<story><title>Simplify Your Message, and Repeat Often</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/business/john-lilly-simplify-your-message-and-repeat-often.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dceddia</author><text>This is a really interesting point:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;When I was a V.C. at first, I would just ask my questions and kind of poke, poke, poke, poke. And now I’ll say: “Look, I’m going to ask some things, and this might be kind of awkward, but I’m just going to say it, and let’s work our way through it. And it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in you and your company. I just want to understand where you are and what you think. I’m going to ask some things and they might be wrong, but let’s figure some things out together.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve noticed that people have different assumptions about what it &lt;i&gt;means&lt;/i&gt; to ask questions. Some folks (like the interviewee here) just ask away, because they want information -- their questions have no malicious intent behind them.&lt;p&gt;But on the receiving side, this can cause problems. Some people, when asked probing questions (or any questions at all), will get defensive. Just the fact that someone is &lt;i&gt;asking&lt;/i&gt; must mean they think something is &lt;i&gt;wrong&lt;/i&gt;. Questions like &amp;quot;Why did you choose Node.js instead of Java?&amp;quot; can be (and I think often are) interpreted as &amp;quot;The questioner thinks I made the wrong choice, so I have to defend my choice now.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;People in the tech community seem particularly affected by this assumption. Interesting that this VC ran into that problem too.</text></comment>
<story><title>Simplify Your Message, and Repeat Often</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/business/john-lilly-simplify-your-message-and-repeat-often.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TheBiv</author><text>This Q&amp;amp;A really hit home for me.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Q: Early leadership lessons for you?&lt;p&gt;A: I didn’t understand the role of simplicity and messaging early on. One of the things that happened at one of my start-ups was that I would get bored saying the same thing every day. So I decided to change it up a little bit. But then everybody had a different idea of what I thought because I was mixing it up.&lt;p&gt;So my big lesson was the importance of a simple message, and saying it the same way over and over. If you’re going to change it, change it in a big way, and make sure everyone knows it’s a change. Otherwise keep it static.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>