Why CEOs need to think more like athletes, with investor Byron Deeter

Founders ship faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone, anywhere, and get visas handled fast so you stay focused on scaling. Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 40,000 fast growing companies trust Deal to move fast. Visit deal.com/mos. That's deel.com/mos. When you have people pushing their agenda or their pet things or trying to help and you can just see the CEO's head exploding in the meeting, It's, I think, also important to to draw a line and and and pull back because life's too short, and these companies are running so fast. Byron Dieter has spent more than two decades investing in some of the world's most innovative companies, from Anthropic to Waymo to Canva and beyond. Don't find things that are doing okay and going to fix them so that you go from, you know, good to great. Go find the teams in the business that's already great and make them excellent or help them just stay excellent if they're already there so that the slope of line stays bigger. This is Masters of Scale. I'm your host, Jeff Berman. This week on the show, Byron Dieter. After founding and exiting a pioneering company in the early days of cloud software, Byron moved on to become an iconic investor. He spent twenty years at Bessemer Venture Partners with an incredible portfolio that includes 26 companies, each worth more than a billion dollars. We talked about his advice for both founders and investors in this moment of AI transformation, why CEOs need to think more like athletes, and much, much more. Byron, welcome to Masters of Scale. Great to be here. I'm thrilled to have you. You are an investor who started as an operator, so I'd like to start with your operating days. How did you become a founder? I fumbled my way into it. I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur starting from, invention idea books in my elementary school days to ideating in my McKinsey days with colleagues trying to think of startup ideas. When I got my first pass at venture, I did a lot of brainstorming time on the side and found my two cofounders in that journey diving into the early world of cloud computing over the 1999 to 2000, walked in in early January, and quit my first venture job to dive in. I'm not sure that everyone knows there was cloud computing in in the late nineteen nineties, early two thousands. What was the world like back then? So Salesforce and NetSuite had been founded within a few months of that. It was highly controversial because download speed, browser capability, etcetera, were still real bottlenecks. But my CTO, ultimately cofounder, convinced me that there was this other way to do things. But it was a big bet, and I'll tell you nine and a half out of 10 venture …