A lot of companies are always struggle between winning the short game and winning the long game.

And to be clear, you need to win both games, to be successful.

If you don't win the short game, you won't be around to play the long game and

if you over-optimize for the short game then you make decisions that aren't good for the long term.

I'm Mary Long and that's Martin Gonzalez. He's the

creator of Google's Effective Founders Project, a lecturer at Stanford and author of the

book The Bonfire Moment. Martin's built a career on studying startups and their

founders. He researches what makes talented people tick, whether they're CEOs or

middle managers, and he's got a whole lot of insight into how culture can build up or tear down any organization.

On today's show, Ricky Mulvey talks with Martin about what public investors can learn

from a venture capitalist approach, why treating people like volunteers is a recipe for

success, and what a computer character can teach us all about arguing well. approach to stock investing. These are folks you know pretty well where they're

essentially going for a slugging percentage versus an on-base percentage.

And if you're playing that game, the thing, one of the things you write about startups in these smaller companies is that these venture capitalists are really sort of picking the jacky, not the horse.

They're looking for leaders, team, culture, fit, that kind of thing.

Not necessarily the idea or business they're going for. Can you explain, can you explain that decision or that bias, if you will?

Yeah, it stems from the belief that ideas are

cheap and that execution is what matters and that's where the people the

cultural dynamic the quality of the people really come into play. There's a really classic study that

really spurred me on to a lot of this work I do with startups that surveyed a bunch of venture

capitalists around, you know, think of the last

companies in your portfolio that failed and why did they fail? And the study revealed that

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