David Walsh

David Walsh has been fired twice, once from a big tech company and once from a small one. He says it should happen to everyone at least once in their career because it teaches you that no job is secure. Later, as a founder, he had to do the firing himself, letting go of 40 percent of his staff in one day. That meant 25 back to back 15 minute meetings where he told people he had worked with for years that they were out of a job.

Now he runs a seed stage company and he is all in, all the time. He is checking email at 7 AM and again at 11 PM because if he doesn't set the pace, no one will. He calls entrepreneurship the most lonely job, the complete opposite of the pedestal people put it on, which looks a lot like playing golf and living on a beach. It's hard to explain what you do to friends who don't have the same experience.

To handle the stress, he used to have two or three drinks almost every night. He says that was not a good idea. Today, his go to is golf, not because he is good at it, he says he is getting progressively worse, but because it gets him into nature and away from his phone. His rule for leading a team is to create an environment where people feel safe to fail. The only catch is you can't make the same mistake twice.