Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. As a founder. When was the last time you felt like you had no idea what you were doing that at best. You were spouting half truths to your team, your investors, your customers today on the startup therapy podcast. We'll talk about why feeling like a fraud is actually a very normal part of founder life and why this is Ryan Rutan from startups dot com. Back for another episode of the startup Therapy podcast. I'm joined by my partner and Ceo will Schroeder everybody you might want to turn your volume down. Just a touch because we're going to take into something that I have a feeling is going to get slightly passionate. I can, I can feel will holding himself back already and we're about to get into it. So what are we talking about today? We're talking about this very common feeling amongst founders that we're frauds will take it away.

Wil Schroter: We're talking about frauds. We'll explain. Yeah, I mean, come on. All of us. We wake up in the morning, we're going to work on a product that's never existed for a customer that's undefined for a company that's never existed into a future that we have yet to define what version of that would make us feel certain what version of that makes me wake up in the morning. And of course this is this is how this is supposed to go, right? No version of that, right? But we're in a business where we are all but required to pretend none of that is true And we're supposed to walk into rooms of investors, rooms of customers, rooms of employees and pretend like we have defined answers to things. There's no fucking way we could possibly know, right? And if, if giving those speeches to enough people across enough hours, weeks, days, months, whatever your time, you know, period is years, decades doesn't make you feel like a fraud. There's probably something wrong with you. Yeah, Right? Yeah. You're, you're

Ryan Rutan: pathological at that point. Exactly. It's funny, man, it always comes to me in similar moments, like when I, when I go into my entrepreneurial bunker, right? And I'm down and I'm like, just I'm heads down on product or marketing or whatever. I'm building stuff. I'm thinking through, I'm spending a lot of time convincing myself of all this stuff. It all works really well, right? And I feel fantastic about it. You know, maybe I'm telling some friendlies and everybody's giving me good feedback, Everything feels really good. And then all of a sudden, Despite feeling 100% certain about what I'm doing and I was like, yeah, come tell this group or maybe I have to present to potential clients or investors or whoever. The minute all of a sudden I have to go talk to strangers and all of sudden like, oh my God, none of that was true bullshit. Like what the heck am I doing? And it, it's over and over and over. And you'd think that like, at some point, it would start to stick and be like, oh yeah, that's just always the process. It's just scary every time.

Wil Schroter: It never gets better. And and and I wish I could have told you, we've talked about this before. Like I could have told the younger version of us earlier in our careers, that that was the case. Can you imagine how much anxiety you and I have expelled over the past few decades, hoping that one day we would achieve this Jedi status where we could know the future and and we could have just gone back to that younger version of ourselves and then like, you know, there's no way this ever ends, right? You know that like, no matter what, no matter how much you keep building the uncertainty is the only certain thing, right? That would have been really useful information. Hell, I don't even know if that's useful information now,

Ryan Rutan: that's the thing. And you know, it's it's good to know. And I think that there are times where I can I can pull back a little bit and go, okay, look, you've been through this before. You know, this is what it feels like. Don't don't worry about it too much. You know, I I used to joke with with Elliott in the early days when we were really figuring out how crowdfunding was going to work and how we could play in that space and how we could really get involved to help. And we were building our our consulting product around that. The joke was that Elliott would lie and I would make it true, right? And that was the balance of like, first we had to say something like, can you help us do this? Of course we can. Well, we probably didn't know how to do that on the day we said that, but by the time we talked to the client the next time we would have figured it out, right? And that's just part of it. You have to put it out there and say yes, we can do that. And yes, we're glad you want us to do that. And now we'll go figure out how the hell we actually do that. And that's that's just part of the game.

Wil Schroter: That's the business right now where it gets tricky is no one tells you this, right? And so, so there's a reason they didn't. You you're you're going into all of these interactions and you're you're simultaneously on one half of you so excited about what you'd love to build. But the other pragmatic side of you is like, well, wait a minute. Like, I don't have $100 in the company bank account right now. I have no idea how this is going to get built. Like, like how am I supposed to feel confident about this? And like I said a minute ago, how how is everyone else feeling confident about it? Like, do they know something that I don't right? And

Ryan Rutan: you know, typically they know far less than you do. That's, that's the part that always scares me. It's it's that realization that I can see this beautiful future in my mind where the product exists, the team exists. The customers are there, everything is just going the way you want it to. Everything is beautiful. And then I realized the person that I'm trying to use my mouth words to explain this to is just looking at me like they have no fucking clue what I'm talking. Like, oh my God, I'm a total fraud, right? That's where it comes from.

Wil Schroter: Well, right? And remember early in my career, I just didn't get it right. And so I'd walk into a meeting uh, and this is, you know, when I was running a web design agency in the, in the early days and someone would say, can you do this right? You know what, whatever, whatever the goal was. Uh funny aside this is, you know, in the, in the early nineties, uh, the dawn of the web, if you will when they asked can you do something, there was a chance that actually couldn't be done in other words. Like literally no one had written a shopping cartage and cookies didn't exist yet in browser. So you couldn't persist the session. I mean like you name it. And I found out at some point that you're supposed to say yes, right? I'm so say yes, I can do that knowing that I've never done it and then what I learned later on is that the only way to build a business, right? I mean, yeah, you have to deliver on it, right? But you're in the business of doing things you haven't done yet because you still have to grow to do those things.

Ryan Rutan: The answer to that question was always yes. But it's going to cost you write. That was always the caveat, right? And you never put a whole lot of definition around that because you figure like if they just keep giving me money eventually, I'll figure out the solution to this.

Wil Schroter: But, but, but you, you feel like a total fraud, right? Like you're, how if the customers asking me if I can do that and I've never done it before. You know, how can I in good conscience say yes. You know, I can do it now. It pains me to think that the answer is yes because it's, it doesn't feel feel feel just, doesn't feel right. What I was missing in that calculation was, what I'm saying is I intend to do it right now. What I learned later in life is how many times I would be saying yes when I meant yes, I intend to try. Right? So I'd go to investors and investors would say to me, Hey, this sounds like a great opportunity. I'd love to invest. Do you really think you can get to $100 million? Yes, I intend to, I intend to, and, and folks would come on and say, hey, you know, I'm going to quit my job and join your company, you know, do do you think it's the right move? Do you think it's going to be a big opportunity? And I would say yes? And I in, in Ryan, when you say yes, don't you kind of believe it, I'd like to believe I did, even though I knew I was,

Ryan Rutan: I've never not believed it, at least in the moment. And there were times where after saying yes and this is, this is another one of those fraud feeling generator moments is you've said yes to something you believe fully that you can do it. And then either you think about it more in terms of what that's going to involve or you talk to the person on your team who would be responsible for making that happen and they're going no fucking way. And they're like, oh, sh it. Yeah. So yeah, there, there you always, I think that, you know, it's, it's a hallmark of an entrepreneur that we always believe in ourselves at certain points in the day. Right. And so those are the times when we say yes, I don't think I've ever said anything yet yes to anything that I didn't truly believe I could make happen, how I always made everything happen. Of course not right. That is the nature of what we do to your point, we live in a fully uncertain environment where we're building things uh delivering service that's never existed before. So the answer is, we don't really know, but we know that we're going to try.

Wil Schroter: Well, let's stick with that. Let's talk about living in a business that is uncertainty, Right? And and so, so let's be clear if you're working for an established company with an established product with an established price, the customer says, can you deliver? And, you know, you have the product on the shelf and it's just a matter of them paying. Of course you can. We're in the polar opposite of that right now, we're in the business where we don't know who the customer is going to be, we don't know what the product is going to be, we don't know where we can be. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We have nothing. Yeah. And every, every aspect of what we do as founders is built around uncertainty, right? Therefore, when we're talking about what makes us feel like a fraud, it's not that we're trying to deceive people, right? You know, we talked about this, uh, you know, in in the article about this, we said like, you know, Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, she was trying to deceive people, right? Bernie Madoff was deliberately trying to deceive people. Like, I mean, that is the the foundation of fraud, right. If you're trying to build something for somebody, you can be honest and say, hey, we haven't done that before, but we'll try, you know, if if that makes you feel better about it. But the very nature of what you're about to do is to make a voluminous number of commitments based on no data. That says you're absolutely going to make it work if that makes you feel like a fraud, honestly, you're kind of in the wrong business because this is only going to get a lot worse.

Ryan Rutan: Alright, so let's stick on this. The fraud equals uncertainty piece for a minute. Because I think there's a lot of situations that come up where we're forced to deal with with questions that we can't possibly know the answers to one of the most common ones that we get. Well, is Is this a good idea, right? And how do I know if my product is a good idea and is this a good one and we don't, that's

Wil Schroter: the whole point. And yet you're going to bet your entire career, your life savings, maybe the savings of people that are important to you, you're you're going to bet all of that on the fact that you couldn't possibly know any of this, right? If you look at that situation that that we're going to make all of these bets, you know around our product, let's say, and and put so many other people's, you know, livelihoods slash savings slash you name it in jeopardy not to mention our loved ones. You know, and what we're moving forward with etcetera. Um, knowing that you have no idea whether it's going to work or not. It's kind of tough to feel good about that.

Ryan Rutan: Oh, it is, it is, it's, it's one of the hardest balancing acts that you'll face as a founder, which is 1 to have enough belief in what you're doing to feel like you can move forward at all. But to be pragmatic enough to look for the signs and do all of the things you can to kind of validate as you go to make sure that you're getting feedback along the way, right. It's super, super hard because at some point you have to kind of put up your entrepreneurial shield and say feedback be damned. I gotta power through this next piece of it. I believe in what I'm doing. I got to get to this next level to validate where we're at with the product or where we're at in the market or whatever. Um, and other times you have to be super pragmatic and really look at, you know, the date of the results and say, are we still doing what we'd be doing? This is still a good idea. And man, that is, that's, that's the, that's, that's hanging a sign out, inviting the feelings of fraud to come in and visit.

Wil Schroter: Well, especially because you're about to make some really big commitments, right? You're about to say to your buddy that you've been working with for the longest time. Hey, you should quit your job and come work on this, right? You should, you should bet your future on this thing that I have no idea whether it's the right move or not. Now, there's probably a version where we're thinking of entrepreneurs, some somebody that's not us, that has all the answers. Right. Um, and we assume, you know, there's this, this, you know, steve jobs type person or what have you that that's figured it all out. And you know, they must have this certainty, your confidence level. They must know some sort of inside baseball that we don't,

Ryan Rutan: He's somewhere inside a garage floating above his chair turning out startup ideas left, right? Yeah, yeah,

Wil Schroter: yeah. Not at all. Right. Not even a little bit. So if if the folks listening are feeling like, oh my gosh, you know, everybody else has the answers. Will and Ryan have the answers, But you know, I must not have the answers. We don't, yeah, exactly. We don't. So when you're looking across from your buddy and they're saying, hey, you know, should I quit my job to do this? There's no version where you're going to be able to say with complete certainty yes, you should do this. And I absolutely know this is going to be the right answer. You can't possibly know that right? The only thing delusional is to pretend that you can now. Yeah. The first time this happened to me when I had my, my 1st 1st time I had a buddy of mine quit his job, like a real job, a salary paying job to officially come and work for my company. He asked me this question right now, mind you, I'm trying to think back. He was like 27 at the time and I was maybe 21, but but he had a real job and a wife at the time, like, you know, it was, it was, it was a real commitment for him to come and join the company. And I remember him sitting across from me saying, hey, you know, I'm really excited to do this. This, this, this whole internet thing seems interesting. But you know, how can you, how can you guarantee me this is going to work out? And I started into a whole diatribe about the future of the internet and web design and all these things, right? You know what? I never told him was anything that was like, yes, it's going to work. I basically just recited all the reasons I got out of bed. But as I was telling him this, right, like I was thinking to myself, this is probably one of the greatest opportunities I've ever seen in my very short career. And if there's ever a time for me to be certain this feels like it and I'm not certain whatsoever. So, like, how do I tell this guy in good conscience to pull the trigger.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, You can't, you can't tell him to do that or not or her to do that or not. It comes down to make a decision. I think you can give them as much objective evidence as you can be as clear and as transparent on, on, you know, here's, here's what I know and here's what I don't and here's what we're going to strive to figure out the right people that will resonate with the wrong ones will go back to their job and, and that's fine

Wil Schroter: too, right for the better. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and so, you know, there has to be collective delusion for all this to work out exactly right. We're all drunk together. Yeah, exactly. I remember the first time I was in an actual VC pitch, you know, I pitched angel investors for different businesses before, but when I was in a real deal Silicon Valley VC pitch, I remember sitting up there with my pitch deck, going over all of my numbers and getting asked a bunch of questions about the future vision of the business and you know, the market address the addressable market size and all this good stuff. And I remember thinking to myself, wait a minute. This was just one of those like pause the world moments. I was like everyone in here does know that we're talking about completely made up numbers, right? Like everyone's talking about them in a very factual way,

Ryan Rutan: wait a minute. Will walk us back to year

Wil Schroter: three where exactly

Ryan Rutan: hasn't happened, right?

Wil Schroter: Like this product hasn't even been built yet. Like I understand we're talking about about the what ifs etcetera. But I was I'm thinking to myself, you realize we're all drunk right now because none of this is true. There's no foundation for any of this. And the only thing real about this conversation will be the money you put into this business because the rest of it's all TBD right? And

Ryan Rutan: you know, the proper answer to all these questions. I guess so, yeah, that's actually that's the accurate insert. I guess so. I guess it will be true. I think so.

Wil Schroter: Here's what I found was interesting when folks were asking, should I join this company, should I invest in this company? Uh, you know, should I get behind this and by this, this new product, what have you? What I found they wanted was yes. They wanted a confident defined certain version, you know, right? You want to know that you're captain of the ship has command of the ship regardless of whether that ship goes down. Right, Right. And it always threw me because it felt to me like what they were investing in what they were making the commitment behind was my self confidence that I could make a go of it. Not an actual answer of will this come to pass. The implication was was will it come to pass? But what they wanted to know was tell me, yes, tell me with the fullest of your authority and confidence so that I can feel good about kind of getting onto this journey. But that sounds well and good. And I'm sure I said yes more than enough times. But every time there was this little part of the back of my head, you know, you had the angel and Devil on your shoulder, right? And and and for an entrepreneur, that devil tends to be much, much bigger than the Angel wins a lot more. And the whole time going, you know what, let's see where this goes, right? And that always felt like such a weird kind of way to be certain and what through me at that. You know, earlier in my, my career was I would be reading about all of these amazing stories of these incredible founders, right? You know, this is this is in the era of Forbes and Fortune when like that's what you would read. And they would have guys like Bill Gates on the cover. You know, Soon thereafter, Jeff Bezos on the cover and things like that. And they would tell these stories of how they built these empires and here's what here's what I would think. Everyone else must be legit, right? Everyone else like, like Jeff Bezos must have had some playbook that I just didn't get access to write, write

Ryan Rutan: the headline might have been every time he knows what he's doing, you're a fraud, right? Because that's that was the takeaway, right? As we're sitting in our, in our little little offices and building our small companies or big companies, whatever. Like that was always how it feels, right. Of course we know that we're getting the distilled version of that right now, that's not the reality behind that. Was that Jeff Bezos has probably felt like a fraud even more than I have

Wil Schroter: agreed.

Ryan Rutan: Not while he's standing on the cover of Forbes.

Wil Schroter: The difference Ryan is when he gets it right? He's worth $100 billion.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, but

Wil Schroter: but listen, the way I see it is with all the media around us and I'm not going to just like point to the media as this Amorphous broken engine, right? Maybe it is, who cares? I'm saying even in our closer circles and other founders that we talked to, et cetera, we get this sense that everyone else is killing right? That that everyone else's, you know, got these amazing stories. I can't believe that guy got funded or or I I can't believe she just doubled the size of her company. They must know what they're doing, right? When I tell my folks that I know what I'm doing, I'm a total fraud, they've got it figured out, right? But Ryan, I know you and I talked about this, what's so broken with that narrative, like what's so broken with the concept of they've got it right? Because I read it online.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, well I mean everybody's showing their their instagram filtered version of of what it took to get them there and what the reality is, right? The uh the scene just off camera is very different right there, going through all the same issues. It's it's not reality. And I think that it's it's sad that people have started to embrace some of this stuff as reality. You know, in the best of times, it's great because then it motivates people to inspires people, but at the worst of times the very same content if you're already feeling down, you're already starting like you're on the cusp of of of feeling like you're on the wrong side of that fraud equation. This can this can really really push you over the edge. And I think that overall this raises an interesting point which is there's really two sources of these feelings, right? We talked about, we talked more about the, the kind of the internal right as I'm saying things that I know not to be true yet that I'm going to go tackle, but that I'm presenting them in a way that sounds maybe sounds factual to the person listening. There's this internal source of feelings of fraud and then I think that there's these external signals that come at us that allow us to compare ourselves something that you know, you and I have talked about before on the show that we should not do because we're only comparing the few data points that we can see um and not everything that's gone into that story and you have these external points of of fraud. I mean you were telling stories about your early career and and you know walking in and explaining what the internet was. Two people at that same stage. I was doing a lot of the same stuff. I actually had somebody, I had people tell me I was a fraud right whether directly or implied like so it wasn't I didn't have to figure out for myself. Dude, I walked into an office once and you know, we were both fairly young, we started doing this and looked even younger than we were. I remember sitting down with a fairly large construction company in columbus Ohio who wanted to do a fairly extensive website and I'd met with a couple of the members of the team, somebody in marketing, somebody in finance. We had gotten through a fair amount of that. I was going to be meeting the founder for the first time and when I walked in and sat down this guy was sitting there reading something new, had come into the room, it was power play a little bit and eventually looks up at me from the other end of his giant conference table, right, you know more more wood than I could have built a house out of that point? And this guy looks up. And he goes so does your dad do the coding? And I was just like, Oh my God, because I looked like I was 14 legitimately. And so now my to my credit, my response was no, my dad cuts people. Um he's he's a foot and ankle surgeon, so he's allowed to do that. But yeah, that was my, it was probably not the best introduction did end up getting the business in the

Wil Schroter: end. But despite

Ryan Rutan: yourself, yeah, despite myself and despite this guy being a total schmuck. Uh but yeah, I was I was made to feel like a fraud, right? He came at me wanting to point out that he felt like I was a fraud and we ended up building a great property for them.

Wil Schroter: When I talked to people who have built big businesses or folks that are in the middle of building a big business now. Like I'll give you a good use cases when I talk to folks who have done huge funding rounds, like, you know, I'm talking about 100 million plus funding rounds and I've, and I've known them since they started and kind of watched them kind of grow through this story and we get a chance to catch up and I asked them, I said, you know, obviously huge news, you know, maybe you've hit unicorn status, so to speak, the billion dollar valuation status, etcetera. How confident are you feeling in the business? Do you know that? None of them do, right? None of them know right? And now And

Ryan Rutan: for good reason, man, it's a huge thing to have happen. And now all of a sudden you got a lot more eyeballs point at you. So you assume if there are any holes in the armor, they're going to be seen by everyone

Wil Schroter: and, and these are crazy, ambitious, intelligent, uh, scrappy folks, right? Leading these companies. But when the, when the cameras get turned off and the mix get turned off and it's just a private conversation over some vodka, it's a very different discussion, right? These folks are saying, look like I can't believe I got all this money, right? Like all these people are relying on me now. Like what the hell am I supposed to do right? If I don't have a $2345 billion outcome, I look like a total loser. Right? Get this. Those are the people everyone's aspiring to be the people like, you know, reading the stories going, oh my God, I wish I could accomplish what they've accomplished. And so what I've watched is either myself or with others, no matter how much you've accomplished, no matter how long you've been at this. No matter what you've done, you still have this internal feeling like there's just not quite enough justification, right? Look, put it this way, I've been doing this for 25 years, right from like absolute concept level all the way up to hundreds of millions of revenue, right? I've done this for a long time, mentored thousands of startup founders right through like every growth situation you could possibly fathom. Like I've seen everything you could possibly see either firsthand or secondhand on startups dot com. I mean, dude, how many books have I written on these topics, Right, About how to start companies etcetera. I'm

Ryan Rutan: not a reader will have no

Wil Schroter: a ton. Right? And so having been, you've done this for as long as I've done, I've checked all the boxes, you know, young millionaire, all of that stuff Startups, we grew to startups to $100 million like all these things that you want to do, right? And I'm saying all of this to lead up to the fact that I don't feel any differently. I feel as shitty about it. Not, not about that, but what I've worked on, I don't feel any more confident in my ability that like I've got it all figured out now Then I did 25 years ago, right? And of course act, it's worse. Right,

Ryan Rutan: yep the stakes go up, right? I think that it feels like there's more and more pressure to perform and yet it's not like we've been playing basketball all these years, right? Where the rim has stayed the same height, the three point line. Well, okay, that's changed with the three point line is roughly the same distance. And so you get to do the same thing over and over and over and refine the craft to your point. From the very top of the discussion, we constantly re enter an arena of uncertainty, right? And while we might become slightly more comfortable with that conceptually driving outcomes in that uncertainty is no easier. Having done it once or 20 times really doesn't matter

Wil Schroter: actually. And I think when you start realizing that it actually becomes not harder, but harder to look for that, that blind optimism when I was early in my career, I would look at the future as a place of safety where I would say, look, I'll have figured out all the hardships by the time I swim to shore by then. Yes, exactly. Right. Like I'll have figured all that stuff out by then. Right? And then things will be easy. Like it looks like for the silver haired dude on the cover of fortune back in the day. Right. What I didn't realize is that in the game that I was going to decide to play for the rest of my life in the startup game, you never get to a point of certainty. The closest you come is if you build something and it becomes a huge enterprise that becomes the very like kind of sacred corporation, uh, you know, that, that we're talking about at the other end of the spectrum, But if you're still in the startup business, which is what I live and breathe, it never gets better, right? Because I'm constantly gonna go after something that doesn't exist. That that, that I'm going to build from scratch that I have no answer to. I'm gonna be constantly asking people to join my merry little band running into the abyss, Right? And there's the only certainty I have at this point is that I'm certain of nothing, right? And I think I've just gotten a little bit more calm about that, but I'm as much a fraud as anyone else, right? And that's that's a tough pill to swallow. If I'm being honest,

Ryan Rutan: I think it is. But I think, you know, if we're honest about it as well, then then we if we

Wil Schroter: defraud anybody,

Ryan Rutan: I think we defraud ourselves more than anybody else to your point, you know, we have to develop blind optimism at some points. We have to develop that thick skin around plowing through the uncertainty in order to do that. You know, we have to make ourselves believe things that aren't true so that we can go and make them true.

Wil Schroter: But but think about, I agree with all that, but think about think about what we put ourselves through, right? Think about when we're in a room, a cocktail party situation and we're hearing everybody chest pound about how they're doing so well with their business and you're scratching your head, like, I mean we're doing okay, but like everybody else seems to be doing better. Like why, why is everybody else so confident about their business? And and and you know, why do I feel like sh it about my business and what I've learned when those thoughts start going through my head or our other founders heads is that we all just have a different perception of how much certain do we have, right? That that one, you know, entrepreneur right now, that's, that's bragging about the future at this very moment, just has a different perception of that future.

Ryan Rutan: No, it comes down to a very simple fact. He's he's at that party, he's just had more gimlets than you

Wil Schroter: have at that stage. No, but but really right. Like, I think the only way that that that I know I found a level of tranquility with all of this is to kind of just embrace the fraud. You know what I mean? Like, just like, okay, I get it, man, this is a business of uncertainty. If if that's if me trying to work towards optimistic goals with no certainty makes me a fraud, then fuck, I'm a fraud, I'm sorry, right, I'm gonna try to do my best to make the world a better place while doing it, but I guess, I guess that's what it is.

Ryan Rutan: Well it is, I mean, it's it's simultaneously the thing that we fear and the thing that we run towards, right. I think that if it was all certain there would be no allure to doing this. I think a big part of it is the puzzle solving aspect. You know, it's the, you know, we get to go figure out things that other people haven't figured out yet and, and that is a big part of why we do this, right? So if if you're not embracing the downside of that, you're never really gonna be able to fully realize the fun of the upside of running into the abyss because it is fun sometimes.

Wil Schroter: Right.

Ryan Rutan: Right. Right. Um, but then we have to power through those periods where we have to admit to ourselves and, and even more painfully sometimes the people around us that we don't know what we're doing all the time and that's okay too.

Wil Schroter: You know, one thing we have done the right, that, that I've been proud of over the past, you know, 10 years here at startups is we've been, we've been fairly supportive of the concept that I don't know the answer and neither do you right, where, you know, we'll look at a hard problem and we'll say, hey, we want to get into this and we'll kind of bandied back and forth, but we quickly come to the resolution where we say, let's agree that none of us knows the answer to this problem and just go pursue it anyway, right? And I feel like there's this, there's this future zen version of will that just becomes so kind of relaxed that the problems are going to exist forever. Unknown is going to exist forever. And that's where you'll find your peace in this kind of, you know, abyss of uncertainty, right? I want to believe that that zen will can exist like that. He just hasn't reared his head yet. I

Ryan Rutan: think you have to believe that he can't exist. I have, I have serious doubts that he will exist, but but I think that you need to believe that so you can keep striving towards super zen will. Well I look forward to meeting

Wil Schroter: him. So here's here's what I would say in the interim for all of us if what we do for a living, if trying to create something for nothing for nothing. Trying to transform new industries, trying to kind of like make the world in our image and build this all in the foundation of uncertainty and getting the people behind us whether they be employees are our family investors, customers would have you if trying to pied piper all of them into this new world consummates us as frauds. So be it then you know, let me be a fraud, you know to the day I die

Ryan Rutan: frauds for life buddy frauds for life. That's a wrap for this episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan on behalf of my partner Wil Schroder and all the startups dot com family thanking you for joining us and we hope you'll continue to join us. Be sure to subscribe rate and comment on ITunes or wherever you love to listen to startup therapy. You can find all of our episodes at startups dot com slash podcast. If you're looking for more amazing resources to launch or grow your startup, be sure to head to startups dot com and check out startups unlimited. It's everything we have to offer from our online university to our amazing community of experts and founders and even all the tools we've built like biz plan, fungible and launch rock. It's everything a founder needs visit startups dot com slash begin that startups dot com slash b E G I N. You'll thank me later.