By the sounds of it, this happened before Andrew started doing "pre-interviews". Now he has one of his team members speak to the person to suss out their story. Andrew just just wrote a book about his interview process – it's called Stop Asking Questions, and I thoroughly recommend it. He shows you how to get interesting material from people, rather than platitudes like: "business is a marathon, not a sprint".
Ya, we went in cold after just a quick email exchange, so you're spot on there.
Still, I remember being quite struck by how authentically he was working to get to the heart of it and tease out some value from the mess I was making. It really felt like he was on my side, working with me, despite how difficult I was making it.
I grabbed a copy of his book a couple days back (which is maybe what reminded me of this little anecdote) but haven't gotten into it yet since the pile of interesting reading is just a bit too deep. Very much looking forward to it though, cuz nobody knows it better (except maybe Oprah, I guess?)
