Can Emotions Make You a Better Founder?

Editorial Introduction

I’ve interviewed many founders on *The Business Philosopher Within You*. A recurring theme keeps surfacing.

As organizations grow, the technical problems become easier to solve than the human ones.

We know we need better systems. Better strategy. Better execution. But sooner or later, every founder runs into a different kind of ceiling. The company begins asking something new of them.

Not more intellectual engagement, but a different way of learning.

When Mike LeBlanc and I sat down for this conversation, I expected to talk about robotics, AI and building companies. We certainly did. Mike spent 13 years as a Marine Corps officer before co-founding Cobalt Robotics, which grew to a $360 million valuation. Today, he is helping build Foundation Future Industries, a company with the ambitious vision of creating the world’s most capable humanoid robots.

What I didn’t expect was where the conversation kept returning.

Emotion.

Not emotion as the opposite of reason. Emotion as a source of wisdom. Emotion as feedback. Emotion as the place where real learning begins.

"The learning that really matters isn't intellectual. It's emotional. It challenges you. It changes you."

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

And something more surprising: emotion as intelligence. Not intellect, but intelligence.

Emotions carry intelligence in a nutshell. They are a powerful tool we all have at our disposal. And yet, in the business world, we hardly ever use them.

We’ve been conditioned not to use emotion in business. We’ve been specifically told not to “get emotional” at work.

Mike draws on Aristotle, military leadership and his own experience as a founder to make a simple but profound observation: the learning that changes us isn’t merely intellectual. It’s emotional. It forces us to confront parts of ourselves that information alone never reaches.

That idea resonated deeply with me.

One of the central questions I explore through Awayre’s Humanity Framework is whether leaders continue evolving at the same pace as the organizations they build. We often say that companies become founder-dependent because of systems or structure. Increasingly, I believe founder dependency begins much earlier. It begins when the founder’s own growth starts to lag behind the demands of the organization.

As Brian Chesky famously observed, “A company grows as fast as its founder learns.”

Perhaps the deeper question is this:

What kind of learning actually changes a founder?

That’s the conversation you’re about to hear.

Note: The transcript below has been very lightly edited for readability. But it’s still mostly raw, the way the conversation actually evolved. I felt it didn’t deserve to be changed much from its original form.

Introduction and Highlights: Learning Is Emotional, Not Intellectual

[00:00:00.00] - Mike LeBlanc

Learning is painful. It’s just a very, very painful thing. That really is what a founder needs to be doing is learning. You’re learning what your product is. You’re learning how it fits within your competitors. You’re learning, but it is not, you know, to your point, it’s not a simple download of information. Yes, you may be able to pull the Wikipedia information about everything, be able to look around a room and know what kind of TV a TV is. That’s not an important kind of learning. The kind of learning that matters and that a founder needs to do, you know, or that anybody, you know, changing their life needs to do. It is emotional. It is difficult. It challenges you. It forces you to look back at everything you’ve done and wonder if you’ve done it right. Learning is painful. We had 60-some people and we’re making robots that replace security guards. The problem is we hadn’t sold one. Zero sales. We’ve raised at that point probably about $30 million. We have cool offices. You know, we have all cool engineers, you know, wearing t-shirts and we’re ordering DoorDash every day. And we’re spending, you know, I think we were spending $1.4 million a month and we have no sales.

"The learning that really matters... it's emotional. It's difficult. It challenges you. Learning is painful."

Mike LeBlanc, Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:01:10.19] - Mike LeBlanc

We have, you know, 20-some salespeople. We have 6 marketing people. Nobody’s moving any of these robots anywhere. All of a sudden, we we have this moment where I’m just like, what are we even doing here? Right? And what am I doing here? I was planning on going and just saying, I’m just going to execute whatever business books I’ve read. And, you know, I go in, I’m a nice manager every day and say, you know, compromise with all of my employees. And I say, can we get this done by, you know, April 10th? And they go, oh, we wouldn’t be able to do that for XYZ. And I go, well, those reasons make sense. So we’ll push it off till July. And I was doing all of that. And in so doing, I was hugely resentful about the entire company and I was angry at myself. Aristotle had kind of primed me to all of this, but Plato has a famous thing called the tripartite soul. The idea is Socrates says there are three parts to a human. Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, one of the things that he said that that will always stick with me is a company grows as fast as its founder learns.

[00:02:19.06] - Mike LeBlanc

And that’s always that feeling is like when you can tap into that, that’s why this is, it’s a spiritual journey more than it is a career journey. Let robots do what robots do best, but you’ve got to figure out what humans do best then, and it’s not robotic.

[00:02:31.14] - Bhavesh Naik

This is the Business Philosopher Within You podcast. I’m your host, Bhavesh Naik. There’s a belief in business that scaling is about systems, hiring, and execution. But at some point, most founders have run into something else. The way we manage ourselves begins to shape what the company can become. And sometimes what we feel, not just what we think, plays a bigger role than we expect. Mike LeBlanc is a founder working at the intersection of leadership, technology, and personal growth. He spent 13 years as a Marine Corps officer, including time at the Pentagon before co-founding Cobalt Robotics, a company that scaled to a $360 million in valuation. Today he is a co-founder of Foundation Future Industries with a mission to build the world’s most capable humanoid robots. They’re currently raising at a $3.5 billion valuation with a long-term vision of building a $50 billion company. Along the way, he’s been exploring a question in real time: how does a founder keep evolving fast enough for the company they’re building? His work touches everything from reverse engineering that $50 billion vision to something more human, like the role of emotion, such as anger in leadership. I’m so happy to have you on this podcast, Mike.

[00:03:48.12] - Mike LeBlanc

Thanks so much.

[00:03:49.07] - Bhavesh Naik

And a special shout out to you, our listener. Hey, listen, we’re not just a podcast. We are a movement and you are the business philosopher. We learn from each other and grow with each other. Please remember to like, subscribe, follow, share, and comment, but most important, ask and answer questions. Thank you for tuning in.

Why Did Aristotle Change the Way You Thought About Emotion?

[00:04:06.02] - Bhavesh Naik

So, Mike, You went to a college not far from where I’m at. I’m in northwest of Washington, D.C., about 15 miles, right? So I’m D.C. area. And you went to college in St. James, I think, in Annapolis, which is not too far from St. John, right? And there is a moment that you talk about which is that you started going to college and you started seeing yourself as, I think you used the term blue blood, right? You started thinking that, hey, I’m this intellectual now, right? I’m a thinker now. And you started reading some Greek philosophy, right? Aristotle and Plato, if I’m not mistaken. And you started reading that. And you thought that, hey, you know, I’m gonna find something that is more intellectual than being human, right? And human condition. But you found something different. You were surprised by the philosophies of these Greek greats, right?

“Aristotle wasn’t saying to eliminate emotion. He was saying to use it well.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:05:19.11] - Bhavesh Naik

So take us back behind the scenes a little bit, what was happening at this time, and how did you, start exploring these philosophies and, you know, what was that big insight that you had?

[00:05:32.00] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, I think that most people go to college thinking that what they’re going to learn is gonna confirm their beliefs.

[00:05:37.19] - Bhavesh Naik

Ah, yeah.

[00:05:38.05] - Mike LeBlanc

So they’re, they’re very excited to go and learn how smart they already were.

[00:05:42.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:05:43.06] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and that was, that was me to a T. I thought I have, I have the right view on everything.

[00:05:49.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:05:49.08] - Mike LeBlanc

And now I’m going to open up You know, I’m studying the ancient Greeks, so I’m gonna read Plato and I’m gonna read Aristotle. I’m gonna read Thucydides and Plutarch, and they’re all gonna tell me how smart I was in different words. And there’s almost, um, you know, there’s voyeuristic, uh, quality to it where you think that you’re going to, you know, open up the pages of, you know, these old Greeks that didn’t know much, but still you’re piecing together their words and you’re like, even they knew, you know, what, what we know today. And so there’s, there’s the superiority. In your mind of how we think and we think, well, we get it all right. And if you go on the, in the past, people, people had it all wrong.

[00:06:25.02] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:06:25.21] - Mike LeBlanc

So what, what those views looked like to me were, you know, there was, there was no need for barbarism anymore. There’s no need for, uh, there’s no need for men really. There’s no need for fighting. There’s no need for conflict. There’s no need for anger. Uh, these, these were all just things that You know, any, any person that’s getting along in the corporate world knows you can’t, you can’t go and be emotional at work. You can’t, you know, you can’t, you can’t be angry. Like who gets angry about something?

[00:06:53.18] - Bhavesh Naik

You can’t be, right? Right.

[00:06:55.11] - Mike LeBlanc

That’s, that’s something much lower. And instead, when I started reading these books, I would read them very carefully. That’s not what they say. And they, they’re interesting. I mean, it’s, it’s, it goes back as far as, uh, as the Bible, right? People, two people can read the same passage and see something different. Exactly. But, but these, uh, when you, when you really get into them, it’s, it’s clear. I mean, Aristotle says that anger, for example, is a virtue. That was a shocking thing to me. Yeah. That Aristotle would pop that anger could be a virtue. He says that, uh, that shame, that being ashamed of yourself is almost a virtue.

[00:07:32.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:07:32.18] - Mike LeBlanc

It’s not a virtue because it means that you have something bad with you and you need to be able to have all the virtues, but right. He’s basically saying shame. Shame’s a good thing. Uh-huh.

[00:07:40.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:07:41.07] - Mike LeBlanc

And you know, they, they all think that there is excellence in war. Uh, you know, Aristotle again thinks that, uh, the only place that you can have courage is in, in wartime. So that’s, that’s not just the highest form, that’s the only form.

[00:07:55.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:07:55.17] - Mike LeBlanc

And yeah, you, you end up getting this, this new view of the world where you say, what if, what if these guys are right? Yeah. What if these guys aren’t just mistaken old men in this? What if they have a point? And that was sort of the insight that I had that drove, I’d say, the next 20-plus years of my life.

[00:08:17.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Wow. Wow. And you hit on something so, so important in my view, because here we are, you know, we look at business world and it almost feels to me like we have done everything we can to take emotion out of everything. Our business literature doesn’t talk about emotion. At work, we’re not supposed to get quote-unquote emotional. We’re not supposed to talk about emotions. We’re not supposed to even be emotional. We’re supposed to be this intellectual automaton, which is the business that you’re in today, right? We’re gonna talk about that. The irony of that, we’re building these AI machines and we expect ourselves this last, I don’t know, few hundred years of our history, we want ourselves to be like machines, right?

[00:09:04.18] - Mike LeBlanc

Yes.

[00:09:05.21] - Bhavesh Naik

And you found something different. These greats are saying that that’s not necessarily true, right? Shame and anger. By the way, courage, is that also an emotion in your view? You said the word courage, right?

[00:09:19.23] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah, no, yeah, I think much more in terms of virtues and vices. Than I do with emotions.

[00:09:26.13] - Bhavesh Naik

So, and also there’s, I think there, I don’t know which one of these two greats, Plato or Aristotle, they talk about there is three parts to what they call the soul, right? Could you kind of explain that a little bit?

[00:09:40.13] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah. Well, so Aristotle had kind of primed me to all of this, but Plato, Plato has a famous thing called the tripartite soul. That’s what people refer to it as. And the idea is Socrates says there are 3 parts to, to a human.

[00:09:55.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:09:55.14] - Mike LeBlanc

Now, these 2 of them are basically what we see in Looney Tunes, right? There’s a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. Right. And everybody knows this debate very well. Yeah. They’re going, you know, the devil going, why not order the chocolate cake? Let’s, let’s go.

[00:10:10.01] - Bhavesh Naik

Right. Yeah.

[00:10:10.17] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, and you got the angel on the other side going, I think it’s, you know, we, we probably, probably don’t need that. That’s a little extra calories.

[00:10:17.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:18.06] - Mike LeBlanc

And so he, he’s got those two same parts, right? For the angel, uh, he says that he’s, he has the little man stand in for it. So the mind is actually just like another little man sitting in your brain. So that’s the part that we relate to the most. Right. But he, but he’s small.

[00:10:33.17] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:10:33.23] - Mike LeBlanc

And then you have your appetites. That’s, that’s our normal devil. And that is, he represents with a, with a hydra, a many-headed beast.

[00:10:41.22] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:10:42.16] - Mike LeBlanc

Every time you cut off one of the heads. To grow, grow back in its place. So if you tell it, you know, no, we’re not gonna eat chocolate cake. You just want more and you, you know, you keep wanting more.

[00:10:52.00] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:10:52.05] - Mike LeBlanc

So what, what he added though was that anger was not in those appetites.

[00:10:58.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:10:59.04] - Mike LeBlanc

And to me, anger would’ve been more of a classic Hydra head. You get angry about something, right? Bloodlust, right? You’re seeing red. You, you know, you can’t think about anything else. It’s, it’s almost like an addiction. It’s, it’s, it’s something like that. Socrates breaks down and says, no, there’s actually a third part and it’s anger and we’re going to represent it with a lion.

[00:11:23.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Okay.

[00:11:23.21] - Mike LeBlanc

And so you all of a sudden, he says, he says, you’ve got to picture the three of these existing, the little man, a hydra, many-headed beast, and a lion all living in the same body. And they all got to make decisions together. And he said, that’s, that’s what life is. And you know, that was a shocking, a shocking change for me because why would anger be separate? You know, and why would he represent it with this noble creature? The lion.

[00:11:52.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:11:53.04] - Mike LeBlanc

And then further, you know, everybody knows the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. I didn’t know where that third part would come in. Right. And so that, that to me was, was a great mystery. When I read it and, you know, and it stuck with me for a long time of trying to think what, what is this lion and how do you employ it? How do you work the lion?

When Did This Philosophy Get Tested in Real Life?

[00:12:15.17] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes, absolutely. And where did this get tested for you? Did, was it after you became a Marine, you know, after the college or was it before in college?

[00:12:27.12] - Mike LeBlanc

So, you know, all through college I would be, talking about this, discussing it, reading it, thinking about it. And you get, you get some kind of, you know, intellectual hold on what’s being talked about, but it really, it really became personal for me when I was in the Marine Corps. So after I just finished a very tough course called the Infantry Officer Course, where for 10 weeks you basically tell your Hydra to shut up, you You know, there’s, there are weeks when you barely sleep, uh, weeks when you barely eat. Uh, you’re, you’re just not giving into any of your desires throughout any of this.

[00:13:05.22] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

“It’s not just downloading information. It’s changing how you see yourself.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:13:06.04] - Mike LeBlanc

And by the end of that, you know, I graduated and I thought I made it, you know, I’m, I’m an infantry officer. I’m very proud of myself and you push yourself all this hard. So I, I went, I checked into a hotel room. I was starting a new course the next day and. And I got to stay in a hotel room now. So now instead of sleeping out on the ground, right, I have a bed. I order, I order Subway, I order Wendy’s, I order, you know, I, I go out and I buy every, every chocolate and candy and gummy and, you know, chip, whatever known to man, right? And I bring it, I bring it all back to my hotel room.

[00:13:42.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:13:42.12] - Mike LeBlanc

And I just start, just start crushing these things and I’m just eating and eating and eating. And, and I think, you know, I think everybody knows this experience. I, you know, as I’ve, as I’ve talked to other people about it, I don’t think they binge quite as hard as, as my family can get into. Yeah. But you know, I, I keep eating all this stuff and at the beginning you’re thinking, you know, it’s rationalization. You’re like, this is great, I deserve it. You know, I’ve been through all this. You keep eating and you go, oh man, it’s gonna be a lot, lot to work off. And why, why am I taking all this? I’m gonna feel sick. And you go, eh, you haven’t done it in a long time. Let’s keep pushing. And, and I continue on until I’m just feeling, you know, totally sick. And I pick up my, my favorite of all, of all these junk foods, which is peanut butter. And so I’ve, I’ve loved peanut butter since I was a kid. So I open, I open up that big jar of peanut butter and I just start scooping in with a, with a spoon.

[00:14:35.20] - Mike LeBlanc

So I’m not even putting it on a cracker. I’m not putting it on a pretzel. I’m like, I’m just eating this thing, eating this thing straight. And, and as I’m eating, I start to realize this huge jar of peanut butter is about halfway down and I’m going, oh my gosh. I’m like, I can’t believe I ate all this. Right. And I start, I start feeling that shame, but the Hydra in me is just plowing through. Right. And just goes like, doesn’t matter. You know? And my, my rational part is coming in and going, you know, Hydra, you gotta take it easy. You can’t, you can’t be eating a full jar of peanut butter. Like you can’t, you can’t get in like this. And Hydra’s just like, back off. Like, I’m eating now. And, and that’s, that’s what’s going on in me. And I’m, you know, so I’m, I’m like hating myself as I, as I eat this peanut butter now and I’m just getting, you know, getting to the bottom of the jar. And when I finally, when I finally hit the bottom of the jar and I start, start to be done, uh, I’m so disgusted with myself that I get angry and now my, my rage at myself has now overtaken the rationality and overtaken the power of the Hydra.

[00:15:44.12] - Mike LeBlanc

And I’m so mad at myself that I tell myself, you know, that’s it, drop this. I was eyeballing ice cream. I went and flushed the ice cream down the toilet. I took a big spoon and flushed it down.

[00:15:56.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:15:56.21] - Mike LeBlanc

And because I couldn’t trust, trust my Hydra with it. And I went and put on, put on my running shoes. This is all at midnight. Right? This is midnight the night before I begin a course. I put on my shoes and I force myself to go run 10 miles. And the whole time out there, I am feeling like I’m gonna throw up. I’m feeling so disgusting. I’m exhausted. It’s, it’s the middle of the night. Yeah. Takes me, takes me about 2 hours. And so I arrive back at my hotel, it’s like 2:00 AM. I am so bloated, sick feeling, terrible feeling. And I, I go to sleep finally just exhausted with having the 3 parts fight each other. And I have to wake up at 6:00 AM for my new course. And you know, so 4 hours later I’m there looking disheveled, broken, big bags under my eyes. And everybody’s like, man, this guy partied last night. And it was like, no, I was at war with myself last night. And that’s, that’s where I really started to understand it was that, that part that came in. That would discuss it with myself, that rage, that was the lion.

[00:16:59.09] - Mike LeBlanc

And that’s the lion looking at the rest of me and just going, I won’t have it anymore. This is not my standard. You will get to my standard.

[00:17:07.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. That is such a breakthrough moment. That story is, because here we are, you know, the Western civilization and now the entire civilization today, because, you know, entire civilization is, the world civilization is in influenced by the Western civilization. We think that rational, being rational is higher than being “emotional.” And your rational mind was kind of justifying eating all the junk food and the peanut butter and finishing, going through the half and then finishing the rest. Your rational mind was kind of going along with it. Let’s do it. We’ve worked hard all these years. Come on, it’s just one night. Couple hours, let’s do it. And then the lion comes in and so it supersedes. So there is this kind of hierarchy. It’s almost like, right? So, right? So, and it splits on that. Yeah.

[00:18:03.13] - Mike LeBlanc

This is what’s really interesting. So Plato says, so since you have 3, 3 is a really interesting number in politics, right? I have 3 kids. So I get to see this principle played out all the time. 2 against 1 is powerful in anything. Yeah. And so I’m, I’m going, you know, do you kids wanna go for a hike or go to the beach today? You know, and it’s, hike, beach, beach. And then they go, well, but don’t you wanna go on a hike with me? Yeah, I guess I do. And it swings and they go, why did you switch your mind? But that’s, that’s the power of three is that, that there’s always a, a decision vote.

[00:18:34.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:18:34.23] - Mike LeBlanc

And that’s, that’s what Plato says is when you’re laying these out, the little man, he can never take on the Hydra. There’s no way. Yeah. The little man can only take on the Hydra if he had the lion as his ally.

[00:18:49.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Ah, yeah.

[00:18:50.01] - Mike LeBlanc

And so the, the job then, you know, the task for us as humans is to get our reason to start working with our anger so that we can work against desire and appetites and short-term thinking and no consequence thinking. And only if we have anger as our ally can we achieve that. And that’s an interesting, you know, that’s an interesting thought.

Brian Chesky’s Lesson Every Founder Should Hear

[00:19:13.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes. Something else in that moment, which is that, you know, we think that learning, you know, the definition of learning, right, is we think that, you know, we need to evolve. And one of the things that I like to kind of follow on this podcast is, you know, our internal growth affects the way we build organizations, right? And the better we learn, the better evolved we become, the bigger and more successful our organizations become, right? Whatever they may be. And here, so then what is learning? So learning often is seen as collecting information on top of more information, right? You said this so beautifully at the start of this session where you said that we go to school to validate our beliefs, something like that. I’m paraphrasing, right? We don’t go there to have them challenged, right? So, but the growth happens when they do get challenged. And, and that, that experience is not intellectual, rational experience. It’s right.

“A company grows as fast as its founder learns.”^*

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb, Inc.

^*A guiding principle discussed by Mike LeBlanc in this conversation.

[00:20:12.12] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah, no, that, that’s a great, that’s a great way of putting it because, yeah, I love that. You know, I had, so my, my first company, so fast forward out of the Marine Corps, um, I, I, I co-founded a company called Cobalt Robotics.

[00:20:25.02] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:20:26.07] - Mike LeBlanc

And Cobalt, we were backed by Sequoia, was a very, very big investor with us.

[00:20:30.03] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:20:30.15] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah. Sequoia So Sequoia would bring us out, you know, they’d, they’d bring founders out on these elaborate trips. And, and I got to go, uh, camping this like fancy, really fancy camping one time. Uh, and, and they brought out, uh, they brought out Elon Musk came with us. They brought out Brian Chesky came with us. It’s, you know, it’s probably, it’s a, it’s about 100 of us.

[00:20:51.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:20:51.17] - Mike LeBlanc

And so you have these, these kind of intimate but powerful conversations.

[00:20:55.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:20:56.07] - Mike LeBlanc

And, you know, Brian Chesky. Founder of Airbnb.

[00:21:00.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Sure.

[00:21:00.13] - Mike LeBlanc

Like one of, one of the things that he said that, that will always stick with me is a company grows as fast as its founder learns.

[00:21:08.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Hmm. Yes. Yeah.

[00:21:10.12] - Mike LeBlanc

And you know, I, I hadn’t, I hadn’t put it that way. I definitely noticed that phenomenon before, but, but that really is what a founder needs to be doing is learning. You’re learning what your market is. You’re learning what your product is. You’re learning how it fits within your competitors, your, your learning. But it is not, you know, to your point, it’s not a simple download of information. I hear all these people that talk about Neuralink or something and they go, oh, we’re just going to be able to download. Yes, you, you may be able to pull the Wikipedia information about everything and be able to look around a room and know what kind of TV a TV is. That’s, that’s not an important kind of learning. The kind of learning that matters and that a founder needs to do, you know, or, or that anybody, you know, changing their life needs to do. Uh, it is, it is emotional. It is difficult. It challenges you. It forces you to look back at everything you’ve done and wonder if you’ve done it right. You know, learning, learning is painful. Yes.

[00:22:10.14] - Bhavesh Naik

You know, 100%.

[00:22:11.22] - Mike LeBlanc

It’s, it’s, it’s just a very, very painful thing. And so that’s, that’s what I think that you need to keep, keep gearing up for all the time. And that’s where you find this drive in yourself to continue putting yourself through all the challenges.

When Did Learning Become Painful for You as a Founder?

[00:22:24.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely. Now, you were 13 years a Marine, right? And then you worked for Pentagon. Was there a moment where you stepped out of, from the Pentagon, right? Being a Marine Corps into being a founder, right? Kobalt. And was there a moment when this came to like a personal experience where you said that it’s difficult, it’s painful, right? Growth and learning is, you know, so could you take us behind the scenes in a particular moment where that kind of hit you in a personal way?

“You have to manage yourself before you can manage an organization.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:23:04.23] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, it’s interesting that many, right? And that’s the other thing is you just, you’ve gotta have a strong stomach for this stuff because it is, it’s, it’s constant. Just things aren’t adding up, right? The world is not the way that I want it to. It’s not, you know, your dreams are off track. Right. And, but, but at Cobalt, so, you know, I’m, I’m running this company. We’ve had probably at the time, I think we had 60 people. We had 60, 60-some people.

[00:23:33.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:23:33.21] - Mike LeBlanc

And we’re, we’re making robots that replace security guards.

[00:23:37.21] - Bhavesh Naik

Sure.

[00:23:38.15] - Mike LeBlanc

Uh, The problem is we hadn’t sold one.

[00:23:41.14] - Bhavesh Naik

Oh, okay.

[00:23:42.06] - Mike LeBlanc

We had zero sales.

[00:23:43.20] - Bhavesh Naik

Uh-huh.

[00:23:44.21] - Mike LeBlanc

Uh, we’ve, we’ve raised at that point probably about $30 million. Uh, we, we have cool offices, you know, we have all cool engineers, you know, wearing t-shirts and we’re ordering DoorDash every day and, you know, kombucha around the office all over. So we’re, we’re spending, you know, I think we were spending $1.4 million a month. Wow. And, and we have, and we have no sales.

[00:24:08.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Mm-hmm.

[00:24:09.05] - Mike LeBlanc

And so we’re sitting, you know, sitting in the boardroom, you know, with our board and, and our board’s just like, well, you’ve, you guys have the product to the point, right? The product is, is ready enough. You’ve gotta get it out to customers.

[00:24:20.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:24:20.22] - Mike LeBlanc

That’s, that’s the number one goal. We’re like, that makes sense. That’s the number one goal. We talk to the whole company. That’s the number one goal.

[00:24:26.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:24:27.02] - Mike LeBlanc

Uh, and, and, and still we have, you know, 20-some salespeople. We have 6 marketing people. Nobody’s moving any of these robots anywhere. And, and I, I start digging into this because they all, you know, of course all salespeople have these big pipelines and everything and start, start digging in and nobody, nobody has anything real. Right. And I start, I look at them, I go, nothing’s real.

[00:24:52.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:24:52.12] - Mike LeBlanc

And all of a sudden we, we have this moment where I’m just like, what do, what are we even doing here? Right. And, and what am, what am I, what am I doing here? I was planning on going and just saying, I’m just gonna execute whatever business books I’ve read. And, you know, I go in, I’m a nice manager every day and compromise with all of my employees. And I say, can we get this done by, you know, April, April 10th? And they go, oh, we wouldn’t be able to do that for XYZ. And I go, well, those reasons make sense, so we’ll push it off till July. And I was, I was doing all of that. And, and in so doing, I was, I was hugely resentful about the entire company and I was angry at myself that I’m like, why, why are we not moving anything here? And, and that was, that was where I started to realize, you know, I, I was like, nobody else can do this. None of the salespeople can go and solve this problem. You can’t hire somebody to solve your biggest problem. You can’t hire somebody to solve product market fit.

[00:25:55.07] - Mike LeBlanc

Nobody, nobody will care enough. You cannot, you cannot do it.

[00:25:58.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:25:58.12] - Mike LeBlanc

Um, and so we were, we were gonna run out of money. We were spending so much. And so I went to my, my co-founders and I wrote a list of, I think it was like 25 different actions.

[00:26:10.21] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:26:11.03] - Mike LeBlanc

And I said, if, if we don’t do these 25 different actions, the business is gonna die. And so if we don’t take these 25 actions right now, I’m, I’m gonna leave. Because we’re, we’re already done.

[00:26:22.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:26:23.08] - Mike LeBlanc

And that involved, uh, you know, laying off about half of the people that we had.

[00:26:29.03] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:26:29.06] - Mike LeBlanc

Uh, it involved getting rid of our entire sales team, our entire marketing team.

[00:26:33.11] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:26:33.18] - Mike LeBlanc

Uh, you know, it was a, it was complete rearrangement of all of these things. Yeah. And, you know, my, my co-founders pushed back on, on like one or two and I thought, yeah, we, we kind of amended, amended like one or two of them, but but the majority of the list stuck and, right. We, you know, so we went through that whole process was horrible. It was horrible. You know, people are very emotional. People are crying through it. The people who remain are very angry with us and they’re like, well, why are we mismanaged? All these things. But through that, we, we ended up finding our first sales. We ended up finding traction and, you know, and we ended up,, you know, we, we continued on for another, another 8 years after that. Yes. Right. But that, that to me was that, that always, I always remember that was a, a deep learning moment. That’s what it feels like to learn is the realization that what you’re doing just isn’t working.

[00:27:29.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:27:30.04] - Mike LeBlanc

And having to choose actions that, you know, you really wish you didn’t have to do.

How Did a 60-Person Startup Become More Bureaucratic Than the Pentagon?

[00:27:34.17] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And, and here’s a, here’s a This is a great moment because there is an angle here, which is that, you know, 7 billion of us on this planet, we’re all human beings and we have, each one of us has this tripartite, as you call it, right? Working within us. So when you’re working with other people and when you’re managing and leading a group of people, whether it’s 2 people or 200 or 2,000 people, they bring their own mix of, and this unique mix of, I have to believe that it’s not exactly the same thing. It’s sort of a, it’s like a metaphor in a way. So they play out in different ways within each one of them. So then you have to manage that not just in yourself, but also probably, or at least address in others, or be mindful of the fact that they also bring those things to the table. Right.

[00:28:34.19] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah. Well, oh yeah. Go ahead.

[00:28:37.02] - Bhavesh Naik

Go ahead. No, no, no. Yeah.

“At sixty people we had become more bureaucratic than the Pentagon.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:28:39.00] - Mike LeBlanc

Well, you’re, you’re just reminding me, I mean, this is, this is Hobbes, right? So Hobbes, Hobbes, and Thomas Hobbes, uh, the political philosopher. And you know, one of his interesting insights was that when a lot of people get together and start acting together, right, they start acting as if they’re one human.

[00:28:56.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Oh yeah.

[00:28:56.18] - Mike LeBlanc

So the characteristics of an individual are the same as the characteristics of a nation. Are the characteristics of a company.

[00:29:05.01] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:06.18] - Mike LeBlanc

And so you start finding this is not just an internal battle. What you learn in your internal battle about how to manage it is key to how you end up leading your organization.

[00:29:17.00] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great point. It’s like, you know, when you say, you know, your group has a personality kind of thing, right? Each group, you know, this group has a different personality than the other group that I’m part of, right? And they vibe in a different way. So Is there any insight on how, you know, how you deal with that when others are also bringing their own sense of those, you know, the little man and the lion and, you know, the hydra?

[00:29:42.22] - Mike LeBlanc

Well, that’s, yeah, that’s where the key issue came in with how I was running Cobalt.

[00:29:47.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:29:47.11] - Mike LeBlanc

Was, you know, a different look at that same story, right? Was all of the engineers, you know, mechanical engineers, electrical any, any part of them, they, they were all wanting to give into their hydra of, yeah, they wanted time. They wanted time to figure these things out, you know? And so all between, you know, the little man that was going, you know, I want to really work through this perfectly. I don’t want to put anything out that I’m embarrassed of. And you had the hydra that is going to them going, yeah, we should do, we should have a lot of time. We raised all this money. We should take, let’s take 2 years and figure this all out before we put it out there.

[00:30:24.14] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:30:25.05] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and the conversation goes on between the hydra and the little men.

[00:30:28.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:30:29.01] - Mike LeBlanc

They make comfort-based decisions and they make rational decisions.

[00:30:32.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:30:33.15] - Mike LeBlanc

The actual thing that you need is, is the lion to be able to push you out. Right. And that’s what I had to act like in that scenario was going, I’m not going to take it anymore. That’s, that is, that is a mass, like a major part of any business is when the founder, and, and really you don’t even have to be the founder to have this moment, but it’s just, I’m not doing this anymore.

[00:30:56.02] - Bhavesh Naik

You’re right.

[00:30:56.07] - Mike LeBlanc

That’s a very important point.

[00:30:57.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:58.22] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and it often involves, it often involves being willing to walk away. Right. It’s, it’s, but it’s extremely emotional. But that is, that’s the catalyst.

[00:31:07.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yes.

[00:31:09.11] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, I love, there was, um, there was a video my dad showed me one time, uh, Howard Stern video.

[00:31:15.02] - Bhavesh Naik

Mm-hmm.

[00:31:16.09] - Mike LeBlanc

Now Howard Stern, right? Famous for, you know, having, whatever. And, but this, this was a leaked video of him talking to his staff.

[00:31:25.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:31:25.23] - Mike LeBlanc

So it’s not him on the show. And it’s a very different Howard Stern. It’s not Howard Stern the character. This is, this is Howard Stern.

[00:31:31.10] - Bhavesh Naik

This is the real one. Yeah.

[00:31:32.11] - Mike LeBlanc

Or businessman.

[00:31:33.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:31:34.10] - Mike LeBlanc

And he’s got, he’s in an auditorium. It’s a great leaked video. I think it’s from like 2013 or something like that.

[00:31:40.01] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:31:40.07] - Mike LeBlanc

But. He gets up there and he’s telling his staff, he’s so angry because he says, why do we not have A-list guests every week on our show?

[00:31:51.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:31:52.06] - Mike LeBlanc

Why? And he’s saying, we are, they were at satellite at the time, right? You know, it’s at Sirius and he’s going, we have 60 million listeners on Sirius and we have at least half of those come just for the Howard Stern Show. And he goes, and meanwhile, if David Bowie’s gonna put out a new record, he’s gonna go on David Letterman. Who gets maybe a million a night. And he goes, I’ve got 30 million. Why isn’t he coming to me? And my 30 million love rock and roll. Why don’t they know that? And, and he’s, he’s angry going through all these of, we made these people’s careers. We bring these people on, we showcase them. They were nobody and we brought ‘em on and we turn ‘em into, we, their, their hit record. He goes, does anybody know about this? No. Does anybody care? No.

[00:32:32.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Mm-hmm.

[00:32:33.00] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and the whole thing is, is him being so sick of the way that things are run that he’s saying, we’re gonna change around here. And you know, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s such an inspiring video to me, you know, as, as business owners, business, as somebody who runs a business, right? Because it is to a lot of people out there that think, no, you need to, you know, be corporate and compromise and find consensus and all these things. No, it’s in those Howard Stern moves where you say, Yeah. I’m sick of this. It’s no one person’s fault. If it were one person’s fault, you could, you know, very calmly fire them.

[00:33:09.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:33:09.18] - Mike LeBlanc

It’s not. It’s an organizational problem. And it takes that emotion. It takes the company seeing that you’re not going to stand for this anymore. That’s the only path forward for you to really fix it.

[00:33:21.01] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes. Yes. And is there a way to, you know, is there any intentionalities in terms of, you know, kind of cultivating a culture where people are, it’s not just when the poopoo hits the fan and we’re like, oh, come on, let’s get together and figure this out. Or can it be like embedded or inbred into the culture where you kind of expect that, that there is the, this is a cycle and this is where we are in the cycle and we’re gonna hit this wall and we’re gonna have to figure this out and get angry or feel ashamed first and then let the anger kick in and move forward as an organization. Is there some intentionality to that?

[00:34:02.23] - Mike LeBlanc

Is that— I think that’s where people really like this idea of, you know, feedback is a gift.

[00:34:08.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:34:09.04] - Mike LeBlanc

And direct feedback and we communicate with each other. I see those words written on walls all throughout startups. The hard thing is in practice, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do. Right. Right.

[00:34:21.02] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:34:21.10] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah. Work, it’s very hard to be direct and be liked. And in any organization, it’s very important to be liked because, you know, every, every startup is kind of like Survivor and somebody is going to get kicked off. Yeah. So, you know, we, we’ve kind of taken this idea of we’re gonna have feedback and direct communication, but we’ve coupled it with this idea that somebody cannot be a culture fit.

[00:34:44.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:34:45.05] - Mike LeBlanc

And when you do that, you’ve given that person a reason off the island. So, yeah, you know, a lot of luck. So as soon as somebody comes into this, right, they’re, they’re like, why, why should I be the one that stands up and says the emperor has no clothes? Yeah, there’s no need for me to do that. I don’t need to be skylined. So, so they instead, they just go, eh, somebody’s probably thought about it. And you know, in a way they’re right because that is, that is the founder’s job. That is the leader’s job to look at this and go, I’m, I’m the one that this all falls on.

[00:35:17.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Right. Right.

[00:35:18.11] - Mike LeBlanc

I’m the one who has to stay. So it’s a, I would love if it didn’t need to come out in fits and spurts.

[00:35:24.11] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:35:25.05] - Mike LeBlanc

But to me, that’s a, that’s a natural cycle. And you want to keep it from being layoffs and we’re changing the whole way that we’re doing business. You want to keep those fits and spurts, you know, smaller, but, but there is a way in which that’s, you know, a lot of good founders are are angry a lot of the time.

[00:35:43.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And that’s when sometimes one of these videos leaks and it goes viral and it’s good and the bad and the ugly and all the rest of it, right? But hopefully the organization moves forward through that, right?

[00:36:00.00] - Mike LeBlanc

There’s a great conversation recorded of John F. Kennedy. So John F. Kennedy, when he was president, We’re all used to hymns here and say, you know, we’re gonna go to the moon, right? Because God, you know, we’re, we’re used to this, this JFK. But there’s a great phone call where someone from the military had spent a whole bunch of money on a bathroom.

[00:36:23.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:36:24.03] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah.

[00:36:24.14] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:36:24.20] - Mike LeBlanc

They got a whole bunch of money and JFK is calling him, you know, this general and going, what the hell were you thinking? Do you know how bad this is gonna look with me? You know, I’m out there saying we need to save money and you’re out spending all this money on a bathroom and. You know, sorry, sir. You know, and he’s going, it was stupid. You know, and, and you hear this angry JFK, you hear what he was actually like picking up his phone behind the, behind the desk in the Oval Office.

[00:36:49.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:36:49.13] - Mike LeBlanc

That, that is, you know, that anger is right. And you know, and going back to Aristotle’s point, anger, anger is a virtue when, yeah, you know, you were angry at the right, at the right thing for the right amount of time. It’s the right Yeah.

[00:37:05.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:06.08] - Mike LeBlanc

We have road rage and we’re way more angry than we should be about somebody cutting us off.

[00:37:10.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Exactly.

[00:37:10.22] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah.

[00:37:11.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:37:12.04] - Mike LeBlanc

But JFK being angry at this spending and this PR thing, that’s the right thing to be angry at. He didn’t go fire the guy.

[00:37:19.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:37:19.08] - Mike LeBlanc

But he definitely called him to the carpet and was angry. And, and I think that’s, that’s what a lot of founders, that’s where they’re holding themselves back is instead of feeling acute anger, they’re feeling chronic resentment.

[00:37:31.01] - Bhavesh Naik

Ah, yes.

[00:37:32.11] - Mike LeBlanc

And so you need, you need to find what is the appropriate level of anger? What is the appropriate punishment? What’s the appropriate way to handle this situation?

How to Continuously Reinvent Yourself?

[00:37:41.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Acute anger, but not chronic resentment. That’s, that’s a tremendous takeaway from this because there’s a difference. And I have to believe that there has to be, you know, you have to cultivate some kind of an awareness of what’s going on inside here. I find that, you know, I’m in the learning and training and all that business for a very long time. And some folks resent that, having to look at yourself, right? And you have to kind of cultivate that idea, right, of looking at this one, this guy right here, right? From where I’m looking out, looking in there. And any thoughts on how to cultivate that self-awareness? You know, is it something that it just happens by habit or, you know, repetition, or is there some trick to kind of getting there?

“Every new stage of the company requires a different version of the founder.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:38:32.03] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, to me, when I started this sort of inner journey in college, you know, I was reading all of the Greeks and I came up with a very flat-footed mantra. And it’s not exactly right, but I see a lot of people wear bracelets or things, reminders that are like this. So I think that it relates to people.

[00:38:52.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:38:53.00] - Mike LeBlanc

But my idea was I needed to be ready to kill everything.

[00:38:56.11] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:38:56.17] - Mike LeBlanc

And you know, not, not in a bloody sort of way, right? But any, any idea, any theory I need to be willing, you know, I, I even looked up, uh, flat earth, right? Yeah. I, I actually, during those years I thought, I thought, what do I know if the earth, earth is actually a sphere, right?

[00:39:14.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:39:14.07] - Mike LeBlanc

Maybe there’s something to this. And I went to a computer and, and typed it in. And I went to the Flat Earth Society and they said, you know, the government’s lying to you. All these pictures are made up. And I said, well, that’s really stupid. I don’t believe that. And I, and I moved on, but I was willing to question it.

[00:39:27.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Exactly.

[00:39:28.04] - Mike LeBlanc

Right.

[00:39:28.17] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Having open enough mind to, if someone making, makes an argument about something, then, you know, as a true scientist, you just kind of explore that and say, what, what really is your argument? Yeah.

[00:39:39.20] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, I had, I had back then as a freshman in, freshman in college when I was reading all these things, I had, I had hair down to my shoulders. Uh-huh. My, my hair was, was so long.

[00:39:48.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:39:48.11] - Mike LeBlanc

And it was never, it was never because I liked long hair. I thought I looked ridiculous. I thought I looked like an ugly girl, but I grew it out because at every stage of my hair, everybody would tell me, oh, you have such beautiful thick hair. Oh my gosh, you have such beautiful hair. So I would grow it more and people would go, oh my gosh, your hair. To the point that, you know, this is like sitting at my shoulders and other people in my life are all like, oh, you know, Mike’s got the hair, you know? Yeah. It’s, it was all about this hair and, and I hated it. And so, yeah, you know, as I was, you know, it, it started to become a symbol to me of, yeah, my indecision of going, I don’t know what to do with it. So it just sits.

[00:40:30.19] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:40:30.23] - Mike LeBlanc

And it’s something else that other people want from me and not something that I chose for myself. And so I went to the store, I bought, uh, hair clippers and I just shaved it all off. I just shaved it down to the skin. And, you know, everybody in my life is just like, why did you do that? You had such beautiful hair. Why would you do that? You know, and, and everybody’s just like, you’ve gone crazy. But that, that was a real marker for me of, I, I am willing to kill everything and I’m, I’m willing to take it back if, if I don’t understand it, even if it was right. Maybe I had gr— you know, great hair down to my shoulders. I don’t think it was. Looking back at pictures, but even if it was, yeah, I’m going to go back to what I think and, and I’ll learn that I was wrong and then have to regrow back out. But I’m, I’m going to do everything that I actually understand. And so I, I think oftentimes it’s pushing yourself in those smaller moments. Yes. And those smaller insights to be honest with yourself.

[00:41:24.19] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah. Uh, it’s, it’s shocking how much you’ll be rewarded. Yeah. And, and your mind will start to say, well, if you can handle that about your hair, Let me tell you this about your career choice.

[00:41:35.04] - Bhavesh Naik

That’s right. Yeah. I think what you’re saying is like, you know, be willing to kill is that what you’re saying is don’t get so attached to some version of yourself or anything or any factual things that you collect, any belief system. Be willing to challenge it. And if necessary, kill it as in, you know, just let it go and, you know, let something else grow in its place.

[00:41:57.18] - Mike LeBlanc

The real problem at Cobalt at the time that I was talking about it, we had, you know, people going on the birdie, um, was that we were a bureaucracy. That was the real problem. And now everybody thinks we’re at a startup, we’re agile, you know, these old behemoths, they’re slow moving. Well, the old behemoths aren’t necessarily slow moving.

[00:42:17.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Right. Right.

[00:42:18.06] - Mike LeBlanc

You go, you go to a place like, uh, Amazon, Amazon’s massive. I’ve worked with Amazon for a number of years. They still make very fast decisions on a lot of very big projects. Yeah., you know, and, and, and they’re huge. We were tiny and we would have, I remember I was gonna demo a robot one time and I said, let’s bring this robot out to a potential customer. Let’s demo it. And they said, oh, we’re not able to get it out. Well, why? Oh, we need to give 2 weeks notice. Yeah. Before any demo. Mm-hmm. To who? They go, the guy who set up the demos. I go, doesn’t he work for me? You know, I go to this guy and I’m like, what is this 2-week demo stuff? And he was like, yeah. Otherwise, I’m the one who looks stupid because I go out there and the demo doesn’t work. So you need to tell me 2 weeks before. I need all of the Wi-Fi information. I need all the— and I go, you are a bureaucrat. I said, you’re worse than the Pentagon.

[00:43:08.20] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:43:09.02] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, that, that’s what we had become though, is just too many people understanding each other. Too many involved people sitting around and going, oh, was that, was that hard? Okay. I understand that. Let’s, well, just keep at it. And I guess we don’t have a timeline because it’s a hard problem to solve.

[00:43:25.00] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:43:25.16] - Mike LeBlanc

That’s where we lived. And so we lived in, you know, mush. We lived in a swamp. We lived in this slow-moving, sludging organization. Even though we’re 60 people.

[00:43:36.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:43:38.02] - Mike LeBlanc

60 people with cash were supposed to be able to make fast decisions.

How Do You Lead Founders, Investors and Brilliant Engineers at the Same Time?

[00:43:41.00] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And there’s one more question I have about this specific situation. And then I wanna move to the, you know, the exciting stuff of the future, right? The who question, right? Because, and especially for you, what you had built at the time, and I think you still believe, you still have that issue, which is that you are startup, venture-funded startup. So you have, you know, you have you, but you have co-founders, right? So you have fellow founders, and then you have obviously your organization, you know, you have people with probably considerable egos, you know, who are building robots and things like that. These are PhDs probably, and, you know, all the credentials that you can think of. And then you have the investors, right? And investors are probably kind of saying, hey, you know, I’ll put, you know, they’re looking to hit, you know, if they believe the statistics, you know, they invested in 20 companies and they’re looking for that one hit. And they’re going to each one of these companies and they’re saying, they’re pushing you for that hit., right? So that they can go hockey stick. So, or at least cash out at a certain valuation or something like that, right?

[00:44:50.07] - Bhavesh Naik

And there is a cash-out event. So any, we can have a whole podcast just on this question, right? But in a nutshell, any thoughts on how you can manage these different people from this perspective of the you know, the three parts of the soul kind of an angle. How do you handle them?

“IQ gets you through the door. After that, it isn’t what separates great leaders.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:45:16.05] - Mike LeBlanc

I think what you’re talking about, all of these different stakeholders, is the major reason that startups die. I think that’s the number one.

[00:45:23.21] - Bhavesh Naik

I’m sorry, can you repeat that?

[00:45:25.03] - Mike LeBlanc

That is the number one reason that startups die is management of all these different stakeholders.

[00:45:29.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Oh yeah.

[00:45:30.12] - Mike LeBlanc

Stakeholders all want different things. And you know, I see it in movies all the time. I used to think when I was a kid, you know, every movie that you watched was somebody’s baby and somebody was like, this is the greatest movie. And what you start to realize, you know, when you, when you turn on Harold the Purple Crayon or Benji or something, you actually had very cynical investors that were like, ah, there’s big, there’s big audience for Benji. Let’s throw together. There’s some screenwriter that was like, well, at least I have this that I can get paid for while I’m doing what I care about. You have a director like, yeah, I guess if I do this one, I can probably work up, work my way up to something better. I mean, you have all cynical characters in it and nobody thinks that the movie’s good.

[00:46:15.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:46:16.00] - Mike LeBlanc

Nobody thinks that it’s their big break. Nobody’s trying to make it that good. Everybody’s just kind of going through the motions. That, that is what startups are. Yeah. When, when I go to failing startups, they’re filled with cynical actors that that are all just kind of moving things forward and, and usually a founder at the middle that wishes that it could be great. But going, why does nobody care? Why is everybody here if they don’t care? You know, and they’re very, very confused by this. And, and that again, that’s where I go to what it means to train, you know, train and employ this lion.

[00:46:48.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:46:49.02] - Mike LeBlanc

You’ve, you’ve gotta have that passion in yourself.

[00:46:52.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:46:52.14] - Mike LeBlanc

To say, I wanna make this good. That’s what I’m here for. And it doesn’t need to be, you know, I never thought that security robots were a good idea. I never woke up and thought, we really need security robots in the world. I never thought that, right? But there’s this, you know, sorry, I’m all over the place on this, but there’s a Canadian show I love called Slings and Arrows. And it’s about a little Shakespeare troupe that’s putting on plays.

[00:47:20.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:47:21.02] - Mike LeBlanc

And that the director, it’s the last show of the season and you know, the, the audience is a bunch of kids throwing pennies at the actors, you know, nobody’s paying attention and he’s still giving the actors notes. Yeah. And the actor goes, you know, Jeffrey, to the director, what, what are you still giving me notes for? It’s filled with a bunch of school kids. Nobody cares about this. Yeah. We’re all just here finishing this. We have a big party coming up. It’s over.

[00:47:48.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Stop. Right.

[00:47:50.15] - Mike LeBlanc

And you know, when he says, I can’t stand to see these words by Shakespeare recited poorly. I can’t stand to see actors owning it in. I can’t stand to see bad performances. And you know, that again, that is that lion of somebody’s gotta be there. And this to me is the, the essential role of the leader.

[00:48:10.20] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:48:11.11] - Mike LeBlanc

Say, I hate seeing it done badly.

[00:48:14.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:48:15.03] - Mike LeBlanc

I can’t stand it. I can’t, I can’t stand waking up and watching a bunch of people drag themselves to work. I can’t stand myself, you know, sitting in a Monday morning meeting talking about the same issues that we did last Monday with nobody taking real action on them. I can’t stand us not knowing how to handle our customers not liking our product because we’re not willing to have hard discussions with each other about whatever it is. I can’t stand it. And, and that to me, that is, that is training that lion to not go off the rails and, you know, have a temper tantrum and go, everything here’s screwed up. Everybody knows bosses like that.

[00:48:52.11] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:48:52.21] - Mike LeBlanc

Or to be somebody that can actually sit there and go, well, okay, you know, marketing, this happened to me, marketing.

[00:48:58.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:48:58.21] - Mike LeBlanc

How come you said you had a million impressions last month? We had a million people that, that looked at our brand and sales zero.

[00:49:06.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:49:06.13] - Mike LeBlanc

And, Is sales, they’re just that bad at bringing you through.

[00:49:10.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:49:10.16] - Mike LeBlanc

Right. And forcing the conversation because that, that is what is implicitly being said between a million impressions on marketing and zero sales.

[00:49:17.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:49:18.06] - Mike LeBlanc

Sales not pulling it through. And sales implicitly saying marketing is not getting us the right leads. Right. So I, you know, having, having the lion is bringing that conversation up and going, you can’t both be right.

[00:49:29.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:49:30.16] - Mike LeBlanc

What, what are we on?

[00:49:32.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. And it seems to me like, and you’re also kind of implying that there is the reason why they get angry is because there’s a standard or there are standards. So they have a standard in mind as to how things should be. Like, you know, Steve Jobs, right? He was angry a lot and he used to get in people’s face and, you know, point, you know, like nose to nose, like almost touching them. And he would scream at them because he had a certain idea of what that, whatever the product he is that, that he was working on, what it should be like. And if he didn’t meet that standard, then he would react that way, right? So it’s that anger that is quote unquote the right anger, probably, than the anger that comes from resentment or other things, right? Insecurities and things like that.

[00:50:19.21] - Mike LeBlanc

And that’s what I used to say, because I get accused a lot at at my companies, um, and kind of, you know, just kind of anywhere that people will go like, hey, you’re not understanding the team. You’re not understanding all of our, all of our hardships. And I would tell ‘em, no, I understand the customer. And I am the voice of the customer.

[00:50:39.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:50:39.10] - Mike LeBlanc

The voice of the customer is pissed off. Right now our, our actual customers were very nice. Again, these are nice corporate places. They, you know, you sit with them and they go, we understand, we understand. It’s a little tough for us. We thought that demo was gonna go better for the CEO. Yeah. You know, that, that everybody’s very nice.

[00:50:56.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:50:56.08] - Mike LeBlanc

But, you know, internally they’re pissed. Oh, yes. They put their reputation on the line to bring in a new technology.

[00:51:02.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:51:02.22] - Mike LeBlanc

And we squandered it and we made them look like idiots.

[00:51:05.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:51:05.21] - Mike LeBlanc

They’re, they are angry. And so the voice of the customer needs to be angry. And that’s, that’s what I was coming back with was somebody’s gotta speak up for this poor customer. Yes.

[00:51:15.14] - Bhavesh Naik

Or else.

[00:51:16.02] - Mike LeBlanc

They’re never gonna get what they want.

[00:51:17.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:51:17.19] - Mike LeBlanc

They’re gonna get a bunch of excuses and that’s, that’s all through life.

[00:51:21.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:51:21.11] - Mike LeBlanc

That’s, that’s what you’re, you know, if, if you only set yourself to understanding your problems and the things that are in your way, you, you will, you will fail and you’ll have great excuses. You’ll have the great excuses for why you lost.

[00:51:32.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yes.

[00:51:33.13] - Mike LeBlanc

You will not have any, any victories.

What Does It Really Mean to Build a $50 Billion Company?

[00:51:35.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely. And Cobalt was, uh, was, you exited., right? And then Foundation Robotics, right? Foundation. So that’s your current company and you’re building this $50 billion future, right? How did this come into play, this whole idea of learning? You know, Mike LeBlanc has to learn and grow from being a founder who exited to being a builder of this even bigger vision, I’m assuming.

“We don’t ask what a $50 billion company looks like. We ask who we have to become to build one.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[00:52:11.11] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah.

[00:52:13.00] - Bhavesh Naik

Any, any transition, any, any things to share in terms of how you evolve into that, that mindset, or have you not yet?

[00:52:20.17] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, it was so interesting. I, so when we sold Cobalt, I thought, uh, I thought, okay, the big lesson here was don’t do hardware again. That was, that was a big lesson. And because I was sitting there, I was trying to think. What, what did I learn? What do you, what do you learn? I thought hardware’s not the way. I should be doing an enterprise software. I’m very good at selling to these big companies. You know, we, we’ve had Uber and Salesforce and Amazon and Citi, FedEx. We had big names that we were able to sell into. And I thought we should have been doing a software that we could, would’ve been very easy to iterate on, make better. Um, I could do really well in that. And that was kind of my big, my big takeaway. Um, I went and had, had breakfast with, uh, Alfred Lin at Sequoia who’s on our board. Right. And, and I told him that insight that I was like, you know, he’s, he’s like, well, what, what company do you think about doing next? And I’m like, you know, never hardware. And he just goes like, he’s like, well, SpaceX is a hardware company and Tesla and Apple.

[00:53:23.06] - Mike LeBlanc

And hardware’s not the problem.

[00:53:25.14] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:53:26.11] - Mike LeBlanc

Right. He’s like every, any business that you pick, it’s always going to have its challenges. And he said, you, you’re really cut out for the challenges of hardware. He’s like, it takes this, this grit and this operational willingness to just, just pushing to fix these things.

[00:53:42.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:53:42.22] - Mike LeBlanc

‘Cause we, we had almost 1,000 robots out in 9 countries, you know, on 4 continents. We had, you know, we had 350 people. There was just a lot, there was a lot to manage at Cobalt.

[00:53:53.11] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:53:53.16] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and he said, no, that grit, that that you have to do that. He’s like, that’s what nobody else does.

[00:53:59.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Mm-hmm.

[00:53:59.19] - Mike LeBlanc

So that’s what you want to use in the market. And, and that was, you know, that was a key insight to me that I go, ah, what I, what I learned was not knowledge about business that I could have learned from a book beforehand.

[00:54:12.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:54:13.12] - Mike LeBlanc

It was all of these tiny operational details. It was all this, you know, learning my ability to actually, you know, use my anger, you know, in a, in a way to actually push, push people out to figure out how are we gonna fix all these robots? And hardware just makes it, you know, all the more abundant that there are failures in reality. Right? So everybody sees, you know, when it, when a software glitches, everybody goes, I don’t know what happened there. But when a robot runs into the wall, everybody’s like, it wasn’t supposed to do that.

[00:54:40.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes. Yeah.

[00:54:41.09] - Mike LeBlanc

So constantly faced with this harsh reality. And that, that was his point was no, that’s, that’s really the way to go. And I, and I realized, yeah, going into, into robotics again, that’s, it’s a great place to stay. Yeah. And that’s, you know, Foundation, our, our first product is a humanoid robot. And so, you know, which is, which is an even harder robot than we made at Cobalt, but a much more useful, useful one. And so all, all the same problems are there, all the things that I’ve learned kind of how to overcome, but mostly in the style. Yeah. With which I deal with all, all of this with customers and with, and with employees. That’s, Those were the biggest things that I learned and took with me.

[00:55:20.03] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely. And $50 billion vision, what is that and how do you reverse engineer that? That was an interesting thing that I read in your bio. It’s like, how do you reverse engineer and what does that even mean?

[00:55:34.15] - Mike LeBlanc

Well, it’s really interesting to think, you know, well, I had, you know, my son had this great maze. I wish I had this maze. It’s a 3D maze.

[00:55:44.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Maze. Yeah.

[00:55:44.22] - Mike LeBlanc

And you, you know, you move a little marble thing all through, all through the maze to get there.

[00:55:49.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:55:50.03] - Mike LeBlanc

And he’d been sitting with me, he’ll sit with me while I do all my calls in the morning. He’s 8 and he was sitting out for hours. Yeah. Just moving this, this little ball around the maze.

[00:56:00.17] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:56:00.23] - Mike LeBlanc

He just over, he’s just totally focused on this thing.

[00:56:03.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:56:04.17] - Mike LeBlanc

And finally I’m off, I’m off one of my calls and he, and he says, can you help me with this? And I said, yeah, go get me a Sharpie. Uh-huh. And so we went to the end and we started drawing out and I said, well, where would it need to come from if it’s going to go there? Oh, where could it come from that? That’s a dead end. So it must be this way. Okay. Where would it come from there? Let’s follow that through for a minute. Nope. That’s a dead end too. So it must be. And, and we just did that all the way until our little line touched the marble. And suddenly within a few minutes, he was able to just roll it through all of those spaces and got the Marvel app.

[00:56:40.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:56:41.06] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah. And that to me is, that’s such a powerful way of operating.

[00:56:46.20] - Bhavesh Naik

Definitely.

[00:56:47.19] - Mike LeBlanc

Think what is the end and how do I get there? Yeah. And so, you know, when I’m reverse, you know, when I’m doing that, pulling out my Sharpie with $50 billion company. And I think we’ll be much, much larger than that. $50 billion is kind of a near-term near-term. But you know, the trillion-dollar company is really where I’ve got to think, how does that all work? But on $50 billion, you know, to me, I go, what does that deck look like? You know, what does the conversation sound like when I’m pitching it? What do we need to have in place for an investor? I’ve had, you know, thousands of conversations with investors. What are they going to hear that makes them go, yes, that is worth, you know, $50 billion. It’s, it’s the same, you know, anybody can do this watching Shark Tank. I love Shark Tank with my kids and everything.

[00:57:36.21] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah, me too. Yeah.

[00:57:37.23] - Mike LeBlanc

But it is like you, you start to know when somebody comes in and they’re asking, you know, $100,000 for 5%.

[00:57:43.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:57:44.10] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, the people go, all right, great product. What are the sales? They’re going to ask, what are the sales? That’s going to be a key input. What do your sales need to be to justify that valuation? What, what do your, what partnerships do you need to have? Where does your product need to be? What problem does it need to be solving? How many people are going to use it? Yeah. The questions in almost every investor conversation, regardless of hardware, software, or small business, are essentially the same. Yeah. Essentially, who’s going to buy this from you for how much and why don’t they buy it from somebody else?

[00:58:15.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Exactly.

[00:58:16.09] - Mike LeBlanc

I mean, those, those are going to be the questions. And so you can, you can either solve those for, you know, small barbershop of here’s why we’re the best barbershop in the neighborhood. Yeah. Or you can solve it for, you, you know, a new technology that’s going to change the world. But, but both of them have the same process of having to go through and, and ask those questions. And so, you know, I’ll, I’ll do that all the time. I have a big whiteboard here and we’ll, we’ll start going up and saying, what, what do we want to pitch at $50 billion? What do we need to be able to say? And we start writing those things down and then you start, you start looking at each one and going, well, how will we get that? Right. And that was it. That was what we already did. You know, we did our,, you know, we’ve been at several billion that, uh, investors valued us at. We’ve, we’ve already done this of saying, well, how many military contracts would we want to have?

[00:59:03.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[00:59:03.15] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, okay, well, how do I get those? It all starts with, oh, I’ve got to call that guy back. That’s, that’s what, that’s what they all, they all lead back to something mundane.

[00:59:12.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[00:59:13.06] - Mike LeBlanc

But when you have, when you have that idea of what it’s going to turn into, you start to run through these, these iterations much faster and start to go, that’s what I’m moving toward. That’s, you know, and, and being able to stop yourself and go, this one’s not turning out.

[00:59:26.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[00:59:26.16] - Mike LeBlanc

You know?

[00:59:26.20] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Right.

[00:59:27.19] - Mike LeBlanc

How do I ditch this and move on to another? That’s, that’s the whole, to me, that is, that is what a business day, a workday looks like. Yeah. Is all these little actions that go toward a larger goal. And every little action that you take gives you a little more information about how possible that is, what the goal might be. And, and just changing based on that.

[00:59:45.21] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely. Absolutely. Love that. Love that. Fascinating the way you describe that. You know, it’s like the details behind the details behind the details. So this is not just a pipe dream. It’s actually, there’s, you know, this deep thinking behind each and every one of the steps that you will take to get there.

[01:00:03.01] - Mike LeBlanc

Oh yeah. You know, and that for me, you know, I’ve always got, this is always just big. This is 10 things I don’t want to do today. That’s literally says up top. I write it every day on this big sketchpad. 10 things I don’t want to do today. That, that one says, you know, April, April 13th. That was from yesterday.

[01:00:18.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:00:19.11] - Mike LeBlanc

And I write out 10, 10 different things.

[01:00:21.11] - Bhavesh Naik

Uh-huh. Yeah.

[01:00:22.04] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, they are, you know, one, you know, one is, uh, you know, planning up. Uh, so we’re, we’re setting up partnership with, uh, Lockheed Martin. Right. And I want, I want, we’re doing a video with them that I wanna follow up in detail. So. Right. That, that means, you know, actually spelling out, you know, day by day, week by week, what are our touchpoints? What are our goals? What are our milestones?

[01:00:41.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[01:00:42.00] - Mike LeBlanc

Right? Kind of a, kind of a complex one. Another one on there, get rid of filing cabinet.

[01:00:46.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Oh, okay.

[01:00:47.10] - Mike LeBlanc

I, I was really trying to find the cabinet. I need to get rid of it.

[01:00:49.21] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:00:50.01] - Mike LeBlanc

I don’t wanna do either of those things.

[01:00:51.17] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes. Yes.

[01:00:52.05] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, one of them sounds much more important than the other, but in a way it’s not. In a way those are both, those are both psychological weights on me.

[01:01:02.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[01:01:03.07] - Mike LeBlanc

Those are both things that are stopping me from moving forward. And so when I, when I get rid of the filing cabinet and I get to I cross that out off the list, my mind rewards me with new good ideas. It reminds me with freedom, you know, it rewards me with freedom. Yeah. And so that’s, it all comes back to these very small, small things that it doesn’t matter why they’re weighing on you.

[01:01:25.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:01:25.18] - Mike LeBlanc

It does not matter. Right. The fact that they’re weighing on you is all that you care about.

[01:01:29.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Right, right, right.

[01:01:30.12] - Mike LeBlanc

Fix those and you’ll find you’re good at it. Yeah. Don’t try to get inspired. Don’t go, you know, that’s what people think is let me go sit on the beach and stare at the ocean. I’ll have the best idea about my business. No, you, you will not. Right. Yeah. Your, your best ideas are going to come when you finally get your desk clean.

[01:01:47.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Mm-hmm.

[01:01:48.00] - Mike LeBlanc

They’re gonna come when you take a junk drawer and you go, I’m sick of this junk drawer being like this.

[01:01:52.02] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:01:52.08] - Mike LeBlanc

I, I want this to be, I wanna be able to reach over and have pens. I don’t wanna be looking for pens around my office. I’m sick of that. That, that is when you’ll have the idea about what to do for your customer. That’s when you’ll have the idea about, you know, about how to get the next valuation. That’s where it all comes from is in these small, in all of these small little things. And so it always comes back to, I mean, that’s what human beings are, right? Is this kind of high divine vision and this sort of animalistic execution.

Are Great Companies Built More on Emotion Than Intelligence?

[01:02:20.19] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. And I think you kind of answered my next question in a way, but I wanna ask it anyway just to kind of, you know, make it more overt. How do you make sure that that lion is somehow lost as you build this $50 billion and beyond vision that you’re not, you know, you as an organization are not basically, you know, your little man and the hydra are ganging up on the lion How do you make sure that that doesn’t happen as you move forward? Because you’re probably a little bit more comfortable today than you were back when you were a Marine or even when you were a founder, right? So you were in that comfort zone and I’m assuming that there is a pretty good chance that’s creeping in, in a way.

[01:03:12.17] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah, well, and that has been, that’s been a big change is, you know, back then we had no money. My wife and I don’t come from money.

[01:03:20.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

“Most people go to college hoping they’ll discover they’re already right.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[01:03:21.03] - Mike LeBlanc

We had no money.

[01:03:22.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:03:22.10] - Mike LeBlanc

Um, and, and now we’re rich.

[01:03:24.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:03:25.13] - Mike LeBlanc

And being rich is a great thing. I don’t, I don’t have to worry about what my kids are gonna eat. I don’t have to worry about, I, I, there, there aren’t many, many small worries in that. Right. And I think that’s, you know, that’s, that’s where it comes down to what, what is your level of ambition?

[01:03:40.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:03:40.21] - Mike LeBlanc

Because I see people that get satisfied with small amounts of money all the time. And they, they, even though they’ll still talk about, you know, their dreams or something, but they, they’re really pretty happy doing what they’re doing. And you know they’re happy because they, they work for 30 hours a week.

[01:03:56.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:03:56.18] - Mike LeBlanc

Right. That’s, that’s your vote of, of saying I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing. I’m not, not working that much. Right. You know, and for, for us, I think that, you know, money was, money was never the goal. Um, it’s always been a short-term goal. We, we love, we love getting more money.

[01:04:14.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Who doesn’t, right?

[01:04:15.21] - Mike LeBlanc

My, my wife. Yeah. My wife and I love this, but, but the long-term goal has always been, you know, to do, do something that impacts history.

[01:04:24.20] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:04:25.10] - Mike LeBlanc

You know, that, that was where this all started. That’s why I joined the Marines. Yeah. That’s why I wanted to be a general. I wanted to be Secretary of Defense. I, right. That was kind of my, my track that I wanted.

[01:04:35.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:04:36.00] - Mike LeBlanc

Because I wanted to influence history and how the world developed.

[01:04:39.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[01:04:39.18] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and I think when you get, you know, when you get your first million bucks, that is, that’s the test of if you really, if you really wanted it. Yes. When, when all the kind of daily problems start to go to the side, do you still, do you still care? Or were you just telling yourself that and it was actually, it was actually about the money. And, you know, for us it is. Everything that I do is so much smaller than what I want it to be. And it may be at, that’s somebody else’s, it could be on their goals list to kind of be with where we’re at. But to us, until it’s a trillion-dollar company, until we’re a name that’s recognized all around the earth, until we have robots on every continent, including Antarctica, you know, in every country. Bhavesh Nai. We, we haven’t done the job and we’re, we’re embarrassingly, embarrassingly small compared to that. Right. And that’s, that’s what, you know, where you continue to, to get into yourself to go, no, you’re, you’re exactly right. I love, I love the way you’re saying this because the Hydra, the comfortable part of you starts going, let’s not rock the boat.

[01:05:51.02] - Mike LeBlanc

We’ve got a good market going. We got a good thing happening. Uh, you know, I’m, I’m pretty happy, so don’t mess with me. And then the rational mind is going, you know, why change things for more risk? Wouldn’t want to invite risk back.

[01:06:04.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:06:05.09] - Mike LeBlanc

Let’s just stay where we’re at. We’re making a profit. Let’s just keep, keep on cooking. Those two are the ones having the conversation. And so it needs to be this, this third part, this lion, this ambition, this anger, this part of you that knows we’re never done.

[01:06:20.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes.

[01:06:20.21] - Mike LeBlanc

It’s, it’s never good enough.

[01:06:22.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:06:23.12] - Mike LeBlanc

And you know, you’ve, yeah, you, you’ve just gotta figure out what, what to do with your business. I was going around, I was gonna buy after Cobalt, I had, I had this thought, uh, that defense is going to be spending a lot more. They’re gonna spend a lot more money for defense. So you can go to all of these contract manufacturers who have CNC machines and they make whatever part for, you know, for a plane, you know, or something like that. Yeah. You know, but they’re all over America and And you can buy these companies for a couple million bucks each. And I thought, I’m going to scoop up a bunch of these because it’s just an investment. I’ll, I’ll buy 10 of them.

[01:06:59.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah.

[01:06:59.20] - Mike LeBlanc

I’ll improve their operations a little bit. So we’ll already get a little bit of alpha there. And then, and then the, the wave is going to carry us all up because there’s going to be so much more defense spending.

[01:07:08.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:07:09.14] - Mike LeBlanc

So that was my thought. The interesting thing was when you go into these places, there’s this thought, you know, that, well, they’ve been running the business for 40 years. They know what they’re doing. You know, there aren’t gonna be ways to change it. Uh, and there’s another thought that is an arrogant thought that’s like, well, I can change it. But what actually happens when you go and talk to these guys that have been running for the company forever, they know exactly what their business needs to do to change. They know exac— and they are right. So you go into these guys and, you know, you’re walking around and I’d be, I’d be piecing together like there’s, there’s simply, there’s no tracker. There’s no shared tracker of where they are. Like, that would be a very helpful thing for all these people.

[01:07:48.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. Yeah.

[01:07:48.23] - Mike LeBlanc

It’s a down guy and he goes, now if you wanted to really blow this thing up, you need to have a shared tracker that everybody sees. I mean, they know all of these things. Why aren’t they doing them? Because they’ve got other interests in life.

[01:08:00.12] - Bhavesh Naik

Exactly.

[01:08:01.08] - Mike LeBlanc

And they’re at a point in their lives that they, that they go, no, you know, I, this one’s running, it’s great.

[01:08:06.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:08:06.22] - Mike LeBlanc

It’s making a month’s need, but I, I love fishing. I love this or that. Yeah. It’s not a stupidity issue.

[01:08:13.22] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[01:08:14.13] - Mike LeBlanc

Everybody always thinks you’re going to solve it with the little man. It’s not the little man.

Why Is Building a Company a Spiritual Journey?

[01:08:18.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah. The shame isn’t there yet, which can turn into anger, right?

[01:08:24.02] - Mike LeBlanc

Yes.

[01:08:24.16] - Bhavesh Naik

You know, I’m ashamed the fact that we’re not kind of optimizing this, right? And then that needs to turn. Like you used a very great telling phrase just now, just 2 minutes ago, which is that we’re embarrassingly small, you said. We’re embarrassingly small. That’s an indication to me of shame, right? This is not good enough, right? We’re too small, right? And then behind that is this anger that what is it that we need to do to get bigger, right? So yeah.

“Building a company is more of a spiritual journey than a career journey.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[01:08:56.01] - Mike LeBlanc

And that’s always that feeling is like when you can tap into that.

[01:08:59.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:09:00.01] - Mike LeBlanc

That’s why this is, it’s a spiritual journey more than it is a career journey.

[01:09:04.16] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely.

[01:09:05.04] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah. It’s not, you know, it doesn’t really matter what, you know, where you are on the Y-axis, right? Your slope is determined by how much you are willing to relook what you’re doing. Yes. And say, this isn’t working. You know, the, the New England Patriots have to do this.

[01:09:19.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:09:19.12] - Mike LeBlanc

They have to sit around and go, what are we doing wrong? Absolutely.

[01:09:21.18] - Bhavesh Naik

100%. Yeah.

[01:09:22.20] - Mike LeBlanc

They can’t go, well, look, we’re obviously great. We want all these, you know, Super Bowls.

[01:09:27.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Right. Pretty good.

[01:09:28.11] - Mike LeBlanc

Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing.

[01:09:30.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:09:30.19] - Mike LeBlanc

Those guys are still in there going, man, I don’t know what we’re, you know, this guy’s just not, he’s not pulling weight. What are we gonna do about him?

[01:09:36.03] - Bhavesh Naik

Right. Exactly.

[01:09:37.07] - Mike LeBlanc

They’re handling all the hard small issues over and over again because they go, we need to be greater. We need to be, you know, greater still.

Looking Back, How Has Mike LeBlanc Changed?

[01:09:44.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely. Absolutely. And on that point, Mike, Mike LeBlanc in Annapolis going to college and Mike LeBlanc today, right? Envisioning his future. By the way, the book that, that it’s about to be published, right? Yeah. It’s, what’s—

[01:10:01.14] - Mike LeBlanc

August 25th, What If Anger Is The Answer?

[01:10:03.13] - Bhavesh Naik

What If Anger Is The Answer? I had written it down. And so here you are today and back then, what is the, you know, as you look at your arc, what is the biggest change you see in yourself? You are an introspective guy, so I think this should be a fairly easy question to answer maybe.

[01:10:23.13] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah, the biggest change I think is that I’m, I’m just much more genuine now.

[01:10:28.23] - Bhavesh Naik

Ah, yes.

“I’m just much more genuine than I used to be.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[01:10:30.01] - Mike LeBlanc

And you know, I think, I think everybody kind of has their, their version of this. You know, I, I keep noticing it with, uh, you know, you notice it with like rappers and stuff.

[01:10:39.21] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:10:40.00] - Mike LeBlanc

That they all get this like alter ego.

[01:10:42.04] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:10:42.19] - Mike LeBlanc

Kanye West calls himself Ye and Eminem calls himself Slim Shady. Kobe, Kobe was the Black Mamba. They have these alter egos that they go with. And, and it’s a way of, it’s a persona that they can take on that helps them handle challenges in the world.

[01:10:58.03] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:10:58.17] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and I think that, you know, a lot of life you want to take on those personas.

[01:11:04.06] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:11:04.21] - Mike LeBlanc

And you grow through them.

[01:11:06.18] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[01:11:06.23] - Mike LeBlanc

So you don’t, you don’t end up ditching them off as a, as a total phase. You kind of integrate the parts that were there that you needed and, and you move forward. And for me, You know, back, back then when I was in, when I was in college, I was extremely ambitious. Mm-hmm. You know, I, I very much at 19 years old, you’d say, Mike, what, what are you gonna be someday? And I said, president of the United States. It’s funny.

[01:11:30.15] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:11:31.01] - Mike LeBlanc

I’m going to be president of the United States.

[01:11:32.19] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:11:33.02] - Mike LeBlanc

And that’s, that’s what I wanna do. And that’s, that’s what I’m gonna spend all these years doing.

[01:11:38.19] - Bhavesh Naik

Awesome.

[01:11:40.00] - Mike LeBlanc

And you know, you, you have that level of ambition.

[01:11:43.13] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:11:43.20] - Mike LeBlanc

But you still have this part of you that’s going, no, I’m gonna play the Marine role and I’m going to turn on all the parts of me that are like a Marine and I’m going to be, I love the idea of being just so hard on myself, so hard on everybody else. I, I loved, I loved that idea.

[01:11:59.14] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:11:59.20] - Mike LeBlanc

Right.

[01:12:00.09] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:12:00.14] - Mike LeBlanc

And you start to take those on. Then, you know, I got outta there and I started wearing my button-downs and slacks.

[01:12:05.19] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:12:06.01] - Mike LeBlanc

And I, you know, I was at Morgan Stanley and I was like, I’m gonna be an investment banker and now I’m the finance guy. I’m gonna take that military hardness and I’m gonna put that here.

[01:12:13.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[01:12:14.07] - Mike LeBlanc

And, and I think that as, as that’s gone on, as you have kids, as you’re married, as, uh, and you know, as you go through your companies, you start to take away the basic comforts and stuff. You start to get left with, well, yeah, there’s an aspect of, of that that I, that I like. It’s a lot of what we’re talking about today. Yeah. But there, there is like, what, what do I actually wanna do with it? How do I actually wanna be? Who do I wanna surround myself with? Yeah. And you no longer have to. You never had to do it, but you know, take on people in your life that you didn’t want there because you thought that this person’s useful to me or something like that.

[01:12:47.22] - Bhavesh Naik

Sure. Yeah.

[01:12:48.16] - Mike LeBlanc

You, you never actually had to do that. I, I never did.

[01:12:51.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Mm. Yeah.

[01:12:52.10] - Mike LeBlanc

Well, I get to work with who I wanna work with.

[01:12:54.14] - Bhavesh Naik

Right.

[01:12:54.18] - Mike LeBlanc

I get to, I don’t take on partners or customers that I don’t like.

[01:12:58.07] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

[01:12:58.13] - Mike LeBlanc

I take up, I, I, I’ll, I’ll talk to my customers for hours each week. I need to pick ones that I really, that I genuinely like. So everything in my life now is much more genuine. And I think that’s also where you perform the best.

Getting In Touch and the Book : “What If Anger Is the Answer?”

[01:13:13.19] - Bhavesh Naik

Yes, yes. And that’s a well-earned insight about yourself because, you know, you have this track record of, you know, and the arc of being— and we haven’t even touched on, you know, the kinds of things that you did as you, you know, when you were the Marine and, you know, but for that, I think there is a book. So How do we get hold of you and this book that you’ve written, what’s it about? Just give us in a nutshell summary and how do we get that book or at least get to read it? I don’t think it’s published yet. And then also how do we get hold of you and get in touch with you for things that are important to you?

[01:13:54.03] - Mike LeBlanc

So officialmichaelblanc.com is a website that you can go to to preorder the book. It’s also on Amazon, Target, Barnes Noble, anywhere that you get books. But that’s where you can learn a lot more about it. And then really to anybody that’s listening to this, you know, either get me on LinkedIn or just mike@foundation.bot. Those are ways to get in contact with me. And I can talk about this kind of stuff all day. I love thinking through how to transform businesses. I love doing this kind of thing. So anybody that’s interested, you know, don’t hesitate to just reach out.

[01:14:30.21] - Bhavesh Naik

Perfect. And we’ll put all the content information in our show notes that will be published with, along with the episode. And yeah, so, and I think, I feel like we have just barely scratched the surface of the kinds of things that we talk about. We probably at least have 5 more episodes, you know, just looking at each one of the segments that we talked about. So hopefully we’ll be back here again in a year or two talking about some of those other things. And wish you all the best, uh, continued success. And, uh, thank you so much for being on the show, Mike. This was an awesome conversation.

Behind the Scenes Thoughts

[01:15:05.23] - Mike LeBlanc

Yeah, I had a great time. Thank you. You know, you come, you come in all this from such a great, great angle because it is people, you know, it’s just, it’s always funny when you listen to business podcasts and stuff. I love listening to business podcasts and things, but so many people get caught up in strategy.

[01:15:20.01] - Bhavesh Naik

Yeah.

“That’s what my dad always said. It’s like, if you don’t figure these things out personally, you cannot bring them to the organization. You are not the person to change an organization.”

Mike LeBlanc
Co-Founder, Foundation Future Industries

[01:15:20.21] - Mike LeBlanc

And I think the whole time they’re talking about it like it’s a chess game and I’m going, You guys, this, this is the worst thing you can do for listeners is make them think, oh, if I just had the right strategy, if I had the right idea, I could do it. And then you go, no, it’s, it’s, you need, it’s the execution. And you know, you can’t, you know, you gotta run you before you run a crew. That’s what my dad always said. It’s like, if you don’t figure these things out personally, you cannot bring them to the organization. You are not the person to change an organization. So.

[01:15:50.05] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely. Yeah. And the things that he’s sharing, those things that you’re talking about has more weight simply because you’re building robots. You’re not saying that we can all become robots, right? Yeah, right. You’re saying, let’s go into the depth of what makes us human. Yeah. And then build the robots, right?

[01:16:08.06] - Mike LeBlanc

Yes.

[01:16:08.18] - Bhavesh Naik

So that’s the part I love about this exchange, this conversation.

[01:16:13.01] - Mike LeBlanc

And even, I know I should have talked about it more, but even more so, just let robots do what robots do best But you’ve got to figure out what humans do best then. Yes. It’s not robotic.

[01:16:21.10] - Bhavesh Naik

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Get In Touch with Mike LeBlanc

For more insights on Founder Glass Ceiling and practical guidance on Matt’s approach to building and leading organizations, reach him via Linkedin or Official Mike LeBlanc Website.

---

This article was created from the live video conversation on The Business Philosopher Within You podcast. The episode was published on YouTube under the title “Can Emotion Make You a Better Founder? | Mike LeBlanc.” The article was created with the help of AI after significant input from human intelligence.

Get the Unfair Advantage I Have

One of the perks of hosting this podcast is that I go through the episodes such as the one with Mike above multiple times.

As I watch the video, listen to the audio and write about it, I can’t help but have new insights about the content we covered and deepen my understating of the things we discussed. I have the benefit of coming to this material from different modalities of learning.

But I want to level that playing field for you. I also want you to have the benefit of engaging with this material from different angles without getting bored or jaded. For this reason, I have created yet another experience for you to work with.

Click the button below to engage with this episode in yet another way.