Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the start up therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan from start ups dot com. Joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of start-ups dot com. Will schroder will. We've been at this like long enough that I'm having trouble remembering how old is my daughter. It was 11 years, 12 years almost now. And you know, we've been consistently stuck and out problems as we go, never been a shortage of those around. But I, I fixed an attribution problem that we were having this morning on one of our marketing campaigns. So I just wanted to ask, was that the last one? Are we done now? Was it Shangri La from here? We

Wil Schroter: finished the final problem. We, we have, we have now erased all of our problems and, and there's nothing left to deal with. I think early in my career, many moons ago, I genuinely believed that there was gonna be this moment where I finally stomped out all the problems. The only reason the problems existed in our start up at the time. This is like 30 years ago. The only reason they existed was because I hadn't fixed them

Ryan Rutan: yet. Yeah. Hadn't solved it yet. Yep.

Wil Schroter: But if I could, ok, we got this payroll problem how we're not making it and we're not paying anybody, you know, we've got this marketing problem where we can't get customers and we've got this, you know, recurring revenue problem where we can't do. What about? And at some point I'm like, well, if we just solve that problem, we're good. Right. Payroll seem like a pretty big one. So if we just solve that one, we're good.

Ryan Rutan: It's gotta be downhill from there. Right. It's got to just be easier and easier, higher quality

Wil Schroter: problems. 30 years later, still waiting for that moment where you solve all the problems and there's just, they just go away. But, but I gotta say, but this isn't about that. Number one problems are gonna be around forever. We'll talk about that. But what we're talking about is the severity of problems of all the problems we have right now. Are, are they our end of days type problems? And how do we, how can we tell the difference between? Oh my God. I should be putting all my effort and all my focus and all my stress into this versus, yeah, this is a problem. But sort of who cares? Like, how do we make that distinction? Because I, I don't think you can run in red alert mode all the time. You know what I mean? You

Ryan Rutan: can uh for a period of time, but it's generally not a good way to live your life. It's not a great way to run your business. It's a great way to ensure that you will keep having more problems and more problems. So, yeah, it looks, it's hard. We get it. There are times where, and I think this is an important annotation of this entire thing. There are times where all you have are problems right Where there doesn't seem to be one single ray of light where it's like, well, at least that one thing is going, right. That still doesn't mean it's the end of days, sometimes start ups are just a collection of problems that you're currently working on solving. That's OK. Right. Like we keep saying, it's a bunch of variables that you have to try to turn into something a bit more like a constant which involves problem solving to your point. They're not all houses burning down around us level issues, but we can turn them into that really quickly. We did the one on, on paper dragons too, right? Where like the shadow of this thing cast is much greater than its actual mass. And yet we have an amazing capability to invent and escalate problems to an apocalyptic level when anybody else looking from the outside is gonna go like that feels like a $20 problem. I think we can solve

Wil Schroter: that. Well, ok, so let's, let's talk about that because I think before we get into all the, the different challenges with, with overstating these problems, let's talk about the difference between your run of the mill start up problem or business problem for that matter. And like true Apocalypse because if we're gonna create a scale, a scale of 1 to 10 0 being like kind of who gives a shit type problem. And 10 being dude, if we don't fix this, we are game over, right? That spectrum is very wide, right? There's not a lot of like stuff that oh it might be one or the other. No dude. The problem is if you've never done this before, if you've never run a start up, you actually don't know the difference. You're

Ryan Rutan: out foraging in the, in the, in the forest, right? And you don't know which one of them mushrooms will kill you. So they all look really damn dangerous, right? Like I don't know what I should do and this might kill me, right? So I

Wil Schroter: think what happens is first thing that happens is we go to a start up and everything is instantly broken right from the moment we went to, you know, register our domain to the, we had to set up accounting to all the everything is broken. Well, we don't know because usually our first time doing it is that, that's actually the only way it goes. There's no version of it where all that stuff just fell into place. But what we're talking about gets far worse than that. If you're running a start up, I can guarantee you currently have one of these problems. You have a teammate that's dissatisfied slash co-founder slash whatever. Right. No way. Yeah, you're behind on your product. Road map. You were underfunded. Did

Ryan Rutan: you say one or did you say all of these problems? How did he know?

Wil Schroter: Of course, you are. Yes. To all those things. You're stressed, you're broke companies, you're bankrupt. Like, like, of course, all of those things are true. Here's the problem when they're happening. If you've never done this before, this is why we talk about this stuff. You think it's all apocalypse? All of these problems are like, oh my God, these are all life threatening and it's like some of them are, some of them actually could end you, right? But here's the thing, very few of them. And so I think the first thing we gotta do is we gotta talk about why that Delta in assessing those problems is so important because if we don't get right, if we take a look at every problem, you know, salespersons behind in their numbers this quarter, right. Oh my God. At the end of days. Right. Well, maybe if that's your only salesperson, you're literally not gonna make any money. I think on the, the far end of the spectrum, the level 10 problems and there are very few of these mean if we don't solve this problem. Now, this business will cease to exist. I'd

Ryan Rutan: even take that a step further. Hang on a second. I'd call those eights or none. Right. I'd call those eights or nines. Here's why, because there are some problems that we might not even be able to solve. Right. That will end the business. Right. That's it. For me, that's a 10. And I want to draw that distinction, which is like, make you a relevant massive lawsuit, things that there's just no way around. We screwed up in such a way. There's no recovery. There are so bloody few of those. And yet you and I constantly talk to founders who are running around banging the alarm bell for 10 bell fires, right? They just, there are so, so very few of

Wil Schroter: those. This is a stupid example, but this happened a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced that they're going to put Winzip functionality in raw functionality default into Microsoft Windows. Now, for those of you that are kind of nerds and Ryan, you can appreciate this. I grew up with a product called Win R which is like like the unzipping kind of utility. It literally made them obsolete. Wins everywhere, right? It's, it's like I've been using that, that software for 20 years minimum on the same 40 day trial. But, but, but, but so anyway, this news comes out that like Microsoft made this a default thing and like, now you don't even need that program anymore. And, uh, the hell of it. I went over to their, their twitter. Right. I didn't know they had a Twitter, but I'm just dying to see how are they announcing the apocalypse? Right. This is a classic. They had the little meme where it shows the person seeing fires all around them and the little thing that says this is fine and I just, I just thought to myself that's a level 10 problem like like Microsoft just put you out of business, right? It, it get I I'm laughing at their response, not laughing at, at their fate, but that's a level 10 problem. That's a oh OK. We don't exist anymore. There are a few of those beer. That's a good point. The level 10 could be a problem that we can't solve everything else below. It is painful but not unsolvable. So let's talk about some examples back in the day. Uh Ryan, you and I both ran uh agencies. So we had lots of client work, et cetera. Talk

Ryan Rutan: about a collection of problems waiting to be solved.

Wil Schroter: Oh my God. Right now on any given day, we had to worry that one major client and this could to other people in the customer segment or whatever can call us up and cancel early in the days. You know, we had one big client that I've talked about before named Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company and Lily was paying us somewhere between like, like 2 to $250 million a year in like media and fees and stuff like that. And they were our biggest client at the time, by far, by orders of magnitude on any given day. If the CMO or the CEO literally called us and said, hey, we're done. There was no way we could fix that problem, right? That, that was a game over problem.

Ryan Rutan: There were a few phone numbers man that if I saw pop up on my caller ID, which was a thing back then, right? Caller ID, you had to pay extra for that for the anxiety that when those numbers would call in. I was like this is it, this is, this is it, this is where nationwide tells me that they're not gonna pay me anymore and it's all over, right? This is where the Ohio State University tells me they're no longer a client and it's all over, right? Because the same, same condition I had two massive clients. I had a whole bunch of other little clients. They didn't add up to 10% of what I was being paid by those guys, right? So it's like those were level 10 problems waiting to happen if you

Wil Schroter: recall going uh pretty far back to 2012 when we were launching fundable dot com as a equity crowdfunding marketplace that was on the heels of the Jobs Act being passed, right? And there's all this like these tenuous moments as to whether or not that was going to go through or not or exactly what the regulations were going to be, which was the whole premise and impetus to be able to do an equity crowdfunding marketplace.

Ryan Rutan: Right. That bill doesn't go through. There goes, there goes six months of, of planning and work and the next 10 years of our future projected lives great.

Wil Schroter: Exactly. Right. And so, so there's the difference between, oh, ok. That's gonna end us and let's call it what it is every other problem. So let's go to the other end of the spectrum because I think folks are like, oh, ok. Well, I don't wanna do those extinction problems, but I still look like I got some pretty serious problems as we move down the spectrum and I'm just gonna be a little bit arbitrary on kind of how I grade these, but I'm gonna put orders of magnitude at seven or eight, at seven or eight. We're about to run out of money. So we've got maybe 3 to 6 months of runway left and we're trying to fundraise or we're trying to land that next client. We're trying to do whatever. But if we don't, it's end of days game alone. Yep. That's a seven. You should be lying awake at night thinking about that problem. As many of you listening are, why are

Ryan Rutan: you laying down in the first place? Is the question at that point?

Wil Schroter: Ok, that is a fair seven or eight problem. But, but wait a minute, people will say, ok, well, I don't have that problem. Cool. Guess what? You're further down the spectrum in a good way. Here are a few others that as you move down the spectrum, as you move down the spectrum, our product is shipping very late. Like, our competitors are gonna laugh us and if we don't get this thing out there quickly, we're totally screwed. That's a four maybe civil unrest in the company. Everyone's pissed off. Everyone's angry at name. Your issue doesn't matter, right? But the culture is definitely at risk at the time. It doesn't feel that way at the time. It's like, wait, hold on, everyone's pissed off this, this whole thing is coming off the rails. That's fixable, super

Ryan Rutan: fixable, all internal too, right? It's thing, it's something you have control over, which I think is a big part of it just is we're thinking as, as we're, as people are listening to us and they're thinking about how they can gauge these problems for themselves. Think about how much control you have over the solution, right? If this is, will Obama sign the Jobs Act or not? Generally speaking, unless your name is Michelle, you don't have a lot of control over that, right? Like he's gonna do it or he's not, it's his decision. If this is an internal culture issue, right? You have a lot of control over that, you can make changes that enforce that. So your degree of control over a problem should have a huge bearing on whether this thing ends up a 123 or a 78 or a nine. Right? It's a big, big

Wil Schroter: factor here. I also think it helps to like externalize these things. You know, when we put groups of founders together and we all kind of share notes. I think this is one of the things that implicitly help all of us because we all share our stuff. Part of the, we get to see everyone else has the same issue at kind of the same level. And I think that helps normalize things a little bit. You know, it's kind of like parents when they complain about their kids, they realize that every kid kind of does the same shit. And so it feels a little less frustrating. I'm

Ryan Rutan: sure you see this all the time too. But you know, we'll have founders in a live call like this. You know, we're, we're talking to somebody and they're like, man, I got this going on, I got that going on like this is a huge issue and then I'll say, oh yeah, you know, here's what we did when that happened and just all of a sudden like you just watch that problem in their mind go from a 10 to a six to a five to a 4 to 3. Like, wait, I can survive this. You've already survived this. You seem to not really be too bothered that this is happening to me. Ergo. I guess I won't either. Right. It's an amazing moment to just watch that weightlift off of somebody.

Wil Schroter: So let's talk about why it matters to be able to grade these problems and actually appreciate them for what they are. And really you can kind of use this in your, your own life as well. But let's, let's like, keep it with the start up for a second. The reason you can't treat everything like it's a level 10 problem is because every time we go to exert that energy to solve a level 10 problem, it drains our life force. It, it, I mean, I literally takes something away not only from us Ryan, but from everybody else in the organization that's around it. You can only shout fire so many times before it starts to not no, no longer have as much effect or so differently. People start looking like going. Yeah, I guess you just, you know, just that's the way it always is.

Ryan Rutan: It's amazing to me how often people do this and we've all, we've all heard the, the parable of crying wolf, the boy who cried wolf, what kills me is to watch founders do this to themselves where they're crying wolf and the only person who can hear or respond is them. What are you doing at that point? What the hell are you doing? You're just burning out your adrenals, you're driving cortisol and you're gonna put yourself in the hospital. We've actually done this, we tested this with you. Well, it's possible.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, I was, I was just gonna say been there, been there and so for the 1st 10 years of my career I didn't know any better. This is exactly why we do these episodes. I didn't know that there was a scale of problems. I, I just didn't know any better. And so I look at every problem from the, the first year of having, you know, issues till the 10th year as, oh my God, you know, I've got to put everything into this. And dude, I was, I mean, you've worked with me for a long time. So, you know, I was so freaked out at all times and, and I just assumed that every problem needed full guns attention and it made me feel responsible because I felt like, hey, if I'm giving a full guns attention, if I'm staying up all night, worried about this, then I must be on the job. What I didn't understand was that I was only 22 years old and I could act like that. What I didn't understand was that over a given enough, a given period of time, five years, 10 years, 15 years, you can't keep running like that. It doesn't like nothing good comes of it. And the reality is with our start ups a typical start up if things go well, if things go well, you'll have a 10 year run. Right. It takes way longer than people think to actually build something successful. If you're burning that kind of cortisol, that kind of adrenal at year one, year two. And granted, those are harder years, but that just never ends and you just constantly run like

Ryan Rutan: that just becomes the

Wil Schroter: pace, like, try any sport where you just sprint the entire time and never come off the field and see how long you last. You lose that game. 10 out of 10, maximum,

Ryan Rutan: maximum 15 minutes in my case,

Wil Schroter: 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 start ups 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. There's

Ryan Rutan: another subtlety here, I wanna touch on which is that when, whenever we're pointing all of our guns at something, it means we're not pointing our guns at other stuff, right? And so we, we might have, you know, we, we look, we're looking at this problem like it's a seven or an eight and maybe it is even. Right. But we got to be really careful about not doing too much of that because when we, when we over prioritize any one thing, it means we're deprioritizing everything else. Just the nature of how our ability to act on any given thing works. Right. So then a problem that was a two can become a three, can become a four, can become a five because we were over here running around pants on fire about problem, you know, whatever the one that was a seven at the time. So really, really important to keep these things in perspective so that the other ones don't grow out of control or that we just ignore other things that are equally as important because we mis prioritize this like and people are probably wondering like, why are they so concerned about like the the priority of these problems because it act actually matters, right? If you prioritize incorrectly, you spend your time in the wrong places. This is where shit goes off the rails really

Wil Schroter: fast. And there's another part to that too, which is like I said, Ryan, if you and I wake up today and we, we create a level 10 problem out of something and then we go to our whole team and tell them it's a level 10 problem. We're now burning all of them out too. Now, it makes us feel good. Let me explain what I mean by that. It makes us feel good that we're telling everybody that this requires the attention and ideal, they give it that attention that we feel it requires. The part we're missing is you don't get to keep fire in that bullet. Right. You can only do that so many times before you start to wear people down. Yeah. Or

Ryan Rutan: you just have the reputation of somebody who turns every problem into a 10 because the other side is sometimes other people will have experienced these problems, right? They may not be the founder, but they may have experience with this particular problem at a previous job, previous life, whatever. And they're like, this isn't really that big of a deal. Why are they blowing this out of proportion? Which loses you credibility, which loses, they're just not going to put the input and then the next time you come with a level 10 problem, maybe they don't understand that one, but they go, this is probably the same shit. It's probably the same scenario where they're just blowing this out of proportion to try to rally us to do something that we don't really need to do, right? Super

Wil Schroter: dangerous. We've actually seen the, the benefit I think and I know a number of our folks here internally, listen to this. So it made me I'm kind of speaking to you guys, now we've seen the opposite. I think where, as we're recording this is, is Q 3 2023 and we're in kind of middle of recession, QQ and a Q tooth, whatever. And we're kind of in middle of what will be a recession and people are losing jobs. There's layoffs. I mean, it's, it's kind of bad shit all around and we're fairly unfazed, not unresponsive, but unfazed. And so most of our staff, which is younger than us is like, dude, shouldn't this be freaking you out? Like, you know what the use to used to, right? But I went through it in the dot com bust, I went through it in um in the, in the nineties and the financial crash like this is pretty much just like that, right? When COVID hit, same thing I was like, look, you have to react, you have to be serious about it but you get through it and right now we're in the nuclear winter of start up funding like it's bad, it's really bad and you know what, they'll thaw, it'll go right back the way things were. There'll be another boom time, et cetera. And I think that being able to show the other side, which is, you can have, you know, extinction level type events that are happening in your industry and you can take a long view and like, you know, we'll make it through, right? It'll be tough, you know, things will things will be difficult, but we'll make it through. I think that shows the opposite. Whereas you running around all the time saying, oh my God, everything is, you know, uh, uh, chicken, uh, the head cut off, you know, a pants on fire kind of moment. I think you lose credibility with your staff because again, it's that cry wolf moment. The flip side is if you can learn how to like, uh, treat things as the problems that they actually are one, you can save yourself, but you also save the team

Ryan Rutan: 100% right? You you can't be, you can't be running, running from the front lines, shouting, hold the line and expect anybody to do it right? If you look like you're scared, you don't know what's going on and this isn't, this isn't saying, right? Keep bad news from the team. We've talked about this before. Honesty is super important. Transparency is super important but you know, be be transparent about, you know, reality of the situation, right? This is why it's so important for you to assess first before you just run to the team and go oh my God, this is a massive issue, right? What is it actually? Right? Because I know when you and I talk to founders all day, every day, when we really dig in and start to dissect problems, it turns out that when you start pulling the thread, right, things fall apart pretty quickly. It's like, ok, this is, this is a problem. Sure. But it's probably not as big of a deal as you thought. And if you, if you just start shouting about the problem before you dissect it before you really internalize and understand how much of a problem it is. Even just that can lose credibility if you get to the right conclusion. Just if you're constantly reacting in a way that seems over the top, you're gonna lose credibility with the team. Right? And once that happens like that, that can actually be a level 89 or 10 problem. Right.

Wil Schroter: Yep. Two things though from there. Ok. So, so we've assessed the size of the problem. We've kind of give it, given it a severity that so we can attack it properly. We've recognized that every time we respond to problems with whatever intensity and veracity we're gonna respond to problems with that, that churns energy from us. It, it takes it from us, it takes it from our team, et cetera. So it's expensive to overreact in a lot of different ways. The last part though is this idea that once we solve this problem or maybe the one after it, we're gonna be out of problems. No, this is, this always cracks me up about human nature. We all wanna believe that once we've solved this problem state, whatever your problem is right now, then we're ok in the course of human history and I won't go too deep into this. We've solved all the hard problems. And again, I'm not, I'm not doubting today's problems or whatever. I'm just saying that, like, from, like, basically inventing fire, I was gonna say, yeah,

Ryan Rutan: we, we mastered fire and we figured out clothing. Right. I think we're pretty good.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. And, and, and when you get eaten by wooly mammoths or something like that. So, in the history of history, we consistently solved the problems that were supposed to be the problems to end all problems and we have new problems, right? However, within start ups, you cannot solve all the problems. It is actually impossible. Now, you can ideally make some of the the worst ones go away. So for example, in our now 11 year history at start ups dot com, in the early days, beginning of man, we had uh the true extinction level of problems. If we don't solve this problem, we, we, we're out of business, we're going to lose our paychecks, et cetera. Like those are bad problems. Right. Along the way, we've encountered lots of other problems that were certainly less than a, a seven or an eight, right? Where we had disgruntled employees or disgruntled groups, teams, whatever, right. Those are never going away. In other words, yes. Address them. That's not the same as saying, ignore them.

Ryan Rutan: No, whack the moles when they pop up, but don't pretend that they're going to die, right? They will come back a

Wil Schroter: perfect example. Is Google and I love the Google example because what's so beautiful about Google is no company in the history of history has ever kissed the ass of its employees harder than Google. So, so let's just play this out, right. Google gets started by Larry and Sergei. No idea what this thing could become, it becomes this absolute pain of a place to work at, right? Almost like laughably. I mean, all of the show Silicon Valley was literally based on how ridiculous that environment was, right? So they, they get to a point where they're now showering their employees with money. Like the offers you could get to go to work at Google were so bananas. Then once you got to Google specifically Google, they really drove this to the next level, their facilities, their perks, they, they had like Michelin grade restaurants as their cafeterias.

Ryan Rutan: Like I walked into their offices, which by the way, in the UK are like a block and a half from Buckingham Palace. Not bad real estate. What is the first thing I see? Well, I saw a lot of things, I saw a lot of things that just made my jaw drop. But the one that cracked up the most was a prize claw machine that you didn't have to pay for. It was filled with $1200 phones, right? It was like tablets phones, watches like all of these electronics just like insanity, right? Just and again, like you said, like the, you know, the carts rolling around with uh, any kind of sushi you can imagine, uh, four star Michelin restaurants inside, like just bananas level perks. Ok.

Wil Schroter: So this is the best part and yeah, and yeah, this is the best part is, it's the killer, the Google employees were trying to form a union so they could strike.

Ryan Rutan: What else did they want that? Ok.

Wil Schroter: So what I'm saying is, and I'm not saying that their issues weren't valid. I'm sure people they had their own reasons. It's not that, that's not my point. My point is that dude, how much more could you possibly give to people still want to strike against you?

Ryan Rutan: Doesn't matter what you give. The desire for expansion is infinite within a human, right? And start up being, you know, reflections of the humans that run them. So are start ups, right? That, that we solve one problem, we'll create a new one. We'll find something else that desire for increased expansion. We will keep expanding our problems with equal

Wil Schroter: pace. Absolutely. I see this with my kids. Right. And they're great kids and I listen to the problems that they have, right? Like I'm bored and I think to myself, you have more access to more entertainment that's ever existed in all the history of mankind combined, right? And you're still bored, you, you, you have the same issue that I had when I was a kid decades earlier when I had one Nintendo cartridge and that was, that I didn't

Ryan Rutan: even have the, so I just had the cartridge. I just looked at it and imagine what it would be like to play the game.

Wil Schroter: And so my point is like, no matter how many times you solve problems and this isn't the same as saying the problems don't matter. We're saying isn't, we're not saying that the problems don't matter. Everybody's pain is their own. What we are saying is you can't make all problems go away. And so you have to look at problems as they come up as an ongoing conveyor belt that never stops, it never stops. And so whatever we solve, we're just gonna trade this problem for another problem tomorrow and, and it would sound awesome if we could say, oh no, no, no. Once we solve this, we're good, right? Once Jody's, you know, got her problem figured out like we're gonna be good, right? Like because that's really no d as soon as that problem is like, enter 10 more to take its place, right? That that does not go away. And I say that so that, you know, as founders, we can look at these things and go man. Yes, let's address this, but let's not pretend like if we don't address this, that it's like game over, right? It's like let's address this. Let's be mindful that by the time we're finished addressing this problem, there will be one waiting, waiting on the doorstep. Right behind that problem. Right. Think of how much time we've spent, how much effort we've spent solving problems at start ups dot com. And we have geometrically less than we had before, but

Ryan Rutan: it's most of it, most of the time that that kind of is the gig. Right. I, I think one of the biggest problems we can solve for is treating problems like problems. It's the work. right? It is. It's what we signed up for that. We knew it or not was problem solving on some level. We're always gonna be solving some kind of a problem, I guess. I mean, like for me and sure for you too, that's part of the appeal, right? Is that we get to solve challenges and puzzles and I think big part of it is how you frame it. I think that's why we're harping so heavily on this today, which is, don't let the problems creep out of scale. Don't treat a four like an eight because solving a four problem when you've actually dealt with an eight feels pretty damn good sometimes, right? Like uh uh dealing with level four problems can feel like a vacation if you've dealt with nothing but eights. So don't let the problems get out of scale and scope. That is a problem in and of itself, right? So we gotta be really

Wil Schroter: careful with this stuff. My biggest challenge is I think over time I've become more numb to problems, right? So, like when Sarah, my wife and I, when we have dinner at night, like, so what happened at work today? And I always think when she asks me that what like 27 year old will, would have said I had the same day that I had, right? You like, you'll never believe what just happened. And, and my response is like, nothing, nothing. We have a good day work. Yeah. Like, because it would take so much to rattle me. It always reminds me of, remember the opening scene? The Saving Private Ryan, how everyone's freaking out. They're storming the beach or whatever. Then there's like that old grizzled sergeant that just kind of like leisurely walking up the beach. Right.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. She's walking up the beach, lighting his cigar. Right.

Wil Schroter: It's always, so I get the sense that like, again, if you've never done it before, if you're the person raiding the beach for the first time, you were terrified. Yeah, of course.

Ryan Rutan: Rightfully. So.

Wil Schroter: Yep, there does come a point and I hope that founders that you get to this point where you can be the person walking up the beach while bullets are flying being like, hm. It's just another day because you've done it enough. The purpose of what we're doing here today is to try to actually give you a framework to think about, to think about the fact that maybe not every problem is a level 10 problem. And chances are the problems you've got are nowhere near that. Now, you're running a start up. You have a few. Right. But what's important for all of us is to be able to calibrate these problems. Think about the fact that we need enough energy, not just for ourselves but for the whole rest of the team to make it through this long, long game. So if we're gonna do that, we need to take things down a notch. We need to only focus that kind of energy on the level 89, 10 problems and let everything else just take a beat. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on start ups 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, 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, fundable for attracting investment capital. When you log into the start ups dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.