How do I handle a crisis without blowing up my deal?

Episode 96 - David Meadvin Transcript Jason Kirby (00:00.488) We're taking a slight change in direction of the content during this break that we have to talk more about, you know, deal, deal structure, the things that happen in the moment deals can get done. And, you know, with crisis management, I'm just like, all I remember was being in crisis management when, you know, selling to Walmart. And being that you're an expert, not only on the politics side and having been there, but also now on the company side and companies having to deal with political responses as a company or, or how would it manage a certain, presence when you're trying to manage deals or anything of that sort of, trying to acquire a company or, get quiet, get acquired. And so. I was curious to ask you before we like, you know, get into the thick of things and just see if there's any particular stories that come to mind for you that either you consulted on or advised or experienced or observed where, you know, you kind of had to step in, you saw like something unfolding and you had to step in and like, here's, here's the best practice of how they handled that situation. In particular, ideally around a deal, if you know of David Meadvin (02:36.792) Yep. So two that come immediately to mind, one is not the first one is not a deal, but it was a new CEO of a private equity backed startup, pre IPO startup, kind of a professional CEO. He had been in that role at a couple other companies and was recruited and brought in to help the company graduate and move toward an IPO. And he was brought in and recorded kind of a fun intro video introducing himself to the team. And it was a pretty big company, right? So as opposed to getting everyone in a room and saying, hi, I'm your new CEO, there needed to be a bit of like, let's do something that can be seen in various offices. And he, someone on the marketing team came up with the concept, which he basically did blindly and then got back a final cut basically when everyone else saw it. And it was like super sexist, just unbelievably bad judgment in how it was cut. And not only did a lot of employees rightly have a big problem with it, but they connected it with their new CEO before they had even met him. So he was in damage control internally from day one. Right. And, you know, to me, it's a really important reminder that Two things, number one, you can find yourself in crisis in the most unexpected ways. mean, no one could have predicted that. Number two, often it's not your fault. It's unforeseen, there's nothing you can do about it. But also kind of this idea that what really made that hard for him was he hadn't had the chance to build up any credibility, any currency with his team. So he didn't have the benefit of the doubt, which is why when that video came out, people blamed him. And he couldn't have changed that because he was new and it was a weird scenario. But I think it's a really good reminder to always think about putting the currency in the bank, right? Always thinking about your reputation because when a crisis comes, you want people to give you that benefit of the doubt. David Meadvin (04:48.486) he recovered. was fine. It was a painful couple of weeks, but it wasn't, it wasn't great in the moment. Jason Kirby (04:49.051) That's painful. Jason Kirby (04:56.429) How does someone recover from that? How do you go from being like the worst first impression to at least 50 % of your employees to then coming out of that? How does someone recover from that situation? David Meadvin (05:10.092) Because the truth of the matter is, I think there is this mythology around crisis where you can hire a consultant or you can kind of weasel your way out where if you actually did something wrong, if you make all these moves in the background, you can figure out a way to overcome it. The truth of the matter is most of the time, if you genuinely didn't do something wrong, you're gonna be okay. If you genuinely did something wrong, there's almost nothing you, sorry, there's almost nothing you can do to recover from it. Jason Kirby (05:38.981) That might give too early. David Meadvin (05:40.302) No, no, I'm... it's allergies, so let me see if I can clear my throat. Sorry about that. Okay, we'll power our way through this. Jason Kirby (05:52.72) It's going to stick with you for a second there. The beauty of editing, we're to chop that up. David Meadvin (05:56.671) Exactly. Yeah. But the reality was that he was genuinely the victim of a circumstance. And while people's initial impression of him was negative, he could explain it, right? The facts were on his side. And so and he was genuinely a good guy. So people were willing to give him a second chance. Jason Kirby (06:14.501) That sucks that the like, watch the raw video. Watch the hour of uncut footage. It's okay. David Meadvin (06:19.434) Exactly. Also, kind of can't get out without blaming, right, without blaming someone else on the team, which you never want to do. The other story I'll give you, and this is one of my favorites, is I was working a few years ago with a company that was about to IPO. It was a SPAC during the SPAC boom, which Jason, you know a little bit about. And they, as you know, probably not everyone knows, Jason Kirby (06:24.827) Yeah, exactly. Jason Kirby (06:40.903) little bit. David Meadvin (06:47.414) In order to IPO, a company needs to get a formal approval from their shareholders. Now, the problem we have is companies that have significant individual ownership versus large institutional ownership. Often it's hard to get a quorum for anything because you're asking people who bottle a few shares on Robinhood times a million to actually participate in this pro forma vote. It was the night before they were IPOing. We were in New York, ready to ring the bell, holed up in a conference room in a hotel, kind of a war room we had set up. And overwhelmingly, the votes that had come in were going to favor the IPO. No one was supposed to, but they couldn't get to the quorum. it was on a knife's edge. we went into this mode of, mean, this was enough years ago that some of the tools we had were a little bit blunter than the ones we might have today. But we were buying banner ads on Yahoo Finance just to sort of find those individual retail investors, they were working the phones, the CEO was calling every bank, every institutional owner, and we were just doing everything we can to uncover enough votes to get the thing. And it was like, if you needed 51%, they were at like 49.8, and we were marking every cluster of shares that came in and voted, they made it. But man, up until literally the night before the IPO, there was a real chance that we were gonna have to pull the plug on it. Jason Kirby (08:16.783) And it's just because they had such a diverse stockholder base of retail. I guess before the back, before this back, how do they acquire so many retail investors? David Meadvin (08:29.315) There's a period where, because it's a weird quirk, right? Where the SPAC is investable. So you actually can invest in a company as part of a SPAC before the official IPO. Yeah. Jason Kirby (08:37.879) it was a SPAC. So the SPAC approval of the acquisition and got it. Okay. That makes more sense. Yeah. Everyone's got their like $10 share of the SPAC and, you know, hoping for the best. David Meadvin (08:44.867) Yeah. David Meadvin (08:50.671) And it was a company that was buzzy enough and in an industry that retail investors had some interest in. So there were a lot of kind of quirky dynamics that made something that for 99.9 % of IPOs was totally standard practice, uniquely difficult for them. Jason Kirby (09:09.511) Was it literally like a margin of error of like 0.1 % like 51.1 kind of thing, or did it like pick up steam towards the final final. David Meadvin (09:17.165) No, it didn't pick up steam at all. I mean, we crossed the threshold just before midnight and it was, you know, like a handful of thousand shares over the the finish line. Jason Kirby (09:26.535) Because that point is it worth just like someone buying 10,000 shares that's already on the cap table and just like pushing it through. David Meadvin (09:35.407) It would have been, but you can't do that. was, first of all, it after hours. You can't do that and vote, you know, at the same time. But we were thinking about all of those different things. I mean, it got to the point where I was a very, very tiny shareholder and I was on their list, right? Like I was on the list of people the CEO was calling because it was just all hands on deck. Jason Kirby (09:41.729) yeah. Jason Kirby (09:58.856) That is a, that's it. This is going to be so nail biting. Like, you know, you're finally this glorious moment of an IPO, getting on, you getting listed, it works so hard. And then like you're hurting cats to like, the end degree, like most founders in private companies, like they struggle chasing like the 10 angels that invested in them like 10 years ago, but you know, trying to find anonymous retail traders on the internet. That's a, that sounds hard. David Meadvin (10:28.649) It is very hard and, and not something we'd ever done before. It points to another point. The thing about crisis is, often it's a thing you couldn't have possibly predicted. So often it's less about, Hey, let's dust off the playbook from the last time this thing happened. you know, the story I told you about, you know, the CEO who made that video or the story about the SPAC. No one had done exactly that before, maybe versions of it. But in those cases, it's really about building the pattern recognition to be able to make good, calm decisions faced with a lot of uncertainty. I think that's a lot of what we'll probably talk about. Jason Kirby (11:09.767) Yeah. And like, for context, for the audience listening here, like you are the crisis management expert. You've worked at the highest levels in government. You've worked for Citadel and Bloomberg and other top companies, you're across the country, helping them navigate complex crises. When it comes to your frameworks on, as you say, like you don't know what's going to happen. You're going to get blindsided. What's the best way for a CEO or founder to be able to protect themselves or just prepare themselves, I should say, for the unpreparable? David Meadvin (11:51.94) before you ever face a crisis, you have an opportunity to think about managing your portfolio to inoculate yourself for what may come. And I will say that, I I work with CEOs who are, you know, of an older generation who tend to be a little bit more comfortable with the public profile part of the job. I'd say by and large, a lot of the founders and CEOs who are coming up now building companies may be looking at transaction or an IPO, they tend to have a little bit of a different perspective. It may be because they came up as more of product person, more on the engineering side. Their focus often is on, me build the best product. Let me find the right customers. Let me scale it. Let me improve it. And thinking about how you talk about yourself and how you talk about the company in the world is often an afterthought. And I think in many ways that's the right. thought process. There is nothing wrong with that. Those are the basic building blocks to how you build a good company. But I also think that when you look at the CEOs in the world who really get waylaid when a crisis hits, often it's the ones who haven't invested in building some credibility, inoculating against future crisis by conveying to the world, to investors, to employees that you know, basically you're trying to do the right thing. You're driven by values. You have a good perspective. then when a hard moment hits, people tend to rally around you. It's human nature. Jason Kirby (13:29.287) And when it comes to like your experience, you're there at the table to mitigate and find a way out of the situation or turn it around, spin it, whatever it might be. What's the story where a deal is getting done or like, you know, something happened and a deal blew up due to a crisis. What's the story that you might be able to share around that front? David Meadvin (14:01.135) I'm trying to think if there's a specific kind of like real blow up that I can share with you. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of a story that would be compelling to tell. Can we come back to that one? Jason Kirby (14:06.471) We can keep it anonymous if we have to. Okay. yeah, just thinking, thinking in the back of your head of like, maybe one of the title is deal specifically, but, just like where things didn't go right. right. Like you tried everything and it just, either the executive kept making it worse or this, whoever is like the crisis got worse. Like the other story like that. David Meadvin (14:30.596) Yeah. Yeah, there are so many examples, Jason, and I can think of ones that are tied to politics. For example, during COVID and during everything that happened in the aftermath of George Floyd, CEOs were often pulled into taking political positions in ways that were uncomfortable. One of the things that I will always advise a CEO is when you are faced with getting involved in a hard and controversial decision, you're not going to make everyone happy. You have to map your stakeholders in some cases, prioritize them, but understand that at the end of the day, there's probably not a perfect answer. And that is a little bit of the mythology around crisis. Rarely can you come up with a plan that will make everyone happy. Typically you're choosing between bad options and you're choosing the one that will cause the least amount of damage to the stakeholders who matter most. That may not be satisfying, but it is the reality. And so, One of the things I always tell the CEO is know that even if you make the right decision, you're going to get some blowback. A CEO of a big company who shared some thoughts on the Middle East conflict, which is obviously a third rail kind of issue, took a position that was very thoughtfully crafted, but then received several emails from employees pushing back on the position he took. Jason Kirby (15:49.519) Yeah. David Meadvin (16:00.305) That was inevitable because there is no happy middle ground on an issue like that that satisfies everyone. My response to him was don't focus on those few angry notes. You got focused on the fact that out of thousands of employees, the vast majority stayed silent, which in that case was a sign of support or at least understanding your position. Similar example. A few years ago, I was working with the founder of a very large pre IPO startup, about 1500 employees. They had planned, their HR team had planned a global offsite in Florida. They have a young and very progressive employee base. One of their ERGs raised their hand and said, we don't want to do business with Florida. And in fact, some of our LGBTQ employees may not feel comfortable going to Florida for the offsite. No one, know, the CEO didn't wake up in the morning saying, I'd really like to get involved in a conflict like that. They had already put down. Jason Kirby (16:54.459) Yeah. David Meadvin (16:56.302) you know, a very substantial deposit on the hotel. They had made travel plans. It wasn't an easy thing to unwind. Now you're faced with a lot of different competing interests and the imperative to make a decision. There's a little bit of a, you know, a thread of people who say, CEO should stay out of politics. Sure. When you have that opportunity, I've never met a CEO. who wakes up in the morning thinking, how can I get my name in the papers talking about all the controversial issues happening in the world right now? CEOs want to build a good company. They want to grow. They want to do right by their investors and their employees. They are generally driven by pretty strong values, but they're not looking to stir things up. The reality though of living in the world we're in right now is that when things happen like what I described, the founder of the startup, Often we get pulled into things where we have no choice but to engage. And then the question isn't, should we engage or should we not engage? It's how do we look at the whole map of all of the stakeholders who matter to us and determine how we're gonna make the decision that will have the best outcome for the most of our people. Jason Kirby (18:04.667) Yeah. And it sucks that you just kind of have to bite the bullet that as you say, like not everyone's going to be happy. And it says, how do you, how do you make that, that list of people as small or as minimally impacted as possible, but the reality of choosing between bad options, I think is something that founders that reaches scale of like, you know, a real business, know, like you're, scaling a real business. have, you know, either. Hundred, know, hundreds of employees. It becomes very sensitive very quickly on just the the breadth of personalities that you have. Like you can't win everyone. David Meadvin (18:39.066) Well, that's right. And there's a two dimensional way of thinking about this in a three dimensional way. I would say the two dimensional way is treating the stakeholders in your ecosystem as the same value in all cases. So the, you know, there will be a CEO who says, you know, I'm pretty much always going to take the word of my investors first. So if your investor weighs in and says you should do one thing, you're going to do it. The fact of the matter isn't, let me take a break here. David Meadvin (19:11.408) Ahem. So the two dimensional approach is to always think about your stakeholders as having equal value in all cases, which means if you are a founder who tends to default to your investors being your most important stakeholder, if an investor calls and says, you should do a thing one way, you're probably going to do it that way. The fact of the matter is there are cases where the investor is the most important. There are times when the employee is the most important. There are times when the customer is the most important and so forth. So the three dimensional approach is to understand that the dynamics of each case will dictate how you should react. Jason Kirby (19:47.847) Uh, brings back some, some PTSD for me where you multiple cases, like the situation where, you know, Samsung was supposed to buy my company. They, the deal fell through the morning of close. Like just couldn't have been any worse of a situation. Literally get a text at two in the morning, like morning time in Korea that the deal is dead. Uh, and you know, the new CEO vetoed every deal on the table, regardless of what it was. And we had told our whole team to show up in the morning at 9 a.m., which we never did. Never told them to show up early in the morning. And, you know, Michael and I were sitting there like, do we say to them? Because no, they're not everyone knew. There's only about five people in the company that knew that we were selling. You know, but the rest, everyone else was just like, you know, coming in and like, oh, something exciting and big is going to happen. They've been teasing it for a while and all the decisions you have to make that are like so not aligned with. Your day-to-day operations as a founder and like everyone starts questioning your authority, why you're doing certain things is like, you can't tell employees certain things. And then that moment you're leading up to falls apart the morning of, and having to basically make a decision of what do you say? Like, how do you, not knowing that the deal might still happen. We didn't know we didn't have enough information, literally just a text deals, deals that like deals on pause right now. Yeah. We don't know what's happening. We'll get back to you. like. David Meadvin (21:17.467) Yeah. And Jason, and I think that this is such a classic example of thinking about the audience in front of you. The crisis you had was a crisis with your team. It wasn't a media crisis, at least not at that moment. It wasn't yet an investor crisis, although I, sorry. David Meadvin (21:45.522) All right, let's see how we are now. So it speaks exactly to thinking about who your audience is. Your audience at that moment was your team. It might shift later to the media if there was a leak or to investors, but at that moment, your singular concern was the people who were shoulder to shoulder with you building the company. And what I would say is when that is your number one audience, as much as you can default to honesty and openness. to the extent you can, right? When you're putting a deal together, we all know that there are things that you can't disclose to people. When you can't disclose things, be honest with them that there are things you can't disclose. But the truth of the matter is there's not really any spin that could have changed the reality of what you were going through, which means that the best approach is level with people. Give them the most optimistic version of what you have to tell them because the job of the founder or the CEO is to you know, make people feel good and ready to rally even when times are tough. But if you sugarcoat it too much, if you spin it too much, they know, they always know. And I always like to say that the worst thing you can do with employees is treat them like the rest of the world. You can't communicate with your employees by press release. You have to make them feel like you're bringing them under the curtain to whatever extent you can and treat them like adults. Jason Kirby (23:07.406) I told them we were gonna have a great Christmas party. David Meadvin (23:10.097) Which I bet was true. Jason Kirby (23:14.31) It was all right. Everyone got aggressively intoxicated on that. All of us. Yeah, that was a... We were all depressed at that point. Unfortunately, we moved very quickly, got another deal done. yeah, I don't know if I handled that right, but didn't see a lot of options on the table. But for the crises that you've seen and overseen at the scale of what you've seen, I'm talking about a small startup. David Meadvin (23:16.644) Hahaha! David Meadvin (23:35.483) Fair enough. Jason Kirby (23:44.527) it's raised a couple million. You're dealing with like multi-billion dollar companies that, have to navigate, you know, very complex, very public situations. And you kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but I would like to unpack a little bit more like when, you know, if I'm a founder and I'm blindsided by external internal force of chaos, that's going to derail whatever my expectations were, what's the framework? that you work through with your clients on understanding the situation and discovering what options might exist. David Meadvin (24:22.063) The first thing, and this sounds obvious, but it's important to say is really dig deep, take a deep breath and make sure that you are interrogating all of the facts. There is a human instinct to make a decision quickly under pressure. There's also a mentality that I see frequently where when a company gets into a difficult situation, there will be people who the expression is they smell smoke, so they start a fire. You know, something is going a little bit wrong. So they make a decision that makes that accelerates that process. It makes things go wrong much quicker. I wrote an op-ed quite a few years ago and I don't remember much about what I wrote, but I do remember I thought the title was pretty clever. It was don't just do something, sit there. So what I will frequently advise and again, it feels intuitive, but often it isn't in that moment is Take a breather. Don't feel the need to make a decision immediately, whether that decision is changing a policy, whether it's contacting a reporter, whatever the kind of decision set in front of you, usually you can afford a little more time than you think to think it through. So number one is within reason, take your time because you can't pull back a thing you've done. but usually you can take another hour, another day to make sure you're doing it right. Number two, make sure you have a team of people around you who you trust. And I think that that can be some people who are formerly on your team. I think it's good to have some outside perspective that can be an advisor like my team, or it can also be a spouse or family member or an investor or a mentor who you trust. I think it's critical. to have people who are not living and breathing the day to day, bring a little bit of outside perspective into the conversation. And ultimately, I think the job of a founder, the job of a CEO is often to bring together a group of people who have disparate viewpoints and to hear them out and then to determine how to make a decision based on different inputs. If everyone's giving you the same advice, you're not gonna make a good decision. If you have people inside the company. David Meadvin (26:46.65) outside the company, potentially from different industries who are giving you competing opinions, that tension will help you get to a better outcome. Jason Kirby (26:56.006) You mentioned something else earlier about knowing your audience too. Who are you going to end up speaking to? And who matters most in what's put out into the world, whether it's the public narrative, the customers, the team, employees, or shareholders? And when it comes to assessing that, what would you recommend to founders when they look through all their stakeholders? David Meadvin (27:25.67) first thing is always consider that group of people variable and changing given the dynamics. There will always be people who matter a lot. Your investors matter a whole lot. Your employees matter a whole lot. Your customers matter a lot. You can think about the media if it's a media situation as a stakeholder. They matter. And you need to come into any situation having a pretty nuanced idea of how you think people will react to different outcomes. You're not always going to be right, but you need to be able to game that out a little bit. And then really think about the kind of the string of events. If you make one decision and investors are pretty happy, but a group of employees goes absolutely crazy, can you afford that dynamic? Maybe it's the opposite. Who among your board will give you the benefit of the doubt? Who among your... investors will give you that benefit of the doubt and say, hey, I may not agree with this decision, but I believe that you've thought about all of the angles. Maybe you've thought about things that I haven't, and I trust you're going to make the right move here. And by the way, when you think about your cap table, the people who are willing to give you that benefit of the doubt, those are the keepers. But sure, part of that is you want investors who are willing to put that trust in you, but part of it is you need to earn that trust, which is really about relationship development. And it goes back to You you can't start thinking about your stakeholders when a crisis hits. You need to have done that legwork way before you hit a bad patch. You need to be communicating with your investors and your employees and your customers in ways that engender that kind of trust. Jason Kirby (29:09.638) You know, it's such a key characteristic of like foreign founders of like, how do they handle themselves when shit goes wrong? Uh, it's so easy to kind of say like, Hey, everything's up to the right. Everything's like, great. But like those companies that are exploding with growth, if they like hit a point of crisis and immediately fall off a cliff, like there's a company that, um, got just absolutely ripped this morning in a op ed for basically claiming that they had, you know, X million dollars in ARR, you know, it was all perceived to be that way. But then the churn was like 90%. Like, so was just falling off a cliff. And so rather than like fixing the problem, they like doubled down on the narrative and doubled down on, you know, the customers with the problem, not that, and like just completely not, you know, going in the right direction, obviously, because now they completely got eaten alive and, know, will probably be sold for parts or dismantled at some point for just mishandling the situation as opposed to looking at how do they properly address this crisis. David Meadvin (30:11.973) It's exactly right. obviously every founder wants to be known for growth and financial success, right? That's you can't be a founder without that, but it's also not enough because everyone hits that moment where growth stalls or where there's a challenge with a new product. And if your entire reputation is built on being the founder who's growing fast, that can crumble really quickly. My company, grew incredibly fast for the first two years. And during that period, growth can actually be enough, right? Growth can fuel a really positive culture or at least what feels like a positive culture because of the adrenaline and the sense of being a part of a winning team. During that growth, we thought a lot about what happens when if A, the growth starts to slow or B, we reach a point where we are more mature and the growth isn't the thing that brings everyone together. And we spent a lot of time thinking about what are the things we want everyone to rally around and feel as part of their identity. It's not just we're part of this growing company. It's we're a part of a company that's doing things the right way, that has a long-term vision, and that we feel good about the work we're doing each day. Jason Kirby (31:23.184) You know, another kind of consistent, the nominator and everything you're mentioning is like, you can't do this alone. As a founder, like I've seen founders basically internalize everything and try to manage and capture all the chaos, all the stress of a crisis to themselves and themselves alone without bringing in trusted advisors and, you know, not talking to stakeholders at all, just having to take that burden entirely on their own. What would you say to those founders? that have chosen that path as opposed to what you're kind of promoting in terms of, you know, make it a discussion, get the facts, talk it out. What would you say to those founders that have decided to go solo? David Meadvin (32:07.463) I get it. And in some ways it's virtuous, right? You want to take that stress on because you own that stress. You're the one who volunteered for it. Others didn't in the same way, but even though I think the spirit behind it is often virtuous, the outcome will never be as strong. It's simply a fact that the more viewpoints you bring into a conversation, the more diversity of thought, the better enabled you'll be to make ultimately the right decision. Now that sort of board of advisors can look different depending on your personality. As I said, it can be, you know, a group of folks internally. can be a group of investors. It can be outside consultants. It can also just be, you know, you're a buddy of yours from high school who, you know, has nothing to do with your industry, but you really trust them and you know that they're not going to tell you what you want to hear. Right. It can be, there are so many different models. What you want to avoid is people who are just going to reinforce your thinking. You want people who will challenge you, but do it in a positive way, right? Some people, the idea of, challenge the CEO means tell them they're wrong. That gets old really quickly, right? And what I find is that, you know, the CEO is often right, or at least is some version of right and maybe needs to see a different perspective, but bring together people who you really trust, but trust to give you a very honest assessment of how they view what you're facing. Jason Kirby (33:14.369) the Jason Kirby (33:35.344) David, how did you get into this? You know, you're in Washington, but how did you end up helping, you know, some of the leaders of some of the biggest companies in the country, as well as small companies, know, startups? How did you get into this? Why did you choose to get into the most complicated point of someone's life? David Meadvin (33:50.248) Right. David Meadvin (33:55.014) I started my career as a speechwriter in politics. worked on Capitol Hill, worked at the justice department. And this was very early in my career. And what I realized pretty quickly was I liked writing. I didn't love it. I wasn't someone who wanted to be writing their entire career all the time. But the job, when I was in my early twenties, gave me a seat at the table. It's a cliche, but I got to be in the room. in the room where some really hard decisions were being made that were consequential and had real national implications. And that's what I loved. I loved being a student of leadership and thinking about how you make hard, important decisions amidst a lot of uncertainty with big consequences of the decision that you made. you when I was in my early twenties, I wasn't necessarily asked to weigh in on these decisions, but I got to watch them. And then if you're in the room long enough and you stick around, eventually you have the opportunity to share your view. And so that's really the direction my career took where I had a series of roles in the private sector that were one foot in what you might describe as traditional communications, but another foot in kind of an informal strategic advisor, almost chief of staff to a series of CEOs. And it helped me develop this view that communications shouldn't be thought of as its own discipline. It needs to be woven into a broader strategy. And so I developed this reputation as being someone who had pretty good familiarity with how to advise founders and CEOs. I don't think of myself as a crisis advisor. There are firms where you bring them in when you have a crisis. And I've always thought, why would that... be the signal you want in the marketplace. I've just hired this crisis firm, I must be in crisis. But what we do, what one strategy group does is we have long-term relationships with founders and CEOs and their C-suite. Where we are in the trenches with them, I like to say that we're the first number on speed dial, which means that if they have an opportunity they wanna talk through, they're gonna call us. But also if they have a challenge, it could become a crisis. David Meadvin (36:11.326) we're the first call. So it's really a trust relationship that ladders down into doing a lot of the things we think about as reputation management, communications, thought leadership. But it starts with, we want to be one of those people that no matter what, when you have an important decision to make, you want us in the room. Jason Kirby (36:31.289) And before one strategy, you know, you were at Facebook working on, think during or before the IPO and dealing with that, you're at Bloomberg or at Citadel. You worked at some major companies that have thousands of employees. I'd be curious, obviously you probably can't share when you can't share, but, you know, do what you can. think being in those rooms and hearing kind of this story that didn't come out. the story that, um, you know, maybe didn't get the full picture or like, you know, was the option not chosen to talk about any, any interesting stories you can share on that front without causing any trust issues with your past clients. David Meadvin (37:14.388) Well, here's what I can say about the aggregate of those experiences. In many ways, the only difference between a crisis that a really big company faces and a crisis that a startup or a small company faces is the number of highly paid people in the room. The elements of it, the consequences of it are really similar. And so, you know, my firm works with a bunch of big companies. We also work with a bunch of pre-IPO, you know. Jason Kirby (37:19.599) Well played. David Meadvin (37:42.899) series eight IPO type companies. And I don't think that, you know, that there's much difference in how we handle a crisis for one versus the other. The other thing I would say is crises come in literally every flavor you could possibly imagine. things happen that are totally out of left field, whether it's a CEO going through a really messy divorce, a CEO who of a pre IPO company who made a really major real estate transaction, bought an expensive property and then realized that it would get reported in the media. And they freaked out about employees seeing how much money they spent on their plan. Or when I worked at Bloomberg, there were some very public crises around the newsroom and the separation between Jason Kirby (38:27.589) Yeah, I think I know which one you're talking about. Remember that one. David Meadvin (38:41.716) news side and the corporate side that took weeks and weeks. you can't, there's an expression that plans are useless, planning is everything. I don't believe in having a crisis playbook. don't think, let me move on a sec. David Meadvin (39:08.692) think there is an industry that exists around trying to come up with a solution to every possible crisis. We need 50 different statements sitting on the shelf. We need a strategy for every different outcome. I think a lot of companies spin their wheels planning for things when the reality is when the thing hits, it's probably going to be different than you imagined. And the best thing you can have is people who stay cool, who have experience dealing with complicated situations, and then can call on their pattern recognition to make good decisions in those moments. Jason Kirby (39:50.758) So looking at some very public crisis situations like Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, dealing with multiple issues, but one that of polarized parts of the country in terms of picking a line on no politics. Because people are ripping apart each other inside of Coinbase over red versus blue in the politics game. when you look at other CEOs that have publicly experienced this and not your clients, What's kind of your commentary on say like Brian Armstrong's circumstance there? David Meadvin (40:26.76) You know, when I was thinking about launching one strategy group, I was working at a really successful CEO advisory firm and It felt like there was an opportunity to do the work that traditionally a lot of publicly traded CEOs got, but bring it to some smaller companies, some startups and pre-IPO companies. And as I was in this process of thinking about whether to do it, there was a very well-known kind of CEO Oracle who had worked in the White House and had been doing corporate advisory for decades and decades, who sat for an interview at a big national publication. And the whole point of his interview was to say that we need to end this age of CEOs getting involved in politics. Let's keep politics in one category and let's put the company stuff in the other category. And I read it and I kind of got angrier and angrier as I read it because to me it was a great example of a very old school way of looking at the world. And I think in the advisory space, what you have is a lot of people who cut their teeth in the nineties and built a way of doing things that were really effective back then, but aren't really responsive to how much the world has changed. And a crisis today looks much different than it did 30 years ago, 35 years ago. So on the issue of politics, basically my view is It's not a question of should we get into politics or should we not? It's a question of when you are forced to make a decision, are you making the best one that supports your employees and supports your position? So sometimes it's unavoidable. And when it's unavoidable, be smart about it, but don't act like it's a black and white decision. Don't act like your decision is, do I want to be a political founder? Or do I want to be a political founder? David Meadvin (42:33.609) because either one is gonna lead you to a bad place. Jason Kirby (42:38.489) You know, I know you're good at your job of how well you're able to like narrate an answer without having to like actually take a stance on like the gotcha topic. David Meadvin (42:49.781) You know, I'll take that as a compliment, whether it was met as one or not, but the truth of the matter is, it's really not for me to pass judgment on the politics of a situation. We have a big client that was faced with a really tough decision that a lot of big companies faced a few months ago, which is would they donate to President Trump's inaugural committee? Very political issue. And one of those things where You again, you get to that moment and you see a lot of your peers who have done it, some who haven't, and you need to decide whether you'll do it. In the way that I advise on an issue like that, you can't get more political than that, but it's not my job to impose my political views on the CEO or the company. It's my job to help them look at the whole landscape and think about different outcomes. And in this situation, they knew, again, no good answer because they knew that You know some employees would be pretty upset if they did it they knew that other Stakeholders would be pretty upset if they didn't and again It's just about weighing the facts keeping your own politics out of it and putting the company first Jason Kirby (44:01.891) You know, one of the reasons I wanted you on this show is not like, just because I like talking to you, cause that's part one. But the other reason is as a founder that's been through some shit, you know, just running around with, you know, I like to say that the visual I create for myself is I was on a unicycle juggling balls of fire, balancing a house of cards. and then someone just like throwing like, you know, flaming balls at me while trying to dodge them. Like that's essentially the visual I create for myself when I go back to my like high tech, you know, gross startup stuff. And, you know, when a crisis hits, it's like one of the balls hit you in the face and every founder has to do it, especially if you raise venture, the, the, stakes are so much higher. The, velocity of expectation or the expectation of velocity is so much higher. And I wanted you on this show because you you talked about earlier about you can't really, like once you're in crisis mode, you know, if you haven't set up the foundation already, it could be exponentially harder. and how you make your decisions in crisis is ultimately what makes a great founder separated from a good or a bad founder. And I thought it would be essential for you to kind of share your knowledge and talk about this. Yeah, you've already mentioned a little bit, but if you can talk a little bit more about that, that prep, like that mental mindset of, you know, while things are calm or while things are going well, how do you manage your stakeholders? How do you manage your communication to make sure that, you know, when that ball does hit you in the face and you have to do something that you have the right foundation to not screw it up. David Meadvin (45:52.427) Yeah. Number one, really know who matters and know them on a personal level to the extent you can. Can you know every customer personally? Probably not. Can you really get to know every investor personally at an earlier stage? Yes. And take the time to do that. I can't tell you how many times I have a conversation with a founder who takes for granted that one of their investors or one of their board members will side with them on a given issue, only to then be shocked to find that they don't. That's probably a discoverable fact, right? You probably, if you're honest about your relationship, could see some warning signs. You could kind of know that maybe that's a relationship that needs to be strengthened. So much of what we do, Jason, across all of the aspects of building a company, it's trust. I think even if you are a product person, even if that's your background, and even if you've built the best product, you have to focus on the trust part first. So that's where I would start. The second is something I mentioned. It's build a group of people around you who you trust, who you know will give it to you straight. And the third is at the end of the day, have the courage to rely on your instincts, probably being right. because something got you to where you are. And I'd say most of the time, a big part of that something is good judgment. So if everyone's telling you one thing and you just have this nagging feeling like there's something you see that they don't, interrogate that. Jason Kirby (47:39.429) You just boosted some egos massively. Like, yeah, you're right. I'm awesome. David Meadvin (47:46.079) Well, because at the end of the day, and Jason, I know you've gone through this in your career, you are the one who has to live with your decisions. And if you have a group around you, if you've got your leadership team, and they all vote to do something one way, and you choose to it their way, even if it doesn't quite feel right, and it doesn't work out, they can move on to their next thing much more easily than you can. You have to live with the outcome of that decision. That doesn't mean That doesn't mean ignore advice, right? Getting that advice is the most important thing, but it does mean that ultimately the filtering that you do of what people are telling you, that's one of the most important qualities of being a successful founder. Jason Kirby (48:27.493) And what I look for to try to suss that out now, because I made some investments. I've worked with some founders where I didn't check this trait about them. And those are all been the worst deals I've been a part of. And the ones that I ultimately look for is like, what was their, what was their moment of crisis in their past? And, or, you like, how do they come out of like, what's their story? What's their narrative? then, um, just how focused are they on? The relationships of their cap table. And you talked about this earlier, and especially at the early stage, you might not have like a hundred employees and you know, you know, whatever, like, you know, big company, you know, logos as your clients yet that you can worry about. Like the people that are there at the earliest or, you know, a couple early stage employees and your cap table, like who's backed you and trust you. And a red flag I see with founders are the ones that are scared to go to their cap table. The ones that are afraid to bring up. the issues that they experienced because like, I got to be awesome. I got to present a bravado that everything's going well. And the problem is when something goes wrong, everyone thought everything was going right. What happened? Why didn't you say anything? Like what what's going on? It's like, if you're able to communicate with your investors, you know, as the not when like shit hits the fan, but the small things like, I'm going through this one thing with employee, like, can you help with this? Or, you know, I'm going through this one thing with a customer or whatever might be happening, being able to start those conversations when the stakes are low to build that trust specifically like in prioritization of cap table, you know, who's, who's first on the cap table in terms of, you know, influential impact, or did you sign a term sheet that one of those investors has veto rights to, to an action that you want to take, like a deal you're going to make, like if you don't have trust. And consistent communication with those people when a crisis hits or an opportunity hits. Like it can all fall apart because you didn't manage those relationships, manage expectations, manage the trust of those relationships. And I've definitely seen deals completely fall apart, um, you know, because of the mismanagement, uh, of their cap table and those relationships. David Meadvin (50:44.159) It's so true. think there is a fundamental truth, is that you really can't spin your cap table. You can't spin your investors. Maybe you can get away with doing it to buy yourself a little bit of time, but in the long run, they're always going to have the facts. And I can't tell you how many times I talked to an investor who says, why is it that the first time I heard about this was when we got to a crisis? I could have helped. I could have helped them navigate. I could have done something about it. But now we're in a position that it's much harder to recover. And there is a human nature to it. People want to be asked to help. They want to be involved. And remember that even if your investors aren't building the company with you day to day, they are emotionally invested in your success. So being open enough to flag a potential concern, a potential problem early honors the trust that they've put in you and doing the opposite. trying to keep them out of it. While again, it may be the right idea to not expose them to things that you'd rather solve on your own, it never works in the long run. Jason Kirby (51:51.782) completely agree and it eventually catches up. Now I've definitely seen some, like I've definitely taken a couple of gambles, like, oh, we're, we're going to get really close to those performance metrics. We're going to get really close. I'm like, yeah, I was like, let's, let's just keep, you know, I'm like, if we're just short, it's not a big deal, but like, you know, big important decisions or things that are going to come out at some point, you know, the, sooner you bring up those conversations with, again, at the very least, you know, if anyone takes away anything from this call, it's like build those relationships with your cab table. Make sure they know you, you trust them. You trust them. And you at least have a couple of people, like you said, like that advisory board that are close to you to bring this stuff up. Cause if you're doing it alone and you're not talking to people about it, it's a one, it's going to increase the probability of burnout, which leads to worse decisions. In my opinion, I'm curious, like, have you seen in your history of doing this at all different levels? Like, where have you seen kind of the, the one that handled it right? And what was the outcome and the one that. didn't handle it right, didn't take the advice or didn't ask for the advice and things went south. David Meadvin (52:58.655) I'll give you some aggregate examples of how it works and how it doesn't. Jason Kirby (53:00.549) You're such a... too good at your job. David Meadvin (53:06.135) I think it generally works if you... Let's take the example of a CEO who finds themselves in a little bit of hot water. One example that Jason and I have talked about is a CEO I worked with who came in to run a private equity backed company and was new to the job. Not he had been a CEO, but was brought in new. And the first thing they did was cut a video Well, introducing him to employees. was a big enough company that he couldn't introduce himself to everyone at once. The video was cut by their marketing team, sent out to employees, and they made some horrible editing decisions that sort of, without going into too much detail, made the CEO look sexist in the way he treated some of the employees who were in the video. Not remotely his fault, it was Simply a really bad video cut but here he is brand new to the company now introducing himself in a way that really infuriated a lot of people The reason I think that that example is instructive is that ultimately he was not to blame he had actually done nothing wrong and therefore While it's not how you want to introduce yourself to your new team He was able to give an explanation that was credible and people were able to give him the benefit of the doubt now the flip of that is when a CEO, when a founder genuinely has done something wrong, there's really no amount of spin that can get you out of it. I think that's a bit of the myth about the crisis industry is if you hire a really good crisis person, they can spin their way out of it. They can kill the article. They can weave some narrative that gets you out of it. That almost never works because people are too smart. So when you've Actually done something wrong, whether it's a small thing, whether it's a big, a big thing. The only way out of it is being direct, being honest, being open. Now that can happen within a thoughtful strategic framework, right? What you say matters. That doesn't mean get in front of a camera or up on stage at a town hall and just let her rip. And often you find that, you know, people take this advice of being open and honest too far. And it becomes this confessional where they actually make things worse. David Meadvin (55:33.709) So be strategic in both directions, right? Be strategic if you are apologizing, if you are explaining it, but treat people like adults. I don't think spin is a thing because people see through it particularly now so quickly. Authenticity, whether we're talking about politics or business leaders, authenticity is everything. That's what we all want from our boss. That's what we all want from our elected officials. We don't always have to agree with their decisions. But we want to believe that they're doing things for the right reason, that they came to the decision based on a thoughtful framework, and that basically at end of the day, they're doing what they can to be a good person and run a good company. Jason Kirby (56:15.813) That's very well said and a great way to wrap up this podcast. David, what would be the best way for someone to learn more about what you've done and or what one strategy does? David Meadvin (56:28.69) Well, thanks, Jason. This was a lot of fun. I dropped by our website, one-strat.com, reach out to us. The way that I think about building this company is yes, of course, every company needs revenue and clients or customers, which we're fortunate to have. I spend most of my time just trying to meet interesting people and be helpful where I can. And in my experience, if you do that, you also kind of build a really successful... company. That's something you and I talked about when we were together a couple months ago in London. I think it's a shared worldview that we have. It's how you run your business as well. So I say that because I am always talking to founders who are dealing with a challenge, trying to think about growth. Maybe they are facing a crisis. so anyone who wants to have a conversation, I'm always up to do it. Jason Kirby (57:19.129) Now I appreciate that. We'll make sure to leave the contact information and then show notes down below. And again, just a final word to founders, you know, get, get a good advisory board around you. Keep, keep the communication open. Don't hold it all in. I've seen too many founders burn out, not create enough optionality for them. And, know, the business crumbles because I literally got an email this morning saying someone shutting down and needs to take a mental health break for the next like six months. It just happens too often to too many founders. David, thanks again for coming on the show. David Meadvin (57:55.767) And Jason, your last point is so critical. Take care of your mental health because your ability to navigate complicated decisions is directly tied to having that mental space. And when human beings and founders are human beings face extraordinary pressure, it's harder to make good decisions. So do everything you can to put yourself in a mental space. exercise, time off, with all the things you need to do in order to be able to make those hard decisions better. Jason Kirby (58:31.428) Really great. David, thank you so much for coming to the show. look forward to getting this out to our audience. David Meadvin (58:37.612) Thank you, Jason.