By Elizabeth Weil, Managing Partner, Scribble VC
Making risk-taking a cornerstone of your culture leads to amazing things. Here, Superplastic’s virtual celebrities & Christie’s joined forces to “blow up” an auction house.
This is #5 of 8 “flash content drops” in collaboration with MOMA artist & entrepreneur Paul Budnitz (CEO, Superplastic). We cover The 3 Types of Intelligence, the Future of NFTs, the “Creator Brain”, and How to Stoke Risk-Taking. You can follow me on twitter to get them.
(p.s. SUPERPLASTIC IS HIRING! If you want to join a rocketship or know someone who should, Superplastic is hiring a Director of Marketing, a Marketing Manager, and a Paid Media Specialist.)
“I tell my team — ‘This job is going to work or not work based on who we are. Not who we pretend to be.” — Paul Budnitz, Founder & CEO, Superplastic
In extreme environments like startups where you’re reinventing how the world operates, it takes the Founders and leaders a tremendous amount of energy to keep people aligned, excited, and willing to take risks.
For example, we’re making all these insane characters. We’re opening stores with holograms. We’re putting out an animated pop group. We’re making a movie. We’re doing all this crazy crypto stuff, creating tokens. And we’re doing a physical product, a sushi restaurant now in Miami, too.
So that’s a high stakes environment. Now the question is — what is the one essential thing that will inspire a culture of risk taking?
It’s Permission. I really think it’s permission to be who you are, the realization that you are not going to succeed pretending to be other than you are.
In my thirties I was diagnosed with borderline autism. I taught myself to look people in the eye because I never did. I think not giving eye contact had become part of the way I had to defend myself as a kid. Because I was a weirdo. And so for me, creating an environment where people feel safe to be who they are, because who they are is awesome, comes from a very personal place.
I tell my team — “This job is going to work or not work based on who we are. Not who we pretend to be.”
The conditions you need for truly innovating is finding the right crazy people, and letting them just be who they are.
Stay Tuned → Coming up at 2pm today — Culture Hack: The Superplastic "Fail Wheel" (1 min read). Follow Elizabeth on Twitter to get this content drop.
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Elizabeth Bailey Weil
Founder and Managing Partner, Scribble Ventures (Scribble.vc). Previously Andreessen Horowitz, Twitter. Investor: SpaceX, Slack, Coinbase, Figma, Clubhouse, Calm. Letterpress printer (@paperwheel). Ultramarathon runner. Mom to @thirdweil and twins.
