Over the past 12 months, I’ve done over 100 interviews and fireside chats. While there are the more popular lessons out there, like asking follow-up questions and breaking the ice with your guest with a pre-interview chat or having rapid-fire questions at the end, for the purpose of this blogpost, I’ll be sharing some non-obvious lessons I picked up in the past year.
- Never start with a question on career.
- Ask your guest three questions before the interview.
- Do enough research to be literate in the subject you’re interviewing for.
- Prep the audience for questions.
- Ask Yes / No questions.
Never start with a question on career.
The first question always sets the stage for the rest of the conversation, especially how vulnerable and candid the guest would be.
The best question in my experience to start with is always a surprise to the guest, as my goal for every interview is to get to know the guest better than they know themselves at that moment in time.
For how you measure success… if that respond with, “How did you know that?”
In practice, it looks a little something like… “I want to start this chat a little off-center. In the process of doing homework for this conversation, I came across the name: Bootstrapping Bill*. Could you share what that name means to you?”
*Footnote: This can be a high school or college nickname or an activity that they were heavily involved in that’s not related to their current career. Or a role model they had when they were younger. Other starter questions can be about quirks they used to have or still have that are:
- Not embarrassing
- Something that only they have.
For example, for some of my interviewees, I found out:
- That someone used to write code on a notepad
- A longtime fandom around Gary Keller
- A nickname the guest used back in his street dancing days
- A class they really enjoyed taking in college and an art professor who inspired her to pursue entrepreneurship
- Someone who used to walk by foot 15 hours one-way just to go to a library in Cairo to download PDFs of Stanford research papers to take home and study
Of course eventually it all has to tie back to the topic at hand, which is usually through a trait they developed early on that created the person they are today. Grit. Creativity. Rebelliousness. Kindness. And so on.
Ask your guest three questions before the interview
To piggyback on the above lesson, don’t touch things that are highly personal and risqué, like their social security number or their divorce. The latter without their explicit permission. You never want to be in the situation where you make the guest feel bad. As such, in my email to them a week in advance with the questions I plan to ask, I ask an additional three questions to help give me parameters for the conversation:
- What would make this interview the most memorable one you’ve been a guest for even two years from now?
- Are there any topics you don’t want to talk about? Or are sick of talking about?
- Are there any questions you have yet to be asked, but wish someone were to ask you?
Of course, also share the questions that you plan to ask before the interview. Leave it up to them whether they want to prepare for them or not. And if you do so, they’re likely to bring more robust and less generic answers for your audience. Unfortunately, not always true depending on the individual you invite and how busy they are.
Do enough research to be literate in the subject you’re interviewing for.
Unfortunately, not every A-lister will bring their A-game. Some have been busy. Others are distracted. And a handful of others frankly just don’t care. For them, this is just another talk they’ve done a million times. Not THE talk of the year. Even if it might be for you.
Luckily, it doesn’t happen too often. But it does happen. And as such, you can’t just ask a question. Instead, I like to give the speaker enough time to think of an answer. I call it the QCQ sandwich.
- Start with a QUESTION.
- Follow up with CONTEXT.
- And close with the initial QUESTION.
I’ll give an example.
“Since you just mentioned LP-manager fit / I want to switch gears for a second… I’d be remiss not to ask you about how you think about it. In your experience, how have you seen the best fund managers think about LP construction when they begin fundraising versus when they’re about to close the fund? To shed some extra color, I’ve recently chatted with a number of emerging GPs. And there seems to be a concentration of thought leadership around… [additional context] So, I’m curious, are you seeing the same? Or have my observations departed from the median?”
Most people either only ask the question or lead with context before asking the question (I’m guilty of the latter myself from time to time).
To be fair, you may not need to use this structure all the time. But for people whose answers are typically less structured and may need some time to formulate a robust answer, this is the play. A proxy for this is if their answers only get better the more they talk or if they haven’t had a chance to look through the questions you sent them beforehand, but they typically like to.
Then there’s the exact opposite. Even if the guest speaker is well-intentioned, in efforts to cram as much info into an answer as possible, their talk becomes overly informational. I forget which world-class podcast host once told me this, but he said that that every episode he does is 20% informational and 80% entertainment. The footnote is that the 20% has to be so insightful that it can carry the episode just by itself. The sign of a good episode is if the listener walks away with at least one thing they didn’t know before.
I go back to Kurt Vonnegut‘s #1 rule on writing. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
As the MC, your goal is to be the steward for insights. The spotlight is never on you, but the question is how do you support your guest in a way that they’re able to put the best foot forward.
Prep the audience for questions
There are two angles I usually tackle from when prepping the audience for questions.
- I tell them exactly what they can ask at the beginning and stay away from those topics so that the audience can ask during Q&A if they have no other questions in mind.
- Give the audience time to ramp up questions by alternating between live questions and my prepared questions even in open Q&A.
“We’re going to cover a lot of ground today from [topic 1] to [topic 2] to [topic 3]. But if I don’t get to all of them, and you’re still curious about them, please keep us accountable during the open Q&A after.”
And I usually don’t get to all of the above topics, which leaves room for the audience to ask them. Before I ask my “last” question for the interview, I also tell the audience to the effect of: “This is going to be my last question, before I turn it over to everyone present today. So for anyone who would like to ask X something, in about 3 minutes, it’ll be your time to shine.”
The big takeaway is that it always takes a bit of time for the audience to ramp up to ask their questions. And this helps seed some possible topics not covered in the interview so far, so the guest also feels like they’re not repeating themselves.
Since almost every interview and fireside chat I’ve done has been virtual in the past year, this second tactic is designed when you a Zoom chat but I find is still useful when you have a shy live in-person audience. I always tell the audience to leave questions in the Zoom chat at the beginning of the interview. That I’ll call on them when we get to open Q&A. More often than not, the Zoom chat is less alive than I would like. And when it is (and I admit this has only been a more recent discovery of mine), I say:
“We’re going to try something new. During the open Q&A, I’m going to alternate between questions I’ve gotten before this chat to live questions from the audience. So feel free to pop your questions into chat, as I start with the first pre-submitted question.”
I know some MCs seed audience members to ask questions at the beginning of live Q&A for it to not seem awkward. I’ve seen it work, but sometimes I’ve also seen those 1-2 people take control of the Q&A, where the rest of the audience doesn’t feel like they have the opportunity to ask their own question, so they turn passive. With open Q&A, I try to give my audience agency to determine the flow of conversation. Sometimes, they just need an inspirational nudge.
Ask Yes / No questions
For a long time, I had this fear of asking yes/no questions during fireside chats. The main reason was that I believed it would lead to a lackluster interview. The guest would give a one-word response and that we would have radio silence after.
But, contrary to my initial belief, I realized over the past year that yes/no questions are insanely powerful, specifically in the context of public interviews and fireside chats. I do want to note that they don’t hold the same weight in mediums that are known or sought for their brevity. For instance, emails and instant messaging. Where speed is the name of the game.
It’s specifically under the circumstance where there’s an allotted time and an expectation to fill the void with content that this tactic shines. The guest would more often than not feel an urge to fill the empty void with additional thoughts and context. In that moment, sometimes they share something that is more off-the-record than they initially planned. Of course, in realizing that it is, and since most of my fireside chats are recorded, I follow up with the guest after to make sure they’re okay with the recording.
As an interviewer, at the same time, I’ve learned to hold myself back. There’s an equal if not more powerful urge in me to fill the void with questions. After all, oftentimes, this is the audience in which I had invited, and feel my reputation is on the line. If you could see below the camera, I have a sheet of paper in front of me where I write “Shut up” to myself at least twice before I jump in.
In closing
While I share all the above, just like being a founder, you could do everything right and the interview may still fall short of being ideal. And when some interviews do fall on either deaf ears or I feel I was just unable to bring out the best in people, like many others, I wonder… do I just suck at being at asking questions? Or being an MC?
It’s an iterative process. And the fun part of it all is that it makes me a better investor. I ask founders better questions. The answers I get when diligencing are more valuable.
The above isn’t the end-all-be-all. I’ve written on this topic before, and I will continue to work to be a better interviewer. But hopefully the above serves to bolster your arsenal of tactics.
Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash
Edit: Added in a fifth lesson that’s too short for a full blogpost, but longer than a tweet.
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