Erik: When’s it good to be a control freak and when it’s not so good?

Dan: This is like my constant struggle my friend, this is hard. You know how it is, I mean this something you, I’m sure struggle with too and everyone does. My experience was later stage companies and I was the opposite of a control freak, it was very much you worked on high-level objective and high-level insights and that was it and I took that to an early stage company at the beginning with really poor results. And so I went through the process of learning how to be more and more of a control freak to the point where now I’m a complete control freak and looking back I’m starting to understand now as the business grows and it’s at scales I’ve got to let that go, but that’s difficult because that drove so much success in the early stage. So, what’s that’s given me, this whole experience is the perspective because originally when I saw people who were control freaks at later stage companies I just presumed they were bad managers and I presumed that they had no idea what they were doing. And now I understand it was a necessity at the earlier stage of the business and they’re just having trouble adjusting as the business grows and now that I have that own problem myself it’s really become clear to me that that’s not an easy change.

Erik: Right, right, how are you working through that change?

Dan: I think the first thing is to really just observe and know when it’s happening, so I’m trying to be more self observant but the bigger thing is I’ve told all the people on my team I’m struggling with it and giving them the go ahead and okay to tell me when I’m full of it [laughs].

Erik: That transparency is important.

Dan: Yeah man. And they’re pushing me and I think they’re starting to understand that I’m struggling with it, you know, this is not and easy path.