Friendship is an important part of life. We make friends throughout our lives in all sorts of places, but as we get older friendships change and what we need in a friend changes. Today we are going to discuss how to have friends in a business environment.  

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Steli begins the  conversation with the idea that you stop making friends once you have passed a certain age.  He doesn’t think it’s impossible to do, but the rigors and demands of running a business, having a family, and just life in general make new  friendships hard to maintain.

Hiten disagrees with this concept, he thinks you continue to make  friends your whole life. Even in a business setting. Today’s topic is where should you draw the line in business and personal life?

During this conversation, we hit these main points:

Sometimes a friend can be a rival and how to deal with that.

The subjective definition of friendship.

Why you have to respect a friend.

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Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah.

 

Steli Efti: And this is Steli Efti, and in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we will talk about friendship and business or friendship in general, friends.  So I just suggested this topic to Hiten, and he was just like friendship, friendship.  I love it.  I love it.  I don’t know what we’re gonna talk about, but let’s do it.  I love it.  So here’s why I want to talk about this or why this is something that’s on my mind right now.

 

There’s many reasons.  So two things.  1.) I think over the last few years I’ve realized – and I think I’m not alone.  This is, kind of, an age thing as I’ve built up a family and have children now and all that.  But I’ve maintained friendships that I had with people that I grew up with, although they don’t live very close by. But I try to, like, meet them a few times a year.

 

We go on a vacation together.  I just recently went on a vacation with two friends of mine for over 15 years.  I increasingly realize the value of friendship.  I increasingly realize something that I think a lot of people do in later stages in their lives which is that it’s hard to build friendship later in life like true deep friendship.  It’s easy when you’re young.

 

Hiten Shah: Hang on.

 

Steli Efti: Yes.

 

Hiten Shah: I don’t want to believe what you just said.

 

Steli Efti: All right.  We’ll talk about this in a second, but my framework here is that I think when you’re very young and you just grow up, there’s an amazing amount of time that you can devote to spending time with other people and experiencing things and figuring out who you are and building these bonds.  Later with work and family and children and things like that, the time just decreases.

 

So you meet people, but usually, the relationships and experiences and the time together is much more superficial.  It doesn’t go as deep typically.  And then talking to my mom – and we did an episod...