KP Reddy: What You Know About Startups Is Wrong

Transcript

[0:00:58] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with KP Reddy, author of What You Know About Startups Is Wrong. Being an entrepreneur seems like the ultimate American dream but the startup mythology is filled with urban legends and false expectations that can cause business owners to lose what’s truly important to them and KP learned this the hard way through more than 25 years of entrepreneurship experience. He has started, grown and sold multiple successful startups and he’s even been involved in IPO’s and acquisitions. By the end of this episode, you’ll know the behind the scenes reality of building a business and you’ll have a better idea of what it really means to be a top entrepreneur. Now, here is our conversation with KP Reddy.

[0:02:11] KPR: The big turning point for me was in 2009 after the economy was tanking. My startup had literally been technically bankrupt for six months but I was fortunate to sell just enough to keep the lights on and had been approached by an investor, acquirer that wanted to buy the company. The predicament there is I had – my then wife at home wanted to know why I hadn’t gotten a paycheck in five years. I had employees that hadn’t been paid in two months, I had investors that caught wind that there was a transaction coming, so they wanted to make sure that they were going to have a payday. And I had an acquirer, that was probably the most amazing people I’ve ever run in to, just great genuine people. They really wanted me to come work for them and buying my startup was a path for them to do so. They were actually the only people I would say in the room that were after my best interest in a self-serving way. We’re in final negotiations, a bunch of things popped up at the end of the deal that were going to kill the deal and literally, the CEO called me and said, “We’re going to take care of you, we will pay off those debts for you, we want you to have a clean slate so you can be your best for us.” Of course there’s this dynamic of they want to take care of me which is important to me and my wife and my kids. It’s not going to help the employees, it’s not going to help the investors, all these other people that I made promises to. And I had to start making decisions of is it me versus them? Who is this for? We’re in final negotiations of the deal and I had to fly out, I was probably about 40 pounds heavier and pumping, diabetic and pumping as much insulin as my body could take just to be healthy and I jumped on a plane to go out to San Francisco to close the deal and I’m on the plane and I wake up and the bottom of the bathroom and they were resuscitating me. Flight attendant fortunately, her son had been, who is a diabetic and she was able to get me back in order, get me some orange juice and get me back in a good spot and then when I landed and I’m walking from Bart to the office, I was like, this might happen again, who can I call? I called my lawyer and I basically said, “Hey dude, I think I almost died, I’m not sure but it wasn’t a good scene waking up in the floor of an airport, airplane bathroom. I’m calling you just in case something happens to me because I kind of feel like if I call anyone else, I’m going to get yelled at.” If I call my wife, she’s not going to be happy, it will open up all kinds of wounds about all the things that I’ve done wrong in my startup, in my life, who I’m literally left calling my attorney in a life and death situation. The walk back, he basically said, “Dude, I’ll stay on the phone with you until you get to your hotel to make sure you’re okay.” Which is just kind of, you know, you sit there and you say, “This is where my life has ended up. The only person I can trust is someone that is professionally bound to keep my secrets, I have no one else.”

[0:05:15] Charlie Hoehn: Wow. That is an incredibly powerful story. That was an awakening for you, that moment, what change did it cause in your life or did you sort of carry on as normal but feeling that sense of wow, things have gotten messed up?

[0:05:36] KPR: Yeah, I had to kind of wake up the next day and get back to work and get this deal done and be there for – be a dad, be a husband, be a CEO, be all the things that are expected of me, except actually being me. I used to always tell people that you know, this enamourment and this ego associated with being a CEO. Yet, you can’t believe it yourself, you have to really kind of figure out a way to get out of it. I think for me, it’s also a lot of ego, I started my first company when I was 19, I took them public when I was 27, I had all this success. Clearly, where I was at basically told me that all that success was luck, I had nothing to do with it because God knows if I did, I wouldn’t be failing now.

[0:06:23] Charlie Hoehn: Did you also think, boy, this success, even if it’s due to luck has come with a very heavy price.

[0:06:29] KPR: Absolutely, because you start to set expectations around you, I mean, it was amazing after that big success and starting this company that it ended up being a failure, raising money was easy, people said, “You got what it takes so I’m going to invest in you,.” They didn’t even need to see a business plan half the time. This idea that I, you know, it was so rooted and grounded in me and my abilities and being this rock star that you start to believe it.

[0:06:57] Charlie Hoehn: What was your company when you were 19 and was it the same company I take it that you took public when you were 27?

[0:07:04] KPR: No, I started a small, little – actually, it was a dry cleaner when I was 19 and ended up selling that before I left college. Then I started while I was in college, I started a software development company, this was the early days of this is 1994 so everybody wanted a website, at least the people that didn’t believe that the internet was a fad, wanted a website so I was cranking out websites nights and weekends for people.

[0:07:27] Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Fast forward to 2009, what was the company that you were working on then?

[0:07:32] KPR: It was a company called RCMS and we focused on basically 3D simulation of construction and buildings.

[0:07:43] Charlie Hoehn: I take it the company was successful, given that you’re meeting with investors who are happy to throw money your way and you were the founder and CEO, you said?

[0:07:55] KPR: Yes.

[0:07:55] Charlie Hoehn: Five years of not getting a paycheck. You’re in this glamorous position but finances health may have painted a different story. And all this is led to why you and I are talking today which is your book, What You Know About Startups is Wrong. If you had to pick the core idea in your book that you wish you could impart upon entrepreneurs who are struggling, what would you say that core idea would be?

[0:08:27] KPR: That once you become an entrepreneur, there’s no going back. All these short term sprints that you’re pushing yourself to, it’s a long road, it’s your lifestyle, it’s not a short term deal, it is a marathon and it is a journey and putting off all the other things in your life, thinking that you can postpone it for that next big deal, that next big exit and then I’ll come back and be a dad and then I’ll take care of myself, that’s just not how it works because there will be the next thing and the next thing.

[0:09:01] Charlie Hoehn: What do you mean by you can’t go back? Can’t go back to what?

[0:09:05] KPR: A job.

[0:09:06] Charlie Hoehn: How come?

[0:09:07] KPR: Well, you can, right? Because I think the biggest thing that entrepreneurship gives you is this freewill and I think you have to make progress in your company but you get to pick and choose how you work and what you work on. Once you get a taste of that, going back to a corporate job where you don’t really achieve anything or you don’t win or lose, you show up, you do your work, you have the vacations, you probably make more money in some cases. You might have to but you won’t want to. I tell people like for me, I know when I am doing my best work, I can’t sleep at night because it’s like Christmas eve to me, not because I’m stressed, because I can’t wait for the next day to start. I’m like excited, when is everyone else going to wake up so we can get going, this is amazing, we’re crushing it like that. That excitement. I don’t think you ever get that in a job.

[0:09:55] Charlie Hoehn: No, not in a corporate job, definitely not. There’s two conflicting sides here, right? We get the freewill but we also get the stress, the massive tradeoffs that come with choosing the life of an entrepreneur and going the path of startups but we also have the path of employees which we know has a lot of downsides too. What do we pick? How do we know?

[0:10:24] KPR: I think that’s the thing, if you have never been an entrepreneur, you know, ignorance is bliss, right? I think once you get a taste of it, I don’t’ think there’s anything you can do about it, I think there’s no way to go back to sitting in a cube all day.

[0:10:37] Charlie Hoehn: I agree. This podcast is really for entrepreneurs who are struggling, it’s not for the corporate desk jockey, it’s for the people who are in startups who are struggling. They know the genie’s out of the bottle, right? They’re not going back. What do you want them to know?

[0:10:55] KPR: That this is the path they’ve chosen, there is no way to go back and essentially, live your life that way. And you mentioned that the corporate people that are, I also tell people that are in a corporate jobs that are getting enamored, the people who watch way too much Shark Tank or getting excited about starting a company and you know, when you’re making that leap, everybody is so encouraging, right? Your significant other, your family, everybody is like it will be great and you’re so smart and you’re the best and all those things, right? All that support system is there. And no one really talks about what that net impact of going and being an entrepreneur really is. The biggest lie we tell ourselves is, “Well, if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to my job.”Which may be the case, right? I mean, if you’re a successful person in your own career, that is absolutely the case, you can go back to your job and you will be miserable.

[0:11:51] Charlie Hoehn: If I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve been doing this for a while, hustling, I’ve been doing it for years but I’m running into the issues that you were running into and I know, on an intellectual and a logical level, this is a marathon, not a sprint but I have all these pressures, right? Got to pay the bills, got to pay my employees, got to make investors happy. What are the messages in your book that you were trying to impart to those people and to your former self?

[0:12:24] KPR: Yeah, I think the biggest thing I talk about is this idea of relationships, this idea that the best thing I think about being an entrepreneur is the number of people you get to meet, the different walks of life they come from and take the time to cherish those relationships, take the time to have meaningful relationships with people and the rest kind of work itself out and if it doesn’t, it’s okay because you’ve built these amazing relationships along the way. I mean, with very few exceptions other people that I’ve met in my life that I wish I never met, very rare and I think that’s the big thing is if you focus on the relationships you’re having and you build great relationships with people and maintain them, you’ve got nothing to worry about, it works itself out.

[0:13:13] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you have a section in your book called Take Care of Others to Take Care of Yourself. Did you find that when you weren’t taking very good care of yourself, it was because you weren’t taking care of others?

[0:13:26] KPR: Absolutely. I mean, the things I used to say to people are appalling, like literally, I’ve never been a yeller but I have one person tell me you're not sarcastic, you’re ‘sarcaustic’ because what you can say to people to make them feel tiny is impressive.

[0:13:44] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, can you tell me a story that you’re uncomfortable telling because it’s an ugly side of you, of the old you?

[0:13:53] KPR: Yeah, I had one of my best sales people, you always kind of came through, he was kind of a crazy man, he called me one day and he’s like, “Hey, I’m really sick, I can’t come in the office, I’m just feeling terrible.” And it was the end of the month and of course there’s all this pressure with investors to hit numbers and I basically said like, “I think you’re confused that I care about you. What I care about is you hitting your numbers.” He’s like, “Okay. I was like, what I need you to do is get your ass in here and hit your numbers, you can take a nap tomorrow after the month is over.” That was constant.

[0:14:29] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I hear that. What you just described is actually really common, once you get into that zone where you feel everything is super important, you are – boils down to a lot of ego too. Yeah, when you’re making people afraid to work with you, it’s tough. When did you sort of turn the tide and start taking care of others?

[0:14:52] KPR: After my divorce, I decided, it took about a year and a half off, talk about in my book, I call it my ‘pretirement’ and I took about a year and a half off and just literally was dad, I was just making my kids – when I had my kids, making them breakfast, making them dinner, taking them to carpool and soccer and probably the most annoying dad, always around. That’s when I just started to have people enter my life where I was just, there was never an agenda, I wasn’t looking for a job, I wasn’t looking for a deal, when the kids were at school, I’d have coffee and tea with people and we just talked as humans, there was never a something which was very different for me. I realized, this time for me, a friend of mine said, “You should take a year off to work on yourself.” I didn’t even know what that meant, I told her, “I don’t know, some kind of yogi or something, I don’t understand this work on myself, what does that mean?” Then she started talking to me about this thing called self-care. “I don’t even know what these words are, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I started to kind of practice that, I started doing a lot of yoga, I was doing a lot of breath work and I just was very connected to me living on this planet with no agenda and that’s when it really kind of hit me. Why can’t I live this way all the time?

[0:16:09] Charlie Hoehn: How long did that take to really feel like you were taking care of yourself? I mean, at the beginning I know a lot of people try to do that and they’re like, they have this negative chatter in their head because they’re dealing maybe with a lifetime of not knowing how to do that.

[0:16:26] KPR: I just had a lot of great friends around me and it was very interesting, I had a lot of friends around me, new friends that were supper supportive and then I had a lot of old friends that honestly like I was kind of a jerk to and not the best friend of. When they started see me kind of turning, they stepped up and were super encouraging and were like absolutely, this is great, keep doing it.

[0:17:40] Charlie Hoehn: You started seeing yourself from their eyes a bit. You have a section in the book called Meet Every Person Where They Are, what do you mean by that?

[0:17:50] KPR: In the world of business, it’s one big pyramid scheme, right? There’s a guy at the top or gal at the top and we call them org charts but they’re really pyramid schemes. I remember someone telling me, “You know, you need to learn how to manage up better.” I was young, I didn’t understand this, “What do you manage up? That’s my boss, why am I managing that person and that the other way around?” I think what we’ve done beside emphasis, from a society perspective is – and specially in startups because egos, you know, I’d never liked calling myself a CEO, I always thought it was the weirdest title because at one point it was a 10 person company, one of my CEO of. I think it’s this idea though that when you’re in these environments, it’s up to you to meet people where they are, not for them to meet you where you are. It’s not for me to tell you like let me explain to you how I operate which I’m sure all of us have heard that. “Let me tell you how to manage my expectations,” and it’s probably on employee quarterly review forms, right? Of how you meet expectations to your boss. My point has been like it’s actually the other way around. What I like to do is ask people, “What do they need from me, how can I better communicate to you? How can I better organize? How do you like to work? What is your natural behavior and your natural tendencies that I can adapt to myself too?” And it’s funny that you talk about this chapter, just yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine in LA and she’s like, “You work really well with millennials. It is really impressive for a guy who is turning 47.” And you know my point was really that that’s what I’ve learned about working with millennials is that I don’t care how old I am, how much experience I have, whatever, that culturally because I do that with everybody that it’s just natural. It just works with the younger generation because I am not asking to live with my construct. I am asking them what their construct is so I can live within it.

[0:19:51] Charlie Hoehn: It sounds like you’re describing servant leadership.

[0:19:55] KPR: I think so, yeah.

[0:19:57] Charlie Hoehn: Which is a good thing, which is a very good thing.

[0:19:58] KPR: Yeah, I think so.

[0:19:59] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so what is the key to working with millennials by the way? I am one so this is a test.

[0:20:06] KPR: I think it’s really trying to help, I think back to the relationship, it’s having conversations about what they want to do with their life not in their job. And it’s kind of your responsibility - I mean I view it as my responsibility, when I had millennials work for me it’s been they’re like my kid brothers and sisters like it’s my job. If the best thing for them is to work at a different company, I will help them get there. If their passion is to get back to grad school and get a master’s degree, I’m going to help them do that. Is that part of my job? No. But is that good for my investors, is that good for my personal balance sheet? Probably not because your best talent tends to be very ambitious. So helping them be ambitious isn’t necessary great for your business, but that’s what I do.

[0:20:52] Charlie Hoehn: You are correct by the way, you passed the millennial test and you’re prize is this selfie stick. So good job. No, I think that’s great. I mean it resonates because I think some of the older generation may have just sort of grown accustomed to being used by an organization and for a lot of them that was a step up, right? That was great to be in a company, millennials kind of had a different reality growing up and they wanted more. They wanted to be looked out for as human beings not just parts of a machine, yeah. So let’s talk about business practices that bring sanity. What did you learn in your priorities? How do you prioritize now to keep you sane?

[0:21:39] KPR: This is going to sound horrible but I do what feels best in that moment.

[0:21:43] Charlie Hoehn: How does that sound horrible? That sounds totally fine.

[0:21:48] KPR: Stop probably from typing.

[0:21:50] Charlie Hoehn: This is going to sound horrible but I take care of myself.

[0:21:54] KPR: Yeah, I think it sounds privileged right? Because not everybody – I mean I think it takes time to get there. A lot of people say, “Well KP like of course, you get to do that. I am not at your spot, so to speak.” But I do believe that nobody likes doing the same repetitive thing over and over again and I think there is a flow that we start to figure out about ourselves of what we like to work on when and there’s always plenty to do. I mean this is the good news-bad news of being an entrepreneur, there’s always something to do and sometimes there’s things you have to do right now but what I found that if I just do the things that I want to do at that moment and I do them, it all tends to work out.

[0:22:35] Charlie Hoehn: Tell me an example of that.

[0:22:37] KPR: So sometimes I like to write, sometimes I like to do my blogs and things like that and sometimes, I like working on financial models. I can spend an hour or two in Excel and sometimes I want to work on Power Points. Sometimes it’s going and networking, I mean I love showing up to networking groups that have nothing to do with my industry, just so I could meet new people. I think it’s just bouncing around and looking at different things that way, you know? Of course every once in a while, I had a board meeting called this morning and I was behind on some board reports and I didn’t really want to, put them off all day but around 9:00 I was like, “You know what? The kids are getting ready to go to bed. I think I’ll crank on this for a second.” And it was fine. I think the biggest thing is we’re so quick to beat ourselves up over everything like, “Oh I had to get this done.” And I’ll tell you my first book was a textbook and being a good engineer I had a spreadsheet. “If I spend this many hours I can create and crank out this many pages”. I had it all mapped out and my publisher has delivered a draft in six months, 18 months later I was dodging my publisher, right? Because I learned that you just can’t, some of this stuff is very fluid and you can’t just – so one thing we demand of ourselves are things that are irrational and aren’t in our natural flow and then we judge ourselves and we beat ourselves up over not having done it which I think is even more – It is almost a bigger problem than not doing it in the first place.

[0:24:08] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah so you made your internal voice kinder during this process as well of self-care, yeah. You in your book say you described choosing your personal life over business as a courageous act. Why is it courageous?

[0:24:25] KPR: We all have mortgages and car payments and we build these systems that don’t allow us to just have a personal life and be connected with people and take the time and you know, look someone in the eye. Taking that moment to look at a love one for more than a second and peck on the cheek and out the door and actually look at them in the eye and saying, “Hey we got it pretty good, don’t we?”

[0:24:50] Charlie Hoehn: You know KP I don’t know if you know this about me but you and I wrote kind of similar books. I wrote a book called, Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety. I think it could have been subtitled “an entrepreneur’s cure for burnout” and it sounds like you and I touched upon a lot of the same things which is just reconnecting to ourselves becoming human again instead of a robotic productivity machine.

[0:25:19] KPR: Yeah, I think it’s we live in super interesting times, right? I mean our productivity is through the roof. We’re working more and one of my inspirations for the book, if you just go search #startuplife on Instagram and scroll through the pictures that you see, it’s scary. That is not – you know someone having five empty cans of Red Bull, “Startup life haven’t slept in three days. “

[0:25:48] Charlie Hoehn: Right, we’re so much better than all the Wall Street people who are doing the same thing.

[0:25:53] KPR: I go on and post sometimes like, “Dude get some sleep, get your 10. You need to get your 10.” You know? And people can be like, “10? Aren’t you in that luxurious if you have 10 hours of sleep.” I was like, “If you have issues for 10 maybe get eight,” but what? And I think that is the stuff, right? I have a friend of mine who is such a dear friend an older gentleman and he’s like, “I don’t know how you do it. You just float around like a butterfly and make money. I don’t know how you do it.” “You’re always happy.” I was like, “I just don’t really focus on it. I just really try to do the things I want to do.” You know I have subscribed to freewill and I try to remind – you know I think on my one interview the other day I said something like, “I find myself going back to my book when I feel like I am off course to remind myself,” and I take my own advice because it’s so easy. Like we can say you wrote your book and we have all of these ideas but it doesn’t mean that we live those ideas every day. That we work without faults, it’s just that I have to go back to my own book and remind myself to like, “No this is what I believe in. This is what works. Why am I..?” so you do, you have to remember where you came from.

[0:27:02] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, and I really hope – I mean you made so many great point there, I really hope other people, other entrepreneurs that struggle with this stuff really read your book, take this to heart instead of going through the heart break themselves. You mentioned your friend says, “I don’t know how you do it you’re like a butterfly floating along” and it reminded me of this quote by Lao Tzu that says, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” And I think we tend to forget that. Especially in the Silicon Valley and Wall Street trader, even just the average American culture now everything is in a big hurry and yet everything can still get accomplished if you go at a normal pace, such as getting eight hours of sleep at night which is not lazy. It is how we evolve as a species, natural selection could have gotten rid of it. It would have by now but it is a feature of us so -

[0:28:02] KPR: I agree. I mean I start writing this book a while back but we are currently in the most interesting – we are seeing the fruits of our labor with all of the different allegations that keep coming out and whether it is entertainment or the Silicon Valley right? A lot of this is coming from this idea like just be a good person and treat people well and I always tell people, especially with millennials, like I treat them like my best friend’s kid. Because for some reason if I treat them like my kid, I might feel like I can still knock them upside the head but my best friend’s kid I’m going to still be super charming too and be respectful and probably not knock them upside the head. So you know treating people well, I mean that’s what we are seeing now is just the results of this lack of intentional focus on the relationships we have with people and actually caring about those relationships.

[0:28:54] Charlie Hoehn: And do you mind me asking, was that the big lesson learned through your divorce or did you learn that through stuff related to your company?

[0:29:04] KPR: You know I think both. I think going through a divorce especially for me being of Indian heritage, it’s not something we do. It’s not acceptable, it’s not any of those things and I have to have a lot of – we had a lot of conversations. I tell people it was probably the least dramatic divorce, there is not a lot of dirt there. But the biggest thing was for me, having two young boys. I am framing the life that they probably would want to live like, “I want to be like dad,” and what does a healthy relationship look like? And I’m the case study for them, I am the benchmark for them of what healthy and normal looks like and that was the biggest driver for my divorce, was I’m going to be what they look up to and this isn’t working and my life isn’t working and I don’t want them to be all of these things. I’ve got to be better than that. And it’s funny now even they’re 17 and 15 now and there’s days they don’t get me. There’s days that I will ask some things like, “Hey you’re pushing yourself really hard with your homework, why don’t you take a break?” And they’re like, “I think you’re the only parent that tells us that.” I was like, “Look, learning material does not commensurate with the amount of time you spend on it. It’s not how that works.”

[0:30:23] Charlie Hoehn: What do you hope your sons will model after you and what do you hope they avoid?

[0:30:30] KPR: I think this lack of – you know if you ask my kids what does your dad do for a living, the first thing they’ll do is chuckle because they don’t know what to say and I think living a life where you’re not highly defined by what you do does not make who you are I think is the biggest lesson I want - You know whatever they do with their careers and what the definition of “This is what I do for a living.” And therefore that’s who I am, I hope they pick that up.

[0:30:56] Charlie Hoehn: That’s a great one to impart and I’ll tell you, I have seen that first hand in others how often they are totally disconnected from the reality of everyone else around them, why their friends and their colleagues value them, has nothing to do with the work that they do but that’s what is going on in their head, “People like me because I do this thing.” No, that’s not why. It’s hard to learn that, it’s hard to pick that up. Surprisingly hard.

[0:31:28] KPR: It is and unfortunately we put children on a track that requires them to, as adults unlearn a lot of things that we teach them. You know that having the best grades means everything, being popular is everything, conforming to whatever is everything. It’s just that being liked aspect which you know the whole being liked like you need to be popular, “You need to be liked,” there is so much internal trauma that’s just created by that. That we later in life have to deal with, you know my girlfriend taught me a term. She said, “You know never use the word should. You should expunge it from your vocabulary.” And I was like, “Oh that is actually a great view of the world.” and what do we do to our kids? You should get better grades. And then we wonder when they’re in their 20s, they’re in therapy.

[0:32:21] Charlie Hoehn: I know. Yeah, I know gosh I totally feel that. I have worked hard, I even catch myself saying ought instead of should and I’m like, “Ought is still a little loaded with guilt there.” But I feel you and I remember saying to my wife, “You know one of my goals is that our daughter doesn’t have to end up in therapy for something that we repeatedly said while she was growing up.” And I think my wife said, I can’t remember exactly but I think she was like, “No it actually should be our daughter should be comfortable going to therapy to talk about those problems.” I mean that shouldn’t – that is actually a great perspective because as parents, you end up doing thing inevitably that you’re like, “Oh man I screwed that up. I didn’t even see that coming.” Well this has been great KP. Could you give our listeners a challenge? Maybe something an entrepreneur could do this week, from your book, that can improve their life in some way?

[0:33:26] KPR: So I love these little challenges especially in the social media world, there’s always these challenges. I’d love to give people a challenge to get 10 hours of sleep for seven days in a row. Just for seven days, you can get back to your hustle on the eighth day.

[0:33:40] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what’s going to happen when they get 70 hours of sleep in seven days?

[0:33:45] KPR: I think they will make better decisions, they will be much more focused on approach and importance. I think you just prioritize better.

[0:33:56] Charlie Hoehn: And how do they do that? I mean let’s say they’re hopped up on stimulants and they’re in constant hustle and grind mode, how do they make that shift to 10 hours? 10 hours is a lot.

[0:34:06] KPR: Lots of hydration, drink lots of water and sunshine doesn’t hurt anything. If you are at an open spot where you can get it but I think just setting some boundaries you know? Setting, “I am going to have dinner by seven.” I also think the guilt around work, I mean I work. I mean I don’t want people to think I am just kind of chill out. I get 400 emails a day so I am busy and I definitely don’t guilt myself into, “Sorry I have to work on this email.” I work on my emails when I need to and then I put my phone away and I go do the next thing and I think you can try it. I mean right now actually I am not living my best life. I am not getting my 10 hours because I have been traveling a lot for the book and some other stuff but I know I need to. I know like, “Oh man I feel like I need to cut out early tonight and get to bed early.” or whatever. Just trying to make it a priority. I mean so is with the negative onset of these challenges is that people feel really bad when they don’t get there but I think setting yourself up for success.

[0:35:06] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I’m with you. I’ll add a couple things to that because I used to struggle with this myself. I do a lot better with it now. Darkest room as possible, pitch black. If you can get rid of every single light source, that makes things easy. Turn the thermostat down to at least 68 degrees, also makes things easy and then the Sleep Cycle app is actually fantastic. It hits you in the face with data showing how good your sleep really is and how much you are actually getting. That makes a big difference.

[0:35:38] KPR: Yeah, I think if you Google sleep hygiene, you get all kinds of stuff right? And it’s funny that you bring up an app. I am a firm believer that your body tells you everything you need to know if you’re just willing to listen.

[0:35:51] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:35:53] KPR: You don’t need an app for that. You can literary just take a break, take a breath and track what is working for you and your body tells you everything. You don’t need like I do have an Apple Watch. It was a gift and I didn’t think I always like it but I’ve actually kind of enjoyed it. But before that, I was just anti-FitBit and everything else. I was like, “You know you should walk until you don’t feel like walking” like this whole – I talk about it in the book too, the whole CrossFit mentality that’s entered our work life, it is just not a good look. Nobody needs to be lifting things that heavy and hurting themselves and yoga and gentle walks, that’s a good move.

[0:36:36] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I agree. So where can listeners connect with you and follow you? I know you were featured in NBC, they did a piece on your book. When is that airing as well?

[0:36:47] KPR: That has actually already aired on NBC affiliate and my website is kpreddy.co. A pretty good job of keeping things up to date and I am pretty active on social media. So I try to communicate. I try not to be a stream of consciousness for people but I try to think through what I’m going to put out there before I put it out there. That’s pretty much where you can find me.

[0:37:10] Charlie Hoehn: Great and can they watch the NBC piece online?

[0:37:14] KPR: Yeah, I will post it. I will make sure it is on my personal website at kpreddy.co.

[0:37:18] Charlie Hoehn: Great. We’ll try and put it on the post, show notes as well. So KP, thank you so much. This was great.

[0:37:24] KPR: Absolutely.

[0:37:26] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to KP Reddy for being on the show. You can buy his book, What You Know About Startups is Wrong, on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.