GPT Party 3.0. Mikael Yang and Valentin Vasilevskiy: tools that can make the entrepreneur’s path easier GPT Party 3.0, the largest Russian-language networking event dedicated to artificial intelligence, took place in Silicon Valley on March 9-10. More than 450 people gathered at Plug and Play to meet leading experts, entrepreneurs, and investors, discuss the latest trends in artificial intelligence, and gain practical knowledge. At GPT Party, Mikael Yang, founder of ManyChat, and Valentin Vasilevsky, co-founder of the Business Booster accelerator and 500 Rollups, discussed the topic of entrepreneurial thinking and shared tools that can help on the path to building a business. Valentin Vasilevsky, co-founder of the Business Booster accelerator and 500 Rollups, and Ruslan Gafarov, founder of San Francisco Innovation Hud Valentin Vasilevsky: Who among you feels stressed because you don’t have time to do something or think you’re not good enough? Artificial employees are already being created around us, and you still don’t understand where to go next. Who has this feeling? Honestly, it happens to me often, especially in Silicon Valley. Today, Mika and I want to discuss the path of an entrepreneur and how to suffer less along this path, while creating great products. When I meet you, you always look calm, with a slight smile. I wonder: do you know the feeling when you start doing something out of fear, and then it moves into interest? Is it possible to bypass the fear phase and immediately create from calm, interest and play? Mikael Yang: Thank you for the kind words. I think I can tell you about my experience. When we started Manychat, I had just proposed to my then future wife. At that moment, the main motivator and reason was ensuring financial security and independence. This motivation came from the desire to get security, which can be called the motivation of fear. It was 2015. Is it possible to bypass this stage? I don’t think so. Maybe someone has less of this, but I think you need to go through it. Some people continue to do things out of fear, and they just feel comfortable doing it. At some point, I also began to wonder if it is possible to do all the same things, but also have fun. It seems so, but you need to practice for this. Valentin Vasilevsky: I want to be as useful as possible, so that the participants take away some tools. What would you recommend to those who are now at the stage of creating something new? At the stage when there is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and, perhaps, little money. What helped you overcome these difficulties? How to get through this phase and at the same time create something significant, but with fewer losses for yourself and your psyche? Mikael Yang:You know, we all have some coping mechanisms. That is, each of us manages our state differently. When you are at the very beginning, you have a huge amount of uncertainty. By default, any startup or project is dead by default. The first year or three, and sometimes more, you are engaged in permanent resuscitation, trying to breathe life into it. At this point, it is very difficult, because entrepreneurs put all their attention and soul into it. The project becomes part of your identity. If something doesn’t work out, you take it personally and start thinking that there’s something wrong with you. What helps? There are many tools. Some of them are more conventional, there are CBT practices, others are more related to the body, for example, regular workouts in the gym to relieve stress and adrenaline. At that time, yoga and meditation helped me. These tools turned out to be effective for me. It is not so much important to find a specific tool, but to realize that this is normal and that everyone goes through this. Understanding that stress is part of the process helps to cope with it. Entrepreneurs must understand that their own state is a key tool for influencing the business. If you are not in a good state, it will be difficult for you to attract investors, inspire your team and solve problems. There is one CEO coach who worked with Altman and the guys from Notion, his name is Matt Mochari. Unlike many coaches who prefer to ask questions, he directly tells you what to do. One of his recommendations is that fear and anger are very bad advisers and if you are in a state of fear or anger, then you need to do something to get into a more neutral state, otherwise you can make a mess. Valentin Vasilevsky: I will make a short summary of what was valuable now. If you experience such states, it is absolutely normal. Your job as a founder is to get out of this state. It often happens that we are in fear or anger and continue to act because there is a lot to do. And going to the bathhouse, hiking or to the gym can cause a feeling of guilt, because this is not work, it is rest. But in fact, it is our job to get into a good, normal, even state. Thanks to this, the business will be successful. Mikael Yang: I think it is very important to note this dichotomy between rest and work. It is wrong to reproach yourself for doing something unproductive, for example, sleeping instead of working. There are blogs on Instagram where people say that they sleep 4 hours a day and work the rest of the time. But the quality of your decisions in such a regime will be appropriate. Sometimes there are situations when this is really necessary. When a critical situation requires a temporary sprint mode with minimal sleep and maximum activity, but this always needs to be balanced. Valentin Vasilevsky: Yes, there is such a good state when you can work a lot and think: “I can do more, I can do more, I can do more.” But then you don’t notice how you get into a state of overload, you become nervous and irritable. It is important to realize this in time and just say to yourself: “Stop, I can’t go on anymore, I need to stop, don’t go into overrun.” Honestly, I had the same thing. I was stuck in this state for months and found myself a few months later among the ruins, among a bunch of mistakes made. I looked at it and thought: “How could this even happen?” By the way, have you ever had such states? Mikael Yang: Yes, when we raised the series, it was in the fall of 2018, we were talking to all the top funds then, and it was a very stressful period. For me, fundraising has always been super stressful, because you are constantly on the edge of something. Until the round is completed, you have not passed to the next stage. It’s a very nerve-wracking situation: something is about to happen or not, and you’re constantly waiting for a check to be sent or not. I burned out then. And after that, the next stage began for me. I think we all go through such moments when we reach the bottom of our states and understand that we need to somehow change it so as not to end up in such a situation again. From that moment, the next stage began for me. I began to pay more attention to keeping a diary. Regular reflection, perhaps not every day, but regularly throughout the week, helps to put your thoughts and states on paper. When you do this, you essentially give these thoughts a form, which helps to better understand and correct them. Valentin Vasilevsky: What time of day do you usually keep a diary? Mikael Yang: It depends on the type of diary. If these are thoughts related to the development of some idea, then I return to them regularly in the morning. We have a team in Europe, so I usually get up at 5 am, and the calls start around 7 am, depending on the time of year. Until then, you can do your own thing. If we are talking about reflection, then this can happen either in the middle of the day, or at the end of the day, or on the weekend. I often do reflection on the weekends, too. Ruslan Gafarov, founder of San Francisco Innovation Hud, and Mikael Yang, founder of ManyChat Valentin Vasilevsky: I wonder, as a person who built a business around social media, how do you protect yourself from dopamine starvation? After all, social networks like Instagram and TikTok actively use the mechanisms of our psyche so that we constantly scroll and wait for something interesting. Because of this, it is difficult to tear ourselves away. By the way, Instagram has a useful function that shows how much time you have spent in the app. I have it set to 2 hours. Sometimes it tells me: “Dude, you’ve been sitting on Instagram for 2 hours already, that’s enough.” Do you have this problem of getting stuck in social media? What do you do about it? Mikael Yang: Yeah, I think we all have our own “drags of choice.” This is comparable to what the writer Gabor Mate says: addiction is not always associated with drugs, it can just be patterns of behavior that we know are not productive for us, but we cannot give them up. Social media is a great example of this. After the whole round-raising story, I started to pay very close attention to how I spend my time. It may seem strange to some, but I write down everything I do during the day. This is the sixth year now, since 2018, when I started keeping such records. I write everything down in a calendar. It really helps with planning. Over time, you begin to understand that you never have free time. The concept of free time is a myth. It is always filled with something. The only question is whether you fill it with more or less awareness. I record all the stories about being stuck in social networks or TV series in blocks in the calendar. It’s like a state thermometer. If I see that this happens regularly, especially with YouTube, when after a difficult day with a thousand calls you just want to switch off, this becomes a signal. What to do with this? I think that you should not try to eradicate it by force, because this is a coping mechanism that is trying to solve something. This is a reaction to something. If you are already in this situation, it is important to understand why you are doing it and to work with the cause, not just the symptom. If you remove this thing, then more tension will simply accumulate, which will then come back to haunt you, for example, with psychosomatics or something else. Therefore, if you find yourself in a state of sticking, it is worth asking yourself: “Why am I doing this? How did I end up in such a situation when I need to relax like this?” Most likely, you had very stressful days or this particular day was very stressful, or some big story is going on right now. You can play with this without violence and internal criticism. Buddhists say: you don’t need to make yourself a battlefield. Everything is fine. If you need to get stuck on YouTube now, then that’s how it should be. When you recover a little emotionally, you can think: “Okay, good. What can I do to be less nervous during the day? What other ways are there to get myself into a good state?” It often happens that when you are stuck, you can do something else before you get to the point where you can’t bring yourself to do anything. You can go for a walk, stretch, talk to someone. Find things that won’t have a big impact on your time and attention. And sometimes you can allow yourself to get stuck – there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s no need to demonize this state. Valentin Vasilevsky: I can share how I dealt with morning and evening glancing at my phone. I had this problem that I could not get rid of. I realized that the phone was getting into my bedroom because of the alarm clock. When I came here, I started using the alarm on my smartwatch. Now the phone lives in the living room or in the study and does not get into the bedroom at all. The problem disappeared. Realizing that I need to get stuck somewhere, I put an e-book in the bedroom that can only be read. If I wake up at night and cannot fall asleep, I start reading something calm, for example, popular science about history. This helps replace harmful glancing with useful. Glancing somewhere needs to be done, but the question is where exactly we choose to glitch. Mikael Yang: What you just described is called environmental design. You create your physical environment so that it supports good habits. And this is a very effective approach. Excellent advice, I won’t even add anything. Valentin Vasilevsky: Your habit of keeping diaries is also a great example. I have been keeping diaries for a long time, although perhaps not as often as you. Sometimes I write once a month. Some of you may have played Red Dead Redemption 2, where the hero, if he is too busy with life, stops writing a diary. This is one of the signs that something is wrong. The developers understand this very well: if you stop writing a diary, then something in life has most likely gone wrong. It happens that you get carried away and everything seems to be fine, but these are already bad signs. Sergey Polonsky, a former billionaire, said in one of his speeches why you should write a diary. This struck me. We are constantly evolving, and today we are not the same as yesterday. A diary allows you to listen to yourself a year ago, five years ago. When I open the diaries that I started writing in 2015, I understand that this really is like me, but this is a different person. This is an amazing habit. Mikael Yang: If we talk about specific techniques and tips, there are several things that help to start a new habit. The first is to tie it to a specific trigger, most often in the morning. It should be a consistent set of actions, when one starts another. For example, we all get up in the morning, go to the shower. If you start tying new habits to existing sequences, they will be harder to break. The second is to start with very small steps. For example, when people say that they want to start meditating, but they can’t find the time or it’s difficult for them to do 20-30 minutes a day, I advise you to start with one minute a day. Just sit on a chair or a pillow, close your eyes, set a timer for a minute and sit. When the timer rings, you can already put a checkmark on the checklist. This is a great source of dopamine. Do this for at least two weeks or a month. If it’s a habit you want to maintain long-term, like fitness, you’re going to do it for the rest of your life, then it’s okay to go in slowly. Start with one minute. After a month, you can increase it to three or five minutes. Valentin Vasilevsky: A very cool method. I implemented morning exercises in exactly the same way. At one of these events, one of the entrepreneurs said that everyone knows that exercise is useful and prolongs life, but few people do it. And I thought: “Why don’t you do exercises?” I started with one minute, and now my standard exercise lasts 13 minutes. If anyone needs it, I can send a good workout tracker. I have a rule: if you really don’t want to do it, do at least one minute. Usually you start and think: “I can do it for two minutes, and then three, and five,” and in the end you do it to the end. This is a really strong cheat code. These little things can make you entrepreneurs who create something really big. These are tools for managing your state. We literally have four minutes left. Let’s recommend what you can read, watch or learn on this topic. I’ll tell you about the book you told me about right away. This is “Work as an Inner Game”. It has specific tools and a vision of how to treat work correctly. All my employees read it, I recommend it to everyone. It is suitable for both entrepreneurs and any employee. The book has a concept of the work triangle, where there should be results, learning and pleasure. Our world is focused on results, but results are achieved through competence and effort. We often focus on efforts to get results, but do not pay attention to competence. The book describes steps on how to turn the situation around and start learning more every day. Journaling, which Mika talked about, is a great technology for learning from your life and making a customized training out of it, while starting to enjoy it. What would you recommend? Mikael Yang: I would suggest approaching it from the side related to building an inner story. I recommend everyone to read books by Thich Nhat Hanh. He is a Buddhist monk who introduced the concept of mindfulness to the West. He has a very interesting story: he went through a 20-year war in Vietnam and remained kind, compassionate and joyful. This shows how strong his practices and inner resources are. He has written many books, and one of them, which is especially practical, is called “Peace in Every Step”. This book is useful for entrepreneurs, although it may seem that Buddhism and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley have nothing in common. It all comes down to the issue of one’s own perception. If a person is in a state of compression, anxiety and tension, he does not see interesting moves and cannot think creatively. Research shows that monetary motivation works well for tasks where it is clear what to do, for example, quickly assembling something. But it doesn’t work well when you need to think outside the box, engage in creative thinking. For sells, monetary motivation works well, but for people working on the product, it can be counterproductive. They will optimize metrics, rather than try to make something really cool for users. Returning to recommendations, Thich Nhat Hanh’s book gives specific advice on what to do during the day, how to return to the moment, and so on. I would recommend everyone to read it. Valentin Vasilevsky: In closing, I would like to say something about the topic of AI. I think that AI will increasingly do intellectual and mechanical work for us, as we saw yesterday in David Yang’s speech. In fact, we will need to become even more human, even more creative, enjoy life and create something new. For entrepreneurs in the era of AI, what we talked about today is the most important. The phase of working out of fear and lack is essentially passing. There are now a huge number of tools, and our survival is rarely threatened. Animal fears deceive us, and status games are really all in the head. Mikael Yang: I think that like all big leaps in productivity, the more resources we have available, the more we move on to the next unanswered questions. Before, we needed to earn money and worry about our physical safety, but over time, that became less of a concern and we were able to focus on other issues. If all goes well with AI, and we really do live in some kind of utopia where everything is done and everyone has everything, then deep questions about our inner experiences will arise. That will be the next stage, and we are already on that path. The popularity of psychological services, the growth of training and mindfulness – all this is not just like that. There is a good reason for it.
