Talking Company Culture, Entrepreneurship & LinkedIn’s Reach with Swish Goswami

In this interview I sit down with Trufan’s founder, Swish Goswami, to talk about how he motivates his team, what type of culture he’s looking to build at his business and why he’s going hard on LinkedIn with content.

Talking with Swish about his vision for his business is always exciting. He’s a young entrepreneur who understands the value of building a strong company culture.

This interview covers 3 main things:

1) Do’s & don’ts of LinkedIn
2) What startups should be focusing in their early days when it comes to company culture (and how to deal with employees who go against what you’re trying to build)
3) How to grow your leadership skills

Click the video above to watch the interview with Swish or read the transcription below.

Michel Falcon: Hey, everyone. I’m here with Swish, the CEO of TruFan, somebody I greatly admire. He’s on the speaking circuit. He has a book coming out.

Swish Goswami: October. I know. It’s on youth entrepreneurship, how to start a business while you’re still in school. But I’m really excited to be with Michel here.

Michel Falcon: Do you have a title for the book yet?

Swish Goswami: Yeah. The Young Entrepreneur.

Michel Falcon: Sweet.

Swish Goswami: Yeah.

Michel Falcon: I’m going to jump right into it. You have been advocating LinkedIn-

Swish Goswami: For a while.

Michel Falcon: For a few years.

Swish Goswami: Three years.

Michel Falcon: Three years.

Michel Falcon: How old were you when you first started at Linkedin?

Swish Goswami: 18.

Michel Falcon: Okay.

Swish Goswami: 18.

Michel Falcon: Gary Vaynerchuk in recent weeks-

Swish Goswami: Has gone crazy with it.

Michel Falcon: He’s been advocating it. He’s been pounding his chest. What makes Linkedin so attractive today?

Swish Goswami: That’s a great question. There’s three things. One is vulnerability. You can’t really show that level of insecurity and failure and vulnerability on Instagram. Because a lot of people when they come on Instagram they’re looking for positivity.

Michel Falcon: True.

Swish Goswami: They’re looking to be happy. They’re looking for positive stories that uplift them.

on Linkedin you really have folks talk about failure in professional setting, and to meet that with people that can relate to it directly.

Swish Goswami: Number two is the organic reach on the platform. I don’t even know how the algorithm works entirely, but it works. If you’re authentic, if you’re engaging in the comments with your community. If you’re trying to find ways to collaborate with people, you will see the results of that.

Swish Goswami: And the final thing is, it’s basically like Instagram and Facebook eight years ago. You know there’s so much you can do with the platform. You know there’s a lot you can do. I did meet ups for example. We’re now in over 480 cities that we posted Linkedin locals in, and it started in New York when I started back for the first time with 20 people that came out to a meet up. So, that was kind of two years ago. You really do something new on the platform.

Michel Falcon: So, those were the do’s of the Linkedin.

Swish Goswami: Yeah.

Michel Falcon: What are the don’ts?

Swish Goswami: The don’ts, I think one don’t be overly salesy on Linkedin. I think it’s easy to do that because it’s a professional platform. You’re like “I want to get customers. I want to close these deals online.” What you really should be trying to do is cultivate relationships and then eventually if there is a customer that you’d like to close, do it in an offline setting. Right, go and meet them or get on a phone call with them. You’re not going to close them in the comments section of a post. Unlikely.

Michel Falcon: Right.

Swish Goswami: Number two is I think try as much as possible to be yourself and that obviously is a very, you know- everybody keeps on saying authenticity, authenticity. But people don’t really understand what it means. Being yourself means, if I was coming up to you in person how would I interact with you.

Michel Falcon: Okay.

Swish Goswami: So, on Linkedin the reason I think people liked me on the platform originally is when I engage with them in the comments section, I’m literally talking to them. My periods and my commas are all over the place. I’m not speaking in grammatical sense and whatsoever, but I’m speaking to them as if I’m right there with them and they can have a conversation with me in the comments, which is really authentic.

Michel Falcon: Whose doing Linkedin very well right now? Maybe not the Gary V, maybe the not so familiar.

Swish Goswami: So for video Quentin Allums. He’s a guy, Quentin Allums is a good friend of mine. He puts out some of the best videos I’ve seen.

Michel Falcon: What makes them so-

Swish Goswami: They’re short snippets like minute to two minutes. They have subtitles on them, which is really critical as well nowadays, because again Linkedin is an international platform. You’re going to have people that do speak very well English, but also people that are just coming in and learning English for the first time. The final that thing I love about Quentin he engages with every single comment he gets.

Michel Falcon: okay.

Swish Goswami: It takes him awhile. It’s not like he’s always on Linkedin. He has a marketing agency on the side and obviously there’s a crossover between that. But at the same time even if you commented at four days after he replies to you, I as a consumer of this content feel very rewarded to get that comment back. That’s him for video.

Swish Goswami: I think for articles, for any text based posts my initial inspiration Michaela Alexis, she has over 140,000 followers and she is crushing it. She got laid off from her job and she got a job through Linkedin and she just talks about how to be able to go from basically rock bottom to be able to now speak around the world on a topic she loves. And pretty much a topic that changed her life’s trajectory entirely. So she’s very open about talking about everything, you know recently she talked about how her and her husband had a hard time conceiving a child. Like even going into topics like that…

Michel Falcon: Really.

Swish Goswami: …to being very vulnerable about it but still keeping it professional…

Michel Falcon: True.

Swish Goswami: …and not entirely personal.

Michel Falcon: Okay. So Quentin, Michaela we’ll tag them up in this so that anybody watching this can, recommended by Swish, connect with them, follow them.

Michel Falcon: What needs to happen for LinkedIn to siphon some of the attention away from Instagram to get those young professionals focused on a professional platform?

Swish Goswami: Well A., I don’t really want that ever. From my end. Well when Gary was promoting LinkedIn, I’m like, damn it! Everyone figured out the secret now! More and more people eventually come onto the platform and saturates it and I do agree with Gary that marketeers ruin everything.

Michel Falcon: True.

Swish Goswami: So the minute people are like, oh my god the organic reach is high there, the amount of, quantity of content, not quality, but quantity of content is going to drastically increase. But that being said, I think LinkedIn has a number of things around live video and that’s their next step. They put out a beta, that released to a couple of users, about 500 users around the world and they’re incrementally going to be rolling out live video. And if that can catch on, and if the right professionals come on, not only to do live video resumes, which I think would be a really cool thing, but to even take live video to networking events and start doing that all on LinkedIn as a professional platform…

Michel Falcon: Right.

Swish Goswami: …that could be really cool.

Michel Falcon: Would you have an idea on when the live…

Swish Goswami: Live video?

Michel Falcon: …videos going to be rolled out?

Swish Goswami: I’ve been told that October is when everybody will get it.

Michel Falcon: Really?

Swish Goswami: But they’re going to incrementally give it out in regions as well.

Michel Falcon: okay.

Swish Goswami: So right now, any of the beta users are all in the United States, next Canda, and then they’re going to release it in New York.

Michel Falcon: Sweet.

Swish Goswami: Which is really pretty neat.

Michel Falcon: Alright, can you trust that it comes sooner than that.

Michel Falcon: TruFan, your organization, raised a million dollars.

Swish Goswami: A million dollars right now.

Michel Falcon: And I’m sure you’re going to use those funds for many great things.

Swish Goswami: Yep.

Michel Falcon: One thing that I gravitate toward in building a company is focus on company culture.

Swish Goswami: Yeah.

Michel Falcon: What should startups be focused on to build their culture in their early days? Whether they a million dollars or not?

Swish Goswami: Yep. So I think A, it’s pretty straightforward, find the right people initially.

Find those four or five people you can really set as a foundation of your culture. These aren’t just kind people, but these are empathetic people, people who would go out of their way to not only sometimes do the right thing, but also care about each other and each other’s success.

So if you even have one toxic person on the initial team, it can ruin the entire experience. You remember Brian Scudamore 1800GotJunk fired his first ten employees because he just wasn’t having fun, and it was a toxic environment. He didn’t have optimistic people around him. So, if you want to set good company culture, it comes down to the initial people. The people who have been with the company the longest.

Swish Goswami: The second thing I think is trying as much as possible not to have a clear chain of command. I think it’s very easy for especially young CEOs to be like “I’m on top and I want everybody in the organization to know that.” But if you can make that first five to ten employee experience for them very collaborative where they feel like even if they don’t have ownership in the company they feel like they do, they would go and make this their life’s work that is the greatest thing you can give company culture. It’s having more and more people come into the company not thinking this is a stepping stone to the next opportunity, but thinking “This is my life’s work, and I feel like I’m as much of the process right now as Swish is.” Which is really cool.

Michel Falcon: Okay. I believe that there is no one size fits all for company culture. You take a company like Netflix. They’re high-performance, but then you compare them to Zappos and Zappos as they say it are weird, it’s in their values.

Swish Goswami: Very weird, very weird, yeah.

Michel Falcon: How do you describe your company culture?

Swish Goswami: So there’s three things. One, basketball. Females or males, everybody on our team loves basketball. We have a mini basketball net in our office now.

Michel Falcon: I’ve seen that.

Swish Goswami: Yep.

Michel Falcon: Do you throw down?

Swish Goswami: I can throw down.

Michel Falcon: Yeah.

Swish Goswami: But like a mini net that’s like seven feet? Probably.

Swish Goswami: The second thing is memes. We’re very humorous people. We have a memes group. In our eight people we still are very active in our memes group that’s sometimes even overly more active than our work channel. We’re really active in the memes group. And we just love having a good laugh at each other, even if we’re all in different places. I’m traveling a lot, our head sales travels a lot, we’ll all be in different places but we can share a laugh with each other, which is great.

Swish Goswami: Third and final thing which I think is really important is we all are social entrepreneurs. Even if you’re a person that isn’t an entrepreneur per se, you could be intrepreneur, which is someone that thinks entrepreneurial within a company, but we’re all very social oriented. So a lot of what we do isn’t just behind trying to make money, it’s very purpose driven. We love seeing our clients use our tools to set up really cool fan experiences and then record that to put out to the world. Because, I don’t know if you saw Chris Paul, or Yannis, both of them had incredible fan moments in the last two weeks. Those videos went viral because the emotion behind it.

Michel Falcon: Wait, Chris Paul when he crossed the …

Swish Goswami: Chris Paul when, no no no, Chris Paul had a young kid, a ten year old kid come up to him after the game and just hug his leg and cried.

Michel Falcon: No way!

Swish Goswami: He’s been a fan of his for a while, and he signed an autograph and everything like that and this kid was just melting. I had never seen tears that much come out of a little kid. And then Yannis had a girl that had been drawing paintings of him for the last four years. She’s like twelve years old.

Michel Falcon: I saw that. That was cool.

Swish Goswami: Right? And she gave her book to him, and he came around and she started crying. That’s kind of like the essence of our platform. And I think everybody on our team loves that emotion. They love that feeling.

Michel Falcon: What’s a meme that is making you laugh today …

Swish Goswami: Right now?

Michel Falcon: …that will make you laugh in two years?

Swish Goswami: All the Winnie the Pooh memes. I don’t know if you’ve seen these…

Michel Falcon: Yeah I have.

Swish Goswami: …but there’s like the clean Winnie the Pooh and the business Winnie the Pooh. I love those ones.

Michel Falcon: What do you do when you have hired somebody who you are like total culture fit, checks all the boxes, but then three months later, they start going against your culture. How do you manage that?

Swish Goswami: We’ve had an extense of that before. We’ve definitely laid people off. I think, to not obviously give names or anything but to give context, we had a remote employee that I thought would fit in really well because they would–

Michel Falcon: What told you that?

Swish Goswami: Their job was marketing, performance marketing, they were really smart, they came recommended by two advisors of mine

Michel Falcon: Two?

Swish Goswami: So I wanted to give them a shot. When we gave them a shot we realized they were coming on to every team call, but they weren’t self-driven. And for them at the time, they were the head of our marketing department, it was a really really hard for us not to have somebody who wasn’t self-driven in that role. Because I couldn’t babysit their role, and also do mine effectively.

Michel Falcon: Of course.

Swish Goswami: The first thing I do is always approach the person. I’m very honest especially between my co-founder and I, too, if I have a problem, I will speak out about it immediately. I hate the lettering, letting anything fester, especially resentment, because if you have resentment against someone else and you don’t tell them immediately, it festers and it grows over time. And then that’s where complications really start to happen. So the first thing is approaching them.

Swish Goswami: The second thing is giving them a clear expectation of what I want them to do every month. So for us, every Wednesday actually we set a weekly deliverables, where as a core team now of four people, we will sit together and be like this is what you have to do this week, this is what you have to do this week, and we’ll compare, how did the last week go. And be very honest about things we hit, things we didn’t hit. That’s number two.

Swish Goswami: And then number three is having to be honest about letting them go. The person we did let go, he’s still a part of the company, because they were with us pretty much from the beginning, but at the same time, if things aren’t working, and they understand that as well, it’s just better to get rid of them early than to keep them on and have them drag the entire process of the company down.

Michel Falcon: Okay. You mentioned you have advisors in the company.

Swish Goswami: Yeah.

Michel Falcon: Is there someone past or present that you would want on your advisory team?

Swish Goswami: We have a pretty strong advisory team now, but I … past or present… I think Seth Godin would be great. Seth Godin is one of my favorite marketeers. He wrote The Purple Cow, you should definitely read that book. But he is also the type of person that, every time I’ve gotten on a Skype call with him, he’s always taken problems that I had and just simplified them. I feel like these problems are very complex, I’m rambling on for five minutes being like, “Seth, I don’t know how to get out of this,” and he just simplifies it like, “What do you want to get done, what is the main issue right now in terms you being able to get that done, and who do you need to contact for it?”

Michel Falcon: Okay.

Swish Goswami: That’s it, he distills every big problem I have into very simple actionable items, and that’s what you really want with an advisor. They’re not here to babysit you and guide you through, they’re here just to clarify situations for you.

Michel Falcon: How would you describe your leadership style?

Swish Goswami: Leadership style, I’m quite assertive. I’m definitely very honest. I move very quickly. That’s something my entire team knows. So when I ask them to do something, they never ask “when do you want it by?” That’s just not a question that ever comes up now, because if I ask you to do something it’s likely because I need you to do it ASAP. But I also do like to give a lot of autonomy to people. For me, for my co-founder, for our head of sales, for CMO, CFO whatever, I know that the reason they’re in their job is because they’re the best at what they do. So, I am in no position to tell our CFO how to do their job. IF they want to work eight hours and then the next day go to the beach with their girlfriend, as long as they got all their work done I’m happy with that.

Michel Falcon: Sure.

Swish Goswami: But I’m not the type of person that would go in and try to make them work like me. I don’t want them to be another me, but at the same time I do need things done and I’m quite assertive about that.

Michel Falcon: Okay. For the useful and the veteran professionals that are wanting to invest in their leadership skillset, where do you recommend people go?

Swish Goswami: So, A, for confidence, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. I don’t know if I can swear, yeah? Good, yeah. Marc Manson. Best book I’ve read in my life.

Michel Falcon: Really?

Swish Goswami: Best book, I mean–

Michel Falcon: It’s hard to escape the book.

Swish Goswami: It is indeed.

Michel Falcon: And I’ve heard–you see it everywhere, and I’ve heard a lot of recommendations that it’s probably the best of the times.

Swish Goswami: That’s number one. Number two there’s a paper called The Five Myths of Great Leadership.

Michel Falcon: The Five Myths

Swish Goswami: The Five Myths of Great Leadership. I’ll send it to you, you can link it. That’s a great paper. Its also like ten pages long. Pretty easy read. It’s really good because it’s counterculture, like a lot of great leadership advice that you’ll see on Instagram, or you’ll see on viral content, they actually debunk that and they go very deep into talking about how that’s not really the case.

Swish Goswami: One for example is a lot of people say that leaders should eat last, right? The idea that Simon Sinek put out in his book. There’s a really really cool myth that leaders are the person that they want their entire team to succeed and they only succeed, but there is actually a counterculture approach which is a lot of times your team if they see you as a role model and if they see you already “eating”, they’re going to want to work to be like you. So they kind of do stuff like that and it’s really cool because obviously leadership there’s no real definitive way to become a leader, and yes there’s a science behind it, but there’s also not. So, you kind of have to figure out what works for you.

Swish Goswami: I’ve seen leaders that aren’t extroverted. I’ve seen leaders that are quiet, they’re silent ninjas. But at the same time, leadership comes in different forms, and it also is based on how you build your team. If your team responds to threats, and they respond to really assertive people, then if you’re not that type of person you probably don’t have the right team around you. But if you have a team that’s around you that you know will respond to how you work, and if you set a good role model for them, they’ll follow, that’s for you as well.

Michel Falcon: Is leadership born within oneself, or is it developed?

Swish Goswami: It’s developed. It’s definitely, obviously natural characteristics people can be born with, like confidence can come naturally, it can also be nurtured at the same time. But at the end of the day, again I’ve seen leaders that are the people who go out of their way to make their employees’ lives hell. Especially after Steve Jobs passed away, everyone read their books everyone saw the movie and stuff. I saw a lot of people were entrepreneurs that were like “I got to be like Steve now, got to make my employees really miserable because that’s how their creativity will spark,” but I’ve also seen CEOs like Brian for example and he’d go to these huddles at 10:05 or whatever–

Michel Falcon: 10:55.

Swish Goswami: 10:55 every morning, they’re there, they’re in front of the team, they’re clapping with their team, they’re approachable. And the people around Brian, I was even talking to them, they idolize Brian. Which is great, I think I would want to be at his [inaudible 00:16:43]

Michel Falcon: I was in a couple weeks ago and I did a video with Brian and we talking about leadership…

Swish Goswami: Yep.

Michel Falcon: …and in a very similar environment as I’m doing with you right now, and one of the things we talked about was his slogan “It’s all about people.”

Swish Goswami: Mmmhmm.

Michel Falcon: And I kind of challenged him on that, and I didn’t necessarily need to because I’ve developed my career at his company, but a lot of people can look at that and think that’s such a platitude, that’s something a nice rallying point.

Swish Goswami: Yep.

Michel Falcon: How do you recommend companies go from having platitudes to actually embedding it into the DNA of the company and making it authentic?

Swish Goswami: Cool. That’s a great question. I think number one is not overthinking it. Having those huddles is great, but if Brian didn’t have those huddles, it didn’t mean that he had a crap company culture.

Michel Falcon: Sure.

Swish Goswami: Right? The huddles actually came out of the company culture itself. It wasn’t like Brian initially was like at the start of the company, we’re always going to meet at 10:55. It’s just the team got to such a size that they needed to build that as another element of their culture. So I think A is not overthinking it, go along with the ride. Be very responsive to what your employees want. If your employees do not want to have a huddle at 10:55 A.M. but they’d rather do Skype sessions every week, or they’d rather go and have a client meeting that you come with them on, right?

Michel Falcon: Right.

Swish Goswami: Stuff like that could be a lot better as well than having the huddle where everybody meets. The one is responding to what your employees want over time and not overthinking it. The second thing is as much as possible take a look at what works in terms of your company culture and know that if you’re at ten or fifteen people, it might not work when you’re at fifty.

Michel Falcon: True.

Swish Goswami: Right? It really might not work when you’re at fifty. But the big thing that you’ve got to do is you have to inspire the initial ten to fifteen people to be like you when the team was really small.

Michel Falcon: Right.

Swish Goswami: Which is they have to go in to their divisions and spark their own internal company culture. So the overall company might be doing really great, and there might not be any cross pollination between sales and marketing, but if each of those individual organisms have great company culture, that is a win in my mind.

Michel Falcon: I’m going to borrow something from our mutual friend named Jayson Gaignard…

Swish Goswami: Who is that?

Michel Falcon: Going to get his ass beat for [inaudible 00:18:59] first. If we were celebrating something a year from today, what are we celebrating?

Swish Goswami: So I think A would be TrueFan. TrueFan, we’re hopefully going to be at around twenty people by the end of the year. That’s where we’re projected in terms of sales, in terms of hiring. And we’re making a lot of good moves within the cannabis industry within esports.

Michel Falcon: Nice.

Swish Goswami: So it could be really neat to have a big partner come one day and even have us license our project out entirely. Which I think is very probable. Incredibly, my co-founder is incredibly passionate about that space–

Michel Falcon: Okay.

Swish Goswami: So he’s been willing all those projects on really really well. The second thing I think would be my mom. My mom has been through the last two years have really been a personal battle if you will, splitting up with her husband, my father, and we’re at the endgame now. Avengers coming out, that was a reference to that. We’re at the endgame now, and I’m really really excited to be able to celebrate with her where she doesn’t have anything in the back of her mind.

Michel Falcon: Moms are the best human beings…

Swish Goswami: They actually are.

Michel Falcon: My dad is a pretty, like a lot of brawn, and everything, but my mom is a hundred times stronger than he is.

Swish Goswami: Yeah, yep.

Michel Falcon: Moms are a beautiful thing.

Swish Goswami: Yep.

Michel Falcon: Alright, Swish, thank you so much my brother. Follow Swish, where can they find you?

Swish Goswami: LinkedIn, Swish Goswami S-W-I-S-H G-0-S-W-A-M-I or you can hit me up on Instagram as well, very approachable, @GoSwish G-O-S-W-I-S-H.

Michel Falcon: Did you learn something by watching this awesome interview? Click the share button, click the like button, and I’ll see you next time.

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Michel travels the world speaking at annual conferences and company events. His speaking topics are focused on customer experience, employee engagement and company culture. To have him speak at your event, contact him directly.