it. 5 key lessons I pulled away from Marc’s reflection: 1. Everyone should have a north star - success is what you make of it; money, influence, impact, balance, intellectual satisfaction. There’s no right or wrong; it’s different for each person. The worst thing you can do is build a life around somebody else’s definition of success 2. Values are easy to have, hard to uphold - Your values shine through in difficult times - Extending Marc’s example, it’s not difficult to wrap up at 5 pm on a quiet Tuesday. In a crisis situation, it is difficult, but not impossible. If it’s truly a value, it will be upheld in rain or shine. 3. Compounding is magical - It is so difficult to measure the compounding quality of non-quantitative actions. In business, we see the impact our decisions have daily; these are easily measurable and can be measured over hyper short duration timeframes. It’s why we gravitate towards them - instant gratification. What we don’t see however is the impact of daily decisions that aren’t easily measurable, e.g. an individual conversation with a colleague, a sit down dinner with a family member, daily inward reflection. In my experience, these decisions don’t breed instant gratification, but they are so important - they’re the source of enduring and sustainable long term gratification. 4. Balance comes from imbalance - I’ve found that the best way to achieve enduring happiness is to go “all in” on whatever you’re doing. If you’re at work - go all in; focus, be the best teammate and leader you can be. If you’re at home - do the same; be the best spouse, partner, parent, sibling, you can be. 5. Constraints force impact - This has been a learning for me as I’ve scaled myself as a Leader. The biggest challenge when you’re operating a high growth business is focus; my friend has a simple framework he uses that I love (and stole!). Every company earns the *right* to do a handful of things really well. No more, no less. Inserting constraints forces you to focus, prioritize and spend time on areas that are highest impact and highest leverage.

Fantastic group of speakers just announced for @MainStSummit. @BrentBeshore and the @PermanentEquity team are putting together something really special. Excited to speak here in November. I’ll be sharing lessons learned scaling a bootstrapped business, what it’s like to sell to PE and how to build after being PE backed.

I have a confession to make: I used to hate public speaking. My palms got sweaty, my voice choked up and I always thought about that time in college when I had to give a presentation, got up at the front of the room and literally blanked. The whole class stared at me. I was up there for 3 minutes, but it felt like 3 years. That experience was brutal. A top 2 embarrassing life moment for me. But what I’m most gracious for is instead of letting me fail and not take anything away from the experience, my professor pulled me aside after class and shared a phrase with me that I keep on my desk to this day: “When the going gets rough, you want to be in the Eye of the Storm.” At first, I’ll be honest - it made no sense to me. Think about it. A storm creates havoc. When we did hurricane drills in school growing up we were told to get as far away from the storm as possible: Move away from the windows, hide underneath the desk, sit in an isolated underground location. Why would I want to be in the eye of the storm? Isn’t that the most dangerous place to be in? Hurricanes, he explained, are made up of 3 parts: - Rain bands: curved clouds and thunderstorms that spiral away from the center - Eyewall: a ring of clouds where the strongest winds form - Eye: the hurricane’s center. The eye is surrounded by the eyewall; in the eye you are insulated from the winds; the eyewall protects you and from it you can see the sun. Interestingly, the eye of the storm is the calmest place to be. And therein lied his point. The eye of the storm is a zone of inner peace - you see the chaos around you, you’re thick in the middle of it, but you can also see the pathway to the sun. Getting to the sun isn’t necessarily easy, but you know that you can get there. The route to the eye of the storm is formed only through experience. There are no shortcuts or hacks. You have to live through moments of discomfort, pain and adversity (the rainbands and the eyewall). This is critically important because it’s in this journey of highs and lows that you learn the most about yourself. Professional athletes have this phrase that I love when they describe progression: “The game gets slower.” Lived experience translates into the speed of the game becoming more palatable - you can see all the components of the game, you understand how those components interact and you can think through the second and third order effects of moves that you make. The Eye of the Storm framework can be applied to anything in life. It has been most constructive for me when I have internally reflected and applied it to areas where I am most uncomfortable. Early in my career this was public speaking, working through conflict, and being assertive. Life is filled with uncomfortable situations. You can run away from them or you can face them head on. In my experience, the best way to progress is not to shy away from difficulty; it’s to embrace it. And for that, you need to be in the eye of the storm.

The playbook to get ahead in life: 1. Change your limits - when you change limits, you’re going to fail and it’s going feel bad. This is a *good* thing - lean into the discomfort. 2. Surround yourself with really great people - great people push you and inspire you. It’s natural to feel insecure around people ahead of you. This is also a good thing - lean into the insecurity and let it motivate you. 3. Learn how to listen and observe - you have to figure out your own style; but in doing so, incorporate flavor from others, especially where you are not strong. 4. Don’t make excuses - this is the deal breaker for most people. It’s never easy to look within and admit that failure is your fault. Learn to not make excuses and push through any situation. At each level, go through 1-4. Rinse and repeat as you keep climbing.

🚨 Super pumped for Gametime 3 this year in Newport Beach. A few years ago my good friend @JChillin and I were chatting about how similar professional athletes and top tier founders / investors are. I’m a sports nut and Josh is one of the most polished former pro athletes that’s transitioned well into business. So we said “let’s bring 50 people from the world of sports and 50 people from the world of business together and see what happens.” Fast forward and it’s been a blast. We have put this event on over the past few years and had some unbelievable folks join us: - Team Owners from the @SacramentoKings, @chargers and @F1 - NFL/NBA guys like @BMarshall, @violajefe, @zaza27, @TheByronJones, @ryannece, @JaValeMcGee - Olympic Champs like @ApoloOhno - 50+ Founders of $1B companies - Top tier investors across PE + VC This year will be the best one yet 🔥

"I want to switch careers, but I’ve invested 5 years in the path that I am on and I fear that if I switch now I am going to have to start over. How would you think about this?" Most people idealize careers as clean linear trajectories. They are not. They are windy, messy and filled with ups and downs. This is not uncommon. What is common is every person thinking *they are different.* Why is that important? Well when you think you’re different in this situation, you get stuck: You don’t want to go backwards and are crippled by some combination of FIRE (fear, insecurity, resistance and ego): - Fear: “I feel like I am going to fail. I don’t know what I’m doing” - Insecurity: “I’m not where I am supposed to be at a certain age” - Resistance: “Am I going to fit in this new environment? Maybe it’s not meant to be” - Ego: “I know too much and am too good to start over” But if you internalize this as a common pathway - that careers have peaks, valleys and all sorts of elevation in between - you understand that it is normal to go down to go up. It’s a really freeing insight. Understanding this at its core removes artificial constraints and barriers from your thinking. More importantly, it focuses you on the right variables to consider in this situation. If I were making the switch I’d ask four questions: - Peak: How high can I go? If I make the switch, what is the potential upside of this new direction? How does it compare to the current direction I am headed for? - Velocity: How fast can I get there? If I make the switch, am I set for a slow and long grind or is it a curve that will require deep learning and familiarity, but once I am up to speed I will be able to accelerate on? Another consideration when you’re thinking about velocity, is consider compounding. At five years into your path, you’re likely just getting to a stage where the benefits really compound. Year 6-8 is not going to be a linear ascent; it could be exponential - so make sure if you’re switching you understand this. - Endurance: How sustainably can I get there? Will you personally endure the path for a long period of time? Building on the point about compounding, real gains come when you’re 5-10-15 years into a journey. Now whenever I think of my involvement in anything - I try to think about if it’s a journey I can see myself lasting on. It turns out you are sometimes your biggest competition. - Personal Fit: If I get there, how do I feel? Envision you’ve climbed the mountain top! High fives all around, you’re the man! (or woman!). Do you feel great or do you feel empty? This is something people spend too little time on in my opinion. The worst thing in life is playing the wrong game. Make sure you give some thought to how you might feel if what you set out to accomplish came true.