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The "No BS" version of how startups are really built, taught by actual startup Founders who have lived through all of it. Hosts Wil Schroter and Ryan Rutan talk candidly about the intense struggles Founders face both personally and professionally as they try to turn their idea into something that will change the world.
TST_EP279 - Full Audio
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Ruchand joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of startups. com. Will, sometimes startups can be a real shit storm. When, if ever, are startups not a real shit storm?
Speaker 2: Man, I don't think it ever stops becoming a shit storm.
And that's the funny thing. Like For startups that are doing this for the first time, you know, founders, they don't realize it. They all think that their version is the shit storm. It's kind of like when people are in marriages and they're like, Oh, I guess we have challenges in our marriage. No, it's just right here.
Right. Everybody else is doing this perfectly. Yeah. It just
Speaker: goes so well for everybody else. Just not us. Yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah, yeah. And I think what happens is for all of us, We get into a spot where like things get pretty bad, right? Like, I mean, they're always challenging cause we're always so resource constrained and we've got, you know, times running out all this good stuff, but there's some times where it gets like really, really bad.
And I think in those moments, many of which people call us, you know, other founders call us specific. That's how we help people and say, Hey, I am in an epic shit [00:01:00] storm right now. How do I get out of it? What I thought we could do today is just kind of. Talk about all the advice that we give when we get into these situations and get into a lot of them.
What advice do we give and what works?
Speaker: Yeah, I think we can keep today's episode focused on like practical ways to keep moving forward Even when everything is falling apart, which is often yeah all the time 100 i mean
Speaker 2: it's hard though because when things are falling apart in our minds like We've done everything wrong and we fucked up and like, you know, and that's it.
Right. A lot of what we don't realize is this is just a moment in time which we'll talk about, but also what we don't realize is it's not just our job to keep our own headspace going. It's our jobs to keep the whole company's headspace. Everybody's. Yeah. Our headspace is a reflection of that. So we have to get ourselves right in order to get the team right.
Speaker: Yeah. I think that's a really important point. And I think it's like, you know, every day it feels like there's a new fire to put out. Right. Every single day. But staying positive isn't just a luxury. Like it's a survival skill to your point. It doesn't just impact us. Right. We have a bad day, a couple of bad days, a bad week.
Next thing you know, that's [00:02:00] spread to the entire organization and things can really, really get drugged down. So this, this is a super practical episode, super important because without this survival skill, you may not make it.
Speaker 2: I think the first thing that founders need to consider when they run in really hard times, you know, when someone's really hit the wall is you've got to regain perspective.
You've got to get your perspective back because that's the first thing that's lost. You're running around and all of your anxiety is just pumping and you're making generally Bad decisions. You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah. I think when stuff's going wrong, right. Which again, oftentimes it is our first instinct is to treat every single one of those moments, like it's life or death.
But man, for me, and I have done this a thousand times, it's the recipe is the same, right? Well, the recipe is different, but the, the, the cake I bake at the end of the same and it's burnout. Yeah. Right. So when, when I forget to like zoom out and ask myself, is this going to matter tomorrow? Sometimes, is this going to matter next month?
Is this going to matter next year? Zooming out always gives [00:03:00] me that, that clarity to stop overreacting and to start making better decisions.
Speaker 2: And I think whatever we think about our lives in the course of a longer timeline, it gives us perspective. And depending on where we are in our lives, kind of how much maturity we have by virtue of age, not just maturity, we can start to understand this.
Let me give you an example. When I was in high school and most high schoolers, that's just specific to me. When something would go wrong, when I'd ask a girl to the dance and she wouldn't say yes, my life was over. That was it. There was no other moment in time. I watch it with my son, who's eight. And if he doesn't get like a food that he wants for dinner, his entire life implode.
There is no moment before or after.
Speaker: He's constantly drinking out of the grail, man. Every supper is the last supper, right? You gotta, you gotta get what you want now. There's no tomorrow.
Speaker 2: It's crazy for as much as we all get it, intellectually we get it, for as much as we all get it, actually stopping, zooming out, and saying this too shall pass, this is a moment [00:04:00] in time, is really hard to do.
Especially when things are going epically wrong, like I've got six weeks to live with my P& L.
Speaker: It's so important for us to remember all the time that, like Every single chapter in our startup company is temporary, right? And we cannot let today's setbacks define tomorrow's success or today's success. Tell us that there won't be setbacks tomorrow, right?
I think that's the other thing we, we, we can't permanent ties anything, right? Nothing stays the same. And so here, here's one for you. Well, because I think that you and I have the luxury of being able to zoom out and look at long periods of time, because we have. Long experience. We've been doing this a long time.
And so, you know, you bring this up a lot. We've been through multiple recessions. We've been through multiple financial class. We've been through multiple up cycles, down cycles, funding bliss, funding nuclear winters for people who are just getting started, right? A lot of, a lot of our audiences is really early in their startup journey for them.
When you can't zoom out and look at your own history and say, [00:05:00] Okay. I've been through this before. How do you reconcile that? Right. Can you go back in time to like the first, second, third time you were running into this
Speaker 2: stuff? That's exactly what I was thinking. I'll give you one of the first times, right?
So I'm 22 years old. I've been running my company at the time for about three years. One of the first interactive agencies, things were going so bad that I basically had to let everybody go and move my, my office, if you will, back into my apartment. Which, like, that was kind of how it was going to end, right?
Like, I could not see a path back, because at which point you can't pay anybody, and you don't have your office anymore, especially back then. You're kind of done. Now, I want to crystallize that moment and kind of what my thinking was at the time. What my thinking was at the time is, I'm 100, 000 in debt.
Which, at the time, when the prevailing wage was 5 an hour, that was like a billion dollars. There's no way I was gonna pay that off, right? I had no college degree, I had no work skills whatsoever, so there was no version where I was like, Oh, I'll just go work for consulting and make a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Nothing. In fact, at the time, or prior to that I should say, the [00:06:00] last job that I applied for, Was, uh, at Best Buy to be the Bose sales representative in that department. I wanted that job so bad. That's
Speaker: a dream job for you, dude. Audio file that you are like, that's, yeah, that's, that's, that's, that was top of the food chain right there.
But,
Speaker 2: but that was my fallback was working at Best Buy, right? Like it, and, and, and I didn't get the job by the way. I wanted to start a company. Nobody would look weird in a polo. Well, it wouldn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so anyway, oh, you know, funny side note. I never put two and two together. Best Buy would wind up becoming one of our bigger, biggest clients.
And I always credit them for having paid for my house.
Speaker: Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha.
Speaker 2: I never admit that. One way or the other, you
Speaker: went to work for Best Buy. You got that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One way or another, they're gonna help us out. Anyway, in that moment, in that, in that very moment where I'm like, this is the end, it had all the pieces of the end.
It's what the end looks like. You stop paying people, you move out of your office, like, clients stop paying you, like, it's kinda how it ends. What I wouldn't know at that time was that I had an entire career ahead of me. And good things happen over [00:07:00] time as well. Within a year, we had merged the agency with another agency, which wound up being a great deal for everybody.
And we'd won a quarter billion dollar piece of business per year in the same year. I could have never seen that coming. And I guess when I think about it, what I didn't have at all was the benefit of experience and perspective to be able to say, Oh, wait, future has time where things can happen too. They can be bad, but they can also be good.
Right. I just didn't have that.
Speaker: Yeah. Unfortunately, like I think we've, as, as young startup founders, we all take that whole live in the present, right? Live in the moment thing a little too literally. And we, again, we tend to permutize things. It's funny. I had similar, similar time, similar experience. It was one of those cases where we had just won our biggest client.
Right. And so all of a sudden we have more cash than we've ever had. I go on a hiring spree. I bring in, you know, like, Not double the team, but like half again, as many people to get this contract done halfway through the contract, they lose their biggest contract. And guess what? [00:08:00] It's on pause indefinitely.
And so I remember thinking again, like it's end of days. Like this is, this is how it ends. It will never end. Did I have the, the ability at that age and that time to zoom back and go, wait a minute, two months ago, we didn't have this client anyways. Right. We had never seen this much money before, even as much as we got with the contract.
The half check just to get started was like more than we'd ever seen before. And it wasn't really end of days, but you just can't see it then. So I guess just as early stage startup founders, if you're, if this is your first go at this, or if you're just early in life in general, if you're just young and haven't been through this in your other career or relationships, anything else in life, just.
Try to zoom back out and remind yourself, whatever is happening today is going to be some different version of what's happening tomorrow and the day after and the day after, right? Nothing is going to just contain a chapter, not the chapter. It's not the book for damn sure.
Speaker 2: I think part of what concerns me though, Ryan, is, is when we get to a point where we lose perspective.
Yeah. We make really bad decisions. Oh, 100%. And they manifest in all kinds of different ways. [00:09:00] First off, as managers, for many of us, we get shitty. Yeah. Yeah. Cooler way to say that, right? Like we're angsty, we're on edge. We're getting in fights with our coworkers, maybe clients. Maybe we're bursting out on social media, whatever.
We're the worst version of ourselves at a time when we need to be the best version of ourselves. And that is so dangerous. Now let me pick this up because we'll carry this thread throughout this and then we make other people like that when we're shitty to our coworkers. Right? Especially if, if we're in a leadership position, they become shitty and they become shitty to people in their lives.
Like it's bad. Enthusiasm
Speaker: is infectious. Yeah. So is apathy. So is anxiety. So is anger.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I find that in enthusiasm tapers off, antipathy or anger spins up. Cycles up, as we just saw, like, with our past election in the United States, right? Oh man,
Speaker: when I plant anxiety in my garden, it is, uh, it is self propagating.
It grows and grows and grows. It does a great job. Takes over immediately. [00:10:00]
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the concern I have is that when we lose that perspective and our attitude starts to manifest because we don't have the perspective as the nucleus of this business, It has a geometric effect across all of our other people, which incidentally are the very people we need to figure this problem out.
And so rewind back to, you know, I'm 22 and I just had to let everybody go. I was cool about it. I mean, as cool as you could be about it. Right. And it turned out, I hired all those folks back like within a year and they got the highest paying jobs they'd ever had in their lives. Right. Awesome. Outcome.
Didn't see that coming. Got to be honest. Right. Weird chapter, right? But not the only chapter, you know, one of the things you and I talk about it, I just want to reiterate. A lot of people don't know this because it's like I said, not in the brochure. Startups go out of business many times before they become successful, right?
No one tells you that everyone's like, Oh, I guess you just find product market foot and then you just scale the business. No, you talk to any, any real founder, uh, meaning they've been in it for a while.
Speaker: Just somebody in my getting customers workshop on Monday who had shut the business down. [00:11:00] Just pre pandemic, just pre pandemic, they just came back, just reinvigorated things, relaunched the website, uh, re rebuilt the offer and is now working on getting marketing back on its feet for, and something years later happens.
William took care of life for a couple of years and never lost passion for the project. Did you want to kill the startup, but needed to go handle some things in life before the startup could become a reality again.
Speaker 2: I've done nine startups over 30 years. And in that time, some of them did well, but a lot of them also did not do well.
And I got to tell you, like, it didn't feel good. I like, I'm trying to give the argument for perspective. When things weren't going well, I wasn't like, ah, you know, I've got perspective. So it doesn't matter. It still sucks. Oh, it does. It still hurts, right? It still creates a tremendous amount of anxiety. But it's how you deal with that anxiety.
For me, it's knowing
Speaker: that there's possibility on the other side of pain, right? It's not that like, oh, I have perspective, ergo pain goes away, and I can just operate happily knowing that it'll change tomorrow. No, but I can operate, [00:12:00] right? I don't operate happily. Necessarily, I'm not feeling great about it, but I can get something done.
I can keep moving.
Speaker 2: When we look at our own business, Ryan, you and I were talking about this earlier this week in the business of helping startups, right? And again, our own business at startups. com. So we're kind of looking internally as of this moment. It's a slow period for startups. I mean, it's no surprise.
We're now in Q4 of 2024 and there has been a funding. And by way of that startup freeze for like three years, almost. Right now we are in the business of helping startups. So by virtue of that, our business slows down. How could it not? We start looking at other companies in our space or other organizations in our space.
Tech stars, right? A phenomenal organization starts pulling out of major markets like Seattle and Austin, etc. That sucks. I mean, they're not really a competitor of ours, but they're in our space. They're in
Speaker: space, right? It's, it's a sign of the ecosystem. Right. It's not, it's not a positive sign that we want to see.
Speaker 2: So how do we deal with that? So the first thing we say is, I think, you know, I talk about this stuff with the team, you know, [00:13:00] we all do openly and say, and it's not to say shitting on tech stars. It's a great organization, right? But we also saw venture for America go out of business, right? And an organization we love, we've hired tons of people
Speaker: from venture.
Yeah. It was a major feed source for us for a long time.
Speaker 2: They're awesome. But you know, their whole business model was putting fresh grads into startups. Well, it works when startups are actually hiring. And startups have not been hiring for a long time. The point is, we know we're in a trough, in a valley in our business.
And we have two different ways we can approach it. One way, we just freak out, right? And oh my god, everything's going wrong. Other way, which, which I'm actually very proud for how we've processed this is, Hey, we're in a valley, right? And there's some period of time that we have to navigate out of this valley.
We've got to cut costs. We got to stay lean, you know, all this stuff, but it's a valley, right? It's going to happen. It's happened to us before that said, Ryan, if I had never been in this before, my perspective would be so much different. I would be, what did we do wrong? What did I do wrong with, you know, like I would have looked at this whole period.
[00:14:00] Completely differently. I know because I was in this, this position and I did look at it differently, but because I've got perspective now and I can say, oh, this is a moment in time, I can navigate. We can navigate,
Speaker 3: yeah.
Speaker 2: Way differently. Way differently. Right. With confidence. Yeah. If that's, if that's hard for people to believe with confidence in a trough.
'cause we know it's a moment in time. We're looking for opportunities. Within that moment in time and we'll build a better business because of it.
Speaker: And it's been a wonderful comfort to be able to do that for ourselves. It's also been an amazing gift to be able to hand that to other startup companies simply by saying, similar to what you've just said, like, look, I have actually seen this before.
We've been through this. This is what it looks like. Here's where it's probably going to end. Here's what we do to get through it. And they go, Oh God, there is something like this. Yeah, yeah, there likely is. You know, it reminds me of like, Those moments when, like my parents shared advice about parenting to me when I'd be like, oh my God, this is all, this stuff's happening.
And then they're like, kids do that. And you go, oh, kids do that. It's not just me. Like, that's a thing, kids do that. Right. Oh, right, right. Okay, cool. I can, I can [00:15:00] calm down now a little bit, just knowing, right? It's just that that commiseration goes so far sometimes. Just to know that again, like you're not the only one going through this, you said at the beginning of the episode, which is like, you know, my startup's a shit show.
No, every stripes, a shit show. That is the name of the show you're running.
Speaker 2: My kid is difficult to manage. It's called having a kid, right? Yeah. So let's talk about the number one advice we give to founders. Sure. When they call us with an amazing amount of anxiety, like their heads are ready to explode. Yep.
The first thing we tell them, you need to take that energy, that nervous, anxious energy and convert it to action.
Speaker: That's it, man.
Speaker 2: Because I got to tell you that nervous energy. Is powerful stuff. If you channel it right or destructive stuff. If
Speaker: you don't, if you don't, yeah, man, action is the antidote to anxiety for me.
And one of the other things I think is really important note there is like, we can talk about this more later, but like even really little steps. Right. Just little actions chip away at really, really big problems. And I think [00:16:00] it's, it's easy to lose sight of that. But yeah, as we start to think about, cause I think this is one of the challenges, right?
So practical challenge, you're faced with a big problem, maybe let's say a truly big problem and anxiety starts to take over, right? The kind like gut wrenching all consuming. I just want to crawl under a rock and never come back out again. I know I've shared on the podcast before there was a period in time where I was having so much anxiety around a couple of projects that we were doing.
When my phone would ring, I would immediately become tired. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, wow. Right. Talk about anxiety, like through the roof. My phone rings and I'm like, I'm sleepy. Cause I really don't want to have this conversation. Right. Right. Right. Right. Logical response. The way out of it was action. I'll use a more recent example.
So we had, uh, you may or may not remember this. Four or five years ago now, major HubSpot issues, right? We had, we'd had a couple of little issues, snowball out of control. Some really big stuff started to happen within our HubSpot account. And I was looking at that just going, Oh my God, I was having so much anxiety and our emails going out is stuff happening.
Are we properly, you know, are we, are we handling leads, all this stuff going on? [00:17:00] And like, there was just this mountain of anxiety because it was this mountain of work. And I finally got to the point, probably with your help, where you were just like, just pick something little, just like chip away at it.
And so I did, and that felt great. And then what I did was like, I just said, like, look, I, when I look at this thing as a mountain, I'm never going to get over it. And my anxiety is going to go through the roof. So I just said, like, I'm just going to take an hour a day. And that's, that'll be the, that'll, that'll cap it.
That way I can limit my anxiety, I can limit my pain, and we'll get through it. It took me three or four weeks and we got, we got through it. But it went from that point of just like pure anxiety, running around like a chicken with my head cut off, to just taking some action and, and turning it into a little bit of progress.
Huge shifts.
Speaker 2: So, so along those lines, anxiety is energy. Anxiety is momentum, right? It's frenetic energy. Correct, right? But how we choose to use it, usually a huge waste of time. We usually use it by worrying as if worrying is an action. So whenever I'm in this spot and I get in this spot all the time, just an anxious dude, and I've been running startups for 30 years.
Like I don't [00:18:00] need, I don't know how else to operate. Right. But when I get into the spot where my anxiety starts to really crank, My first instinct now is Where can I put this energy? Now, when I say that, the key is somewhere simple. Usually a dumb task. When I was 22 and I had, you know, crazy anxiety, we're shutting the business down.
I remember it was the first time I started to have this thought process and it was so effective. I said to myself, okay, I can spend the next 10 minutes or an hour really doing anything, right? I can spend it worrying. I can spend it, you know, blah, blah, blah. Or I can just spend it writing code. And I was like, what if just every time I get anxious, I wrote code.
Well, guess what? I wrote a boat, but because I had an outlet. And so now whenever I have that anxiety, my first instinct is find somewhere to put the energy because lo and behold, it's that energy that gets you out of the anxious situation, man. And I think within that. Those small [00:19:00] actions, they start to cure like a bigger problem.
You know what I mean? Like in part of it is not making it worse. Yeah, in other words. Not letting it
Speaker: spiral out of control, right? Gaining positive momentum instead of negative. It's it's to me, anxiety is always about the momentum shift, right? Yep. Clearly, at the point where I'm starting to get anxious, momentum is working against me.
Something is going the wrong direction. So it's just about. Changing inertia, right? Getting moving the direction that I wanted to move.
Speaker 2: 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 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 like we keep [00:20:00] thinking, here's a great example. Every startup that's ever raised money has a period where they don't think they're going to raise money. It's kind of the nature of it. Money, right? And so the anxiety is at full tilt. So their thought is, Oh, well, I guess I need to work on something with this anxious energy to reach out to more investors or to update my pitch deck.
And yes, that's, I mean, that's not a bad place to put it, but I want to be clear. Part of this exercise isn't necessarily doing the thing that's going to dispel the anxiety. And the reason I say that is because sometimes there are anxious things. That don't have an action that's going to get done anytime soon, right?
It's like, Oh, our sales are down by 30%. Right. Are there micro actions I can take to, to help that? There are obviously, right. There are, but I also think that there, there's some aspect of saying, Hey, I'm just going to do our accounting or, Hey, I'm just going to like, I'm going to work on this, this boring task.
I'll give you an example that for me, I have a long list of tasks, like what I call side tasks. That I reserve specifically for [00:21:00] when I'm feeling this way, or frankly when I'm just like, kind of in a position where I'm like, I'm creatively like shot, right? And I built this habit where when I see one of these tasks, I'm like, ooh, that'll be a good anxiety task, right?
And I just kind of throw it into that bucket, right? And when I have anxiety, I go to that well, and I just motor through those tasks, and I feel great about it.
Speaker: I feel good about it. Yeah. I think one of the challenges is that it feels like in those moments where you're really anxious and there's some big thing, let's say it's like a, an existential crisis for the company type thing.
Yeah. We feel like because our energy matches that problem, right? The anxious energy is there, anxiety is there, worries there, all that stuff is there that our actions somehow have to match that. And I think that's the biggest misconception. And I think that was the biggest thing that I finally got over was that it's actually Far better to start with those tiny steps.
If I don't have to save the company to fix my anxiety or to gain momentum, we can take the smallest possible steps. And that actually starts to get us moving towards where, where we're going.
Speaker 2: I think within that a [00:22:00] big part of what we tend to focus startups on founders specifically, when they hit these really rough patches, it was, they look, first thing you do.
Reset all of your goals, all of your, every single thing that you're working on. You said every single one of those goals and it takes them a minute to figure out what that means. But what we're really saying is take all the big things you were trying to do and turn it into a micro goal, the smallest possible thing, which has so many benefits.
You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, the, there's such a, it's, it feels like such a cheat code to learn how to shrink scope, right? Stop worrying about next quarter, even next week. What am I going to get done today? Right. And we talked about this on the podcast before we plan and weekly sprints, right? For this reason, and a weekly sprint breaks down into what days, days break down into what hours, hours break down to what tasks, right?
Like it, it matters so much because it's a horizon that you can actually do something about. And I think that's a big part of where anxiety comes from is you feel powerless. You feel like you can't get something done. And if you keep thinking that way and you keep [00:23:00] trying to act too big, that is exactly what will happen, right?
You will be right for all the wrong reasons. So when we can shrink scope and just bring things down to ultra manageable, ultra achievable, all of a sudden that momentum shift becomes really, really easy. All right. Instead of trying to move the entire mountain, the shovel full, right. We all get this, we all get this metaphorically, but I think that for a lot of founders, it's really hard to actually take that action and say, well, but that doesn't feel meaningful enough.
I'd rather, I'd rather, you know, die on my shield. All right. Then, or whatever that is, right? Like the, that, that whole thing where it's like, I need, it needs to be big. Like, if this is going to be the end of me, I want to go out doing something big, not focus on a bunch of little stuff. And look, I think we do have to be careful here too, about saying like, Ignore the big stuff.
It's not worth saying. We're not saying ignore the big things and just, just go do some little stuff and everything will take care of itself. No, I didn't say go bury your head in the sand and focus on admin tasks either.
Speaker 2: Let's not look at it in terms of these are irrelevant tasks. Let's look at it in terms of these are critical tasks, but we're making them [00:24:00] smaller, right?
So for example, if our big issue was we're trying to raise money, right? We keep coming back to that, but we're trying to raise money. The macro task, if we want to call it that. Is raise our bridge run, raise our, our next round, whatever we're trying to do. The micro task is find one more investor to reach out to.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right. And so part of what gets us so paralyzed is that we take the macro task as being the work and it's never the work. It is typically the culmination of all those micro events. Right. It's kind of like when, when you look at your room and it's dirty or messy. Right. And you know, my kids are like this, right.
You know, the room will be messy. You give me anxiety. Just
Speaker: thinking about a messy room now. Well, thanks a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right. Well, so first thing I always say is here's what I want you to do. I want you to pick up that football. That's it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Put it away. That seems super easy. And I'm like, okay, now go pick up that, right?
And, and like, once they understand it in the, in the case of achievable micro tasks, all of a sudden you can get stuff done. You and I were talking about this. Uh, you know, you came and visit me to [00:25:00] work on my house, right? You know, build this new house. I remember telling you, I was like, this whole house in this entire process is all done by like one dude.
Speaker 3: Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is, which is crazy, not literally one person, but kind of sorta every single part of the project from the excavation to the foundation build to the framing is just a couple of people, right? In some cases, literally one person, like one person with an excavator did all of my excavation, right? So like, it seemed like this Herculean task, but one person just chipped away at it.
I personally built every cabinet, every vanity, every closet, every single part of my house by myself. In my free time, which I don't have a ton of, but what I did was instead of looking at it and saying, Oh my God, I have to build all this stuff. I said, no, all I have to do today is spend one hour this morning standing this one thing.
That's it. That is my only task. Nothing else matters. And lo and behold, now I have an entire house where the stuff and
Speaker: house with stuff. Yep. Yeah. It's a, the, the HubSpot example that I gave earlier, right? It was like fixed HubSpot became the, uh, the outcome I was trying to chase. And it's like, there were [00:26:00] so many little things going wrong when I broke it down Send to Mars newsletter, make sure that everybody that should get it gets it, make sure that the operates are good, right?
Just fix that one thing, get there. That is a piece of fix HubSpot, right? And so you just tackle these little, and again, they're not unimportant, right? Every single one of those things is important, right? Every cabinet in your house is important. Every newsletter that goes out from sharps. com is important.
And so it's not like, Oh, well, yeah, the newsletter. Well, but what about HubSpot? Oh, right. This is
Speaker 2: part of how we get there. Well, okay, so, uh, this lesson actually was taught to me, and I told you the story once before, was taught to me by a British SAS officer. Oh,
Speaker 3: yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right. So, of all things, I'm at a Forbes summit.
This is, oh my God, it's like so long ago. Can I just
Speaker: say, I'm really glad that neither of us can illustrate anything quite like this. Like, like, I'm glad that I don't have a personal anecdote that hits quite like this one does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so, So story goes, I'm on this summit with a whole bunch of other speakers and they're all founders and we're talking about something and we're kind of in the green room, so to speak, like ready to go on stage.
And I'm talking to this, [00:27:00] this guy is a founder and what he's developed was a practice munition, a bullet essentially for, for soldiers to learn how to get shot. And keep on going. Right? Which is maybe the most badass thing a founder has ever told me. Right? Yeah. And so I asked him, I was like, well, you know, how'd you get into this?
I love backstories. And he said, uh, he's like, well, you know, I'm actually a former SAS officer and I've been shot six times. I'm like, wait, what? Like you got shot six times and you still live? He's like, no, no, no. I've been shot on six separate occasions. Separate occasions. Yeah. I'm like, wait, what? I'm like, okay, first off, maybe you're the most unlucky man.
It reminds me of that first storm trooper that I was put through and gets like blasted immediately. Anyway, so I'm talking about it and I said like, how do you deal with this? He's like, actually, part of what we do, the munition is just, is a bit of a red herring. The issue isn't that you've been shot because most wounds actually aren't fatal at all.
He said that most soldiers die because they bleed out. Because they get into shock. What we [00:28:00] really teach people, the munition again is just, is just a way to like get hit with the force of a, of a bullet. Right. Uh, without actually penetrating you. He said, the training is what to do the second that happens.
Yeah. I kind of can't think of a higher anxiety moment than I've just been shot and I'll probably get shot again. Right? So here's what he said, and this is what stuck with me, and this is what I always think about, like in, in my toughest moments. He said, when, when that happens, the first thing we train the soldier Do is to focus on nothing but getting the cover.
Nothing else matters in the world. Not whether your heart's beating, not whether who's around you. It's getting the cover so you can protect yourself and, you know, and stop the wound, etc. And he said, so what we do is we teach Focus in our most anxiety ridden moment, how to be the most focused and he's like, you know what?
And that's why I'm still alive because when that would happen to me, I'd get shot in my first reaction. You know, the first time it happened a little bit different. My first reaction wouldn't be oh my god I'm going to die. It's I need to get to cover and nothing else matters [00:29:00] until I do that Whenever I think about being in like in a high anxiety situation, I look for what is my cover What is the next place I need to go?
Yep, total blinders on Ryan, right? You Total blinders to anything else. And it is so effective.
Speaker: How do we achieve safety in this moment?
Speaker 2: There's a couple of things here. One is making the goal small, but it's also focus, right? We talked about turning anxiety into action. But part of this too, again, it's not just us.
We got to look at our team and say, If we're stressed, they're stressed. So how do we take their work and make it smaller? How do we take their work and give them the opportunity for those tiny wins? Because what we're also talking about here isn't just making the work more achievable, which is important, it's also creating a different momentum.
how the momentum starts to build more milestones. It's hard to build momentum when you're missing all of your milestones. But now all of a sudden, when you get all your milestones, you just achieved 28 things today. You feel like a champion, even if they're small.
Speaker: Absolutely. And man, like momentum is so important here and breaking those things down is so important.
I think I've [00:30:00] shared this anecdote in the past too, but in, in my one foray off into the corporate world where, where I realized how well things don't work, I was tasked with handling things for 14 different country market level operations. And Politically, the request was that we make progress, even if small, on all of them at the same time, right?
I couldn't prioritize one over the other. We needed to show each and every one of the markets that we cared about what was going on. Sure. And we're trying to, trying to show progress. And my God, when you're trying to make progress on 14 things at once, there is no momentum. You couldn't see it. You couldn't feel it.
Two years later, there was marginal progress on anything. And like, Yeah. People were kind of happy that they'd gotten some attention, but nothing had actually changed. And so we were able to shift that. I, at my like insistence, kind of at that point, it was like, look, I just need to spend the next two months doing nothing but this project for this country market.
And all of a sudden by breaking that down and making that smaller, we started to pick up. Uh, momentum, right? Lots of little wins do build big, big momentum, which [00:31:00] allows you to take on bigger and bigger stuff too. So I think that's, it's important to, this doesn't always mean like, Oh, we only, you can only ever have small tasks.
No, there can be big projects, big things get done. Of course, we can argue, you always break those down anyways, right? Like when you do start to pick up that momentum, all of a sudden it changes what you can get done. And again, not just for you, But across the team, right? So when everybody's just had a little win, now we've got some, we've got some steam, right?
We can actually move forward. We can do something else. We can move on, do bigger things, which feels great to tie this back to kind of like the, the, the show, uh, that our startups, it's like, I think we have to remember that when, when chaos hits that aiming for greatness is not the idea. It's aiming for progress in survival, small, little wins, build big momentum, right?
When you get shot. You're not thinking, how do I win the battle? You're thinking, how do I get behind that log so I can avoid getting shot again? Yep. So I can put on a bandage, staunch the bleeding and maybe we'll return fire. It's about like, again, it's about right. Sizing [00:32:00] what you're trying to do for the thing.
It's going to, it's, if you. Optimize for momentum instead of optimizing for the size of outcome. You're going to be far better off.
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that's been a great hack for me, and I always talk to other founders about this, when they're in super high stress situations, when the anxiety is just, uh, you know, just boiling over, focus on something else.
Now, I know that sounds batty, right? What do you mean focus on something else? How could I, I'm about to lose my house. How could I possibly focus on anything else? Okay. Here's what's interesting about that. We all need something that is as far from our work as possible that we can obsess over. I don't just mean like, Oh, go play some video games or something.
I mean something you can obsess over. That's not work. Now at different points in my life, I've had Like that different hobby or something that I could obsess over for a long time. It was video game, right? Like I have more hours in the civilization franchise than I think the people who made it.
Speaker 3: I would say, I think you've, you've, you've outstripped their development team at this [00:33:00] point.
Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable. You're right. If anybody is a fan, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But through all of my years in 30 years, I've played almost like every one of the franchise. I've got ungodly amounts of hours into it. Why? Because I needed it. I needed something to channel my, like, my anxiety into.
That was an obsession. Something that I could get so gripped by that it would pull me away from that other thing. And over the years, it's changed. What is it for you,
Speaker: Ryan? Oh, man. For me, at this point, It's, it's a couple different things. I mean, I tend to do kind of like you do where I'll go kind of project to project for a while.
It was, it was, uh, pons, which I really mean it was learning all about bacterial digestion and, and like all of these other crazy things. It kind of depends too. I think there are times where I have more physical energy due to anxiety. Sometimes I have more mental energy. And energy due to anxiety, one of the best for me, uh, soccer's always been there, right?
Soccer's always there. And one of the things I love about it, it has a start. It has a middle, it has a finish. There's a process and a progress to it. And I can [00:34:00] obsess about my performance and I can obsess about the team's performance. I can do all kinds of stuff to just really, really get my mind off things.
The other one was jujitsu. And the beauty of jujitsu is that it forces you to obsess and stay in that moment. Yeah. When someone has their arm around your neck and they're trying to deny blood and oxygen to your brain, you don't think about much else until you stop. I'll think differently about that next time.
I think this is such a great tip, man, the, about getting obsessive about something else. And here's the great news for founders, like probably everybody, but specifically founders, our brains are wired to obsess. I know, right? Makes us want to build things in the first place because we can't just look at it and go, Oh, that doesn't work like it should.
Or that could be better. Oh, well, we've never said that. We're like, that could be better. I'll make it better. I'll fix that. I'll go work on that. So we're all ready wired for this. So Karen startup stress starts to take over. That obsession turns into an endless loop of what if, how do I fix this? That's that moment where I [00:35:00] know I'm like, I, I need a healthy out something where I can redirect that energy.
And again, like for me, it's soccer for you, you know, right now it's, it's woodworking and, and, and home building. And I don't really think that it matters a ton what it is, as long as like you said, it, It can be, it allows for obsession, right? It has to be something that's deep enough and nuanced enough that it actually allows you to dig in and obsess, right?
It can't be like somebody like, well, I go for a walk. I don't know what happens on your walks. Will walks are never quite enough for me. Right? Like maybe you're like, I go walk. What do you do? I walk across the one during a rush hour traffic. Oh, okay. Maybe that would do it. But. It has to have that, like erase everything else, force you to put the blinders on and become truly engrossed in it.
For me, that's where the therapeutic nature kicks in, right? It basically has to block everything else out for a period of time. It doesn't have to be something fancy, man, right? Like. Yeah, agree. People clean their houses. Some people garden. If that's what it is and that can get you to that place, if that gets you to that all consuming, fully [00:36:00] physically absorbed, fully mentally absorbed, fully emotionally absorbed, awesome.
It's all it needs to do.
Speaker 2: Agreed. And I also think that something that, like you mentioned cleaning, something that doesn't have consequence is equally important. Or has a positive consequence. Of course, right? If we obsess about something that actually creates more anxiety, Oh my God,
Speaker: I had a friend who would, his diversion from startup companies was day trading.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there it is. That's exactly. Do you want to know how
Speaker: old he was when he had his first heart attack? No, you're kidding. 44, right? Like it's like wrong secondary obsession.
Speaker 2: Cannot do that. Right. And gambling's another one. You know, it's kind of the same thing, but like, um, the keys to this though, I think the first key to, to be able to, to embrace this.
Is allowing yourself to embrace it is allowing yourself to say to be a better founder. I need to go obsessed for this thing. I need to use this as my mental, emotional punching bag to get stuff out of my system. Now, a lot [00:37:00] of times we'll look at it and we'll say, well, I can't be, you know, Doing woodworking now we're doing gardening right now.
I have to go build a startup. No, you actually kind of do need to do it. That's kind of the point, right? You need to get into that so you can get this stuff out of your system And if you're like, oh, well, I shouldn't be cleaning my apartment right now. I should be working on my startup Yeah at some point that's absolutely true.
Yeah But that therapeutic nature of obsessing about cleaning isn't incidental, right? When people go to clean for therapy, it's because mentally they're trying to put things back. They're trying to restore order. They're trying to get to a completion point. For me, with woodworking, it was more about being able to say, I'm done.
And when we build startups, one of the things we often can't say is that we're ever done. Nothing's ever done. In fact, it's always horribly incomplete. We never have enough people that we've hired. We've never had enough revenue. We've never had enough funding. It's always not enough. The level of completion is rare.
And what I always say, When we are complete with something, it's often amorphous. We just [00:38:00] launched the website. You want to have a more boring completion, launch a website. I've done a million of them. Never once was it exciting for more than five seconds. There
Speaker: it is. Yeah. Like there's some, there's a release and relief, but I, yeah, it's not really excitement.
I mean, it's excitement about now it's done, but like, yeah, now a whole bunch of new work begins called marketing and, and, and, and bug fixing and everything else. It doesn't have the same thing, even though it's important. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, again, like to your point, that one has a consequence, right?
So that isn't that, I mean, like, and I know you weren't talking about building a website as a, right. But you know, to tie that back together, it can't be a distraction. Right. And it can't have a negative consequence. It has to be a bit of a reset. And so I want your feedback on this one, because I've realized that a lot of the things that I've done have had a fairly finite start and stop, but the one that you named, like civilization, like you can kind of endlessly play that.
So how do you balance that? How do you keep it from becoming escapism when there isn't a consumption limit to, to your secondary obsession? [00:39:00]
Speaker 2: In that case, it didn't matter that there wasn't an end. It had milestones of progression, right? I beat this nation or I launched this technology, right? Like it had a very definitive stop and start, even if it reset to another one.
The problem, like I said, in our business and what we do as startups is there often isn't a very clear goal. Yeah. There's no
Speaker: feeling of momentum or progress.
Speaker 2: Right,
Speaker: right, right. Are we getting anywhere? I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: When I was a kid, uh, I would go out on the job site with my dad and I used carpenter and, uh, in, in, we build stuff, right?
When we were done with it, I'm like, dad, this is amazing. Like, like how great is this? That like, we were able to build this thing. Now my dad did not give a shit, right? Like he's like, he's like, son, I'm 40 years old. My back is shot. My knees are shot. Do anything but this, right? Which is ironic. Cause it's literally the first thing I did.
But, but my point is I love the fact that there was something visible a few months back when you and I were in my workshop. And we were building drawers of all things, right? You know, drawers for a cabinet. [00:40:00] We sat there, we marbled at how well they came out, right? We were excited about the slot that we put in it.
We were excited about the, how tight the seams got. Obsessing over those little details, man. But it was awesome because at the end of the day, we got to see something in a very short period of time. Literally at the end of the day, we got to see something that was the outcome of our work. Yeah. And we were reminded, therapeutically, That our work has value, that our work has outcome, that our work has a milestone, and there's a pride to it.
Much of what we do in startups actually doesn't have that, and it is wildly frustrating. It adds up.
Speaker: Yeah, but I think that's a, that's a great point. I think that that's one of those places where you can lean back and say like, How do I redesign it so that it does, right? How can I redesign this process?
And this is one of the reasons when I'm talking to people who want to go build a product, and let's just say they haven't worked in that industry before. They haven't built a product like that before. This is going to be something very new for them. Very frequently, I'm pushing them to do something in a service or consulting basis that's related to that, partially for that exact reason, because we actually do get to [00:41:00] an outcome much sooner.
Something that we can actually say like, Oh, I talked to this person. I solved their problem. They're off and running. I feel good. Right. That type of momentum is, is, is so important, but to, to put a bow on the, the secondary obsession, uh, uh, segment here, like I think it is really, really important that every startup founder and even people within the organization, like if you're the founder, you should be pushing people in your organization to also have this outlet startup stress.
Any kind of stress needs an outlet but startup stress in particular because of the fact like you said there isn't always this defined end to where this goes meaning we don't know when the stress is going to end and the reality is it doesn't really end it changes right it just changes clothes it changes shape changes form where there's going to be more stress so it needs that outlet.
And to make sure that to the extent that you can, you're obsessing over something restorative, something that fills you back up, not something destructive that also just wears you out, but in a different way.
Speaker 2: So I actually don't think that any of this has to do with specifically times are bad and we're acting like this.
I think everything we [00:42:00] just talked about is how you manage startups is how you start if I've ever lived through. Yes, right. And so when we're talking about having perspective, it's not just useful for when times are going bad. It's just as useful for when times are good, right? When we're talking about converting our anxiety into action, when will there ever not be anxiety, right?
Always be anxiety. So that skill, not just for us, but for our team is incredibly important. And when we're talking about taking big goals and turning them into small goals, right? That is valuable to every aspect of everything that we build. One of the oldest adages in software development is you can tell the success of a project or the probability of success by the length of the timeline.
The longer the timeline, lower the probability, right? That's the nature of small goals. And when we're talking about getting obsessive about something, about finding some place where we can unload all of this anxiety on a regular basis, in ideally a healthy way. All of the things we just talked about need to become fundamentally how we're built as founders, right?
And how we [00:43:00] build our startups around this for all the people that are part of this. If we can't figure out how to channel and manage our anxiety in a productive way, our chances for building a big startup or being around and healthy long enough to do it are pretty much zero.
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