How Hard Can It Be? With Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm

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Selling From The Heart With Larry Levine
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TSP Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm | Startup Business

 

How hard can it be to monetize your startup business? John Livesay sits with Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm, an entrepreneur, optimist, and author of How Hard Can It Be? The journey is full of peaks and valleys. It’s never just a straight line towards success. The key is to start small. Validate your assumptions by throwing your ideas into the market. Don’t forget to get honest feedback. The most important thing? Believe that you can. Need more tips on how to make your startup business a success? Tune in!

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How Hard Can It Be? With Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm

Our guest is Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm, who is an optimist, entrepreneur, and author of How Hard Can It Be. He leads sales and business development at GLOBHE, which is a health platform for drone data on demand. He mentors startups at the Nordic Startup School and Leaders on TaskHuman.com. He is the Founder of multiple startups, including internalDesk, a SaaS platform for enterprise collaboration, where he served as the Chief Operating Officer. It was recognized as one of the Top 10 Tech Rising Stars in the Nordics in 2014 and was acquired in 2019. His interests include entrepreneurship, neuroscience, and everything related to mindset and wellbeing. He lives in Stockholm. He’s also a fan of storytelling. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, John.

It’s great to be with you. We have some mutual friends. I would love you to take us back to your own story of origin. You can go back to school or even childhood of how you get interested in being in the world of entrepreneurs. A lot of people are not even exposed to the concept. You either go to school and become a doctor or lawyer, or you have your own business as an electrician or something. How did you get into this world of entrepreneurship?

The quick answer is I feel that I’ve always been an entrepreneur. It’s a weird one. I’ve never fitted in. I’ve done the classic curriculum in a way, although it wasn’t a straight line. I went to school, dropped out, started to work, and went back again. I didn’t follow the classic schooling in France initially. I worked a bit and eventually realized that I felt behind academically. I needed to have this bigger degree. I went on and pursued an MBA.

After that, I work in management consulting. I didn’t align with my expectation of what it meant to be in business. I did try a couple of things along the way, naturally. That’s why I’m saying I’ve always felt like being an entrepreneur throughout. After years in management consultancy, I went all in and dedicated my life to entrepreneurship. It’s been joyful and exciting.

Your book, How Hard Can It Be, is a chronological watch of your startup journey. At the beginning of our entrepreneurial journey, most of us are seeing big winners like Jeff Bezos. You said it’s like comparing a late-stage Picasso to someone who’s starting. It’s not fair to yourself to do that.

We were exposed to the big successes, the Kardashians and the Elons. When you start with that picture in mind, you can quickly, rapidly, or totally be sent off guard and end up being depressed, perhaps even.

[bctt tweet=”The journey is full of peaks and valleys; it’s never just a straight line towards success. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

The worst thing we can do in any career is to compare ourselves to other people because that is the gateway to Imposter syndrome and self-doubt. It never benefits us.

I did my journey, and my startup lasted for a few years. We did the classic entrepreneurial startup journey. We had the idea, blended some angel money, driving a tech startup, and we’re incubated. We got VC funding and did the whole trip. We landed very nice customers, Fortune 50 companies, and did some nice rollouts. It was a nice and enriching experience.

When you look at the data points, at that time, we were all looking beautiful. It’s all aligned. The journey itself is filled with peaks and valleys. It’s never a straight line towards success. We go up and down. Eventually, after a few years, we never got to scale the way we wanted to. We had to hang up the gloves and let them go.

The reflection of that post-journey, even though it didn’t necessarily end up in a failure, but at least a personal failure, not meeting my own expectations. I realized that most of us, 9 out of 10, will end up like that. As you look around and from where we started, it all looks everyone is an Elon, but that’s not the case.

There are a lot of takeaways there. A lot of people think it’s all or nothing. Either you’re this huge success, or you’re this huge failure. What I’m hearing is while you didn’t scale the business, you were still able to sell it. I’m wondering if the investors got some, if not all, of their money back, or maybe even a little profit. Tell us how that turned out.

It didn’t turn out the way they had expected. We did sell the technical platform, but it’s not that we ended up on the beach with piña coladas, nothing like that.

The fact you’re able to sell something is a huge accomplishment. A lot of people have to realize things are not all or nothing in life. Your book takes us on this journey, much like my fable, The Sale is in the Tale, where you pull people in with this story with great exposition about. We know it’s Stockholm, know what year it is, your laptop’s open, waiting to go live, yet there’s some conflict because there’s a big delay. That creates some tension. It’s important for people to realize that any good story, whether a movie or a book, sets something up and then instantly creates some conflict because there is no story without conflict.

TSP Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm | Startup Business

How Hard Can It Be: Startup Lessons From Trying (And Failing) To Take Down Facebook

I did an MBA. I was a management consultant. I read most of the books that are concerned with strategy and entrepreneurship. Most of them are either highly academic, which serve their purpose but are not so inspiring as a story would be. Otherwise, they are a list of the hacks to make it work. Someone has figured it out.

If you buy the book, you’ll manage yourself. It’s not black or white. It’s a very gray zone in here. My intent was to put the wannabe entrepreneur or the entrepreneur who is running his or her startup into what it’s like to drive a startup from everything, the actual emotional rollercoaster because there’s a lot to it. It’s not success after success. There are a lot of valleys and difficult situations to rise from and decisions to make.

We’ve heard about the hero’s journey and the trough of despair. What you’re saying is that your emotional skills are as important as your tech skills.

It’s all about what’s in between your ears. That’s where everything happens. There is this thing that either you believe you can, or you believe you can’t. In both cases, you are right. That’s true.

The subtitle of your book is Startup Lessons From Trying (And Failing) To Take Down Facebook. That’s a huge goal. Ironically, we are doing this interview close to the plummet in Facebook’s stock. A lot of it has been blamed on somebody taking it down, whether it’s Apple changing the ruling about tracking things, TikTok getting a little more popular, or Google doing some things. It seems like a multifaceted series of challenges that they’re facing. Give us some perspective on that. You spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to take them down back in 2013 and 2014. Years later, it looks like it might be happening. Timing is a big factor in everything.

Sadly, it wasn’t me this time. At that time, Facebook was the social platform of choice. What we were frustrated with as management consultants was the focus on behaviors. My thing was helping large organizations to cascade strategic initiatives. That implies typically either upscaling the employees themselves to help them roll out the strategy of the moment inside the company or upscaling of behavior like mindset change.

What does it take to roll out a sales initiative or whatever important strategic initiative that needs to be rolled out in large corporates? As we were looking at Facebook, all of our friends and the whole world were wondering what’s in it for people to press that button from there so fast and call that engagement? Why should you do that? Why should you like the content of the plate of your neighbors and be satisfied with that?

We thought there was more to life than being content with that action. We would challenge them with a social network that would be more engaging, and the mechanism we had found to do that was to create challenges. Anyone could challenge anyone. You could challenge your friends or yourself to something that you want to achieve in the real world.

It could be anything like becoming a storyteller, learning Chinese, or starting running in preparation for a marathon. Whatever you would set yourself to, you would have to do on the platform and provide evidence of your accomplishment. We thought that as we would do that, we would help people become better versions of themselves.

[bctt tweet=”Help people become better versions of themselves. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

It was all back to self-development in a way, self-actualization, and helping people to move from their current state to their better self. When you look at it from all theories you have out there, from Maslow to anything you can come across, it’s all agreed upon. We all want more, but there’s a gap when it comes to doing it.

You had mentioned that one of your challenges was scaling your business. What advice would you have from going through this experience for people of either a mistake to avoid or something they need to make sure they are doing to scale a business?

I’ve got plenty of advice, having gone through years of it. One of them would be to start small and not think about this one thing we believe is the best thing since sliced bread. We are going to scale it, all is going to be nice, and we’re going to end up as an Elon. No. Start small, validate your assumptions by throwing your ideas into the market, getting real feedback, and not overdeveloping things. That’s the beginning.

For example, when you launch a product, the MVP thing, you don’t want to be overdeveloping only to realize that you’ve developed out of your own imagination. It doesn’t resonate with the market whatsoever. I’ve learned to get out there, get real feedback from the market, and follow the lead of your target audience.

One of the things you say in the book is scalability is a scale in itself. You give an example of a telemedicine application on the phone being more likely to scale because you can increase the number of virtual consultants exponentially with only a small increase in the actual costs of IT. What you’re talking about is figuring out something that can scale fast without a lot of expense.

Yes. Also, your product can be scalable. Ours was. We had developed a platform that could host a lot of videos and content. The platform was scalable, but the business model was not. There was a conflict here. I have to take you a few steps back. As we tried to get people to become other versions of themselves, we failed at that because that’s a mindset element. That’s the thing we can talk about.

Everyone has their own comfort zone of how you only let yourself get so fit or whatever the issues before self-sabotage kicks in.

TSP Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm | Startup Business

Startup Business: Business strategy books are highly academic but not as inspiring as a story.

 

It’s very hard to naturally do things that you have not done before and throw yourself into new things. People get comfortable and function 95% out of a routine they’ve established or have not established for themselves based on the mental models they’ve been given or downloaded throughout their younger age and believe what they perceive as being the world is what it is but it’s not. You can shuffle it all up and come up with anything you want. You just have to decide what it is you want.

As a storytelling keynote speaker, I’m always explaining to audiences the importance of showing something and not telling them. You did a great job of that with the story of how you met your wife, Claire, and all of the obstacles. I thought Romeo and Juliet had a tough go. You guys were in different countries and time zones. It would be so easy to have given up on that relationship.

You think, “I got this job opportunity to be close to her.” The next thing was she has moved and got her own thing even further away. That little love story within the business story shows your tenacity and flexibility. That’s what investors are looking for, being able to tell me a story either in your personal life or career where you show those things as opposed to saying you are someone like that.

When you have a story like that to back it up, then it’s memorable. People feel it’s so wonderful because you’re married, have children, and happy. Children love to hear how their parents meet. It’s such a great legacy as well. The same thing is true when you’re telling not only your personal story but your company stories.

Let’s jump ahead a little bit to what you see happening now. For Facebook to double down and even change their name to Meta, you’re asking people to make big changes and no longer “live in the real world” as much they may currently be doing and want to be immersed in this world with avatars and things. It’s a big escape beyond video games.

What is your take since you’ve been so immersed in this world and seen some resistance? Is it going to be an age thing? Young people are going to go, “This is for me. I am a digital native,” and people over a certain age will be like, “Maybe I’ll spend an hour in there, but not my whole life. I still want to talk to people in person.” What do you see happening in the future?

That’s a very multifaceted discussion, the metaverse, blockchain, NFTs, and all of that.

Let’s keep it to the metaverse because it ties so well to what your book is about, which is, “Just because the platform exists doesn’t mean the business is scalable.” Do you think it’s going to be age-specific, or is everyone going to want this new metaverse world?

[bctt tweet=”Your online digital brand image is crucial. ” via=”no”]

To some extent, we are already doing it. Interestingly, we spend a lot of time online. We all do it first for work. Every document is in the Cloud. You are already spending a large portion of your time online. You’re already in the metaverse. Another thing that struck me is that we’re not conscious of it, but we tend to create our own branding.

Our branding online has become more important than our branding offline. You can go and buy milk in your not-so-classy trousers. In your neighborhood, you may know just a few people. However, when you go online, you have potential access to millions of people, and you want to show right. That means that your actual avatar or your real or personal branding has a higher value for you online than it has offline. To some extent, we are already there.

There are all kinds of people who will spend money buying costumes and jackets for their avatars. The movie that was done several years ago about everybody going into this machine and becoming a 3D avatar is certainly an interesting thing. Do you think it’s going to appeal to a wide range of people and not just young people?

Yes. There’s the next level with the whole brain that is connected to the net, and we live mostly in the metaverse. First, we’ll go there as digital avatars, and then eventually, perhaps with Elon again, we might end up being thrown into the digital world itself.

I went to New York and saw my friends and their son, Max. During the pandemic, I wasn’t able to see him. From 6:00 to 8:00, I only have a relationship with someone via FaceTime and Zoom. In real life lunch, he said to his mom, “Uncle John is more fun in person than he is even on Zoom or FaceTime videos.” I thought, “Thank goodness.” He seems surprised that he would have more fun in person than he would on a call. What a fascinating perspective for someone who has been so isolated at that age range because that was not my childhood to have that comparison. What’s next for you?

Two things, I’m working with the book. I want to help as many entrepreneurs as possible to get a feel of what the journey is. If they are not yet in it but are considering the move, they’ll get a head start if they read the book. That’s one. Another thing I’m doing connected to the book is Keynote and things like that. With organizations, we talk a lot about failing as a capability that needs to be built into the organization for resilience.

Naturally, as a leader, you should understand what that means and how you get feedback from your people and build a culture where failure is not the thing that you don’t accept. It’s even going beyond embracing failure. It’s about seeking failure so as to dare new things and extend the box in which you are, and hopefully, find next-generation products and services.

TSP Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm | Startup Business

Startup Business: Start small and validate your assumptions by throwing your ideas into the market.

 

In the startup world, there’s all this culture of fail fast and learn from it, and reiterate. In the world of Corporate America, people are afraid to fail. They think they’re going to get fired. To become more agile and nimble, they need to embrace failure as something that people are not afraid of doing or, worse, hiding it, and because we don’t take risks, we’re so afraid of failing that we can’t experiment. We keep doing the same thing.

I talk about Blockbuster with all the video stores that kept doing the same thing. By the time they tried something new, it was too late. Netflix did not go down that path. There are many examples of companies failing to the point where they go out of business, like Kodak, because they are not willing to try something to fail. If people want to reach you, you’ve got this wonderful website, which is the title of the book, HowHardCanItBeTheBook.com. Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?

Dare and seek failure as opposed to being afraid of it because it’s an illusion. It doesn’t exist. You’re making it up. The moment you try something that you have not tried before, you realize that finally, it wasn’t that hard. It’s a mental block. The more you dare try things, the more you rewire your view of the world, and the easier it becomes to try different things.

[bctt tweet=”Failure builds resiliency.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I tend to look at this as when you run. If you stay stagnant on one thing you’ve always done, like running around the block while you’re not going to run 10K or further, the moment you start pushing it a bit, you realize that, “I can do that. Maybe next time I run a little further and a little further.” Eventually, you end up doing a marathon, and it wasn’t that scary after all.

It’s about expanding yourself by putting yourself into situations that at first may seem difficult, but the reason they are difficult, or at least in your head, is because you haven’t done them before. They are in your reach. Anyone can do anything. It’s a matter of mindset and daring to get out there and do the thing that you want to do.

Your children are lucky to have you as a parent that’s inspiring them with those messages. We’re all lucky to have your book inspiring all of us. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you, John.

 

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Selling From The Heart With Larry Levine
Winning Is Better With Bob Wiesner
Tags: emotional skills, entrepreneur, Facebook, startup, story, successs