TBC: Likability vs. Brilliance

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Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the back channel. I'm traveling right now. I happened to be in San Paulo, Brazil. So I want to do a quick. TBC on a small concept that I think is going to be important, especially as I do an event, which is all about meeting people and networking with people. It's a bit of an extension on the formula that I had talked about in a previous episode, where I talked about time given, and time to interest and how balancing those two things working on those two variables. Is one of the keys to being great at fundraising. The two things as a primer work time, given time, given are all the things that you do that make a venture capitalists want to spend more time with you.

That's like building a lot of credibility, creating relationships. Driving awareness. Actually having good product, all these things impact an investor to make them want to spend more time with you not to mention your [00:01:00] relationship with the person that made an introduction to you, how you draft off of other people's credibility. Okay. Now time to interest is how good are you at telling your story?

What kind of metrics do you have? What are the things that you can show somebody that gets them interested? And while we were trying to do everything that we could to increase time given we are trying to do everything we can to reduce time to interest. And so much of that is becoming a better storyteller.

How you organize your thoughts. How you communicate. Face-to-face how you communicate in written language. What your deck looks like? Okay. So that's the background on that? A formula that I talked about time given minus time to interest if time to interest is too long and you go on the negative, there's no way you're going to get someone actually to consider investing in your business.

Now, the extension of this that I want to talk about is the dynamic between how brilliant you are. And how likable you are now. [00:02:00] This came out to me after meeting a founder who by all measures of education. The complexity of the work that he was doing, the logos that he had an on his resume was an extremely brilliant founder. But when I met with him under the context of doing everything I could to just help him. He came off as an extremely prickly and unlikeable person. Someone who was pushing me when I wasn't even trying to criticize him. Uh, when he was getting defensive and overblown in different parts of our conversation, things that made me not want to spend time with him. His likeability score was very low. Now people have probably discussed this before.

Is it important to be likable or does it matter if you're extremely brilliant? And I think some schools of thought would say, As long as you're super brilliant, doesn't matter. You can do whatever you want. Now here's where [00:03:00] it comes back to the formula. I talked about. And the relationship between time given and time to interest.

Now you could be extremely brilliant. And if your brilliance allows time to interest to be very small. As in your brilliance is just undeniable. Like people would look at what you've done in the past or your measures of brilliance and say, There's no way this person doesn't do something amazing. Or if your brilliance has produced a product that you can show and say, I do this all by myself.

Obviously. I'm brilliant. Then look. Your time to interest is going to be very small.

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[00:04:00] So you don't care about how large or small your time given is. You could meet an investor [00:05:00] with no. Warmup, no relationship. And they will see your brilliance in half. Doesn't have to be interested. But if you're tying interest. If you're time to interest is not tiny. If your brilliance, isn't such that I can understand exactly how that plays into greater value down the road immediately. Well, then you better do stuff to increase time given. And likeability. Is one of those things that is so easy that anyone can do it. In order to increase time given. If you just work on being a likable person, you get more time with people. People want to spend more time with you.

People want to listen to you. And that allows you to have more shots on goal, more opportunities and more time. To express what you're building, why you're special, why this is going to be massive. To the point where they finally get to, oh, I get it now. This is super interesting. Okay. So I don't need you to be [00:06:00] likable if you're incredibly brilliant, but what does it cost you to be likable? Very little and all it does is increases the amount of time that you get with people. And your goal and your journey in order to drive your business forward. Capture more capital for the company, recruit the best talent and sign up partners.

All right. So that's my quick. Backchannel episode on the dynamic between likability. And brilliance. I hope you have them both. And I'll see you next episode for the back channel.

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