Does increasing success cause the people around a leader to give less honest feedback?
4 recorded positions from 3 people, first said Jun 19, 2023. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Success causes people to stop arguing back a sad loss
Alex Lebrun · Jun 19, 2023
A repeat founder with prior exits falls into the 'Kim Jong Un entourage trap' — investors and team stop disagreeing, and the resulting lack of challenge produces real early mistakes
At Nabla nobody challenged him, and the unchallenged decisions included staying too long on a B2C healthcare model before recognizing the right path was B2B
Scope: based on his own experience as a third-time founder after two exits
8:27 20VC: Why No Models Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why Open Will Always Beat Closed in AI, Why Proprietary Data is Less Important Than Ever And Why EU AI Regulation is a Disaster with Alex Lebrun, Founder & CEO @ Nabla
Harry Stebbings · Dec 4, 2023
As you become more successful people go quiet around you and stop arguing back, which is a sad loss
Scope: based on his own recent experience
51:56 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche
Also on the record
Craig Courtemanche · Dec 4, 2023
Successful leaders get less and less honest feedback, so they need a small standing cabinet of people who will call them an idiot
If everyone tells you every idea is genius, eventually your craziest ideas get acted upon and they are not genius; his cabinet keeps him grounded and reminds him he's human
52:09 Successful leaders need a small trusted cabinet for honest feedback
Alex Lebrun · Jun 19, 2023
The fix for not being challenged is to seek out distant, already-successful outsiders who have no incentive to please you, and to explicitly instruct your own team to overturn your decisions
Investors and close contacts are too close to give honest signal; distant successful people have nothing to gain from flattering you, so you get more information from them
9:50 Seek distant outsiders and explicit team mandate to overturn decisions as the fix
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.