Welcome back to the episode of the startup therapy podcast.
This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by Will Schroeder,
my friend, the founder and CEO of startups.
com.
Will sometimes a lot of the times, most of the time being
a founder feels like we're like swinging and missing over and
over and over and over again.
But you know, the truth is our careers aren't about
being consistently right in like really big ways, right?
Like it's about, you know, eventually connecting
with a bigger one, but just as much about like.
Regularly connecting with the small ones, like, and I know,
I know you want to share a story today and, and like,
let's tee it off with that, which is that, uh, Mark Cuban
once famously said, I think it was basically just, you
only need to be right once.
Yeah, I may be off by a word or two there.
So I'm not quoting that.
I'm paraphrasing Mark Cuban, but that was the basic premise.
We got to be right.
Once and sometimes that doesn't even mean a really big right.
It just means enough of the right kind of right.
But I think that's interesting because I don't think as
founders, uh, that we understand how asymmetric our wins are.
The opposite of asymmetric.
Yeah, sequential whereby we show up at a job coming
out of college and we keep working that job and every
year we get paid more.
Right.
Just this kind of sequential compounding style of success.
As folks know, this is nothing like that, right?
Just like you could go 10 years working at this thing
and actually have less money than when you started.
Quite frequently the outcome.
Exactly.
And we're in this interesting thing where
we have our whole career.
Let's say like our professional active career could span
50 years reasonably, right?
At any time in that 50 years, we could have our moment.
The problem is we don't know what it is, but I think, I think
there's like a false narrative.
That's like, well, if I haven't hit it by the time I'm 25 or
30, which is usually only like relegated to people that are
that age, that things like that, that I'll never hit it.
And so I think let's dig into how wrong that is, like how
really in this business, you only need to be right once at.
Any point in the timeline at any point in the timeline,
so we mentioned Cuban, okay?
So a lot of people don't actually know, remember,
or care where Mark Cuban actually made all his money.
They hear he's a billionaire.
Yeah, he owns the Mavericks.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, right?
I don't know.
But I bet if you ask the average person on the street,
how did he make his money?
How did he become a billionaire?
They can't tell you.
Yeah.
And here's why.
Mark Cuban made all of his money in 1998 when a
company called broadcast.
com, a company you've never heard of went public and
then essentially got sold to Yahoo a year later.
So for 5.
7 billion,
which by the way, at that time, like for a startup
company, that, that was.
A banana's valuation.
I mean, it's
crazy now, back then, that was unheard of, okay?
Now, just real quick, because I love, I love,
uh, internet history.
So, with Broadcast.
com, Cuban wasn't, he didn't even start Broadcast.
com, until he was 37 years old.
Okay, now I, I think that's interesting because
a lot of people think like, Oh, he was probably
24 and blah, blah, blah.
No, he
wasn't a 37 year old in the dorm room, I hope.
Yeah, exactly.
And where I think this is interesting is a lot of folks,
specifically folks that are 37, are like, oh, I'm later
in my career, it's too late.
It's like, dude, this guy, like, the biggest, most
important decision he made wasn't until after he was 37.
Now, fortunately, because he just hit at exactly the right
time, which is part of this, he ends up selling again, you know,
his stake, he had a co founder, but his stake in this wildly.
Overblown valuation to Yahoo, which at the time was one of
the few, like, companies that survived the dot com crash
and everything else like that, so the money was good.
But by the time Cuban became a billionaire,
he was 41 years old.
Now, Ryan, what did we say the vintage was?
99 ish?
98, 99 that that happened?
It IPO'd in 98, I think, and then Yahoo did the buyout in 99.
Okay, well, let's
stick
with that.
25 years ago.
Now here's what's even more interesting than the fact
that he was 41, let's say that he became a billionaire.
He's been a billionaire for 25 years.
Yeah, that's one of those things they don't tell you,
right, like never rest on your laurels or you can't rest on
your laurels unless they're 5.
7 billion worth of laurels, then you can
rest on them for a while.
You can actually sit on that for a good amount of time.
Now the reason we chose Mark Cuban as the person
to kind of like feature around this is because Cuban
has clearly been Wildly active in investing, right?
I mean, he made actually a great investment in the Mavericks
which which worked out Okay, but definitely didn't have
the kind of payday that he had before that and you know, he's
obviously famously on Shark Tank So he's investing tons
of stuff now to be fair for folks that aren't aware Shark
Tank investments are generally like the worst investments ever
and they all tend to fail And most of those deals never get
done and I, I love shark tank.
So I'm not knocking it.
I'm just saying like, yeah, there's no way Mark was going
to get rich on that one.
But my point is he's a very active investor, Ryan.
I don't know if you know this, Mark Cuban is in our cap table.
So yeah, yeah.
He's been in there since clarity.
Yeah.
He invested in clarity.
Every time we have an investor
relations meeting, I expect Mark to be there.
And he, he never is like, I always call it.
I'm like, Mark, are you, are you on the call Mark right here now?
And, Mark, I can guarantee you're not going to make
another billion dollars from us.
Not off that one.
Just locking that in now.
Anyway, so, here he is, this wildly successful founder,
and he makes, you know, over a billion dollars.
He's 41 years old.
Now he has 25 years since then to do any deal you could
possibly imagine, right?
The guy's wildly connected, wildly active, etc. And has
never done it again since.
All the resources you could
possibly need, right?
Exactly, right?
Why?
Why hasn't he done it again?
And why, generally speaking, do most people never, ever,
ever repeat the success that they had in any capacity?
I think that's There's a lot of randomness involved, right?
There's a lot of chance particle collision that
makes these things happen.
Dig into that.
When you think about how random it is, what comes to mind?
The lottery, right?
Like, you don't, you don't ever hear anybody worrying about
something like, hey, how do we become a three peat lottery?
And we're like, oh, you've only done it
once, you failure, right?
Well, I didn't really have that much to doing it in
the first place, right?
It wasn't really something I did.
Uh, and so therefore, yeah, it's, it's, look, it's
not quite that random.
And I think that there is something else important.
I know we're going to get put a little bit later, uh,
but it's, it's the fact that.
Success at this level is very rare, but success within a
startup doesn't have to be success at this level, right?
You don't have to be that right, right?
Mark Cuban was right once at that level.
He's also been right on a lot of other things that would have
also made him wealthy enough.
Yep.
We can argue about whether he could have done that without
the resources from the first really, really right or not.
But that's what it comes down to, right?
It's the, that level of rightness requires.
a lot of good fortune, really incredible timing, most of which
is actually out of your control, right place, right time, right
idea, right level of input and kind of tenacity and sticking
to it and just being around long enough so that you are there
at that right moment, right?
Right.
And
you know, part of it too is understanding.
I think this is the hardest thing for a lot of folks is
understanding that we are in a wildly asymmetrical business.
Like I mentioned before, which means We don't have like year
over year consistent wins.
It's just generally not how, how it works.
We have lots of usually losses and misses and
failures, which then lead to.
One, hopefully, you know, one phenomenal win, but the
reality is we don't know when that that win is going to
come, if it's going to come
right, if yeah, that's, that's it, if
right, right.
And so that when isn't just in our career, it's when in the
startup, the startup hit that level of trajectory, right?
So like you could be in year six of your startup.
And it's doing two million in ARR, and you're
just getting by, right?
You have just enough cash just to pay people, and
you're just getting by.
And you're thinking, ah, well, that was my shot, I missed
it, etc. Maybe, or, maybe your hit isn't going to come until
year 14.
I think that's the real misconception here, is that
there's sort of two paths.
One is this sort of stacked linear geometric growth, like
where it's just like, you know, we just grew year over year
over year and I understand how compounding math works.
And so eventually we get big just by every year growing
a little bit bigger, right?
Or there's the, we, we start, we pitch the
idea, we go get funded.
And somehow in the first three to four years, we
have this crazy, crazy spike that crazy spike.
Can never come.
It could come in the first three years.
It could come in year 12, right?
It's again that that that level of success is Incredibly
reliant on the principles of chaos and randomness
That's what I'm saying.
And I think that's the hard thing for us to wrap our heads
around, you know We're like, well, it wasn't successful in
the first three years like some of these things are so I guess
that's it I guess you know it we missed and maybe that's true.
You know, maybe you actually missed or Maybe the business
you are building takes 15 years to hit that, that metric.
And that's fine too.
Now again, can you survive that long?
Do you have the capital?
Do you have the, you know, the resources?
Maybe not.
But what I think is interesting is that for a lot of
founders, we have this feeling like this one must be it.
It's like, no, dude, like this is one of many.
Right?
Like hopefully, you know, if you're so fortunate, you start
one startup and that's your hit actually, to be fair, that
happened to me, to be fair, that happened to me, right?
Like the first startup I started did extraordinarily well.
And if I'm being honest, I've never built anything
bigger since, which is ironic because like it was my
biggest.
Like,
I have exponentially more experience, more resources,
more cash than I had back then.
Yeah.
And I've never been able to replicate like
that level of growth.
Now, there's some things I didn't want to replicate,
but, but, but that's, that's over there.
Right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I can't say it was my big, biggest success in,
in all regards, but it was the biggest payout.
Now, what was also interesting about that though, about
that first success is that it set up all my other success.
And I feel like folks don't really understand
how valuable a base hit early in the game can be.
And a base hit means either a business that became profitable,
and you can, you know, kind of leverage those profits,
or you had some sort of, you know, small windfall, etc.
You'll hear something like, ah, well, they only made 200, 000.
So, you know, It wasn't a big hit.
Yes, but would you say no to 200, 000?
Wait, no, no, no, but I think what's interesting is we're
so hyper focused that this is going to be the runaway hit,
especially early in our careers.
We don't realize how valuable a base hit could be to
our overall trajectory.
Let's, let's go back to, let's go back to Cuban for a second.
What a lot of people don't know, cause I don't
even know what broadcast.
com was, is that.
Cubans sold a business, I think when he was like 24
or 25, like pretty early, for 6 million dollars.
Like, way earlier than that, almost like, like
10 15 years before that.
Which gave him the latitude to be able to make some bets
that could become a broadcast.
com, right?
And that's what I think is fascinating, like, early in
my career, I made some money so I could pay off my debts.
Right?
So that I, I wouldn't have to, uh, constantly, you know, be
servicing all the debts that people tend to have in life.
Which set me up to be able to make other bets, right,
that I would have never been able to make if I was
servicing all those debts.
And, and I, I think those, those small hits, if you
will, give you that luxury.
Those small hits, while they don't seem like a big
deal at the time, that they don't let you retire, they
set up the fact that you can do things and make swings
that could be the big hits.
How do you see it in terms of small hits?
Right?
So there's, there's that version of a small hit, which is a
couple million dollar exit or 500, 000 exit, whatever it is
you, you, you pay off your debt.
What about the small hits that are just ongoing?
Are we talking just about small, but still relatively
significant kind of one off hits or the accumulation of just.
Every year we're able to put a little away or every
year we chip away at this.
Are we drawing a distinction there?
Are you, are you saying that like kind of doesn't matter?
You know, what's interesting is I remember having this
conversation, uh, with a really successful founder years ago.
And we were talking about like, what was the inflection
point in our careers where we got the most amount of like
value out of life, if you will.
Let me be specific.
I felt like when I was able to put 20, 000 in the bank,
Mind you I'm like 21 years old time, but when I was able to
put 20, 000 in the bank that probably Impacted 80 percent
of my life going forward.
And a lot of people like they're like 20, 000
bullshit, blah, blah, like, no, you don't understand.
It's all relative man.
It depends on where you are.
Like would, would 20, 000, if you had 0 right now, would 20,
000 set you up for a long period of time based on your life?
Now, probably not.
You've got, you've got family, kids, lots of stuff going on.
But at that time.
It was a big deal, right?
Like you said, it's the inflection point.
It sets a new baseline, right?
The foundation just got a little bit broader.
Well, let me be specific when people hear that their
immediate reaction is, well, you know, I can't pay bills
and retire in 20 K. That's not what I'm talking about at all.
Right.
What I'm saying is being able to keep playing baseball.
Exactly.
Right.
Like, yes, I needed active income.
I wasn't gonna retire in 20, 000.
Um, but once I had 24, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like once I had 20, 000 in the bank, I could take a
swing at something, and if I missed, which I would, I
had just enough cash to get back to the plate, right?
When you don't have that cash, and the miss is game
over, go back to, you know, Best Buy or wherever you
were working before, then that's a game changer.
It's, it's an extra life.
Go, let's switch off sports analogies for a minute.
You're, you're, we're video gamers now.
You've got an extra life, right?
So I can survive, I can survive a startup death and come
back and keep going, right?
Like we can, we can miss payroll.
We can lose a client.
We can get sued, whatever it might be.
We now have a 20k buffer between us and the abyss.
It was interesting because early in my career, like my expenses
were stupid low because I was coming out of college, right?
But I, I bought a house, uh, back in 1997.
seven, give or take, and I spent 167, 000 in that house.
Now, uh, when people hear that now, I mean, you got
to understand that was a long time ago, right?
So like that, that same house was probably worth three
to four times that, that amount now in today's terms.
So just, you know, do the math.
But that's how much I spent on it back then.
Right?
And that was all the money in the world to me.
I was living in a campus apartment prior to that.
So like, and my rent was 250 a month.
So like, relative to where I was, that was a big expenditure.
However, I was able to get in front of that debt.
I was able to pay off my college debt.
I was able to pay off my house.
I was able to pay off my car.
So I had no debt.
So I've essentially had next to no debt for almost 30 years.
Now, That has a
compounding effect too.
That's what I'm saying.
What people don't understand is they're like, Oh, you have
to make millions of dollars to have these opportunities.
You don't.
You don't need to have thousands of dollars
spent in the right places.
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 a
thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists.
You may just not know it, but that's okay.
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.
startups.
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.
It's funny because I think that in, in a lot of ways.
Founders think of like the small wins as stepping stones, right?
That they somehow need to lead to bigger and bigger wins.
Yep.
Or if we're not gaining, like the size of the
wind doesn't change.
If I just keep having the same size win over and over and over
again, it's not a good thing.
I would, I think we would both disagree with that, uh,
patently, but on the other side of it, I think that it's.
It's, they are more than stepping stones.
Yes, they're stepping.
So if you just keep repeating them, they're there, they
have their own value, but it's that safety net, right?
It's right.
It's what it buys you, right?
And it's not just a stepping stone towards the next step.
It's it enables that step in and of its own, right, right
again, because you now have this buffer between you and just
not being able to play anymore.
Right.
What was it?
Gretzky said, I miss a hundred percent of the shots.
I don't take.
Right.
Same thing.
Like if we're, if we're not out there, if we're not in
the startup game, like there is no chance at a big outcome
if we're not playing at all.
You bet.
And so I think that that's what these, these small,
tiny, geometric, sequential wins bias the ability to be
around for the bigger one.
That's what I think is interesting because
again, people are saying, Hey, you know, I need to
have this massive win.
I'm working at this startup and it's not going to
have this massive outcome.
And I'm like, I get it.
But will it get you on base?
Will it give you some breathing room so you can take
a bigger swing after that?
If so, it's a win.
Because I think if all we try to do is optimize for
I'm gonna do this one thing and it's gonna be the total
cash out and I'll never have to do anything else again.
You're
likely gonna fail.
Right.
Refer to our previous episode optimized for the, the, the,
the probability of the outcome, not just the size of the outcome
we, you and I spent almost an hour on that one because it's,
it's so absolutely valuable to understand that as startup
founders that you really do need to think through like,
yes, yeah, a big one is great.
Right.
But if your probability of hitting that massive
win is, is really low.
And the probability of getting any base hits or smaller wins
because of the way you're thinking, because of the way
you're approaching business, because you're aiming for
that big, big, big win, right?
It's that thing that my dad used to say, you know, aim
for the moon, sure, but keep clearing the fence, right?
Because if you just consistently clear the fence.
You can keep clearing the fence, even if you never
get to the moon, something good still came out of it.
Right.
But I think that when we, when we go all the way, let's shift
gears for a second and go back to something we were talking
about before a little bit, which is that we often think
like this has to happen by our twenties or our thirties, or
it's never going to happen.
Right.
Let's talk about like, when does this actually happen?
Right.
When, when, when does it occur?
And, and when too late, is there too early?
Right.
What, what happens here?
And I think you, you and I were talking before the show, a
couple of additional examples.
Walton comes to mind, Sam Walton.
Right?
Right.
How old was he when he started Walmart?
Over 40 Reed Hoffman from LinkedIn was over 40.
Yep.
Warren Buffett made 99 percent of his net worth
after 50 It also helps to start as Warren Buffett at
50, but but but this is a
young person's game
Step one live to a hundred step to become Warren Buffett.
What's interesting is there is an Incredible and I I
had it maybe you did too an incredible bias to believing
that our success If it's going to happen, it's going to happen
at an inordinately young age.
It wasn't
necessarily that I thought it was going to
happen at a young age.
But I did believe that I would have a lot more to
do with the win, the timing of it than I actually did.
Right?
I thought it wasn't necessarily that I was young, I did,
but that was relative to how old I was at the time.
And it was more so that like, I was going to have a lot to
say about the timing of it.
Right, right.
Well,
I mean, that goes back to the Cuban thing, right?
Yeah, the guy's been a billionaire for 25 years, right?
Yeah, obviously he has the wherewithal to do what he
did before again It just doesn't work like that.
It's like like Bill Gates is one of the most successful
entrepreneurs in history He's never built a second Microsoft.
Yeah, right like in the reason for that is Is because it's damn
near impossible to replicate, to kind of like falsely
build, if you will, fate.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, like, some of this, and I don't believe in luck.
I, I, I, when it comes to entrepreneurs, I do
not believe in luck.
Good, good fortune
is the closest we can get.
Good fortune, right?
Timing matters, right?
Like, doing the right thing at the right time matters.
There's a lot of businesses that had I built it at
a different time it just simply wouldn't have worked.
And there's businesses that I did build at the wrong time.
Again, we go back to Affordit versus Affirm.
That would work pretty well right
now.
For all the other businesses that are
killing it in that space.
And so, there's a lot of factors that go into it.
What I think is interesting is, when I talk to people
earlier in their careers, in their 20s and 30s specifically,
they have a bit of a sense that, like, this is it.
Like, if I haven't nailed it by this point, I
must be out of the game.
And I gotta say, that mentality is fairly new.
And in, you know, let's rewind back.
Really, I think the internet era, the startup internet
era, ushered in this expectation of young wealth.
Of, I can be exponentially wealthy at a very young age.
Because, what I always thought was interesting is, in the,
in the early 90s, when I was kind of growing up in my
career, and, uh, I remember I was just buried in Forbes
magazine, Fortune magazine.
Yeah.
And it was all these silver haired foxes.
I was gonna say, yeah, wasn't anybody that didn't
have wrinkles on the cover?
It was all these folks that were like, the, the new
young gun at IBM is now 57.
And there was this expectation, now most of this of course is,
you know, more sequential kind of corporate ladder stuff,
but there was this expectation that much later in your career
you had all the success, but then internet came around.
And internet threw everything off, and I know people are
gonna say, Oh, prior to that you had Bill Gates and
Steve Jobs and Mike Dillon.
Yes, sort of.
And four other people.
Yeah, right, right.
But those were total freak outliers that nobody, There
was no pattern to it that
anybody was expecting.
Here's one, man.
Just think about it this way.
In that same period of time, how many lottery winners were there?
Far more than there were people who did that with business
and the odds of the lottery are like 220 million to one,
right?
You bet.
Okay.
There you go.
Yeah,
right
But like all of a sudden in the 90s you had a lot
of pioneers of wealth that were young Again, this is
kind of us dating ourselves, but like Marc Andreessen
was my folk hero Right.
Mark Andreessen started Netscape, had one of the most
successful IPOs, I think it was 95 if my history is right.
Sounds right.
Um, and was on the cover of Time Magazine back when
people read magazines.
And he was in a throne, right?
And it was like, this is it.
And I remember when that came out.
And I remember seeing that.
And I remember thinking.
Everything's about to change.
You could
just feel it.
You could just feel it.
And it did.
And that gave way to like the Mark Zuckerbergs.
You know, like the next generation, etc. And I
remember there was a story years ago where Zuckerberg met
Andreessen for the first time.
And I don't know if he was just being sarcastic, except I
don't think he has that gear.
Mark Andreessen was explaining that I had started a company
called Netscape, blah, blah, blah, and Zuckerberg was
like, I've never heard of it.
Right.
And I just thought that was like, like, that
might even be true.
It sounded like something he would say, but like, I just
thought that was hilarious.
That this guy was like handing over a mantle to the next guy.
And that was like, that'd be interesting if it wasn't
truly sarcasm, that'd be an interesting Harbinger
that AI will be capable of that at some point then.
Mark can do
it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so I, you know, where this gets interesting
is the expectation of.
I should be wildly successful by 20 something.
I should be wildly successful.
That's fairly new in our culture.
It is.
And I think that the thing that I think it was both
exciting, that time was super exciting, right?
It was, it was a wonderful time to be alive.
It was a wonderful time to be an entrepreneur.
And I loved most of it.
And interesting.
I'm trying to think now back to some of the other
founders that I know, the same vintage and then like the
generation immediately after.
I feel like it became more of a problem for
the generation after.
Yeah, I feel like we came up at a time where we were still
starting things and trying when that still wasn't the narrative.
Yeah.
And the narrative changed.
I think for the people that came after that, the
problem was, this wasn't just something that was possible.
All right.
And like, you could be really wealthy at this young age.
You'd have this massive success at this young age.
Did that went from being a Highly unplausible
possibility to the path, right?
Like it's Zucker die, right?
Like I gotta, I gotta do this or like, or I'm not successful.
This became the new watermark instead of the holy shit.
We landed on the moon moment, right?
That's what it should have.
That's my point too.
Like, those outcomes are such outliers.
Like, I specifically remember when Instagram sold for a
billion dollars, and they were like three years into it.
Yeah, yeah.
And I was like, oh, shit.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, now everyone's gonna think that System, you just confused
everyone else on the planet now.
You just screwed it up.
Like Like that is such a freakish outlier, right?
Like, yes, it did happen.
It doesn't mean it does happen.
And there's a dramatic difference there.
And I think all of a sudden expectations get out of whack.
And again, it would be different.
If the line of corpses of people that thought that was
true weren't so insanely long and the line of people who
actually got to see it become true were so insanely small.
And I think those expectations have, have real consequences.
They do.
And let's stick on that for a second, because I think one
of the consequences there is there are a lot of businesses
that would still be around that aren't simply because
they tried to push for that super, super elevated track.
They're right.
We got to go, we got an IPO in the next four
years or we're out.
And the vast majority of them ended up on the latter half of
that, which is that they're out.
And so I often find myself wondering, like, what if those
business had just stayed around?
What if they had just enjoyed like a more linear
type of success and just built really good product?
Where would we be now?
All right.
As, as a tech community, as, as, as the founder community,
as the planet, like what would have happened if less of those
had gone moonshot or else?
Right.
And just said, build good business.
I'm, no way of ever knowing that, but it is something
that I think about.
To be fair, that's how most businesses operate.
Right.
I'm, I'm so fascinated by like, you know, what we call the
small business, uh, community, which is by the way, like 99
percent of businesses, right?
It's most, you know, we are the freak show within
the world of building businesses, not everybody else.
And, and when I think about that, I often think about when
in, in 97, when we're, when I was building my digital agency.
Uh, we connected up with a traditional agency and
we merged the agencies.
Okay.
The traditional agency, an agency called GSW had
been around for at least 20 years, like probably
longer, but at least 20 years doing more or less the same
business for a long time.
Right.
They were like, maybe like an eight to 10 million
business as far as billings.
Right.
And not terrible.
Right.
Good business for, for the, the, for GSNW, you know, they
built great lives around it.
But that year, uh, in, in 97, you know, we had that
chance to pitch Eli Lilly.
Uh, we won a quarter billion dollars a year worth of bill
billings, and that became a very different business.
Yep.
There was the hockey stick.
For them, 20 plus years into running their business.
And, and, here's what's funny.
Of the GS& W, the W's, uh, Rick Weissheimer, he had
retired the year before, because he had turned 55.
Holy shit.
That's way closer.
Wow.
That's scary.
Okay.
Um,
don't do the comparative math there.
We'll you're way younger than he is now
at the, at the time.
I'm like, are we putting up a tombstone for this guy?
And I'm like, damn, that's a few years away.
Anyway, my point is like, I look at it and I'm like, those
guys, We're basically putting themselves in a position
to have this you only need to be right once moment by
being around that whole time.
Now, to be fair, they were happier than hell.
Yeah.
How the business had gone, right?
They were like, oh, this sucks that we've been
running for 20 years, it's not worth a billion dollars.
No.
They were like over the moon.
Yeah.
Right?
Living good lives.
Living great lives, right?
And planning for retirement, you know, as you should.
But what's interesting to me is that Because they kept
that longevity, it turned out that year 21 would be
the year that would make those guys worth hundreds of
millions of dollars, right?
And it blows my mind to think about, like, how many
companies are like, Well, we've been in this for two
years and it's not taking off, so, you know, we're out.
Right?
Like, I guess it's dead in the water.
Watertight yet.
Like, what are you worried about?
And I think there's this, this, this just broken narrative
that like good businesses have to be good businesses
within the first few years.
Yeah.
As if, as if the velocity to success is somehow
makes it more successful.
Right.
As if like, The, the pace at which you get there, honestly,
do we care if Usain Bolt ran that his, his top a hundred
meters at age 18 or at age 23?
No, it's a phenomenal accomplishment regardless
of when that happens.
The pace at which you get to your best year
ever matters a lot less.
Okay.
I would, if it's your last year on the planet, you're
like, I finally did it.
Ah, you're gone.
Like, yeah, that would kind of suck.
But like, let's, let's be real.
Like it doesn't matter.
How quickly you get to that point.
Yeah, you get to
that point.
I agree.
And I guess what I'm saying is like, I see a lot of businesses.
And this is really my point where the business just
needed time to breathe, man.
Yeah, the business just needed time.
Like, there's no way in year one through five, it was
ever going to be the business that was supposed to be.
It was never meant to be the business it was supposed to be.
It's growing up, learning what it needs to do.
Right, right.
Years 5 through 10.
Still, not the business it was supposed to be in.
Now I'm not saying this is every case.
I'm saying the fact that folks don't even like, like give
it that timeline is bananas to me because most of the
rest of the world absolutely expects that timeline.
Weird tie all to this together for just a second.
This is going to be funny.
Okay.
So on that note, you got the GSW guys, right?
Like, so they built a great agency.
It was a good agency for a long time.
It was a great business had nothing else ever happened.
They would have been totally fine with that.
They led great lives.
They were on their way to retirement.
They were happy people.
Cool.
They did not know that there was going to become
a fundamental change in the market that would allow that
business to grow that way.
Right.
Digital wasn't on their mind because sometimes
it's not even just the fact that we don't know when we
don't actually know what.
Yep.
Because 20 years ago when they started, they can be like,
okay, we're going to run this thing for 20 years, digital
is going to come around and then we're going to hockey
stick up and then we're out.
Cool.
Cause they didn't see that coming.
Sometimes your biggest successes are really just kind of do come
out of nowhere, but by virtue of still being around, you're
there to take advantage of that.
And here's where it gets tied together and really funny.
Like I looked down at my mug and I realized I'm
holding a lesson right now.
Do you, can you see what that is?
The leaning tower, leaning tower.
That was a fuck up.
Right.
This architect's claim to fame was objectively
his worst build ever.
He didn't set out to do this.
He built a bad foundation.
The damn thing tipped over.
Right.
And that became his big win.
Arguably one of the most recognizable buildings on the
planet that otherwise would have just been a nondescript
tower that they would have let fall down a long time ago.
Right.
Ironically.
It should have, and they've kept it up at the ankle, right?
So like, you just don't know.
So in addition to just like not knowing when, not
knowing what is actually going to be the thing.
Like we can guess and we can, obviously we, we need
goals and we're trying to hit those things.
We're trying to create outcomes, but we don't
necessarily know exactly what else is going to come along.
Right?
Nobody was talking about including AI in every part of
their business four years ago.
Now I can't talk to a restauranteur who's not
like, here's how we're trying to involve AI in
our onboarding process.
I'm like, you sell hot dogs.
Yep.
What are you talking about?
Like, you know, with AI now, cool.
Right.
Didn't see that coming.
It's crazy.
Look, you can't predict.
No.
When your moment's going to be.
That's the whole point.
Right.
The point is being in the game long enough to be
there when your moment, if your moment comes.
Yes.
But if you're trying to force feed it, if you're trying to
get a, give it an artificial timeline, as if you have some
control over exactly when and how that's going to happen.
Right.
At that big exit.
You're kidding yourself.
You're deluding yourself.
Nobody's been able to do it.
People have been able to build companies that became great
things and that's awesome.
But no one's been able to do it artificially despite
everything, so to speak, right?
And I think for, for founders, if we really believe that we
want to hit our big asymmetric moment, we just have to
consistently be in the game.
And sometimes it takes a really long time and you know what?
It's worth it because again, all we have to be in our career for
the entire longevity is right.
Exactly.
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