Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend and the founder and CEO of startups dot com. Will, it's never easy to be a startup, but it is a particularly tough road right now for a lot of folks, as we sit here in early December of 2022 where the entire market is shitting all over itself. People are slashing jobs like that is the Christmas bonus and it's bad, right? But so what's the hardest part of all this? Right? The startup founders when we are wading through a trench neck deep and shit, what's what's the hardest part of this whole

Wil Schroter: thing? There's a lot of hard parts. But I gotta say the one thing that, that, that we try to provide is some perspective because when you're in the middle of it, when you're dealing with all this, when you're, you're going through layoffs and recaps and all these things, having some perspective is so hard to achieve. But at the same time, if you get it, it's one of the most powerful assets you can have going through all of that. And we talk to a lot of founders right now that are going through a lot of tough times and every time we say, look, ok, before we get into all this stuff, let's talk a little bit about the perspective. Where are you relative to your whole career and everything else like that. So I think we dig deep into that today. Today is all about trying to develop some perspective. It's one of the most healthy things you can have when you're going through all this

Ryan Rutan: stuff. Sure. Yeah. And like you said, it is extremely difficult to achieve. But when you do it can be really damn free, right? Because we get, we get caught up in this concept that you know, whatever is happening right now, we project off into the future forever and and we do this for good and for bad, right? So like we have our best revenue month ever that will just keep happening forever, right? That'll just go on into the future and we'll be uh we'll be super successful. We do the same thing when things start to take a downturn. All we can see is the slope we're currently on and we imagining it just continuing off into the abyss, deeper and deeper and further and further. Look, that's just not the case, is it

Wil Schroter: correct? And I think when you and I tell these stories, right? When we tell stories about things that we've been through and we talk about other founders and what they've been through. I think a lot of people hear them as great stories. But you gotta understand like we lived all this stuff. So we understand the value of perspective because we've been through the whole thing. I think for in general, when you're talking about, you know, things can go on great forever what we miss and this is a good thing. Things can only fail for a finite period of time. That's right. I can make money at the, at the casino for days if I'm inclined and I keep winning. But I can only lose once, I can only lose all my money once, once it's gone, I'm done. And we have to consider that when we're in that point where things are failing. If we've let people go, we had episodes about this. If we've let people go and we've, you know, closed the company, etcetera, it's done. There is a finite bottom of failure at which point, start moving up again. We start moving up into the right things start to get better. But I think when we're in that kind of trough of failure, we can't see it.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, for sure. Now it, it just feels like the floor is falling up underneath you, right? And there is no floor and that this can just continue to get worse and worse and worse. And we let those fears compound and we talked about this before you know, the, the, the the Paper Tigers, Paper Dragons and that we allow the, the shadow of something to become the reality versus the, the actual size of the problem, which is hugely problematic for founders, right? Especially in times like this, where your focus, your ability to remain calm and deal with whatever pressures you're facing are super important. But when you lack that perspective to be able to see, like, you know, it's the classic and you don't, you don't know where you are in the map and you know, it feels like you've got miles and miles to go, you may be inches from your destination and just not know it. And in that moment without that perspective, super hard to see that and can be really devastating emotionally for founders

Wil Schroter: when we're thinking about things like layoffs, which I think are one of the most emotionally devastating things that most founders have to go through and a lot of them are going through it right now, top of mind right now. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and we feel for, for you guys, for going through that, but we have to understand that once that layoff is done, it's done in a more extreme case, maybe we're winding down the company awful. But once it's done, it's done again, this failure while it sucks, does have a finite timeline. And I think that's part of the perspective. I think part of the perspective is understanding that this isn't a marathon, a failure, a failure tends to come in sprints, tends to happen quickly. But we don't think about it like that. Maybe we've been working on the business for seven years and we've had starts and stops, you know, opportunities for success, et cetera. But for whatever reason, number of events, we're now at a failure point or we're just at a lull, we keep thinking that it's gonna be seven years of this doesn't work that way. And I think when you understand, when the founder understands that there is kind of a finish line, if you will, that you can cross and move past. It puts a little perspective on the board. It makes you realize, hey, maybe I've got a little more juice for this thing or the next thing.

Ryan Rutan: Oh, 100%. Yeah. And, and it's amazing how often that's all you need, right? That little bit of extra juice, that tiny bit of perspective that says there is an end in sight for this, whether that's complete failure, but there's a bottom to it or there's a way to turn this around either waste, that's all you need, right? Just to be able to feel better about it by understanding there is a limit to this stuff, right? There is a finite period of time for failure, like you said, it's generally not a long time, right? It tends to happen fast, right? Growth can be slow and brutal, the opposite tends to be fast. Also

Wil Schroter: brutal. All right. And, and once you start to understand, hey, if this thing, if it's end of days for this startup and it, sometimes that happens, Ryan and I, you, you and I have been through this with our own startups. It sucks. But in looking back on it, it didn't last for terribly long when things went sideways or we had to close shop once that happened, it was done. And we were on to the next thing which was typically wonderful. Certainly by comparison. So the first thing that we sit down and we say no matter how bad this gets, it will end relatively quickly and you'll be done with it, you'll be on to the next thing at the time that still feels shitty. It does. Yeah. At the time it's so painful, but there's a difference between pain that will last forever. Like a prison sentence for the rest of your life and pain that will be short lived. That will be like like a, a bruise that you get that will heal back quickly and you move on to the next thing. I think there's a big difference in that perspective. That's the first point of

Ryan Rutan: perspective. Yeah, for sure. It's so hard. I mean, I think for, for founders is why it's so important to have third party perspective too. Talk to other founders, talk to the people who've been this through this before. Listen to us talk about all the shit that we've failed at and watch us boil it down into a two minute story. Right now when we went through, it certainly felt a lot longer and it was incredibly hard to self diagnose at that point, whether it was a bruise or a critical wound or the prison sentence or whatever, whatever and all you want to use here, it was hard to diagnose for ourselves and say, right? So when you're going through it, it feels like it could last forever or it could be much, much bigger problem than it is. This is where getting that perspective, which often has to come from the outset. Sometimes we're just too damn close to it or if we've never seen it or been through before, how the hell would we know? Right. This is a big part of why you and I do this every week is that we can provide that perspective that says, hey, duck here when you hit your head on this, it hurts like hell, right? So that perspective from other founders, you know, seeing what they've been through. And so of knowing this is how this plays out allows us to get that perspective and like you said, move on, right. Move on to the next chapter and whatever it is that we're gonna do.

Wil Schroter: Well, let's talk about that, let's talk about the next chapter part of what we fail to understand as we're writing this horrible chapter. It's just one chapter. Yeah. That's exactly it. Whenever I talk to founders who maybe closed up shop or something awful has happened. I always say the same thing. It's one chapter of many, many, many chapters, like you were saying a minute ago when you and I tell stories about how something failed or something we went through and right now it sounds awesome because there were some successes maybe before or after it or a

Ryan Rutan: great learning. Yeah. Yeah. At the time the time it wasn't like, boy, I'm glad I'm learning this lesson. Right. Yeah. I was always wondered what it would be like to be, you know, abjectly poor. Right. This is fantastic. I

Wil Schroter: was out at dinner last night with the, the head of school at my kids' school and I was telling the story about how I got rejected from every college I applied to and basically just went to college for a year as a fake student. So no one would know that I didn't get into college. I love the story. Well, ok, so it's a funny story is now, wasn't funny to me. No, not at all. That chapter of my life sucked ass the entire time. It was so awful. I was working two full time jobs from eight AM to one AM and going to school full time on the weekend. Right.

Ryan Rutan: Pretending to be pretending to be a college student. Yeah.

Wil Schroter: Oh, my God. There was no high five moment. Oh, my. There was also, there was no perspective at the time. I had no idea that this might turn into a funny anecdote that I could tell over dinner at the time. I was like, this is my life and it sucks and it's not going anywhere good any time soon. And so when, when, when I tell the story, now the hard part for people to understand when they're going through it is wait a minute, that's just the chapter. And I would start to use other chapters in your life. It could have been a marriage you've gone through. It could have been some, you know, incident in high school, it could have been your college career, it could have been anything, it doesn't matter. You've got to understand that this too is yet another chapter. But at the time, we always think it's the only chapter we don't understand. It's part of a bigger book, bigger

Ryan Rutan: book. And, and we talked about this a couple of podcasts ago, there are a shit ton of chapters to this

Wil Schroter: story, right? That's

Ryan Rutan: a long, long time to do this. Actually, we talked about this across two different episodes. One where we talked about the fact that like there's a lot more time in our careers than we typically, than we typically think about, right? Which is to say that like you may do 10 years that may feel like forever. But then you got like three or four more of those to go and you get to do that over and over and over each time. Right? And then we talked about the fact that each time we do this, we're compounding experience, we're compounding knowledge, we're, you know, figuring out what works and what doesn't and we can extend this longer because we're doing something that we really love, which keeps us coming back and wanting to write that next chapter, right? I think that's the, that's one of the keys that we forget about is our unwillingness as founders to put the fucking pen down. We're like, nope, not done yet. I am not done yet. I will not let it end this way. And there, there's something to that tenacity, right? But it's so hard to know what a superpower that is. Again, when all of your tenacity is just being poured into wading through that river of shit, right? Doesn't feel like a good use of that energy at the time. But when we look back as we're writing the next chapter, the chapter after the chapter after that, that perspective again, boils down into a funny two minute dinner story and is just part of the past at that point.

Wil Schroter: Well, you say it's part of the past, sometimes it's a forgotten part of the past. We talked about this in another episode where I was saying, I've got some stories of where I had abject failure. You know that trough of despair if you will, that I kind of don't remember anymore. I know that it happened. But if you, if you pressed me to write a, an actual chapter detail about what happened, I can barely remember at the time, it seemed like an end of days moment. That could be anything from an event in high school. Right. All the way through events up to five years ago where at the time they were awful and, and I thought they were gonna define everything until I look back. And I'm like, I don't even, I barely even remember those. And I think that's interesting, you know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's ok. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups dot startups dot com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do, let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.

Ryan Rutan: It is, well, I've got an analog for you and, and luckily my wife's not here because if she heard me comparing this, she would, you would literally see a face, my fist flying off screen. And punch me in the face. But she talks about this ability to forget the of childbirth each time we had a new child, right? We've done this three times over and she's like, man, if I hadn't forgotten what this was like, I never would have done this again. And I heard that two more times. Right? So it's like, but we go through something similar again. I'm glad she's not here to hear me say this, but it's something similar in kind of like we will fully forget things, we block them out so that we can continue. Right and, and nothing wrong with that.

Wil Schroter: And I think what's important and this is what we coach founders on. I said, start the next chapter as fast as possible. Wrap this one up as quickly as you can and go start the next chapter as fast as you can because you need AAA line of demarcation to be able to say. Yep, that sucked on to the next thing. Sometimes that's within your startup. You just did a large layoff, right? Painful. And what you need to tell the staff is that was a painful chapter. Chapter is over. We're now writing a new chapter and the new chapter intends to go like this and we kind of put our focus there. I think our ability just mentally as founders to be able to open and close chapters, very importantly, really matters. It's a matter of perspective and it's a matter of fortitude if I look at this and, and actually Ryan, we were talking about this internally, we just launched a new web app, you know, for startups dot com. And we looked at it and say, boy, this is the start of like a 10 year new chapter which of which there will be a lot of subchapter within. And, but we look at that going, hey, the last 10 years was awesome. It's done now. We're looking forward to the next 10 years. And what does that look like for us? And I think when you open and close chapters in life, it gives you more perspective versus thinking one thing is gonna last forever, like you said, good or bad.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's a great point, I think and as founders, we could be more mindful of doing this kind of putting pins in chapters and saying like this was, this was a particular phase. We tend not to do that. We, we tend to think that this is just sort of a continuous process, right? As if there aren't any defining points. I mean, we, we do to some degree like things like funding or exit, certainly, you know, tend to be at least milestones. We talk about things in terms of milestones, but milestones are still a bit of a, a bit of a challenge in that it implies that you're still on that same journey. Whereas to your point sometimes the journey completely changes, right? We open a brand new chapter and to follow back on your other point, which is that it's really important as the founders that we are good at recognizing them and we're really good at communicating the close of a chapter and the opening of a chapter to all of our stakeholders, not just ourselves, right? We need that perspective, but so does the rest of the team, particularly if we're using examples, like the ones that we have today, like massive layoffs or things like that insanely critical to explain why it happened, what happens next. And ultimately, what is the good that we're trying to create from this bad situation that we just went through? Right? So yes, that was a terrible chapter. Here's how we make the next one better, right? And I think far too often founders get caught up and I remember doing the same thing and almost just you get stuck in this apologetic mode, right? And I'm constantly looking backwards, I'm constantly looking back at what happened, feeling bad about it, feeling sorry for myself, feeling sorry for the people that, you know, we were caught up in it and whatever rather than recasting that and saying, yeah, it was a shit show. We made it out. Here's how we Andy do frame this thing and smell like roses going forward, right? Like you got, you gotta be able to do that, but I don't think that it's a natural tendency for most founders. So I'm really glad you brought that up. Our

Wil Schroter: startups are essentially the chapters, but our life is the book and we can't confuse the two. We may have a startup that we put 10 years into and the whole thing floundered and that sucks. But our life is well beyond that, it started long before this and it will go on long after this. And again, it's that perspective zooming out and saying no matter how awful things feel right now, no matter how awful the situation looks like it's going to pass, it always does. And for as good as things were maybe a moment ago that passed too. These are all chapters that we're looking at and I'll say this, every founder, if you do this, if you play this game long enough, you know, if, if you don't has bad chapters, every single founder. Now part of that is they make for great stories, the comeback story, right? They come from nowhere story, right? Like I grew up dirt poor makes for a cool contrast story, but not when you had to be dirt poor at the beginning of it,

Ryan Rutan: but not at the time.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. And so the way I look at it is for any of us, again, if you're in this long enough, you're gonna go through some stuff right now, we're, we're likely headed into a recession which is awful. A lot of downside is gonna happen for all kinds of founders. But look, we were through it in the dot com version in 2001. We were through the financial crisis in 2007. If you've never been through it, this is gonna sound apocalyptic. If you've been through it, you're like it happens every seven years. Like, I'm not sure how people don't notice it. We're going

Ryan Rutan: through the tunnel, folks flick on your headlights, you'll get to the other end, right? And then, and then things get brighter again. This is how it works, right? But, but yeah, there's so many people who, you know, we work with, we work with founders of all all stripes, all levels of experience, all ages. And some of them quite literally are young enough that they really don't remember that or it was like some thing they heard their parents talking about while they were eating, you know, honey nut Cheerios at the breakfast table before, you know, heading off to first grade. So it is understandable that that perspective can be hard to maintain. And even if you've been through it before, staring it straight in the face doesn't necessarily get a lot more comfortable, but you just have the perspective that it will end. And then it's a matter of figuring out how do we best navigate it until it does run its course.

Wil Schroter: It's hard to have that perspective. Like you said, if you've never been through it before I always give the analogy of when kids go to high school and their parents are trying to coach them through it. And like I said, something awful happens to the kid, they don't make a sports team or they don't get invited to prom or something like that. And the parents trying to, like, kind of demystify it a little bit and say, look, to be honest, this isn't that big of a deal. Like it's, it's gonna be one week of your life and you'll almost never remember it even happened. But to you at that moment, it's de it's everything.

Ryan Rutan: It's every page in your diary from that day forward until the day you die, right? You're just gonna keep writing about that same thing. Yeah, it's, it's tough.

Wil Schroter: What's challenging is when we're trying to uh co-founders or just folks listen to this podcast, et cetera. We're trying to look at both sides. On the one hand, we have a tremendous amount of empathy for what you're going through. We've been through it ourselves. We get it. It's not and that we're not glossing over it. We're not saying, don't feel it. What we're saying is, don't get lost in the feeling, don't get lost in that moment and think that nothing will ever change. And this defines who you are unless you are Elizabeth Holmes or S P F from F T X

Ryan Rutan: S B F F s. In which

Wil Schroter: case, we will probably give you different advice and you know what, again, not here to knock founders just saying like my point is they did something so extraordinary that it's damn near impossible to wine from that. And who knows? Martha Stewart went to prison and she came back with a TV show. So like who the hell knows what ends up happening? You know, even at that level, S P F will probably go on a book tour and make 30. I was gonna

Ryan Rutan: say that that's gonna be more than a 22 minute dinner anecdote that it's gonna be a long ass dinner.

Wil Schroter: But the, the point is no matter who you are, no matter how badly you think things have gotten, you've got to understand. We all get past them. We tend to think, oh my gosh, like everyone's gonna remember this failure that I had in my startup and it's gonna be this scarlet letter forever. And we talked about this in another episode. No one cares like

Ryan Rutan: nobody cares. They're thinking about how they get through this, right? All they're worried about is right? Do I have my hand on the paddle? For Sure Creek, right. They don't give a shit where you're going right now. They don't have time to think about you and once they get through it, you know what they remember that they got through it, right? They're not worried about whether you did or didn't. I mean, not to say that people aren't sympathetic or empathetic, but they're not gonna remember it. They're certainly not gonna hold it over your head. Right. You know, they kind of, every time you see him at one of your kids sporting events, they're gonna be like, hey, remember that time when you completely fucked up and had to fire everybody at your startup, like,

Wil Schroter: and at the time you're like, you're insane. My staff job is gonna remember because I had to let them go. My investors are going to remember because they lost all their money. Yes, they'll remember for like a day, a week, a month, maybe a year if, if you did something, you know, unbelievable and everyone moves on except for us. And so our bad check chapter, you know, the thing that we're thinking is going to define the rest of our life. Number one kind of just becomes a blip in the grand scheme of things no matter how bad it seems now. And secondly, when we think of how it's going to impact our future, you know, when we try to project out and say, wow, boy, this failure is gonna prevent me from raising capital again or prevent me from hiring again. No, no, it doesn't. I don't hate to tell you but no, you know, ask Adam Newman. Yeah. Oh my God. Adam Milman just raised $300 million. The guy had the most epic failure of all time. He

Ryan Rutan: had definitely not even closed that chapter yet. Right. Like, he had not even closed that chapter and he's like, yeah, he's collecting money for the next owner. And I'm like, oh, ok. Yep. That's how

Wil Schroter: it works. That is how it works. That's the part that people don't understand. People assume that if it's a bad chapter, like, I am a person with bad chapter and there's nothing else. Let's do it. Not true. The cool thing about this founder business is there are lots and lots and lots and lots of chapters we referenced numerous times that there was a chapter. I think it was 2007 where Elon Musk was in federal or I'm sorry, in California courts pleading through his bankruptcy, right? Talking about how he's completely liquid and had no money to pay his bills. Now he's the richest man on the planet. It's quite a turn. Yeah. Again at that moment, you know how humiliating that would have been for him. Right? Unbelievable. And yet he goes on to become the richest person in the world. Yeah. He regrew

Ryan Rutan: his fortune and his hairline somehow. I still can't figure that one out.

Wil Schroter: Wonderful. Right. Yeah, great outcomes. But at some point, you would have to have taken on enough perspective. And I think this part is interesting enough perspective to say one, I gotta close this chapter fast, right? I can't be sitting here wallowing in this forever. It's not only unhealthy, it actually, every moment that I spend wallowing is moment I could spend, go building something else. 100%. Yeah. Second part is as much as it sucks now. And it feels like this is going to be the absolute end of my career end of days, etcetera. It's just not. And even if I don't believe it now, even if I'm looking at what we have going on right now and I'm like, no, it couldn't possibly get any worse than this and this is gonna last forever. It's just naturally going to fade. No one breaks up with, with in a relationship once and then just never gets in a relationship for the rest of their life because they were so broken up about that moment, we all heal, we all move on and in this business, people forget pretty quickly. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on startups dot com. That includes all of our education tracks, which will be funding customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. They're so much stuff in there. All of our software including Biz plan for putting together detailed business plans and financials launch rock for attracting early customers and of course, fund for attracting investment capital. When you log into the startups dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.