On the morning I recorded with Sandeep Misra, I had told my team we needed to hire ten people in six weeks.
I have a great team. Building it has taken time, patience and a lot of work. Still, I had sat down with the people responsible for growing it and told them we needed to move faster.
Then I asked Sandeep what he sees great founders do in their first twenty-four months that people don’t talk about enough.
His answer was patience.
You can imagine why I wanted him to explain that one.
When you’re building a company, you can see everything that needs to happen. Customers need something delivered. Roles need filling. There’s a window of opportunity you’re worried about missing. You make a decision, put people behind it, and expect the results to arrive with the same urgency you feel.
Sandeep’s point was that the market has its own pace. Customers need time to respond to a product, a message or a price. You can do the work quickly and still have to wait to understand whether it worked.
That waiting period is where a founder can become a problem for their own company.
You launch something. The early results look encouraging, but they’re smaller than you hoped. You start questioning the approach. Soon, the team is changing something it has barely had time to learn from.
Sandeep put a useful question to that feeling: “Well, why did you think that, first of all, to begin with?”
Where did the expectation come from? Customer evidence? Previous results? Or had you simply decided that by now, things should be further along?
I think that question deserves a place in more founder meetings.
It forces you to examine the expectation with the same seriousness you bring to examining the result. Otherwise, your disappointment can become the reason for a change, even when the evidence still supports what you’re doing.
Sandeep described a practical way to approach this. Before changing a price or launching a message, decide what you expect to see. That could be a change in lead flow or customer acquisition. Once it is running, look at whether those measures are moving in the direction you intended.
Progress can be slower than you wanted and still give you a reason to continue.
For a founder looking for product-market fit, I would take that one step further. Write down what would justify continuing, what would make you reconsider, and when you will review it. Choose a period that gives your customers a reasonable chance to respond, within the time and money you can afford to spend.
You might be testing whether a different onboarding experience helps more customers reach the first useful result. Or whether people who try the product come back and pay. Be specific enough that the next conversation can begin with what happened.
Otherwise, every review risks becoming a discussion about how patient everybody feels that week.
There’s an uncomfortable complication here. Founders also have instincts, and those instincts sometimes tell them something useful before they can fully explain it.
I asked Sandeep how he deals with that. His answer was more flexible than his earlier emphasis on data might suggest. He trusts his judgment about people, shaped by experience. With a strategic decision, such as a potential partnership, he lets the initial reaction start the investigation.
“I can start with an impulse, but I won’t end with an impulse.”
That gives the instinct somewhere productive to go. A partnership looks promising. Fine. What would you need to learn about the customer, the distribution or the work involved before committing to it?
Sandeep said some of his biggest regrets came from decisions he hadn’t supported with enough evidence. He described investing on the strength of a trusted person’s recommendation without doing enough of his own work to understand the business.
Trust had made the decision feel easier. It hadn’t answered the underlying questions.
The same problem can show up when someone you respect tells you to change your pricing, pursue a different customer or add a feature. Their confidence is persuasive. You still have to work out whether the reasoning applies to your company.
Later in our conversation, Sandeep gave an example of how Heald approaches a specific problem.
The company supports people with their metabolic health, combining technology with a human care team. During onboarding, members need to connect devices such as glucose monitors and smart scales to the app. Initially, that involved sending instructions and getting someone on a call to help.
Heald introduced an AI onboarding agent to guide members through the process and gather information along the way. Sandeep said it significantly reduced onboarding time and freed the team to focus elsewhere. When a member preferred human help, a person could step in and finish the process.
What I liked about this example was how easy it was to understand the job the technology had been given. There was an existing task taking people’s time. The team changed how it was handled and observed an improvement.
There was also room for the customer to respond differently than the product team might hope. A member who wanted to speak to a person could still do that.
That matters when you’re trying to learn. If you become too attached to how you want customers to use the product, you can miss what their behavior is telling you. In this case, the human support remained part of completing the experience.
Sandeep didn’t give a percentage reduction in onboarding time, and faster onboarding alone doesn’t establish product-market fit. But it gives a team a concrete result to investigate further: are more people getting started successfully, does the improvement last, and what happens after they get through the setup?
Those are questions you can keep working on while giving the change time to prove itself.
I came back to that hiring conversation as we spoke. Sandeep was trying to fill five roles himself, mostly on the growth side. They had been open longer than he expected. He still wasn’t prepared to hire someone simply because there were forty resumes and he felt a decision was overdue.
I recognized the pressure immediately. An open role starts to feel like something you need to make disappear. The work is waiting. Your team is stretched. You want an answer.
But the urgency doesn’t tell you which candidate can do the job. You have to keep doing the work of finding out.
That is the part of patience I took from our conversation. There is plenty to do while an answer is developing: speak to customers, examine the results, question your assumptions, find the next candidate. You can stay demanding about that work while being honest about what you don’t yet know.
Before you change the strategy this week, go back to the reason you chose it. Look at what has happened since. Then ask whether the evidence has changed enough to warrant a different decision.
It’s a harder question than whether things are moving fast enough. It’s also more likely to help your team decide what to do next.