Name: The Different Stages of Stress When You Launch a Startup
Uploaded: 2016-09-15
Duration: 4 min 25 s
Description: LearnVest’s CEO shares her experience

[ INAUDIBLE ] So what would you say has been the most stressful period during this whole time. You sort of mentioned the early months and years. But what putting it all in perspective was the most stressful? So all stages are stressful. Someone once said to me, if you know what it takes to be a CEO of a start up you would never be one. And that gets truer and truer [ LAUGH ] almost every year, as it got deeper. First, the positives are, it's the best thing that I've ever done in my life, it's the most rewarding and I'm the most committed. And I think most people who love their baby, if you will, and your start up feel that way. Actually I realized stress doesn't ever really go away, Especially if you're someone who uses stress to kind of help you make things happen, but the different phases of stress were different. So in the first stage, it was kind of external stress. Is this going to work? Are we needed to stand up? And as you get to the end of it, it becomes internal stress. We're growing really quickly. We're adding so many bodies. How do we keep everybody on the same page? Post acquisition. Combining two companies. Lots of different types of stress but so rewarding in so many different ways. And maybe the peak stress was being nine months pregnant. And giving birth to my first child three days after we got acquired. Was it sad or hard in any way or do you feel like there was a weight lifted? What did it feel like ?>> It felt really interesting but as the C E O, it's not really about me to be honest. I kept reminding myself that actually my job is someone who's on the board, I'm responsible for the shareholder's, I'm responsible for the team. and I felt it was my job to Get us to a point where we had options. We got to decide what we wanted to do, which we were in such a good spot that we got to do that. And I remember finally, probably, a week before the acquisition finally being like, okay, Alexa, now what do you want? Do you see more companies getting acquired by older kind of existing establishment financial institutions like yours? Yeah, so I think they're be a lot more acquisition I think that in order to truly innovate, it is so hard inside of these big companies to be able to find the bandwidth, especially if their publicly traded to be able to create the space for renovation to happen so I think that acquiring start- ups, acquiring the digital talent, the digital thinkers into those spaces, I think they're seeing a lot of big companies digitally transform And I think the best way for them to do it is to get very nimble teams of those thought leaders to come in and actually help create the tense dynamic of helping people truly innovate. And I think that that's what we'll see a lot of innovation. You spend a lot of time thinking about About your productivity, about your own personal productivity. [ LAUGH ] And, well I'll ask y ou about time management, but what are some die hard rules that you really adhere to that really make everything possible. I mean you have a child now, and things are different. First, I'm a fun person and I like my weekends to not be super scheduled. But during the week when I'm trying to really get things done, I try to make as much decision of the table, if that makes sense. So Things like, I eat the exact same breakfast and lunch, I try to keep my Monday's, Tuesday's, and Wednesdays to almost all of the same schedule every single week, so it's literally just, there's no friction points in how we think. It's really just these regularly scheduled where I can accomplish the things we need to. If you weren't CEO of [ UNKNOWN ] what would you be doing? I would be looking to found LearnVest again to be perfectly honest. [ LAUGH ] No, I think that this is my issue that I wanna solve and I think I'm actually, so we call this chapter two, that were in, posed acquisition. So, chapter one was getting the software built and where we are today. And now, chapter two is really unleashing that software and we launched LearnVest at work where you can buy a subscription for your employees That they can come and actually get a financial plan, and we're now getting to really big companies. We can see this really exciting growth. But to honest, I think this is the problem, this is the problem that I wanna see through helping America's wallets. Touches everybody in such a fundamentally deep and true way, and I just think, I think I've only made the beginning of a dent and I have a lot more work to do. So I wouldn't be doing something else. OK, so what did 10 year old Alexa want to do? I literally, so 5 year old Alexa told my librarian that I wanted to be the first woman president of the United States. 10 year old Alexa wanted to be a brain surgeon. I think 15 year old little Alexa thought I was gonna be a doctor. And then it became very clear to me that I was an entrepreneur and that I loved to build. So that's where I've been. [ MUSIC ]