Shayda Speaks at Austin Start-up Week

Shayda joined the panel at Austin Start-up Week, HR & Culture Track Panel | Nothing is F*cked, Dude: Master the Art of the Pivot to Grow Your Business

Panel Details:

Founding a company is a notoriously difficult and isolated experience. Mental health and wellness are critical for the Founder/CEOs to manage their companies effectively and limit burnout for themselves and their teams. Too often founders sacrifice their own health, both mentally and physically, leading to burnout, depression, and potentially major health complications. Examples: Kate Spade, Steve Jobs

Fear of not measuring up to the perfectly curated presence of competitors, causes an unnecessary number of companies to fold, out of anxiety or inability to prepare for the obstacles that get in the way, within the first 2 years of business.

Whether we like it or not, in 2019, every person, every small business, every service — is a brand.

The accessibility of social media and desire for authenticity has blurred the lines between the personal and professional and created an unrealistic illusion of the perfectly curated life. Being a branding agency we have a thorough understanding of the values and the pitfalls of this shift. This constant need to impress has created both a fear of true vulnerability and a glamorization of what it takes to actually make it as a business owner in 2019 — leaving many feeling stuck in a cycle that is unproductive and unsuited for what they need. However, as Walter wisely said in the Big Lebowski “Nothing is F*cked, Dude.”

Most of the time, all it takes is stepping back and getting some fresh outside perspective to reinvigorate a business plan — which often presents even more exciting opportunities. Using S.W.O.T analysis, we have been able to find ways for many of our clients to change their mindset and pivot towards a strategy that sets them up for success.

It’s time to pull the rug out from under perfectly curated brand presences and good-times-only narratives. During this discussion we will talk about what it really takes to be successful and how to adjust the mindset of yourself and your team as obstacles pile up.

There is a fallacy that founders need to live up to and encourage aggressive and stoic archetypes that ‘crush it relentlessly’ (see: Gary Vee), bottling up the emotions and compartmentalizing the stresses that managing a startup creates. People that care for the founder yet aren’t involved with or empathetic to the startup experience will question their career choices, further compounding the isolation and emotional strain. Without a basic peer-supported network of fellow founders and a community that empathizes with them, we risk continuing this behavior and risk losing more great leaders due to depression and more. As accelerator ecosystem leaders, mentors, investors, and fellow startup founders and CEOs, we need to take responsibility for this culture of burnout and not let the next generation suffer the same systemic mental health problems that are pervasive in our community today.

Through this event, business owners will get unfiltered insight from those who learned to pivot and made it work as well as the tools they need to know how to react when a curveball gets thrown their way. This knowledge will help reposition potential hurdles as opportunities to help them grow their business.

If founders allow themselves to be more open to these common problems during the early company building stages and support their fellow founder peers in a systematic way, we can help relieve some of the stress through peer support, improving the performance of the community as a whole. This panel aims to breakdown these fallacies and replace them with a basic framework that can be applied in our daily company building routines today.

This curated panel includes experts in psychiatry, technology, entrepreneurship (Shayda Torabi), music, events and much more. If you’re a first time founder or looking to build, invest, and support a community of creatives and entrepreneurs, this is a panel you cannot afford to miss.