Execution | It’s All About Helping You Reach Your Vision

Sam Daviau

Season 2 — September 15, 2021

A search fund is like private equity. Where you’re taking a controlling stake of an existing company, usually an existing small company, and improving the process, and having a model from a financial perspective to do an acquisition.
When you’re running a search fund, you’re raising a pool of capital. Operators come in, and you make a successful business without necessarily trying to start the business. As a business owner, you skip the process of finding a product-market fit, and you skip the whole testing lean startup methodology.
There are models like Entrepreneur First, where you don’t go in with an idea, you go in with a skillset and you’re paired with a co-founder. For example, would come in with a business skillset and enterprise sales and all those things, and you’d be paired with a co-founder. I would be paired with a co-founder that’s technical and who knows how to build a product.

People aren’t happy, because they got a promotion, people are happy when they tell people they got one. People are happy, because of the social proof of doing that. The majority of people get value from where they fit in the community and get happiness from those relationships they develop.
There’s something to be said about not being surrounded by type A personalities and the company that brings you. I think you have to be careful with the level of competition that you have within your social circle. As a new grad, when you come out of school as a new grad, often you don’t have that mindfulness to be able to not get caught in the rat race, not compete with people.
If you constantly surround yourself with top performers, and type personalities, you’re going to end up feeling not so great about yourself because no one can beat everyone at everything.If you’re trying to beat everyone and everything it’s not a path to happiness. You have to be conscious of the way you’re setting up your community and ensure that it is meant for support and not for judgment and competition.

If you can stick at a company that prioritizes growth and allows you to experiment in different roles. You end up building a lot of different functional skills over time, and you end up getting a lot more value.
Sam believes that as a salesperson, or as a product person, there’s no way he could’ve been a VP in five or six years at a company without staying for the length that he did. He says he’s only a VP because of the trust that Staflo has in his skill sets, and helping him grow into the role.
By finding a supportive company that is going to be somewhat successful, grow over time, you can accelerate your career much more quickly than jumping around to different opportunities. Jumping around to different opportunities for sure there’s an element of, you’re going to have new experiences, or potentially have domain knowledge in a specific field.

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