Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the start up therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of start-ups dot com. Will Schroeder will. Urgency tends to be the soup of the day every day in start up land. And yet I believe that there is a real cost to always having this really short term vision. Um And, and without putting our milestones far enough out that we kind of have that real true North Star. At what point can we afford to switch to having a longer view? And what's the cost if we
Wil Schroter: don't? I mean, that's the problem like uh initially, it's all about survival and we stay in survival mode because we have to, you know, when you think like, like compared to a job where at, at our jobs, uh the company is already gonna exist, we just have to do our jobs, right? That's essentially, you know, kind of the focal point. In this particular case, we take it a lot further in this particular case, just doing our jobs is enough. We also have to do our jobs and make payroll and to stay alive long enough, et cetera. But we wind up being in this fight or flight mode for so long. And then we combine it with this narrative that's a little bit broken. A lot of what we talked about here. We start ups just have to move fast all the time at the expense of everything that we lose sight of having a long term vision or, or just a longer play. So we get totally distracted, totally distracted the entire time with all of these short term plays and we never wind up building anything, we just wind up with the company that's trying to survive at the expense of everything.
Ryan Rutan: Sure. And that has, that has a real cost at some point, right? Because then it's, you know, all kinds of analogs here, right? But if you're, you're so focused on, on kind of the task at hand that you're not investing or really even paying attention to it. And it manifests itself in different way. If you stay in survival mode, that can have the cost of not really having a clear vision of what you're building towards. Sometimes, even if we have a clear vision of what we're building towards, we stay in that survival mode. We're not really stacking up the bricks in a way that actually makes this into something longer term defensible and all that. Right? And I think that's where the the real challenge begins is that we never transition out of that and, and again, look, peace. If you've just arrived on the island, the first thing to do is to figure out, you know, a little bit of shelter and some water. Um But we can't stay in that mode for very long. If we expect to grow a business, said differently. If we stay in that mode, we should expect to not grow a
Wil Schroter: business. I think it's tricky because there are so many distractions uh in this, you know, issue of survival that it's hard, it's hard to zoom out and say, wait, what are we doing all this for again? Right. And so I think today, let's talk through all of the categories if you will of distractions of the things that actually keep pulling us away from our long term vision for kind of often what we set out to do to begin with. Because for example, if right now we're running out of money, all we care about is raising money, right? So it's all we're thinking about now, think of how many ways that morphs into a distraction from the long term vision at the very least, if I'm out pitching investors, I'm not building product, right? If I'm not building product, that means I have nothing to hand to customers, which is what this is all about to begin with. So that's a distraction. And then what if the things that I'm trying to to to chase right now, you know, to stay relevant are trends, investors, all these things which by the way aren't necessarily synced with our long term vision. So I I think part of this challenge man is being in a mode where we are so distracted, we just watch the entire timeline of what we're supposed to be doing pass us by.
Ryan Rutan: I agree. Yeah. And and unfortunately, it feels like the nature of start ups, like the the very ethos of the entire thing is that it pulls you away from that long term vision, right? Everything that's required to achieve long term vision is some form of a distraction, right? And so it just takes constant re centering and reminding yourself like we talk about this whole time with, with founders going back to the why, right? Because if you, you lose sight of that, right? And I know it sounds, it sounds a little woo but when we lose track of that, why like what it is that we're trying to do in that very long term, not just build the big business, right? But I, because that, that's, that's easy to get distracted by well raising money is what's going to allow us to build a big business. But if we, if we start getting focused on the raising money and not what that enables, even in terms of what that enables, what is the long term outcome of that enablement? This is where it goes off the rails really quick. And we see founders just end up mired down in a bunch of activities that in and of themselves would have been valuable to the business, but not a we get stuck doing, right? And not if we forget the connectivity to that final goal. So
Wil Schroter: the the the investors are one obvious kind of distraction and a necessary, necessary evil, right? And, and again, even, even the investors would explain that, hey, you know, like I get it, you have to spend a bunch of time raising money in order to be able to build the product you want, totally get it. But it is a massive distraction. And here's where it starts to become more of a distraction. This is where I get anxious when I watch founders do this, where they start modifying what the long term goals of the company were based on what they think will raise money. This happens all the time. In fact,
Ryan Rutan: these were two need funds plus hype cycle and you've got a perfect storm for getting hella distracted.
Wil Schroter: What start up is not an A I start up right now, no matter what your business is,
Ryan Rutan: it's hilarious. I thought you were making pita pockets to sell from a food cart. But we're using A I to drive customer insights. Exactly.
Wil Schroter: Exactly. Right. And so if we rewind back 22 years to the last hype cycle with crypto, every business had to be on the Blockchain, right? Every single founder, I would talk to say, oh yeah, we, we are a Blockchain enabled company. I'm like, why that doesn't make any sense and we would get pressured and people be like, oh, you know, start ups dot com. Where are you guys with crypto and Blockchain? I'm like, nowhere. It makes no sense for our business whatsoever. Nothing about what we do needs to be on the Blockchain
Ryan Rutan: or in the metaverse that, right. Like, it's just, it's like constant pressure to jump into these pools that nobody's tested the depth on yet. Well, it's a,
Wil Schroter: it's a few things if we were out there and we needed, we needed to raise capital and we knew that saying that we are on the Blockchain would do that. Guess what? We'd probably be on the Blockchain. I don't
Ryan Rutan: know if that's the cost of entry of the room. You do it right. If that's what it costs to buy the ticket, to gain entry, to gain audience with the, with the emperors, then, then you do
Wil Schroter: it. Sure. But that's what I'm saying. This is where we're trying to have long term focus. But now all of a sudden we're getting pulled off off course by this other bullshit. The hype cycles are bullshit. The problem is most founders, they're, they're founders for the first time. They don't understand the difference between an opportunity cycle and a hype cycle and, and often they're the same thing, right. So right now A I is at almost its apex of hype cycle now to be fair A I is useful. I mean, I, I'm not gonna compare A I to Blockchain because they're very different. But like every other hype cycle it will wash out and you'll start to realize the use cases are really strong in a few areas like they always are and actually kind of useless in others. When we, when we had the mixed reality or VR hype cycles, it was gonna change everything, it was gonna replace phones and, and then people actually used it for a while and they're like, no, no, actually not. Right. Um
Ryan Rutan: Wearing the analog of a 19 eighties cell phone strapped to my head. Right. Not exactly my idea.
Wil Schroter: But again, we keep trying to please the wrong party and, and I think that really takes us off mission. If we're wondering who we should be pleasing. It is either your customer or your employees, right? Like one of the two, ideally both. But if, if, what you're working on isn't at the behest of one of those two. chances are you're probably on the
Ryan Rutan: road distracted,
Wil Schroter: you've been distracted. Yes. Yes, you
Ryan Rutan: check that off and this is what happens. I mean, so just to, to carry this point a little further, right. So there, there are a lot of ways that we get distracted. It's your point. Like sometimes we need to do these things because we need to do these things. Right. If it's, it's what's going to gain us intrigue to an investor conversation. Ok. Right. If somebody on the team really wants to explore how Blockchain could maybe get involved and we give them a little time to do that. Ok? I think where it becomes really dangerous and we see this happen a lot is where we cross the line from doing this because we need to, for some short term purpose to becoming permanently distracted buying it and believing the bullshit ourselves where like if we had to say this to get into a room with investor, that's one thing. But if we start to redirect our entire product vision towards this bullshit that we created just to gain entry to a room. Now, we've got the start of what can be a really long drawn out runway path.
Wil Schroter: Right. Right. I agree. I also think that at some point, all of these distractions don't take us anywhere. That's actually what concerns me. So the idea is start ups need to move fast and do all these things. And there's truth to that. There's of course, there's urgency. No, nobody can question them. But where I get anxious is when we confuse urgency with just straight up short term decision making, right? Just lack of vision if you will. And so uh the, the comparison I would use and you and I talked about this before is the difference between building huts versus castles and, and the analogy. You know, for folks hearing this basically goes like this. Uh you and I are stranded on an island initially. We just need shelter, right? We just need to build a hut. We need basic shelter and we need to make some short term decisions to do that. But every time there's gonna be rain, every time there's gonna be some storm, we're gonna lose the hut and have to build it all over again. We're, we're never really getting anywhere. We're always trying to kind of rebuilding. That's the short term decisions. Like what we wanna be building toward are castles. Something that has actual staying power. Something that by the way takes a really long time, takes a really long time,
Ryan Rutan: especially if it's just the two of us on an island.
Wil Schroter: What else we got to do? Right. For second silent. It's hard for us to, to step back and say, you know what? We got to get out of the hut business. We got to get into the castle business because castles are what stand the test of time. Castles are something that we can rely on for the long term. And, and what does that actually mean? Building castles means things like building product that, that we're not constantly ripping back out on a regular basis building around long term value with our clients versus some short term trend that we think might turn some heads. If I give that an example in current, let's make everything A I OK. Why does it have to be A I just like. Right. Exactly. Like
Ryan Rutan: we will, let's get
Wil Schroter: distracted. Exactly. And so uh the, the challenge, the challenge with building something seminal, something that will stand, the test of time is sticking to your guns for sure is, is being able to say, hey, yeah, this probably won't pay short term dividends. But if this is really the product, the company that we wanna build for the long term, we're gonna have to invest and it's gonna suck because the short term wins are so much more fun. The hard stuff is saying like take start ups dot com. We're in year 11 of start ups dot com. 10 years ago, we made plans to more or less be where we are today, right? To be able to, to have the fortitude and the stability to be able to make decisions for long term. Uh Our team got together this week, flew in from all around the world yourself included, you and I got to hang out and, and we talked about, hey, what do the next 5 to 10 years look like for us, right? For sure. Making decisions that will take 5 to 10 years to manifest. I think one
Ryan Rutan: of the tricks is that we have to make short term decisions at, at certain points, right? There are things that we will have to do for survival, for safety, for a lot of reasons there are things that have to happen in the short term. One of the things we can do to improve that is to try to say what's the best short term decision we can make that feeds into the long term vision, right? And it's, it's sometimes that doesn't mean it's the absolute best for the short term, but we have to balance that short term because to your point, if we just keep saying, well, um we can just build another hut, we can just build another hut, we can just build another hut. We just end up with a bunch of huts, right? And then the value of that at the end is, is near zero, right? We have to say, ok, we need to build something like a hut. But how can we make this in such a way that it could eventually turn into a castle? We gotta keep the castle in mind as we do this. So sometimes there's a little bit of a trade off saying like, well, we could do this thing which would make us a little bit more short term cash or we could do this other thing which will make us enough short term cash to clear the fence, but we can keep pointing towards the moon, right? It's funny, I, you know, I often get asked and I'm sure you do as well. What with the the core qualities of a founder? Like, what is that? Skill set that every founder needs to have. What's that one thing that they all do? And that the answer has changed significantly over the last 25 years. But the thing I found myself consistently saying, and it speaks directly to this point for probably the last 10 years is the ability to zoom in and zoom out quickly, right? To be able to say, I can look at the short term, I can act with urgency when I need to, but I never keep acting with urgency for so long without zooming out to make sure that I'm still pointed towards that long term goal, right? Let's make sure that this hut I'm building today is actually a closet in the castle, right? Let's make sure that the great cash flow I'm building today supports the longer term vision of how we want to sell and who we want to sell to for the long term of the business. And I think this becomes important in terms of being able to make those good short term decisions because we have to, right. There's no version of not ever making a short term decision. It's a start, they change all the time, the environment changes so many variables, we have to make sure that we're not completely changing the equation all the time, particularly not just for some flight of fancy because A I because Blockchain because VR because whatever the hell comes next,
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. I think the great stuff gets built with a willingness to adhere to the long term vision, right? Which is, which is always harder. I mean, if it were, this wouldn't be the subject. It's always harder to be able to say, yeah, this is gonna pay uh pay off right away and by the way, sometimes it has to pay off right away. There's certain things you can't wait for. But that said, I, if all we're doing is short term and we never plant those seeds. Nothing, nothing ever happens, right? We're constantly in the short term business and that ends poorly. I think the other side of it. And I think these two things run in parallel is it takes a really long time to build a good business really. And, and in case people wonder what I'm talking about, I'm saying a minimum of 7 to 10 years to build a good business and, and I know it would be awesome if we could just get it right in year one at that point, sit back and it's not going to happen. And, and, and if it does happen, it is a fluke. It's not because you were so genius. If you're not sure, try to do it twice.
Ryan Rutan: Just repeat, please
Wil Schroter: call us good luck with that. But uh point is, um, it's hard for us to sometimes remember in such a short term thinking business, the start up business that the true value gets unlocked. 7, 1015 years out. Now, a lot of people don't, you can't conceive that because they've never done this before and they hear about start-ups growing overnight. You know, it's always funny when they say, but growing overnight and getting so big so fast and I guess that's the way it goes. Those are anomalies, which is why you hear about them, right? If it is the way it is a thing that everybody did, no one would care. Or
Ryan Rutan: you, you mistake the timeline entirely because you're basing it on when you, you heard about the company, right? And you dig into the history like, oh, this was actually four or five different versions of this same company earlier on. Maybe there were, you know, a couple of co-founders worked on something, you know, similar but disparate at some point then came together, right? It's very rarely, right? Or 30 year career history in a particular field that leads to starting the start up and, and, and the domain knowledge that it took, right, the overnight start up. I mean, maybe there are a few that we've seen that really did like in that 12 to 18 month period from pure conception to scale happens. But look, we're talking about like you want to talk about just, you know, any, any company that gets to that point of success. Um We're in a, a tiny infinitesimal percentage and then multiply that by another tiny in ins uh infinitesimal percentage, I can do it, I can speak. Um And, and then we end up with the, the number of those that happened, right? It's ones per decade.
Wil Schroter: I wish I'd had this um this disposition earlier in my career where I actually understood how long it took to build things and I could have had, I don't want to call it patience because I don't think you and I have already found her as patience, but I think understanding is probably a better way to say it. In other words, you know, when we just got back from our, our leadership uh get together and, and um and, and we're looking at kind of long term, all of us can understand at this point that things take a long time, things worth building, take a long time, any company that's of merit right now. Um that's probably sitting as an app on your phone probably has a 5 to 7 year minimum window that it took to mature to get there. There are exceptions, but there's not a lot. It usually takes a very long time and that's ok. Right. I think when, when we get caught up in this cycle that everything was supposed to happen instantly and we're trying to make decisions to kind of falsely fast forward or artificially fast forward. How long things should take? We, we wind up disappointed, you know, part of what we do with that is we burn ourselves out with these short term expectations for sure. Probably the best way I could, I could make an analogy here is if we think that the start up race is only 100 yard dash, then we're gonna prepare ourselves and we're gonna exert based on a finish line that's 100 yards out. But will you, you will quickly learn is that 100 yard dash is more like like 100 mile dash. And if you go full guns, not just you, but your whole team, it doesn't end well. I've
Ryan Rutan: got an analog on this one. I, I will routinely try to anticipate whether I'm gonna be subbed out in the second half of a soccer match. Um, and oftentimes we only have a couple of subs. So it's, it's happened before where I'm playing like, I'm only gonna play 50 60 70 minutes and then something happens, somebody else gets injured and the sub that I thought was going to be for me has to go play for somebody else. There's nothing quite like that feeling of giving it your all so that you can get to the finish line and then you get to the finish line and they're like, yeah, you're about halfway there, right? You don't want to end up in this position because look at the early stages, there's so much to do, right? There's so many things, but we know jack shit about what it's actually gonna take to get the business there. We make educated guesses. You know, we try to turn variables into constant, we're doing all the things that we have to do, but I've seen it happen time and again where you just pour so much energy into that stage that by the time you, you turn enough of the variables into constant and you've got a bit of a path forward that you now have an absolutely dog tired founder trying to figure out, ok. Now, I know where I need to go, but I'll be damned if I have the energy to take another step. I can't move further forward with this thing now because I've just completely spent myself at a time where the energy wasn't well directed. Now, this isn't me saying like, hey, just conserve yourself until later because then there won't be a later either. But we do have to strike a bit of a balance. And I think to your point, we just, we can't, we're never gonna be patient, right? It's not our thing, but we have to be realistic about how long it takes. And we have to be realistic about pushing ourselves beyond that empty point of the gas tank where then we get to these critical moments and we just don't have the Jews to
Wil Schroter: make it happen. I gotta say um for the last 30 years, I go to bed every night, disappointed in myself. OK. So let me explain. It doesn't matter what I accomplish, how will
Ryan Rutan: sells becoming a founder to the, to the upcoming masses of, of wanna be founders. Come on in guys. It's fantastic. You can, you can enjoy a 30 year stretch of self loathing. But dude, it's I, I same, right. I get it and it's like he always wanted to do a little bit more. Hang on. I just, I want to put a little bit of a twist on this because it's, it really isn't as, as negative as it sounds. We, we care, right? And, and there's nothing better than being able to like wake up and have something to care about so much that you go to sleep, wishing you had accomplished more, right? I I think that it's, it's really a beautiful thing
Wil Schroter: and it's one of those things where um again, even having done this for so long in understanding this stuff. I mean, hell, we're doing podcasts about how you need to pace yourself and what your expectations are. So, so what I'm trying to say is it's not that I don't get it. I do intellectually. I get it, but I feel the same way everybody else does, which is no matter how much I do. I feel like I could have done more. I could have worked faster. I could have done this even though I know that I sort of couldn't, even though, again, I have enough operating history to know what my benchmarks are. If I'm saying, hey, I should be running a four minute mile and in 30 years, I've never run a four minute mile. Right at some point. It's kind of like, no, you, you're not 44 minute mile guy. We
Ryan Rutan: have to recognize what's possible. I think that's part of it, but let's use another analog. You and I spend a bunch of time in the, in the woodshop over the weekend. Right. And there were things that we could have done faster, right. And we could have done faster. I think this is always important to think about. Like, we can always want to have done more, gotten more accomplished in a certain block of time. What we never really are honest with ourselves about is how would that have changed the quality of that outcome? How would that have changed my quality of understanding? How would that have changed my knowledge that came out of that, right? And you and I did a lot of things over the weekend that were counter to speed, but we're pro quality, right? We said like, look, we could do this this way, but back to the earlier point of, are we building a castle? Right? If you're still laying the foundation, this is not a good time to cut corners, right? This is not a good time to, to do things in a way where you're gonna have to replace it later, you're gonna have to rethink it, you're gonna regret it. And so I think we also have to be really realistic about it with ourselves and say like, OK, I didn't get as much as I wanted to done today of what I got done. This is what I try to do with myself every night of what I did get done. Did I do the best I could? Am I happy with the outcomes of what happened? Forget about the quantity. Can I, can I look back at the quality and be like, yeah, I did that right now. If I don't find myself checking that box now, I actually have something to kick myself in the ass
Wil Schroter: about. Yeah. And you know, the other side of it too is, you know, I I said I should have worked a few more hours fine, but they're just gonna cost me the next day, right? It's not like there's this infinite bucket. And I think one of the hardest things there is for me to do, even at this point in my career is to pace myself. Um, actually, maybe be more specific. I'm actually decent at pacing myself. Now, I'm not good at forgiving myself for pacing myself, which is a whole other thing which, which goes back to, you know, you and I have talked about this before. I have two modes work and guilt. And I'm, I'm in one or the other. Either working or I'm guilty that I'm not working, right? Not an awesome place to be. And I'm sure some of the folks listening are like nodding their heads going. Yeah, that's exactly me and the rest of them are going that poor bastard. But uh both of you are right by the way. But it's, it's hard for me to, to continually remind myself that this is a marathon and it's always been a marathon and, and nothing that I've ever done, done well, happened overnight or happened quickly or actually happened as a result of short term decision making. Everything that was worthwhile, whether I meant to or not was actually a result of what was essentially a long term commitment to seeing something through. Not because II I changed the home page or a landing page real quick or, or shift the model to Blockchain and all of a sudden everything worked that literally never works. No,
Ryan Rutan: it doesn't, starts with vision, right? Leads to planning, then there's effort, then there's analysis and adjustment, then you're planning again, but you gotta keep that vision piece in there, right? Is that we're talking about before zooming in zooming out. Um And to your point like it takes time, especially building something of quality, takes time. So if what you want is a big outcome at the end, expect that to take time. If you want a big outcome and fast, you can want that the vast majority, the probability, statistically speaking, math is going to tell you highly unlikely, right? So you know how many people do you know who, who have spent a lot of time planning a trip to those pyramids that they threw together like the ones that they built in four or five years. Do you remember those? Nobody remembers those they don't exist or maybe they did, they don't anymore.
Wil Schroter: There's also rarely anybody to remind us how long it takes to build things, right? Because everything around us is the narrative is counter. That's the challenge, right? Um Investors want us to move fast. The hype cycles want us to move fast. Social media wants us to move fast. Our internal staff wants us to move fast for different reasons, right? For, for their own reasons, sometimes as founders as CEO S as manager, wherever you are in the process, you are under constant pressure to move quickly. Yeah. Yeah. But it's very rare that someone says at what cost? Sure. Hey, we can scale up, we can raise a lot more money. We can do this faster at what cost? Right. When you talk to people who've been through this before, who've raised a lot of money and you know, have seen what happens when you move too fast. They would have killed for someone to raise their hand that could have actually slowed them down, which is rare. But at what cost, there are lots of decisions we can make right now in our business. Um That might make us a little bit more money faster. It might make us uh grow a little bit faster, et cetera. But at a cost and that cost can be any number of things. Um Hiring is a huge part of this, not just the speed at which you hire people, but who you hire, right? Oh, we need this person really badly
Ryan Rutan: because that balance between speed and quality, right? Hiring a bunch of people, none of whom pan out. What did that buy you? Right. But we see start ups do this all the time, post funding. They're like, well, the expectations are gonna grow really fast now. Um The way to do that is to add a bunch of capability and a bunch of hands and so let's do it all right. And so we throw, we throw money at a problem that and, and we grow a team. Um But without considering the quality. I mean, not, not without considering it, but without giving it proper consideration again, we're, we're using time as the benchmark, uh, versus quality is the benchmark and there has to be a balance between the two. We can't just sit around endlessly and think we'll just wait until we find the perfect person. And you're like Ryan, you said that 8.5 years ago. Um, and we're still waiting to hire that human. So like I haven't found them
Wil Schroter: yet. Yeah. Fair, fair. I think that, you know, when we again, if we zoom out like uh part of this is the team agreeing that we've got 5, 1015 years to do what we came here to do. If everybody has super short term thinking and their only thinking is, hey, let's get into this thing, let's raise, let's try to exit as fast as possible. It, it sounds wonderful and of who wouldn't want, you know, money faster, of course, right? It just leads to a lot of shitty thinking. There's really no other way to describe it, right? I think there's a maturity in an experience that comes with being able to say I wanna build something of value. Yes. At some point, if, if given the option, I would love to extract, you know, some, some, some of my own value out of that thing. But I want to build something of value and in order to do that, I'm gonna have to dedicate the next 10 years minimum, by the way. And I just want to go on a tangent for a second. The idea that you only dedicate 10 years in, in to anybody. That sounds like a ton of time. It's even more hilarious. Like no one used to look at a building a business and say, I'm gonna dedicate an entire 10 years. People used to build businesses and many still do. I just want to be clear and they say I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to building this business.
Ryan Rutan: Imagine this, it took you 12 years to go from being a kindergartner to being a knucklehead high school graduate, right? It took that much time to make that evolution. We're talking about building a business that adds immense value to the world. Let's let's put it in its rightful place in terms of a timeline.
Wil Schroter: I love when I see truly generational founders and I don't mean generational founders as if they've handed off wealth. I mean, like the the Rupert Murdochs of the world who have built empires over 50 years over a massive period of time, right? And, and in my mind, you know, uh Warren Buffet would be a great example is um have built a kind of value, an enduring value that only that kind of contribution, only that kind of vision over that long of a period of time can do. Now again, if you could do it faster, do it faster, but you probably won't. So, the next best thing is be able to zoom out and say, OK, we wanna do something extraordinary. How much time do we have for it? And we say it's gonna take us a minimum of 10 years again if we get something done sooner and something crops up cool. But I think if, what we're trying to say is I wanna do that 10 year thing that everybody is talking about, but I wanna do it in two. I guarantee that's going to fail. It's gonna end horribly. You're gonna try to take a bunch of shortcuts. You're like, oh, we raise a ton of money that'll make it go faster and, and we'll get there quick more quickly. No, all you're gonna do is you're gonna raise a bunch of money. You're gonna spend it poorly because you're trying to rush something that isn't supposed to be rushed and then you're gonna look back and say, oh what the hell happened? Gee, I wonder you ran too fast. You tried to take something that takes 10 years, get it done in two years. And every
Ryan Rutan: time I hear somebody talk about that type of acceleration, here's what I actually hear them saying. I would like to put myself in a position to make decisions with less information and less resources. That doesn't sound like recipe for success in my book. I
Wil Schroter: think the other side of it too is, it takes a little bit of pressure off your shoulders and the team's shoulders when I look at something like, like if I look at our business right now, and I say, in order to do something meaningful from here, I think we've already built a meaningful business. But in order to build something meaningful from here, it's gonna take me 10 more years of investment, you know, to get to some of those milestones. OK. Let's pause with that for a second. That means while I wanna get a lot done this month, this year, it's one of 10. Yeah. Right. If I, if, if I change that math and I say no, I want to get there by the end of next year. That is very different math. Those are totally different expectations and it's gonna force me, it's gonna create a force function to do a lot of things that probably aren't in my long term best interest and, and, and that's where this thing starts to really fall apart. I think for, for all founders, I think all founders, the key is to be able to first recognize that things take a long time. Right? And that's OK. And that's ok. But the second part is to be able to pace yourself, is be able to pace yourself and say, look, I wanna build something wonderful. It's going to take 10 years, probably longer, takes less, great, but it's probably gonna take 10 years probably longer. And I'm gonna create a plan and I'm gonna create a Touchstone within the organization where everyone, when we make decisions, we zoom out first and we say does that align with the 10 year plan if it does go for it, if it feels forced, if it feels like we're rushing, if it feels like we're trying to take 10 years and compress it into two, it's probably a bad decision. 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. There's 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.