FOUNDER READINESS INSTITUTE: VERTICAL DEVELOPMENT SCIENCE WITH LOGAN YONAVJAK

E104 FOUNDER READINESS INSTITUTE_ VERTICAL DEVELOPMENT SCIENCE WITH LOGAN YONAVJAK

Transcript

Dalton Anderson (00:00.686) Welcome to VentureStep podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and an occasional book review. The current venture capital model accepts a 90 % fail rate as the cost of doing business, gambling on single home runs to save a portfolio. But what if this fail fast mentality could be changed by measuring the human element? Today, we're joined by Logan Janowak to discuss how the Founder Readiness Institute uses AI to standardize the evaluation of founder soft skills.

removing systematic bias and providing a data-driven path to better investment decisions.

Logan is the co-founder and CEO of the Founder Readiness Group. She's a 2X founder and she's directly raised $85 million in institutional capital for climate investing. Logan is also a founding member of Angels VC. Her work has been featured in Forbes, institutional investor, and now she's on the show with us. Welcome, Logan.

Logan Yonavjak (00:58.52) Thanks so much Dalton, it's great to be here. I loved that intro and the way you characterized, you know, some of the imagine the future adventure.

Dalton Anderson (01:08.782) Yeah, there's a lot of things that can change. And I know that you're helping to push for some of that change. So with the Founders Institute Readiness Group, they have what you call the micro readiness score and this. The score, the scotch ability score for founders, and I think there's two things that you discussed prior was like one is like the evaluation of soft skills and then the other one is like how coachable are these people and then

Logan Yonavjak (01:15.384) Yes.

Dalton Anderson (01:38.596) bridging some of those gaps. But before we dive into that, can you just give an overview of what is being solved for?

Logan Yonavjak (01:46.658) Yeah, absolutely. So we're really helping illuminate an individual's capacity to lead under pressure and with complexity. And so instead of just a personality assessment, like, you an introvert? Are you an extrovert? We're actually evaluating how you're likely going to think, behave and act under pressure and with more complexity. So that's really appropriate and important for startup.

leaders in particular.

Dalton Anderson (02:18.745) Now that, I think that would make a lot of sense. Like can't handle, can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen type of type of situation for sure.

Logan Yonavjak (02:25.474) Yeah, yeah. But, and we do that, we have kind of six different areas within that that we focus on and coachability is one of them. We also look at emotional resilience, what we call purposeful agility, your ability to pivot while holding the big picture in mind, team climate IQ. So we have a number of ways that we're actually grounding what we mean by leadership capacity.

Dalton Anderson (02:52.857) You'd mentioned it, I'm going to butcher it because it's been a couple of weeks since we spoke, but you talked about like leadership science or is that, is that the, what is it called?

Logan Yonavjak (03:00.942) vertical development. Well, so we, the body of work that is underpins our system of analysis is vertical development science. And it's a body of about 40 years of psychological research and then organizational psychology. You know, we, could pull in some researcher names like Cooks, Greuder and others, but

basically it's looking at what I said before of like the ability of a person to grow in their ability to hold complexity and to work under pressure over time. so one of those, just to give a quick anecdote, so the coachability piece that you and I have been talking about a little more deeply.

So when someone is kind of higher in their ability, their coachability score, if you will, in our assessment and our approach, they are likely gonna be able to hold a lot of different feedback or systems in place while keeping themselves in as one component of that system, rather than being the focal point of the system. So when you're earlier in your developmental patterns,

you tend to identify, self-identify as the main focus of the system. And so often when people give you feedback or give you constructive feedback on your business, you might take it personally because you're not really as objective about, you know, the system itself and then seeing yourself in that feedback in the context of a larger system.

Dalton Anderson (04:37.367) Hmm.

Dalton Anderson (04:48.963) Maybe just translating to an employer, employee type of situation. If you're getting feedback about the project or your code, it's not necessarily your code. Maybe also this could be something to look out for when you're giving feedback, when you incorporate some of this thought process and methodologies. When I try to review people's code, it's like, I don't say your code or these kinds of things. I say the code of the project needs to get optimized.

Logan Yonavjak (05:14.797) Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (05:19.029) these are the reasons why we need to make these changes versus your code. But also when you're getting feedback from people or a company or your pitch, then people could internalize it because they're probably the only one working on it. There's one other person to go and that's on me. But it's actually the it is, but it's not personal is what you're saying, right?

Logan Yonavjak (05:41.911) I think that's a really nice way to frame it in the sense of even the people giving feedback can change the way that they think about the system that they're looking at. And the person writing the code or updating the code is just one element of that system. So they can bring in all these different perspectives and it makes for a better outcome because no one's really attached to their specific identity within that.

Dalton Anderson (06:09.471) system or body of work. So if we just back out a little bit, how does this help? So we got really detailed on

what can be done to study the adaptability, dealing with pressure of a human being in a leadership structure or a system. How does that help a VC go from, okay, I've got my box, I've got my box, I've got my investment box. I want my founders to look like this and come from these pedigrees of schools and

and maybe working on these ideas and I'm really looking for like these type of personality types because like that's what I think is successful.

Logan Yonavjak (07:00.62) Yeah, I think that one of the ways I've been thinking about it is like a weighted average. So in making a decision right now in the venture space, what is typically occurring is that the decision making about people comes from a warm intro or two references, and then the team's gut feel or like felt sense of the person. And all of those are valuable points of information, but I think we need

an additional assessment or body of information to come in to improve the way that we're evaluating people more objectively and with less bias. And so what we're seeing as a result of the current status quo, which is the warm intros, the referrals, and the kind of gut feel, we're seeing 65 % of companies failing because of people problems. And we're seeing

a lot of minority and women founders, for instance, receiving only 3 % of VC money. And so those are just like, those are just two statistics that are interesting to look at in the system. But they're coming from, you know, I don't know that the way that we're doing things is really yielding better results, if we're looking at it from the perspective of more companies making it, or more diverse founders getting access to capital.

Dalton Anderson (08:31.545) I think there's a great points and I was just thinking anecdotally something I did during the interview process and this isn't pitching, but this is me interviewing for different positions when I was looking for a job like a couple of years ago. And so I have like a data science background and then I have like a product background. And so I was applying to data science roles and then product roles, but what they deem as like product or what the interview, when I was interviewing, what they deemed like

within the product box had certain personality types, certain hobbies, certain things that they liked and that that resonated. And that's what passed me through the gate. And then, and then I did the same thing with data science. Like if I was doing data science, I talk about like nerdy things I like to do on my free time and tinkering with code and doing these things. And I would avoid like talking about sports or like other types of athletic activities. Whereas product, I talked about like running and fitness and

Logan Yonavjak (09:11.182) Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (09:30.616) all sorts of things and like doing hard stuff or whatever. And it's not necessarily saying that, Hey, just because I run and do these things, I don't know how to code. But in the mind of who I was speaking with, it was like, okay, like these people aren't serious or like, this isn't really what I'm looking for. Like I know that if these people do these things and they put like four X real time strategy games, like they're probably better at coding than, than not. That's honestly true, but I had to get through the gate. So I just played, played my role.

in that scenario, but that that can prevent you from getting great talent for sure. Like if if if people don't know the gate that they need to pass through and and or if they don't want to play, then they don't they don't typically get through the first the first the first five check, I guess.

Logan Yonavjak (10:15.971) Yeah, I think that's a really good, I mean, it's like those things are helpful to know. And I think that there are proxies for a successful outcome. like you get a sense for, okay, know, people that do these things and have these grades and went to these schools are likely gonna be better, but you're also missing out. You might be filtering out people that would be great at the job, but they just don't have X, Y, and Z attributes. So we're talking about capacity.

not personality characteristics or attributes or hobbies or all these other things. So like I said, I feel like it's just that we're missing a piece of the equation when we're making a decision. Like why not bring in some of these analytics into the system so we can hopefully make more informed people decisions.

Dalton Anderson (11:06.073) And it's not necessarily replacing the intros or these other things. It's another piece of information for that person to evaluate the company and leadership better. More information to make better decisions. Be more informed. That's all it is.

Logan Yonavjak (11:20.035) Yes, exactly.

Yeah, be more informed. Yeah, like wouldn't you like to know? That's where I'm coming from.

Dalton Anderson (11:29.591) Yeah, no, I think everybody would love more information definitely in today's day and age. If that is the case where there is, I would say a better lens on who that leadership group is that's applying, how does that help remove the bias or level the playing field a little bit for minorities or women?

that are applying, because you said like 2 % of the funding goes to women and people in minorities.

Logan Yonavjak (12:04.119) Women and minorities. Yeah, and I just, I think it's around two to three. I've heard, I've heard, but you know, obviously still within the band of surprising. But you know, and those are just two forms of diversity. Obviously I'm not trying to make this a conversation about just improving like the diversity of, you know, specific genders or ethnic backgrounds.

But I there's many different kinds of diversity that we're missing out on. But I think we are kind of, when we're enabling our pattern recognition to inform our decision making, that has validity. But I think sometimes these patterns have unconsciously become ingrained in us. And we're not necessarily questioning where they're coming from. And so we're just making these like,

these decisions like, I really resonate with this person or they really, but they might just sound like you, they might, you know, be very charismatic or they might be verbose. People tend to really like when people talk a lot in some instances. I mean, there are just a variety of factors of that can persuade someone to make a decision to hire when what we're doing takes, it's got a human component, but we're really taking AI and we're evaluating

the way that people structure sentences through telling stories and through giving examples of something, we can get a good sense of how they structure their thinking and their sentence structures to give that perspective of how complex is their thinking and how resilient are they under pressure. And so those are really what we're looking for. so you're getting to the underpinnings of how someone's operating internally.

and making decisions. It's just a good proxy for that.

Dalton Anderson (14:10.573) did the exam, we don't have the results back yet, but I was definitely intrigued about the whole thought process and the questions. I'm not going to share the questions that was asked because it's like, you know, it's private, but the, it was just the questions and then the, way that everything was structured, it was like, Hey, this is, this is the situation. This is what you're doing. No pressure. And then I got in there and then I was like, hold on. My mic, my mic isn't working.

And then I had to retake my take and it was like big bold. was like, this is your last take. It's like, Oh no. Uh, all right. I'll try my best. But, and I think my first question, I think it says like the estimated time to complete this question, like read the question, complete response and reply should be within two minutes. And I was like, Oh, I'm over, I'm over the, I'm over the, like just the whole thing. It was just such a funny situation, but I, I thought,

that the way that the system of the questions that were being asked from me and then the examples of how you should think about answering the question, I think led to me providing anecdotal information examples and like background from my thought process. Like it definitely asked you to like include examples of like what you're talking about and try to structure it. But also said, don't talk too long. Like you only have a certain amount of time.

Logan Yonavjak (15:36.889) Yeah, it's, you know, there's a whole like, you know, we spent a lot of time to set up the questions in a way that would help reveal some of that inner workings or how you are making decisions and considering complexity in your decision making. So that's what we're aiming to do. And just to be clear, we have assessment tools, but we also can take any, really any transcript data. We could take this conversation. We could take a publicly available.

available talk and ingest it into our, we call it the readiness engine and come out with similar results. We've tested it many times against synthetic data, against human data. It's really fascinating like what you can pull out of a short transcript in terms of like pinpointing someone's development.

Dalton Anderson (16:27.981) crazy. did question what is what do you think on maybe two examples or two questions one from your end the results of I'm assuming that you've taken the exam and or have used the transcript like so was wondering if you could share a little bit about like your score and then also if there was a situation where hey maybe maybe didn't get

like the warm and fuzzies when I had my intro with so and so, but you know, when I reevaluated and thought through like the score, this is like a conversation with you and one of your investor partners thought through the score. I reevaluated my thought process on how I thought about this, this pitch.

Logan Yonavjak (17:17.936) So the first part of what you said, I'm always happy to share my score. So we score along six different dimensions for the founder readiness level. And so I scored kind of between four and 4.5 on most of them. And what that's really saying is like, you spend most of your time in this range or like at this point. And so I might have good days where I'm really like at a five.

but I'm mostly spending time where I mentioned between like four and 4.5. I was a little surprised by a few of my results. I thought I was higher on a few than the assessment showed. And when we dug in, my co-founder is the one who delivered my results. He made some recommendations that were fascinating. was like, as a leader, one of my growth areas is to share more of how I'm thinking about

making decisions, like the frameworks that I'm pulling from and the observations I'm making to inform the decisions that I'm coming to. So to be just a lot more explicit about that, that that would help create a sense of flow state and connection with my team that would help them understand where I was headed rather than me just kind of coming in and saying, I've arrived at this decision, here we go.

And so that was one concrete area where I didn't realize there was such a disconnect between like how I thought and like how I was presenting those those ideas and frameworks.

Dalton Anderson (18:51.832) That's interesting takeaway. I wonder, wonder what my results will be, but you know, do tell. But I don't know. You've been a great speaker for, I'm just surprised that that was the feedback because you've been a great speaker for, I don't know, for a long time. I've seen videos for like 10 years ago and like you're an excellent speaker.

Logan Yonavjak (19:09.646) thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, maybe you show up as your best, you know, when you're presenting.

Dalton Anderson (19:14.362) That's your flow state when the mic's on.

Logan Yonavjak (19:20.945) But I think you asked a separate question, is how has talking to investors or others about this tool like informed how I've been developing it.

Dalton Anderson (19:31.618) Yeah, that or if it is changed their thought process on evaluating pitches.

Logan Yonavjak (19:37.51) Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of investors haven't thought about this as like an area of, of analysis. You know, I think that a lot of, a lot of VCs I've met or, or, angel investors or accelerator programs, they, they don't have a formalized way of evaluating people. You know, that's been one of the interesting findings or confirmations from my original idea was like,

Yeah, there just isn't a lot of formality. A few use assessment tools and a few use coaches, but very, very few of a percent, I would say like 90 % do not. And so I think we've run into a lot of like curiosity and this is possible. But a lot of VCs, you know, I think, feel like they're doing a good job reading people and like picking companies. And so it's been an interesting journey, you know, trying to understand like,

what the pain points really are or perceived pain points are of VCs. so it's informed a lot of like how I've thought about presenting like the opportunity and yeah, we're doing a lot now with like larger corporates and middle market companies as clients.

Dalton Anderson (20:54.018) I find the offering overall fascinating. the whole thought process of, I mean, we're talking about diversity. We talked about like this, you know, people of color and women, but it's also the people are gonna easily identify that as like, okay, diversity, but there's also like diversity of thought, religion, background, area, class, all of those things. Like you'd want different spectrums of people at your company because it...

Logan Yonavjak (21:12.497) Exactly. Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (21:22.41) is like scientifically proven that the more diverse of like thought background, all these things, like call it just diversity of your company, the better off and more resilient it is because you've got people with different challenges and, I don't know what it was to say, like environments that they were raised in. And that correlates to different ideas and different schools of thought, which then makes things more cool. In my opinion, like I just keep it simple. It's cooler.

and you get cooler things and you can build faster and do all these things like that. But I find that part really cool. And, then also I talked about it in my interview during the readiness exam. It's just like, there isn't a right or wrong person. Like each person has strengths and weaknesses. And so when you're building out your executive team or you're hiring another important leader at the startup,

you've got to make sure that one people like each other because they're to be around each other a lot. But then also it's like, what are their weaknesses that like you need to be aware of? And like, are you accepting of those weaknesses? And does that correlate with the weaknesses? Do they correlate with what the company needs right now? And like, are you okay with like that weakness being a problem for, I don't know, say two years, or if you're not, then you have to look somewhere else. But I don't think people

Logan Yonavjak (22:38.319) Yeah, yeah.

Dalton Anderson (22:49.56) and companies have a good idea of what they're getting into until they get into it or that they've known the person for like five years and like that's why they were hired.

Logan Yonavjak (22:58.627) Yeah, I know. I feel like we're still in the age of AI and all these technological advancements, we're still a bit bespoke. I don't know. That's not the right word. We're still very like informal on how we actually make hiring and promotional decisions. Like you go to major companies and they're like, yeah, we did five interviews and had AI read a resume. it's like,

interesting, you know, and some some use assessment tools, which I could talk about, like why ours is different. But it's just very interesting to me that there's an informality in like these big, some of the sometimes the most major decisions you make about individuals and people and teams are just kind of left to like a few kind of casual conversations.

Dalton Anderson (23:46.319) which is a wild thing when you think about it with all the technology, where, where are we on these important, like an important decision? I feel like if when you're hiring somebody, it's most of the time like a one door decision where you can change your mind later on, but it, you still have lost probably six or like eight months. Maybe you have a quick, quick turnaround and to rehire, but that's still another

six months because you got to hire the person, they got to onboard them. And then you don't really know until like two months from now when they get hired. So if you do that twice at six months, if you are waiting until six months, like it's still like six months. So it's a long time. And when you're talking about at a, a leadership standpoint or at a startup, six months is a, is a very long time to have a gap and you got to get it right.

Logan Yonavjak (24:38.95) Yes.

Logan Yonavjak (24:42.416) And I feel like these tools kind of help make that more prominent. Like hopefully when used in sequence with other decision-making processes, it's like, yeah, could we just improve the odds by, in the case of startups, like five to 10%, that would have material impacts on portfolios all over the place. I don't wanna misquote, someone recently told me that 40 % of

Dalton Anderson (24:42.436) Sooner than later.

Logan Yonavjak (25:12.306) corporate promotional hires do not work out. And so, you're hiring a person for an executive role and 40 % of the time it's not gonna work out. I mean, that's pretty high. And there's many reasons for that, but could we prevent some of those by just flagging and better understanding the individuals that we're looking to promote and whether they're a good fit for that job.

Dalton Anderson (25:24.748) I didn't know that.

Dalton Anderson (25:36.729) At least there would be a process. And I think you talked about with your feedback on your exam is you have a thought process and you got to a result, but you explain the thought process and provided enough background to everyone became there in their flow state or optimize. It's kind of the same process. What you just talked about right now was if you had this kind of internal process of evaluating internally, people that are

maybe eligible for promotion for these elevated positions, then if it didn't work out, like in what I'm saying, if it didn't work out, if that individual or individuals were not qualified or had some concerning aspects about their capabilities, and then you had to go external, then that makes sense. But if you don't do that and then you just go external, then people are bummed out. It's like, okay, well now, now it's like, it's like,

Logan Yonavjak (26:33.136) Yeah, yeah, there's also

Dalton Anderson (26:35.514) damned if you do damned if you don't, cause it's like, okay, well we hired externally and then it's, and then it's like, well, Logan was great for the job and everyone's like, well, why, why wasn't Logan considered? And then it's like, oh, we made that decision. And so then people are pissed and they leave or I got passed up on or whatever it may be. But if you do the other way and you hire internally and it doesn't work out, then that's also a problem. So I think it's just like,

Logan Yonavjak (26:48.73) It erodes trust. It erodes

Dalton Anderson (27:02.862) we talked about a little bit earlier in the show is just transparency on the methodologies and like the capabilities and like where they are at a person at that time in providing feedback and then making the judgment call and like, are the current needs immediately at the company?

Logan Yonavjak (27:22.758) Yeah. And I feel like that's, you know, I've had people tell me, you know, I'm, I'm nervous to take something like this or investors like why I'm nervous. A founder will back off from the deal. If I ask them to take something like this, I think that's interesting information. Like I don't, you know, I guess personally would not be nervous about taking one of these assessments.

But that's because I've always been really focused on like self-improvement and getting feedback and things like that. And I'm not, not to say, you know, I'm not denigrating anyone for not wanting to take an assessment, but it just seems like I would rather know what I'm getting evaluated on than all of these like inherent biases and other ways people are always judging you. And you might not know why you didn't get a job or, you know, it just, to me, it's like this, this doesn't, this adds like a bit of

structure to people decisions.

Dalton Anderson (28:23.116) And that structure leads to better decisions or at least giving people more information to make decisions versus no transparency. Yeah, this is like, it's an odd thing. Like I think so Andy, who was like the founder of a stretch who was on the show, maybe five episodes ago, his company was all about pricing transparency. And like there's, there's correlations here where it's like, okay,

Logan Yonavjak (28:30.599) Yeah. You get it. You get it. Yes.

Dalton Anderson (28:53.454) this is about leadership transparency and capabilities, this vertical science. And then his company was about pricing transparency for grocery stores and the whole Instacart scandal. And it just seems like there's a big push, like within AI, like now that we've got AI and these capabilities, like there's a big push for transparency, while there also is a big push for like innovation. like there's like these two different paths that people are pursuing all at the same time.

Logan Yonavjak (29:07.677) Hmm.

Dalton Anderson (29:23.352) I find it interesting that it's kind of a theme that's popping up.

Logan Yonavjak (29:28.807) Yeah. Well, on that note, it's kind of an interesting, I was just speaking with a seasoned sales professional and she was sharing that she just heard a statistic that 17 ish percent of new hires into companies are actually not people. Like they go through an interview process and like a resume evaluation and they're not actually real people. And so,

Dalton Anderson (29:47.652) Wait what?

Logan Yonavjak (29:55.326) companies are onboarding these AI agents or bots, if you will, come to find out. They went through this whole interview process and it wasn't a person. And so that is a whole nother level of, yeah, talk about transparency. How do we handle all of this? All these AI capabilities are leading to more opacity in some ways about, anyway.

Dalton Anderson (30:07.812) Really?

Dalton Anderson (30:24.216) Wait, I'm just curious. I don't know how knowledgeable you are about the 17 % or not people, but how do you get hired? You're not a person, but so they have the resume and that stuff you could, that could be not a person, but then then how do they do the interview? Like it was just like not a, a video interview or they just did phone interview or

Logan Yonavjak (30:49.459) I think it's both. It's like, think you with AI is good enough now you can create like a video of a person and have them like speaking and responding to interview questions. So, it's a wild world. It's, yeah.

Dalton Anderson (31:01.946) Yeah, I do. I do agree with that. Yeah, I know that I can clones with all this podcast stuff. I've cloned my voice a couple of times and it has it was, you know, I did it a while back, like a year ago, a year plus ago, maybe. And it was really good. The voice cloning was the people couldn't tell that it wasn't a real like it wasn't me, which is no good because well, that's a problem. But

Logan Yonavjak (31:25.841) Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (31:30.01) It is what it is. And that's one of the reasons I talked about it a couple of times recently, but it's one of reasons why I do the video podcasts and always started video podcast is like, how do know that the person on the show is a real person or some kind of AI person or how do they know that I'm real? Just, it was just a weird, weird world that we're going into about this transparency thing, but I guess we'll get back on topic about the.

Logan Yonavjak (31:41.064) Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (31:45.448) Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (31:52.786) I just thought it was so, I mean, and just on that note, like one of the things, I think one of the pain points that we can help solve is not just like, is this a real person? But handling AI as a tool or set of tools is a complexity skill. Like those who are rising to the top or like able to position themselves for this labor market really are people who know how to manage AI and who know how to live.

leverage the tools and that's a complexity skill. And so that's something we would measure. That'd be like a kind of later stages in the evolution of our tool in the sense that what we could measure would be like complex, like ability to hold complexity. And that's a really useful thing for these environments where you're hiring less people maybe, but you need them to be more fluent with complexity.

Dalton Anderson (32:44.154) Yeah, that's interesting because as the technology advances, skills have to shift and they have to shift substantially in certain areas and certain industries and every industry is going to be affected, but in certain more than others. And the whole skill range is like completely. I mean, what was typically required is kind of botched. I mean, it's still important, but the emphasis isn't as high. And the people that I know,

that are in my age bracket that like I went to high school with or in college and they're doing great job. They're all very sophisticated in using these AI tools to optimize the companies that they work at. And they are in leadership positions or they do like high level consulting for large fortune 500 companies, fortune 100 companies. Like how do you build apps and do these things and optimize these processes?

Logan Yonavjak (33:27.347) Exactly.

Dalton Anderson (33:44.29) And I don't know, maybe. And I'm in a similar space to like where that's like pretty was pretty much my gig when I first started on at the company I work at now. It's like, OK, how can you how can we be more efficient? How can we get better faster? And.

Logan Yonavjak (33:58.529) Yeah, and I think if you measured the capacity of those individuals, they'd probably be quite high. And it'd be interesting to look at who's being selected for those roles and how they would show up in our scoring system.

Dalton Anderson (34:15.214) Yeah, overall.

I think that the progress that we're going to make on many different aspects is going to be huge. But I'm also very excited about what founder readiness Institute is looking to do on this capacity standpoint, complexity, like all these things I find. And I've said it before in the episode, I've said, I've said this before many times in this episode, like the phrase,

But it just overall very fascinating to be able to look under the hood on something you haven't been able to do before. And like this kind of sophistication, like you could go, you could go to a course or maybe go to like these individual people, but there isn't like a standardized system to evaluate these measurements. Like it's all subjective, but I find it very cool and I'm super interested in seeing the results is so I can see like,

what's under the hood. Like I don't even know that it's under the hood for myself. And so to be able to see.

Logan Yonavjak (35:19.048) Yeah. Yes, I'm really excited to share your results. No, it's really fascinating when you get them because what we've heard is like, I just had a founder recently say, my mind was blown. Like that was her literal feedback. As she just said, I couldn't believe that you pulled out what you did from the transcripts.

Dalton Anderson (35:38.951) You're literally pulling out nuggets of information out of my brain.

Logan Yonavjak (35:44.511) Patterns, patterns. I just think, you know, some people are good at reading other people and picking up on these patterns, but like anything, it's a skill. And I think a lot of people are over estimating or over grandizing their ability to make these assessments of people. And it's just like, like anything else, it's good to have professional input or kind of a third party to augment your decision-making. And so that's really the role that we're playing. We're not saying, hey, we'll come in and make the decision for you. It's like, here's some more information.

So.

Dalton Anderson (36:18.454) a maybe a leadership evaluation mediator.

Logan Yonavjak (36:23.42) Yeah, that's a nice, I like that mediator. And we're also helping try to prevent mediation from needing to happen. So all those lawyers and mediators that are required are largely a result of like a lack of understanding of people patterns. Because that's later stages when conflict arises and maybe that some of those examples could have been caught earlier.

Dalton Anderson (36:49.21) Maybe on the other side of the napkin is how do know that you're getting into the right, you may or may not be able to answer this, but how do know that you're getting into the right area for signing on with the VC? Like I know that I've had friends who've had like bad, baddish deals or when the paper was signed, it was like different type of interaction versus like everything's warm and fuzzy and then

dotted line sign. It's like, Whoa, like this is different. Like I know that there is this like you speak, you could speak to them and, but you don't have to learn or know until you're married. Uh, is there, is there anything on that end to, I guess, evaluate, I guess.

Logan Yonavjak (37:35.2) Yeah, I mean, I think if there's publicly available information, we could run it through our system. But, you know, if it's already out there in the public domain, if there's anything on the investor. But I would say, you know, it's good to talk to people who've worked with other people in the past. That's obviously like a proxy for better understanding. think other companies that might have taken capital from the VCs would be a really good thing to look under the hood.

Dalton Anderson (37:45.69) Mm.

Logan Yonavjak (38:03.827) I think it's difficult as a company because often you're really, you you really need money. So you're kind of like willing to take what's out there. But the VC model puts you into a very aggressive trajectory. And I think, you know, you have to really evaluate whether your company's that kind of a company to begin with. But then if you're going to take the capital, just doing a bit more under the hood in terms of like, I would say the main thing you can do is talk to other companies who might have

Dalton Anderson (38:12.09) Yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (38:32.629) taking capital from those companies. But just know, nine out of 10, they're kind of assuming like nine of the 10 companies they invest in are not gonna make it. And maybe digging in a little bit more to them in their kind of dating process of like, how do they really support founders or how do they think about the people side of the equation? I don't think that question's asked enough.

Dalton Anderson (38:57.71) Yeah, because you're not just interviewing, you're also interviewing them, but it's a different, it's a different power dynamic for sure. Like if you really need the money, it's like, all right, well, I guess I'll just deal with this stuff. Like, I don't know, you know, but considering all that said, how do people, if they're interested or they want to learn more, get in contact with you and or the founder readiness Institute.

Logan Yonavjak (39:02.193) Yeah, yeah.

Logan Yonavjak (39:24.767) Yeah, so we just launched a new website. Actually, it's the peoplereadinessgroup.com. And so that's our new website. And you can reach us there. We have a contact form. You can email me at logan at founderrl.com. And we would love to continue to hear from folks in the VC space, accelerators, corporates. Like we're really interested in

supporting these decision-making processes and helping improve and reduce hiring and execution risk. I mean, that's what we're about. we constantly have content on LinkedIn as well. releasing a lot of free content, digestible interactive content you can download and use in your own decision-making. So we have a lot coming out and just excited to connect.

Dalton Anderson (40:17.09) Yeah. Once again, super excited about the whole initiative. It's very cool. And closing out the show, wherever you are in this world, good evening, good afternoon, good morning. Thank you for listening. Listen in next week.