Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan from startups dot com. Joined as always by my friend and the founder and CEO of startups dot com. Will Schroeder. We are also joined by a whole host of our founder, friends from the startups dot com accelerator. So it'll be one of those episodes where first you have to listen to Will and I drone on for about a half an hour and then you'll get to hear from other really cool smartphone. Way more interesting people in all likelihood. So today we're gonna take a trip down memory lane and we're gonna find former versions of ourselves and we're gonna tell them things that we wish we had known at the time, like take more pictures while you've got hair Ryan. Like that would have been great to know. I wish I had known. I just didn't see that coming despite all of the genetic evidence in my family. But yeah, there's, there's probably, uh there's probably some more important things to talk about here. Well, here's the thing. I, I think over a bunch of episodes we've had what we call the Marty mcfly Moment where if we could have gone back in time and, like, saw our former selves and we could have had a conversation with that idiot. You know, what would we have said? And, and how would that have been taken? I can already tell you it wouldn't have been. But essentially it's, it's an encapsulation of all the stuff that we've learned that we've finally come to understand it's true. And part of this is hoping that folks that are listening can either identify with it, you know, exactly kind of what we've gone through or if everything goes really well, one person ever listening to this will go, oh, I'm actually doing that right now. Maybe I shouldn't do that and then this will be worth the whole, the whole episode if we can get one person to uh to, to do about face. So what I would say is I've got a list, Ryan, you put together a list of kind of all the things you, you would have told former self and this former self is in the, in the, the context of being a founder. You know, what are the things that we wish we had known? And that stand to be fairly universal, universally true. I'll kick you off the first one, Ryan and you tell me, you know, where your head's at from there. I wish I could have told my former self. I could have gone back 30 years when I first started my first company and I could have told that pimply faced idiot that you actually have 50 years to get this right. 50 I mean, probably more, I didn't think I'd live that long, but probably more. I was gonna say if you do the math on that will, that means you've only got 20 years left. That's probably out. But here's, here's where we mess it up, here's where we mess it up, especially when we're young when we're in our twenties because it's the only professional years we've ever had at that time. If I'm say, 27 years old, I'm like, I've had 27 years on the planet. Sort of, you've only had about seven years best, probably less as a actual adult. And from there it's the only reference you have to, everything that's ever happened. Right. So, in other words, pretty limited per view on the world. Yeah. If there is a progress bar, if there's a progress bar of our entire career by 27 you were at less than 10% of that progress bar for most people. Yeah. So you were like an hour and a half into installing windows 3.1 at that point. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what I mean though? I mean? Seriously, like we have, we have such missed perspectives. Like I can see all the people on the call here. Nobody here is over 40 which means that all I know everybody's like, oh, thank you. So, but it means that like, you're not even at the halfway mark, it's not even half time. Right. And that's, and that's now, and that's now and think about how much we're still learning. And then, yeah, and then go back in time to the 19 year old. The, the 21 year old, the 22 year old. Yeah, man. Uh, if patience was a virtue, I was definitely no saint. I was, you know, in my early years, nothing was fast enough. Nobody was fast enough, including myself, right? I was beating myself up about getting things, more things done, more things done caused me a ton of stress caused a ton of stress for the team which ultimately slows things down, having that sense of accountability and responsibility and a get shit done attitude super important. But like we also have to obey the speed limits of like human sensibility at the same time, right? I had, I had zero speedometer at that point. I was just like, how fast are you going? Right. Not fast enough. Like that was always my answer. Uh And it was a bad answer and it was because I didn't have that perspective. It felt like there, there was always some arbitrary window that I had imagined it was closing. It was that Indiana Jones moment where, you know, I had to slide under the uh the the closing stone door and then reach back and grab my hat because otherwise I couldn't be able to do the show. So, you know, that's what it felt like all the time. I constantly felt like I was doing that. And in hindsight, I would tell myself like, hey, who was closing that door? And the answer is, well, there was no door. Nobody. Right. It was all self inflicted, which we've talked about a lot of other episodes. A lot of our founder wounds are self-inflicted. So I would have just told myself, just be more patient, right? Just, just try to have a little patience. I think when you're first getting started, you know, in your early twenties, no matter what you're doing, start up work or otherwise, you've got a head of steam. It hasn't occurred to you how abysmal failure could be because you haven't had it yet, right? In a meaningful way. And so you've got a head of steam. You've got endless optimism in the world can be anything that's wonderful by the way, that is a wonderful start for anybody. Not everybody has that opportunity, but for, for many people that do, it's awesome with that said you also just assume that because I've only had two years on the planet as a professional adult that if I do four years, that's twice the time I've ever been a professional, what you learn later on. And I learned this from talking to people a lot older than me where like when I turned 30 they were like, you're still a child and I'm like, what are you talking about? I've almost got hair on my chest, right. Like I, I, I, I had no idea what they were talking about. I was so clueless. And then I would talk to guys now who are like 75 they said in the last 10 years, they've just found their groove and I'm like, damn, that's like an entire lifetime away. Well, not for me anymore, but like, you know, it feels so different and you don't get this perspective, you don't get the perspective of how long you have until you've been around a minute to understand how much can get done in five years in a decade. Like, like I've done nine companies over 30 years, they all feel like a totally different life, right? Like, like if we were to talk about one as a microcosm, it felt like an entire lifetime of it. That's nine of them, right? Which I wouldn't recommend for anybody by the way. But like, but you really think about it isn't a recommended diet. But right? But the point is in just a few years, you can do the most transformative things in your entire life, right? We all assume that those must be these years. Maybe this isn't your year. I wish I could have told myself that every year I thought I had to like, you know, win the Super bowl. And the truth is I clearly didn't looking back, I had many, many, many years that went to nothing. I wish I could have understood that part. Yeah. It's funny because I think it's a twofold problem. One is that we don't understand how much time we have and, and the other is that we feel like failure is always imminent and, and if we do fail in that moment, that's, that's it. Like, I can't tell you how many times my ass bounced off rock bottom, it happens and it's OK. Right. You can do that multiple times because again, you have the luxury of time and doing it over and over again, right? If you're persistent and resilient, you can keep doing it. Right. I didn't know that time. I figured like any time we got even close to failure that that was the the harbinger of doom had arrived and this was the future. And now it was like, right, like, like guys, like, remember that pizza party we had last week, hope he didn't throw away the boxes because we're gonna need to build a house out of them now. And so it's just like, again, you don't have that perspective of how close you really are still to the bottom, how much more time you have to get closer to the top. Your sense of relativity is so poor at that point that you just, you just gotta be patient, just be patient. Ryan I agree. I, I, I also don't think that in an earlier age in our life and as we get older, uh, because again, we're doing a look back so we're typically talking to somebody younger. We don't understand the compounding value of every year that we put into the planet. And I'll give you one example of that. I didn't understand how important relationships were. I don't just mean, like personal relationships. Right. But like, I mean, like business relationship, et cetera until I spent 30 years building them in all the time. All of these people that come into my life, right? Whether they become like a client that I'm, I'm trying to talk to or whether it becomes somebody I'm trying to hire et cetera are now this massive web of all of these people I've met over such a long period of time in their friends of friends and their friends of friends. Next week I is booked every single day and every single day I was just noticing it today. It's from somebody I met 15 years ago or longer. And the reason that's interesting is because early in my career, I thought relationships were, I don't wanna say disposable because that's not really my style. But like, I didn't understand that if you fire somebody, right? That it's not just that one moment, that one day, it's everything they go to talk to more people and that creates a chain of events and then a year from now, you're trying to hire somebody else, but you don't realize that that person was, like, don't ever go to work there. Right. Because you've put that out there as you build these relationships, good and bad, they manifest and if I had understood the value of planting those good seeds and the cost of burning the bad ones, I would have been way more careful. I don't think a lot of people see that until you've seen both sides of it. No, I, I don't think so either. I, I certainly didn't. And yeah, it's an interesting point there that they both require special treatment. Right. I think it's, there, there are some people I see who are very good at cultivating good relationships, but I also know that they have bad reputation with other people because they weren't good about how they ended the other relationships. It's like the ones that worked out well, transactional were fine and I was certainly guilty of this early on. It was like, if there was mutual benefit there and I felt like I was getting something from it, I would also invest in it. But if I wasn't getting something back then I would just assume there was no value in that and I would just cut it off and I wouldn't end it well, I wouldn't necessarily end it badly, but I just, I wouldn't make sure that that connectivity was still there and I, that was a huge, huge mess. And, you know, I talked about this couple episodes ago, but, you know, kind of growing up in this, in this household where there was this performance culture, one of the things that I think made me discount the value of relationships was this idea that I should be performing. I should be self reliant. I should be able to do things myself. And therefore I didn't seek out the right types of relationships. I think I sought out relationships where people appreciated what I could do. You know, they were like, yeah. Wow, that's amazing. That's great. I didn't look for people who could see that better future version of myself, right? Who wanted me to be that person? I, I looked for people who appreciated what I was not what I could be. And I, so I wasn't seeking out mentors. I wasn't seeking out a good support network in a circle of friends who were really trying to elevate me. I was looking for people who appreciate what I was already doing. In hindsight. Those were people who were really just trying to take advantage of me, transactional, not necessarily in a, in a, in a really bad way. Just they were saying, hey, you're doing something good. I want to be part of that because of that. I don't necessarily want to elevate you in any way. I just want to ride the elevator that you're already on. And so I think that was a big mistake. And so going back, you know, this whole idea of being self reliance is fantastic, but I would have asked for more help and I would have listened to the help when it was offered, I think, because the other thing that I did again, going back to this whole self reliance and, and performance issue that I had, I would hear people's advice and my response to that was how could I make that better? Like, how could I do and get something better than what they're suggesting that I go and do instead of just taking the advice for what it was, I was trying to make it into something more so that it would become mine. And so that I was the one who had achieved that right? Super, super, super short sighted, you know, you said something though Ryan that I think is interesting talking about, you know, in relationships, not having to try to get the give, get right. And so now a lot of time I spend with, with founders and usually where I spend my time, I just give and people always ask me, they say like, like, you know, what, what can I do to give back? And I was like, you don't have to do anything that surprises people. Now, on the one hand, I appreciate it because you know, that's something nice for me. I want to do something nice for them. So I, I get that. But what I found and the reason I have that response is because you sort of don't need to have a transaction. If you put good things out there, you have no idea which ones are gonna return, but you just know collectively that they'll return. And if I tried to explain this to myself when I was younger, I wouldn't have been able to do it because you have to have experienced it. You have to have like gone through it to see how it actually works. But if you do enough things, right? For enough good people, it builds kind of this, you can call it karma. But if you don't believe in that, it builds this base of return favors in ways that you couldn't possibly, possibly forecast. Yep. And sometimes they're not direct, right? That that's one of the things that I found really interesting. And I think this is one of the things where there's no way to see this early on. But in hindsight, I have found that like people will come to me and tell me, hey, somebody that we mutually know helped me out and they said the reason they did that was because at one point you did something for them, right? And it's like holy shit, right? Like the the universe is delivering this back. So it's, you know, to your point, you don't know how these things are gonna come back. Sometimes it's through a direct return on the favor. Sometimes it's somebody else doing something good. But you're referenced in that in some way. I just had this conversation with the founder last night. Actually, uh, he picked up the phone and hopped on somebody who was considering joining the network and they just wanted to, to pick my brain and at the end, he was so happy with everything that we talked about. He's like, man, what can I do to give back? And I said your point, you don't have to do anything. Like I don't expect anything from this, but I feel like I want to. And I said, well, then, you know, join the network and, and be helpful to other people. I didn't mean I didn't mean it in the way of Yeah, like that like, yeah, it was, you know, you'll find somebody who's going to benefit from your expertise, right? And that's what we're looking for, right? It's that collective give if I were to build on that though, the, the kind of relationships matter part, there's another part about how you end relationships is how the relationship went, right? In other words, like people remember the jobs they worked at but they sure as hell remember getting fired, right? People remember the relationships they have but they sure as hell remember breaking up, right? Like how it ends often is the relationship and I think what ends up happening is let's say we've got somebody that's worked the company for five years and they've been good. It's been a good relationship, but at the end, maybe there's some kind of friction or something happens and we leave on a shitty note. What we're really talking about is maybe a week, a day, 10 minutes of negative energy erasing five years worth of, you know, cash in the bank. If you will, you allow that to define the entire relationship with them and that becomes how you're remembered. And so for things like again, when we have to let someone go, which sucks. But you know, whatever we try to be mindful of it, we try to be mindful of making sure that they understand that even if things didn't work out, we still care about you. We still got your back. Like there's no, there's almost nobody would've ever let go of that. We haven't said, hey, what can we do to help you here? And nobody likes being let go the same with when people just leave, they quit and go somewhere else. Our first answer is always what can we do to help you going forward? Because that's how we're gonna be remembered. It's also just the right thing to do. But my point is I think had I understood how important that those last moments were to define the future moments, I would have invested way heavier. You know, I, I looked at letting people go as kind of transactional. It's just something you have to do in business and I'm a sensitive person. It wasn't like I wasn't caring about people's emotions. I didn't understand what happens afterward. Now we understand. Yeah. Yeah. If you remove the morbidity from it, the, the ending of it should be a bit like an epitaph. Right. You want it to read? Well, right. You don't want it to read poorly to put a cap on this entire thing and, and to follow on that point, just around relationships in general. The other thing I would have told myself is to just be kind, you know, a lot of what you're talking about now is, is, is kindness and it's just, it's be kind, you know, be compassionate and to yourself as well. Right? To, you know, if I could go back and help myself in probably the biggest way it would be like take it a little easier on yourself, man, like you beat yourself up a little bit more than you need to, don't say anything you don't say. Yeah, because, you know, kindness just, it goes such a long way in terms of maintaining the dignity and respect of others and for yourself. And, and I think that was when, when we actually did another episode on this one where we talked about, you know, parting ways and, and how those relationships end and how they're remembered, that was a big piece of it. Right. It's like, how do you let people go on with dignity without fear. Right. And I think that kindness is the answer to that. Right? I, I agree. Other thing that I learned was I have the ability to say no, it did not occur to me. Here's, here's why it didn't occur to me. And I got kind of a funny story of like who taught me this lesson in the most inadvertent way possible when I was growing up. Whenever somebody asked you to do something, the answer was yes. Like if somebody said, like I have work for you, the answer was just yes. And then you find out what the work is or if or how you're getting paid, right? It didn't occur to me that you're allowed to say no to. It wasn't like I was just such a hard work ethic. I just never had the option. And so years later, this is like 10 years ago when we were first uh starting startups dot com. This designer comes in into our office and I'm interviewing and uh he's like first year out of school. Uh living back with his parents. The school that he went to is a very prestigious art school cost like 100 and $20,000 total boat to go there on top of that. His dad was a carpenter, which is my dad was a carpenter. So like he didn't have a ton of cash, right? So in other words, like parents put everything into sending kid to art school. He's interviewing and, uh, he's like, well, so what kind of work would I be doing? And I explained to him some of the projects and he's like, well, I'd really like that project but I don't think I'd want to work on that project. And I was like, huh, wait, I was like, wait, you're allowed to decide what you get to work on. Like, when would that become a thing? The irony too, given what we do, which is like, entirely self driven. And it's a big reason why we're drawn to this is that we get to decide what we do and then we throw that out the window the minute we start it and we just like, I guess I'll do this whatever I have to. Right. I, you know, it's so bizarre though that he taught me such a lesson again. It, he was not trying to teach me a lesson. I just sat there and I was so dumbfounded by his response. I couldn't let it go and I kept thinking about it nonstop and I emailed him like the next day and I was like, just to make sure I understood what you're saying and I, I was cool about it. I wasn't like being a jerk or leading him. I was like, were you saying, like, there's things you enjoy more than others? He's like, no, there's just a couple of things that I don't think I'd be, I, I'd work on and I'm still. And two things went through my head. First, I could imagine the look on dad's face. If his son who just spent 100 and $20,000 to send through art school is living at home. And he's like, so how did that interview go? He's like, well, I did tell the CEO that I just don't feel like doing some of his work. This is the last day on earth. But um, let's go to the workshop, son. I've got something I want to show you the other side of it is some point in his life for better, for worse. He was given permission to say no to things and he went into the world with that permission for better for worse. Right. Again, I'm kind of painting it in, in, in, in kind of a silly light. But the truth is he had that gear and it never occurred to me. It never occurred to me for my entire career that I could say no, that if there are more hours to be worked, if there was, you know, more things that I had to forgo that I wouldn't just say yes to them. And that was horrible. I actually, again, I'm not proud of any of this. I'm not saying this in a way. Like, look at me how much I worked. I'm like, man, where was that kid? 20 years ago? I need to understand that part. And I think it's a reflection of what you were saying too about being able to, like, go easy on yourself. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. By the way, the answer to where that kid was 20 years earlier was preschool. Um, no. Yeah. Well, probably. Right. Holy cow. Yeah. So, he, he wouldn't have been very helpful at that point. Yeah. So, you know, this is, this is an interesting one and, and I think that there was a, there was a point that I, I didn't consider as being part of, of, of this part of the discussion, but I think it is relevant here because I think it's part of what eventually helped me learn to say no to things and it's this ability to zoom in and zoom out. Right? I, I, I wish that I had developed this skill earlier on and I wish I had been told that it even was a thing at an early age because when I look back at a lot of the, the, the problems that I face through the, the early years in the businesses, they were caused by one or two things, generally speaking. And it was either just getting so far down into the trenches and just grinding away, grinding away, grinding away without stepping back to make sure that we were grinding the right direction that we eventually got where we didn't want to be and then had to backtrack, pivot whatever you wanna call it to correct for that. The other side of that same coin was, there were times where then kind of in reaction to that. Actually, with my next business I stayed so zoomed out and so, like, up in the air strategic making plans and, you know, making, you know, sure that everything was documented and never actually getting anything done. Yeah. Right. You can strategize your way to zero. Yeah, just strate my way. Nothing. Right. And so that ability to zoom in zoom out and I think I would tell myself like, you know, on regular intervals, make sure that you're doing that and you're going from that view, like you gotta look at the forest and you gotta look at the tree, then you gotta look at the forest, you gotta look at the tree and you have to make sure to keep doing that. Otherwise I think you do end up saying yes to a lot of the wrong things because you don't have the context for why you should say no, why it's OK to say no. Does this make sense for what we're actually really trying to accomplish? Does this align with the North Star? He do we even have a North Star? Do we get that far? Right. And so I think that if I could go back in time, that would be one of those things that I would tell myself is like, yes, you have to execute, but you also have to think about what you're executing and yes, you have to think, but you also have to execute. You cannot do just one or the other and expect to be successful. Yeah. And I also think it extends to life in general. It's OK to say no to toxic relationships. Be it co-founders, be it clients be employees, be whomever I took so much on the chin for so long from so many people because it didn't occur to me that I was a, I was able to say no and wow, that did that take years off my life. Fortunately, they're the ones at the end. But you know, my, my issue with all of this is like, like when I had clients in my agency in my 1st 10 years, they beat the hell out of me. I mean, like running me endless hours killing me on all kinds of stuff. And I never said no, it never occurred to me that I could be like that guy's a giant a hole. Like, why do I keep working with this guy? Right. Why do I, why do we take him to dinner every month? That's even worse. I don't know. I hate this guy. I have to take him to dinner and buy him dinner like we're talking about his body is unbelievable. It felt horrible or when I felt like I was in a position with maybe somebody that I hired and I let them put me in a leverage position, right. You know, maybe if I let go of them, we lose sales or maybe I let go of them, we couldn't ship product or you name it. And I, and I felt like I felt trapped and it wasn't until I, enough of these kind of moments went by until finally I started to realize that I can just say no, I can just be like, actually, you know what? Yes, we're co-founders, but I actually don't want to work with you anymore. That actually never happened. But I, you know, I could actually have that, that capability or to investors to say like I actually really don't like working with you. It's one of the first things we did. We've talked about this before when we started startups dot com. We kind of did like our like declaration of independence in life and one of our few vows was we'll never work with people. We don't like for any reason whatsoever. And you know, and to be honest, there's probably people who don't like us either. So I would also extend that to them to say, please don't work with us in that capacity, right? Yeah, please don't do the same. But I guess my point is once we stuck to that and it was hard because there's a lot of things you don't get to do, like take on investors and I'm not knocking investors implicitly here, but like it's typically not a very fun process and, or relationship we've been through in our past, companies didn't want anybody telling us what to do. Right. Just we could actually say no to that, you know. So we went independent. We didn't raise money and lo and behold, we don't have anybody telling us what to do. And I think that was something that had, I known the value of that 30 years ago. I would have done everything differently. It would have been dramatically different. But here's the kicker and here, here's the, the, what I want to end it on before we go to our, our lovely audience who I'm actually way more interested in talking to. Um, not than you, but than me. Thanks. Um Would you have taken this advice 30 years ago, Ryan? You're three years old. Would you have taken that advice? I'd love to say yes, I, no, I, I wouldn't have in, in all likelihood that's, that's the problem going back to this whole self reliance issue that I have right? Where it, it, it has to come from me. I have to be the one that did it. That's deeply ingrained. Right. And I'm, I'm getting better about it. But, but it's, it's still there. And so I think it, I was, I wasn't a receptive vessel at that point. Right. I would have just looked for a way to, to prove it wrong or refute it or to improve upon it. And do it my own way. I think it would have been, it would have been really tough. And it's funny because for as much of that as I was resistant to kind of like in my, in, in, in business life and I, I was an athlete growing up, I still, still am and, and I still take coaching and I was receptive to that. So somehow there it was ok. And yet in my professional career, it just had a very, very different feel to it. And I don't know what it was, I guess it's part of, it's just the, the undefined nature of the game that we play as startups and as founders versus the very defined game that I played as a, as a soccer player in jujitsu where, you know, you have rules, you have techniques and being better at, at an exact technique than somebody else can make the difference between winning and losing. Whereas in startup land, it's never quite that cut and dry for as much as I would love to say that. Yeah, I'd have been super smart and I would have listened to myself. I don't know that I would have, I certainly would not have it in my turning point moment. My turning point moment when I, I was about 35 I was raising money in L A for this, this one company and we'd raised from a bunch of investors. And uh and I mentioned his name before this one guy, Mark who's now with upfront ventures, Mark had invested personally before he had become a V C and uh, things were going so well. We started the company, we raised money quickly. We were crushing it in sales. We had like $500,000 in sales. In our first month. We just thought we had figured everything out and I was running around town telling people how we had just figured out the entire world. And Mar pulled me aside, I'll never forget this. And, and I was totally out of the blue and he's like, you need to shut the hell up. I was like, wait, what I mean? And, and, and if you, if you ever heard of heard Mark or whatever, he does not mince words, right? And he was like, you're acting like an idiot and it was so funny because no one had ever, like, talked to me like that before and, and in a respect, I'm so glad he did because it was the only reason it got through to me what he was saying and he was totally right was you're talking about how this thing's already won and you haven't earned it yet, right? You're gonna turn a lot of people off. People are gonna start betting against you because you know how that goes. And he said when you go out for your next funding round, if you don't start getting people kind of on your side by showing some humility who would have guessed it's gonna be a problem lo and behold and at the time, this company afford it was essentially what a firm is now or, or whatever at the time it was right at the beginning of the financial crisis or what was about to be the financial crisis. So I was about to go raise $50 million. Right. When Lehman Brothers had just closed out for a, a high risk consumer credit card, essentially. Right. Trust me, you could not have picked, right? You might as well have an events business on day one of COVID, one of COVID, right. What do you do? Festivals couldn't, it could not have been worse. And as mar predicted, uh the whole thing imploded on us and, and I guess it was the first time where I saw like the, the stark contrast of when I got good guidance and when I deliberately didn't take it and it blew up in my face and I was like, damn, maybe I should shut up and listen from it. That might pay off. And that was exactly my turning point. I was actually talking to mark yesterday. I probably should have said something about that, but I'll leave that one to myself. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're doing 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. That said, let's turn the mic over. Let's go to our beautiful audience. We'll run through here. Ryan will run D MC. This, I'll do one. You do one. Yeah. OK. So Beth, the big moments will actually be a series of big moments that are the one, right? It takes a bunch of the ones to get there. Yes, absolutely. This right. And so Beth, go back in time and, and when you were seeing those, the ones, did you think that they were the one at the time each individually or did you not recognize their power at time? Because I've, I've done both. I've both seen things that I thought like this is gonna be the thing that does it. All I have to do is get this right and everything's great. And then there were other times where I, I was doing something that ended up being one of those contributing components to like great success and had no idea at the time. So which was it for you or was it both.

Wil Schroter: Um I think the most poignant for me was um I used to work in the ad agency business. And so when you're like a little girl and you want to be in an ad agency, then you have this like myth of being on Madison Avenue and like pitching or working, right? So that was like this epitome of what my career would be. So, you know, I jump out, I'm doing wag town and I meet a few people through a conference. And next thing, you know, I'm like, hey, I'm gonna be in New York. I set up a meeting and it was like not get out of the park and I go downstairs to call someone and I realize I just pitched Madison Avenue, right the next day they were bought out by another company, which then was bought out by another company where everything blew up. But that moment of realizing, yeah, maybe that didn't work out. But, you know, you did it right. And it, it helps you get your, your, your story down. And so it's just all those little moments. And so I found that, yeah, I, I'm kind of a dig for the pony person. So I'm like, here's another one. So I think you, you have to have that enthusiasm, but it can be pretty, you know, I'm like with you with the ultra competitive family and, you know, I've, I've got this right. So, you know, like I said in the next one, it's like you have to, you have to be in the room, but it can be exhausting to always be in the room.

Ryan Rutan: Almost always exhausting. Yeah. Thank you. So, uh next up Catherine, our, our lovely Katie part of our team here, she quotes Churchill Katie. I, I don't even want to quote it. I, I want, I want you to read this off in the way you think Churchill would have intended it in Churchill's voice, please. In Churchill voice, please. I don't know that I can do that justice, but give us a quote. Tell us what, what we were thinking. Yeah. So this is a quote that really stuck with me. It's success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It's the courage to continue that counts. And as many people here know, um but for all of those who are listening, my background is corporate America, which is a very, very large corporate America where it's very easy to not fail ever really. And moving from an environment like that into the world of entrepreneurship and startups, you have to have this completely different mindset of you're going into something that's likely to fail, that's gonna have endless numbers of mistakes along the way. And you have to really look at this as an experiment and go into this with sort of eyes wide open that the odds are, it's gonna fail. And if it does fail, it's not fatal to you and don't let that kind of, you know, wear on you too much emotionally mentally. Um, because it, it really can't, if you go in, just with the attitude of like, I have to win, I have to be successful. I cannot fail. You know, I've always been successful. So if I'm not successful here, it's because, you know, my entire life, you know, was a, was a fraud or something and just having that courage to constantly be like evaluating and saying, do we keep going? Do we not keep going? Do I try something different? You know, that didn't work? What else should we try? Just having a really kind of, you know. Yeah, courageous curiosity driven mindset and look at this is just like a really big science experiment is a completely different attitude that I think you have to have and start an entrepreneurship in order to sort of mentally survive. Um, this kind of roller coaster for sure that transition from corporate to startup I think makes that far, far more difficult. I think the impression is, it's like it's still business, right? It's like going from roller skates to roller blades except that it's more like going from roller skates to surfing down a pyroclastic flow on an active volcano, right? A lot less certainty. A little more dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, that, that feels right with, with like a bunch of people yelling at you from the sidelines like you can do it and if you don't, you know, we're all gonna be really mad at you. Um, yeah, it's, it's very different because I think right to your point you kind of go into, you're like, well, I know the principles I know, you know, finance and accounting and marketing, sales and how different parts of the p and all work together. Like we're just doing it on a smaller scale. Right. And the answer is no, no, not even remotely. It's a, it's a more complicated game. It's checkers and chess. They're both fun. One of them requires a little more nimbleness. In my opinion. There are any expert checker players out there listening right now, apologies. Uh More of a chess guy. All right back to you. Let's pick up Joe, let's go, Joe. Focus more on acting like the person you want to be versus the person others want you to be. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. My first question on this is how were you getting the sense? Where were you driving? What you thought other people wanted you to be? How were you picking up on that? Yeah.

Wil Schroter: You know, I think when you start a company, especially if you talk to consultants or advisors, which of course we do and later board members and investors, everyone has an opinion about what you should be doing. And it's easy to start working really hard to incorporate everyone's feedback. A board sends you an advisor maybe that stuff isn't even right for you. But you feel like, hey, the board sent it, I need to pay attention to him and I think the difference here is a coach actually said this. What kind of CEO do you wanna be? What kind of founder do you wanna be? And it's not about the choices you make. It's about always acting in line with that. So I wanna be respectful to the advisor. I wanna listen to them. I want to actually hear them and not ignore them because I'm smarter than them, right? Um You know, those kind of things that, that we can tend to want to do and I think it comes down to Yeah, acting like that CEO I wanna be. So I have little bullets here after my thing of saying this is the kind of ceo I want to be right? And now I'm not very good at that always. You know, there's a lot of things on that list that, that are not my strengths and some of them are, but I think, I think that was just super valuable to me and early on. Yeah, it's not about meeting somebody else's ideal. It's about gathering all that information, that insight and figuring out what it means to, to you and your business. And um yeah,

Ryan Rutan: 100%. It's kind of hard to, to see the person that you are when we're in a business where there's so much left to prove. In other words, it's hard to create a lot of confidence in this business. The business of being a founder when everything is kind of stacked against you from the get right. It's almost like being in a sport where you're not allowed to win for a very, very, very long time. And in some cases where you don't even know how to win because the rules keep changing over and over and over and over. One of the biggest challenges I had earlier in my career is I didn't know what success was. So I never really felt like I could be the person I was trying to be because it was, I felt like the goalposts were always changing and it wasn't until I kind of threw it out the door and said, well, shit, apparently nobody else knows either. Like, like I thought everybody else had to figure it out and then I met those people and they didn't know anything. And, and so I was like, OK, I get it like, I just have to be like, ok with not knowing what the future is gonna be. It's hard to do like who wants that?

Wil Schroter: And if we're innovating, that's the whole point, we're doing things different. And I'm listening to everyone who's telling me how to do it and the fact that I want to do it different is the whole point of innovating. So I want to gather those insights and not be stupid about it, not by being naive. But if we just try to act like everyone tells us to, we are not innovating. We might be building a good solid business. But if you're trying to change how things are done, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to um, know that you're not gonna stay right in the coloring lines for sure. Yeah.

Ryan Rutan: Will and I did a podcast on, we've done a couple actually on advisors on taking advice and ken to your 0.1 of the most important things and we have to remember it's incumbent on us as the founder to make sure and validate whether the advice makes sense, right? When we just start to wholesale, follow what everybody does. And we see this from investors down, giving us advice, advisors down giving us advice. We also see this where in early stages of product development, we try to react to everything every customer is like, you know, I think it'd be better if it was blue or like let's make them all blue, quick, hurry up, right? And it turns out there was that one person that wanted it to be blue and everybody else loved the red ones that we had, right? So, you know, making sure that we validate the the source of the advice, making sure that we think about how that fits into the context of, of the overall thing that we're trying to achieve. Super, super important and really hard to do. Congrats on at least defining the list of the CEO that you wanna be. And I will look forward to kind of following you on that journey and seeing how many more of those boxes you check.

Wil Schroter: Oh, yeah. And it changes sometimes. Is it just because I can learn and grow? Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Rutan: Agreed. All right. Uh Jumping over to Cole and I, I skipped a few folks only because I'm, I'm not sure if, if we got to everybody, I wanna give everybody a chance to chat. If I miss somebody. My apologies, Ryan. Keep me honest here. And I'm definitely gonna come back to Beth's other comment. But yeah, we can. Yeah, we're coming back. I have some major questions there. All right, Cole perspective is why you hire a coach. Totally agree. Or you belong to a community like this getting older gives us all the more perspective to offer to others. Why do you feel that way? Cole and probably like talking about our younger selves? It probably goes back to when I was young. So my dad owned a landscape company and I'd ride around with him in his truck when I was like, you know, 89 10, hand them tools feel productive and he'd have the Tony Robbins tapes right back when they were actually tapes in the truck. So I listened to Tony and got really involved in the coaching world for a while. I actually worked for Tony Robbins for a while and a lot of my family and friends are all coaches. So like coaching is a big part of my life just by happenstance. But I feel like you look at the pinnacles of each area of life, I'll just use, you know, sports as easy because it's, it's so performance based, like without a coach, what would a team be like that? You need someone sitting on the sideline saying like, hey man, or, or I guess golf is probably the easiest thing like, hey, man, everyone has this one, swing the same ball, the same clubs like super tight restrictions, like try moving your shoulders up one inch and all of a sudden you're driving like Tiger Woods versus, you know, weekend Warrior at the driving range. So without that other person to have perspective that isn't behind your, you know, weird neat vehicle, eyeballs, like you can't make progress as fast. So, and obviously the, the more you've experienced, the better perspective you can offer early in your career, you obviously sought out the, you know, people like Tony Robbins, et cetera. What made you seek that out? A lot of people know they need help, but it's hard for them to kind of seek out that kind of advice. Like, how did you know that's where you needed to go? I think it was just like exposure at a certain point that, you know, I was trying, I knew I wanted to get better and do better than I did yesterday. Every day. I'm obsessed with stats and improving myself and improving things. And when I was in like sixth grade, I was the first kid in my old school to have an ipod, but it was just full of Tony Robbins and like Brian tray and stuff. So, like, I just, my teacher would catch me listening to it. Like, what is that like? Oh, it's like is fine. I'm just, I'm getting better with a calculator. It's incredible. You're the only sixth grader listening to Tony Robbins. That is absolutely amazing. Yeah. So I, I think it was honestly just exposure of like doing that program seeing my life get better, my dad's life, get better my family. It's just, you know, when you see people around you doing something that works and you do it too and it works, you keep doing it. Yeah. No, that's incredible feedback. I had def leopard playing in my walkman that actually did not give me any, any advice whatsoever as, as to how the world was gonna work at all or a bad haircut. But so I think for me the, the ability to, to know that you're supposed to be asking other people what the answers are is so powerful. It didn't occur to me like I knew, I didn't know, but I didn't realize anybody would tell me. I, I was so lost. I was such so on an island. What about you? Yeah. Uh, for me it was, it's similar, it was one of those, it was a situation where I had, uh, majorly screwed something up and then was talking to somebody about it and they were like, oh, why didn't you ask me? I could have told you this, this and this, and I was like, because it didn't occur to me that anybody else would ever have the answer nor give it to me. Right? And so it took one of those moments kind of like when Mark Suter broke the emergency glass on your ability to listen, it took me having one of those situations where I realized that like, oh yeah, that would have been way better than learning it from the hard knocks method. So it just, it took the exposure to good information from somebody after the fact that would have helped me before the fact, right? So hindsight being 2020 I was able to, to see what they meant right up next, Brian Mate. I wish I had been less influenced to do things as a CEO by my co-founders and my investors and to do it my own way from the start. I can everybody else hear Frank Sinatra right now. Yeah, I think it's like, like you were mentioning it's a problem because there's so much unknown and you should be confident in what you're doing. But then things don't go like up to the right and then you start listening for more advice and what am I doing wrong? And you get the influence to do some decision that in your God's feeling, you know, they're not right but you still go, ok, we can try this. Yeah, maybe and I should have not done that. I should go like, yeah, ok, thank you for the advice. But no, we are not going, gonna do that. So, but you don't know at the time because when I was first starting anybody with gray hair to me was Yoda, I was young and so like anybody that just had gray hair, which is hilarious, like how easy it is to get was like so smart and they were so wise and as soon as they would tell me something and by the way, they were so wrong in retrospect, right? They were well meaning OK, so I, I, I don't wanna knock them. They were like, I'll never forget I was in this group. If any of you guys have heard of Y P O and, and stuff like this, this was earlier in my career. Speaking of gray hair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was the youngest person in this group by 200 years. It's like the Jedi Council and like anyway, so, so, so I'm in this, I'm in this group which is hilarious because like this is me talking to my and so this agency that I'm running is growing like one of the first web design agencies and things are taking off and we hit like a million dollars in sales. And I remember talking to this group about it. It, it was more that and I remember talking to this group about it and they were like, sell, sell immediately. And I was like, oh my God, I'm supposed to sell this thing immediately because they were like, look, you're like 22 years old or however old, you know, old world time and they were like, there's no way this is ever gonna get bigger. This internet thing is never gonna be a thing. Right? And like, you need to get out now while you can still make money and, but I'll never forget this and go back to college with your college paid for. I was like, wow, they're probably right. That's exactly what we should do. Right. I mean, holy shit. Right. Yeah, that would have changed bad advice to take ever. I had a few times where I took advice that, you know, kind of like you were saying my day where you had a gut feeling against it. But kind of to will's point. I didn't have any way of really knowing who was gonna be right. And I consciously thought, and I'm embarrassed to admit this. I consciously thought at least if I take their advice and it fails, it won't have been my fault. Like, what a shitty way to approach a decision. But that was exactly what I did. I was like, hey, look, uh at least it's rising it for me, this is good. It could potentially destroy the entire company, but at least I'll be able to be like, well, so and so said this and that's what happened. So it's not my fault. See that none of you have jobs anymore. But that was it. Like I had the actual thought and I, I'm embarrassed like if in hindsight, it was sort of like I realized that there was this deep thing that happened. No, no, it was a conscious thought where I was like, well, at least it'll be something, somebody else's fault. Right? Not awesome. But that was how it happened. I mean, these are the kind of things we go through as, as founders when we're getting advice and, and we don't know any better at the time to trust ourselves. And what I did find out later in life was that even when I took advice that turned out to be wrong or I made a decision that turned out to be wrong. I was always happier when I went with my gut. Even if I ended up being wrong, then when I went with somebody else's advice and it ended up being wrong, right. I'd rather be to blame at the end of the day. It's just easier turns out I was wrong about that whole thing. Funny how that goes. So Jen Emerick, what I would tell myself if I could go back and I was reading this as we were doing the show and I thought it was, I was laughing nothing. You would tell yourself exactly. Nothing, Jen. If I told myself anything that would, that I could forecast or prevent something from occurring, I'd lose out on all the actual learning, which of course is true. But I will do things differently the next time with what I've learned. So you'll take that knowledge going forward, which is still only a drop in the bucket from what's to come. I'm sure. So this is kind of like being a parent as well where you're trying to infuse with your Children, the lessons you learn, knowing that you kind of need to learn the lesson that you can't tell somebody what it feels like to touch the stove. You actually have to touch the stove to really understand. Although it would be really cool if you didn't touch the stove, Jen from, from your standpoint, is there anything you could have told former Jen that would have stuck? You know, I'm still gonna stick with? No, because for me, actually, the most valuable part of this whole process has been the actual learning. Even when it ends up looking like a disaster, I probably would have asked myself a question. I probably would have asked myself, ok, if this doesn't look like how you want it to look like in the end. If this doesn't go the way you want, do you still want to do it? So, I probably would have asked myself that and that's it. And if I said yes, ok, you go. But I don't honestly think I would have told myself anything because I, I don't think I wanna learn something necessarily before I screw it up first. And that just may be my own way of going through life. I want to have the experience of screwing it up. So I value the right way to do it. I desperately want to talk to you in 20 years and see if you would advise yourself to take a different approach on what you just said today. We find very likely because I'm, I'm doing it right. This is the whole thing I'm doing it the wrong way. Now, here's the counterpoint to all this. I'm gonna use science if we look at back to the future, right, where you get to go back and change history and it works out for the better. And we look at butterfly effects where, you know, making these little changes in the past, have these massive rippling effects into the future and go by the rotten tomato scores alone. I think we can agree, we should go back and give ourselves advice. But I agree on the learning part too seriously. There is a version where you do have to learn it. But I, I kind of wish I was a little better armed. Actually, this is kind of a good example for, you know, what we've got going on at startups dot com, kind of what we do here. It's, of course, we all have to learn as founders, but me Ryan and a whole crew here and really all, all of you helping each other are kind of like, it'd be a little bit cool if it wasn't as hard as it needs to be. Like, if you're like, hey, I'm gonna go raise fund funding and like, ok, we could let you go and do, make all the mistakes that you're about to make. You're about to call on all the wrong people. You're about to send a mass email to all the investors at once. You're about to, to say the most ridiculous stuff in your pitch and, and I know you're gonna do it wrong, but I just want you to not do it wrong, but there's a cost to doing it wrong, right? Because you actually do need that money. So it's this weird thing where you kind of want to give somebody like a bit of a guiding hand. Kind of again, in this case, I'm, I'm gonna think about it the way I do with, with my kids. I want to give them a guiding hand, but I also want to make sure they learn. I just don't know, the learning has to be as hard as it was for me. That's the only difference I could say. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think we want to be careful, like how primitive we go with the learning. Right? Like, there's a difference between me handing you a stick and a rock and turning you loose in a forest and just seeing what you learn versus telling you. I want you to play golf. Yeah, you could take it too far. All right. Let me jump to Beth, this is from earlier, Beth be in the room when you're exhausted, discouraged or introverted. Good one, go to the meeting, the event, the conference, then get ready. Something always amaze. Amazing. Always happens in those moments. Be ready to notice it and act on it. Beth, why did you say that?

Wil Schroter: Because it's true. I have, um, you know, some health issues where sometimes I'm just exhausted it, whether it be mentally or physically and, or I am introverted, right? So, so, you know, you come off as being this confident person, but in reality, it's, it's hard for me to go to every meeting that I go to. So, you know, I, I have that in my head now because I've had it happen enough where it's like I don't want to go. But then all of a sudden I find myself talking to this person that it's the exact person that I need to talk to right now after I learned this. Right? Like to Jen's point, it's like Well, now I know better from this screw up. And now this person is standing right in front of me and if I had known this, then I wouldn't have pitched this person who was the wrong. You know what I mean? It's just all this stuff starts to fall into place. But you, you have to be in the room just if you're, if you're gonna be, if you're in startups and you really want to be successful, you have to be in the room, whatever that room is for you

Ryan Rutan: agreed and understood, I'm gonna react to something really specific there, which is another, you know, introvert who extroverts when he has to, I find that to be one of the causes of exhaustion for me. Like I notice that when I'm, when I'm put into a position where I have to do when I have to be in the room, when I have to fill the room, then there will be a period after that where I'm just dead tired, exhausted mentally, physically and it happens, right? And I'm just, I have to be aware of that and I have to manage it and I try to plan accordingly. Like there used to be times where I would agree to doing this as part of we're coming. Like the saying, no thing I got invited to speak at like three things in a row where like, you know, two days in a row and then like another couple of days later and I thought like if I do that by day two or three of this, I'm gonna be a disaster and I'm not gonna be worth listening to. And so I think recognizing these things about ourselves and kind of knowing some of these, these limitations that we have and, and, and not being afraid of them and just, and working around them. And while we're on the topic of not being afraid, I want to return to the comment you made earlier about not being afraid to be a woman. And also need to understand the thing about not eating the last peanut M and M I, I

Wil Schroter: got, well, the last peanut M and M thing would be the most important thing that we learned today. Don't jump off before I get to that because I guarantee you'll change your life. But when I was younger, I'm 55 or almost, I used to sign my name as B Miller. Um I, I would imply that I was not female. I wouldn't say that I was a man but it gets you appointments. And I, I purposely didn't join the women in business network because I'm like, I don't wanna get business because I'm a woman just like, I don't want to be paid less because I'm a woman. But there were so many letters and help that I would have had along the way. But I rejected the idea because I was always like anything boys can do, girls can do better. That song that I learned when I was growing up. And so you get that I can do it myself kind of mentality. And I missed this huge, you know, cruise ship of people that would have, you know, introduced me to people and helped me have perspective and, you know, learn from them. So, so that's what that one was, is, you know, kind of to get out of your own way and realize where you have these hard fast rules about who you are and what's important to you and you know, you grow to, I forget who was point. It was the growth thing. So here's the thing about the peanut M and MS. So has anybody here not had a peanut M and M one person? Ok. So this is generally gonna be helpful for people in this room. Have you ever had a bad peanut? M and M like with the nut went bad? OK. And that's how bad would you say that it is on a scale from 1 to 10, like a

Ryan Rutan: 1000? I'd give it a 8.9. Yeah. Yeah.

Wil Schroter: Right. You can't, that's what the last

Ryan Rutan: M and M you can conjure that burnt flavor. Now, I'm feeling it. That's

Wil Schroter: what the last one's for because if you get that last second, last one, that should be your last one. Because what if the bad one is the last one? You have no other M and M to wash it down with. Wow.

Ryan Rutan: So, it's like advice. What if we just hedge our bets and always have two bags? Yeah. Seriously. Oh,

Wil Schroter: now that is a good plan. I plan ahead but not the last bet. Not the last one on either bag.

Ryan Rutan: Ok. I will agree to that. Here are a few things that I just want to kind of take away from this. I, I think we're all of the opinion or kind of uh same mind here that there's only so much you can control for. Like there's only so much you can go back and like change yourself. Like some of it, you actually do need to kind of like, you know, earn it and go through it yourself. But at the same time in my feeling and when I talk to a lot of founders, we kind of also suck for seeking out that help, right? Like I tell founders all the time, don't guess like all the things you're about to do, everybody that's sitting in this room, everybody that's listening has been figured out a million times before you and there's someone probably on this call or, or, you know, uh in the network that actually already knows this answer. Every single person we do a pitch deck with, they come to us and say, hey, I'm putting together my pitch deck. It's so hard. It's like, dude, it's been done like thousands of times before, like, we can actually just give you the answers to the test here. And I think that same concept, that same mindset is what I'd love to see more people change to be able to say, you know, I actually don't have to figure everything out from scratch. There are people that have done this a million times that can probably make this 50% easier. Hell, if it's 10% easier, it was, it was worth, you know, seeking those people out. And so my advice to everyone I speak to myself as well is be the person that is constantly seeking out those answers from other people. Stop figuring it out for yourself, man. I wasted so much life and that's probably the biggest advice I give young pimply face. Will. What about you, Ron? I think it'd be something very similar to that because again, that was, I think the core of my issue was, was me trying to handle way too much on my own and always assuming that I could do better that I would figure it out that somehow, you know, my circumstances were so different than anything else. Anybody had ever done that I needed and had to do it my way. And, you know, to some case, like at the time, you know, the internet was a brand new thing. There, there weren't a whole lot of pioneers who were available to me to follow, but there were certainly plenty of people who had knowledge by proxy that would have been super, super valuable. So yeah, I think I I just echo that man like we don't have to figure everything out for ourselves. Sometimes the wheel is round enough. Uh just roll with it. Yeah, agreed. Agreed. Well, that being said, everyone, thank you so much for coming out. We love seeing you guys. Uh It actually makes the show so much more interesting to us because we get to see your faces, get to see your reactions and we appreciate it. We appreciate you guys listening to the show of folks that are listening. That'll hear the recorded version of this. We love you guys. You guys have given us so much great feedback. It makes it all worthwhile and it actually makes our day. So thank you everyone. 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.