The Flip

Over the last several years of coaching Platform leaders in venture, I've started noticing a pattern that shows up with surprising consistency.

The specifics are always different: one person is asking for another headcount; someone else wants Platform represented in investment discussions; another is advocating for a founder initiative that has become critical to the portfolio. The content changes, but the moment itself is remarkably similar. 

A Platform leader walks into a meeting knowing exactly what they want. 

By the time the Platform leader leaves, they have asked for something smaller.

Usually nothing dramatic happened. A GP asked a reasonable question, someone expressed concern about budget, or the conversation shifted toward implementation before agreement had been reached about the underlying need. Somewhere in those moments, the center of gravity moved. Instead of organizing the conversation around what the Platform leader knew to be important, the conversation began organizing around the anticipated reactions of the people holding formal authority.

I've become less interested in teaching people to be more persuasive in those moments and more interested in shifting the dynamic closer to its root. 

A different way of understanding influence

Most leadership advice assumes the solution is straightforward.

• Be more confident.

• Be more assertive.

• Set stronger boundaries.

• Take up more space.

There is value in all of those skills. Platform leaders absolutely need to make clear recommendations, ask for resources, and stay with difficult conversations instead of backing away from them.

However, over time I've become less convinced that the answer is to simply be more forceful. What if the deeper opportunity isn't becoming more like the people who already hold authority, but rather something much richer?

Why Platform leaders often find themselves here

Many Platform leaders have been practicing the core skills of their role long before they entered venture. They are the people who read rooms quickly. They notice what isn't being said. They anticipate needs before they are expressed. They translate between different perspectives. They connect people, reduce friction, and often become the emotional and operational glue that allows a group to function.

All of these competencies are sophisticated leadership capacities. Research on emotional intelligence, systems leadership, and organizational effectiveness consistently points to skills like perspective-taking, pattern recognition, trust-building, and social awareness as central to healthy organizations.

The challenge is that these same strengths can quickly turn into over-functioning. Instead of using their sensitivity to understand the system or their potential role in shaping it, Platform leaders begin using it to organize themselves around the system. They start asking questions like:

• How will my GP respond to this?

• How can I make this easier to approve?

• Should I soften the recommendation?

• Maybe I should offer the smaller version first.

Without realizing it, attention shifts away from the thing they came to advocate for and toward managing someone else's experience of it.

Psychologically, this makes sense. Human beings are wired to monitor relationships - particularly relationships involving power. We naturally adapt to the people whose approval, protection, or decisions affect our lives. This tendency is well documented across developmental and organizational psychology research. It is part of how we survive in groups.

The problem is not that we adapt. The problem is when adaptation becomes so automatic that we lose contact with our own center.

A polarity that shows up in venture

One framework I've found useful for understanding this dynamic comes from the concept of yin and yang.

There are many theories that describe the same general relational structures (e.g., masculine/feminine or dominant/submissive). In this article, I’m not explicitly pointing to the hierarchical understanding of male-female or boss-report dynamics, although those in Western society tend to follow similar patterns. 

Yin and yang will serve as useful terms to help us define what is happening in the relational dynamics of your firm way before you walk into a room with an ask.

• Yang tends to bring direction, structure, decision-making, and action.

• Yin tends to bring connection, pattern recognition, receptivity, relationship, and meaning.

Neither is superior. Neither functions particularly well without the other. Healthy organizations and relationships need both. And, in my experience, one showing up stronger in one person than another can often lead to productive and compelling partnerships.

When I look at venture firms, however, I often see a different kind of imbalance.

General Partners are typically rewarded for qualities that look more yang. They make investment decisions, allocate capital, determine strategy, and create direction. Conversely, Platform leaders are often hired for qualities that look more yin. They connect founders, build community, notice patterns across the portfolio, strengthen relationships, and help the organization function as a coherent whole.

The issue isn't that Platform is yin. The issue is that yang is often treated as strategic while yin is treated as supportive.

Over time, this creates an implicit hierarchy and actually drives the yin and the yang out of partnership. Authority becomes associated with direction while relationship is associated with service.

I think something important gets lost when that happens.

The hypothesis I've been exploring

I’ve been sitting with the idea that most advice encourages Platform leaders to borrow more yang.

• Speak more forcefully.

• Project more confidence.

• Lead with greater authority.

However, I wonder if the opposite may sometimes be true and more effective.

What if the invitation is not to become more yang, but to become more coherent in your own yin? By coherent, I don't mean softer, more accommodating, or endlessly receptive. Instead, I mean becoming deeply connected to what you actually care about and expressing it without organizing around someone else's anticipated response. There is an important difference between accommodation and coherence:

• Accommodation asks, "What do they want to hear?"

• Coherence asks, "What do I know? What do I care about? What is actually needed here?"

Accommodation manages the room. Coherence tells the truth about the room.

I've started wondering whether what we often call influence isn't primarily about confidence at all. Perhaps influence begins when another person encounters someone whose thoughts, body, values, emotions, and actions are all pointing in the same direction.

Human beings orient toward coherence and we trust people who seem internally aligned.

Founders often have this quality. The most compelling founders aren't always the loudest or the most charismatic, but they are often the clearest. There is very little daylight between what they believe, what they want, and how they speak about it.

I wonder whether the same is true for Platform leaders.

What the flip looks like

Imagine a Platform leader asking for a new portfolio talent hire.

The conventional version sounds something like, "We've been seeing increased founder demand. I was wondering whether we might consider adding another person. We could even try a contractor first."

Nothing about that statement is inaccurate, but before anyone else has responded, the ask has already begun adapting.

Now imagine something different: "I want us to hire a portfolio talent lead this quarter. Over the last year I've watched founders struggle to build leadership teams while our Platform team has stretched beyond capacity trying to support them. We say founder experience is one of our differentiators, but right now our staffing doesn't reflect that commitment. I'd like to walk through the recommendation and then discuss what would need to be true for us to move forward."

So, what changed?

• The Platform leader didn't become dominant.

• The Platform leader didn't become aggressive.

• The Platform leader didn't pretend certainty where uncertainty existed.

What changed was coherence.

• The desire became visible.

• The values became visible.

• The strategic case became visible.

Rather than organizing around anticipated resistance, the Platform leader organized around what they believed was true.

Why I call this "the flip"

My working hypothesis is that something interesting happens when someone becomes deeply coherent: healthy authority often begins organizing itself in service of what has been clearly named.

Instead of asking, "Does this deserve attention?"the conversation should begin with, "How might we support this?"

That is what I mean by the flip. Importantly, I don't think this is something you make happen. Expressing yourself in coherent yin - or with a fully aligned expression of what you see and know to be important - issues an invitation. It’s an invitation to which someone who is healthy in how they hold authority and their yang can respond.

An important caution

I want to be careful not to make this another impossible standard for Platform leaders. This is not an argument that if you become coherent enough your GP will finally become healthy. In fact, that’s the point: you are not orienting around their response, the language they choose to speak, or even the outcome they enable or not. Rather, you are - in a straightforward way - speaking the truth powerfully, as much for your own sake as for the outcomes in the firm.

Some organizations are capable of reorganizing around what is true and others remain committed to BAU regardless of what is expressed.

Your job is not to heal your GP. Your job is not to perform yin so beautifully that someone else finally learns how to lead. Ironically, that would simply recreate the same adaptive pattern we're trying to understand. 

The practice is worthwhile even if nothing changes around you. Becoming more coherent is, in itself, an act of integration and a movement towards health. It is the process of bringing your knowing, your body, your values, your desire, and your voice back into alignment. It means spending less energy anticipating reactions and more energy expressing what you actually see (resulting in less burnout!). It means your recommendations stop coming from strategy alone and begin coming from conviction.

Whether or not another person agrees, you leave the conversation knowing you represented yourself honestly. From my perspective, that is both leadership development and healing.

A place to begin

The next time you're preparing for an important conversation, notice where your attention naturally goes. Are you preparing for their reaction? Or are you becoming clearer about your own center? You may also want to ask yourself three questions:

1. What do I actually want?

2. Why does it matter to me?

3. If this conversation became uncomfortable, what truth would I still want to represent?

Those questions won't guarantee a different outcome. They may, however, produce a different experience of yourself, which is often where meaningful leadership begins.