Recently, I read the news that Patrick Stewart had passed away. Mr. Stewart was famous for a variety of roles, most especially his portrayal of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Reading about him reminded me of one of the most interesting startup talks I attended ~15 years ago. Scott Voigt, now the founder and CEO of FullStory, was then running marketing at an email marketing company called Silverpop, and I had the opportunity to attend their user conference. Scott gave an incredible presentation about stories versus analytics and shared an anecdote about the importance of the Vulcan mind meld among teams.
In the original Star Trek series, Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, was famous for performing the Vulcan mind meld. The mind meld is a telepathic technique where a Vulcan places their fingers on another person’s face, allowing the two to share thoughts, memories, and emotions. Instead of communicating through words, they can directly experience each other’s perspectives and develop a deeper understanding of one another.
Ever since then, when talking about startups and founders, I’ve referred to the Vulcan mind meld as the aspirational goal for the founding team.
The Vulcan mind meld happens organically much of the time just by having the founders sit next to each other in the same physical place. Every idea, every topic, every to-do list item, every initiative, every roadmap discussion, every customer call, and every piece of investor feedback gets sliced and diced and analyzed by the founders in the early days. There’s both an eagerness to know what’s going on and a desire to align and understand each other’s position.
Over time, as the startup grows, this becomes much harder. Departments emerge, founders develop their own areas of expertise, and more time is spent with other people in the organization, customers, vendors, and investors. As a result, the original Vulcan mind meld, which is so important to the early foundation of the startup, weakens over time.
The two best antidotes I’ve seen, and they’re not restricted to founders but are applicable to any executive team, are the daily stand-up and the monthly strategy dinner.
The daily stand-up has been popular for years. The idea is to get together once a day and answer three simple questions:
- What did you accomplish yesterday?
- What are you going to do today?
- Are there any roadblocks?
Every day, day after day, answering these three questions as a team acts as a simple conduit for the basics of the Vulcan mind meld. Of course, it requires a lot more conversation and depth to truly sync on a daily basis, and that’s often not possible as the company scales.
That’s where the monthly strategy dinner comes in. The idea is that once a month, say the first Wednesday of every month, the founders or executive team get a private dining room at a restaurant or gather at somebody’s house and spend the next three to four hours debating the most important topics. A true deep dive into whatever needs to be discussed, especially topics that are strategic and longer-term in nature.
The day-to-day workday works great for the more tactical items and the fires that have to be put out immediately. But carving out time for the truly strategic but not urgent discussions is one of the best ways to continue the Vulcan mind meld around what we’re doing, where we’re going, and why we’re doing it.
Thanks to Patrick Stewart for bringing Captain Picard to life and helping make the Star Trek universe so memorable, and to Leonard Nimoy for bringing Spock and the Vulcan mind meld to life.
Entrepreneurs would do well to spend time and energy staying in sync with their co-founders and building programs and recurring activities to maintain that alignment as the business scales.
Leave a Reply