Flixel’s Philippe LeBlanc Talks Perseverance and Change to Atlantic Startups
MONCTON – Perseverance and change.
Those are the two ingredients Flixel co-founder and CEO Philippe LeBlanc says are needed to achieve fundamental success in the startup world. It’s also the message he drove home is his keynote address at the Invest Atlantic conference Wednesday in Moncton.
Though perseverance sounds like pretty standard trait one needs to be an entrepreneur, LeBlanc (who has had his own crazy startup journey) explained it’s a quality that must go beyond when times are good.
“It’s really when your back’s against the wall, when you have a couple week’s left of funding. That’s when you really need perseverance,” he said.
But in order to gain true perseverance, LeBlanc said you need to have passion from yourself, your staff and even your investors–the kind of passion you’d do anything to pursue.
“The real sense of passion is actually more about suffering. You see, when you’re truly passionate, you’re prepared to suffer for your cause,” he said. “And a lot of times people don’t realize that. They don’t realize that they will suffer as part of the process.
A lot of startups like to think they can maneuver their way around the suffering stage, but LeBlanc said that’s wishful thinking. He said even the biggest companies of today, like Facebook, Uber and Airbnb, had their fair share of it.
“In fact, if you’re really successful you will probably suffer more,” LeBlanc said. “That’s the great irony because your success will be done in public and you will end up transforming in such a way where you’re going to challenge people’s behaviour, because you’re going to incite a lot of change, and people fear change.”
Change is also something entrepreneurs may fear. Particularly how their company itself will change through both market forces and internally.
“Those [internal] changes are actually the most difficult, because it has to do with something very personal. This is your family who you’re working with, so to speak,” LeBlanc says. “So when you have to make changes to your team, even letting go of your valued customers because it doesn’t fit where you’re going anymore, those are very difficult changes. They’re kind of like growing pains. They’re necessary and they’re the only way we’ll evolve.”
LeBlanc said the best way to cope with change is to understand that it’s a necessary part of the course.
“The more you’re aware of this, the easier it will be to deal with it and you’ll understand that’s it’s a necessary part of growing and what works a year before with a certain team might not work later on,” he said.
“If you grow, it’s completely normal that people will change, that you will have to bring on new staff. So don’t take that as a personal defeat. Understand that it’s part of the process.”
LeBlanc told Huddle that he chose this topic because since much of the conference attendees were startups, he wanted to share what he wished he’d been told when he started five years ago.
“It really came down to those two ingredients, because those are the two that we faced and it’s the two that I see as a constant from all the other startups that I meet,” he said. “I thought it would be worth time to dive deeper in those two ingredients and understand what they really mean, so hopefully people in the room can take those two and really build a successful startup of their own.”
He said if startups can hone those skills, others will take notice.
“Investors, if they believe you’ve got those two ingredients, I don’t think it really matters what you start off with as a company,” he said. “Because you will find a way through change and perseverance to find that right product market fit and eventually you will be successful.”