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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.
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[00:00:00] 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. Well, as founders tend to be a couple of people reaching for our pockets as we, as we wind our way towards success. Oddly, I don't remember how many people were there offering us up any, any real advice or any concern about how much risk we were putting in, but it does seem that there's a fair amount of scrutiny every time one of us does succeed.
Your experience. Yeah. Well, my experience is just going to be however long we record this Ryan just one consistent rant that that's That's all this is gonna be right? Like I don't know I'd love to take the can off of worms like this. Yeah This is gonna be a fun one. Yeah, this whole idea that founders should feel bad about the profit that they earn Right or specifically that it's owed to someone else Now, now, before we get into any of this, and obviously the audience knows how we feel about this.[00:01:00]
I feel a disclaimer coming. Yeah, yeah, there is a disclaimer coming. Whatever we're going to talk about, however you feel about this, I just want to be clear. This ain't a political statement, right? Yeah, yeah. And while we're recording this, right, this is going into the summer of 2024. In the United States, we're going into an election cycle.
So now, any opinion you have about anything is ultimately mapped back to, you know, one of two parties, etc. Just to be clear, this isn't any of that. This is exactly the way I've felt for the last 30 years. Right? Yeah. This has nothing to do with election cycle. Nothing to do with current political climate, yeah.
But, but it has everything to do with founders. And I think we get put into a couple of corners. The first one that I cannot stand is being vilified for our own success. Yeah. That pisses me off. Yes. Yeah, man. To get there. And, and they're never, and they're never talking about all the stuff that it took to get there.
Right. Like, it's not like they have some major gripe about, Oh, and the way they did it, or, you know, all the people that were all along the way, they're literally just looking at some numeric outcome and going, I don't like it. I don't like it. Yeah. All [00:02:00] right. And I don't know about you, man, but I, there's tends to be a very, very consistent archetype there.
An archetype as much as just like. A lack of understanding the loudest critics of this in my experience are always people who have almost no idea what the inputs were, how much risk was on the table, all this other stuff, right there. They're so upset. And I guess there's probably a correlation there because if they did know that they'd probably more likely to shut up about it.
Right, right. And so there's this idea that like, you know, the founders sitting there and they've done well for themselves, whatever you consider well to be, I'm not even going to give it a label because I think that'll taint the argument. And there's other people saying, well, you don't deserve that money.
When I say don't deserve, okay, now part of the person that I'm most concerned about feeling they don't deserve it is the founder. The founder. That's it. That's the thing. Like, I actually don't really care that people say this stuff. Yeah. What I care about is that founders listen to it, they internalize this shit, and they start to feel bad about it, right?
Yep. We cannot have that. Right. We cannot have that. Also, this is [00:03:00] kind of new. Kind of new. Uh, yeah, 100%. Again, I'm gonna be typical American, very US centric in my viewpoint here. But really, only I'd say in the last 10 to 20 years in the US, Have we gone to a place where someone's success, which in the U. S.
is kind of literally the American dream, has become a source of villainy, right? Now, again, there are villains. By the way, there are broke villains and there are rich villains, right? Nobody has a monopoly on villainy. However, we've sort of gotten into this thing where we want, we want to look at it and say, Oh, if you've done well, here's why you're wrong here, here's why we should take you down a peg.
Here's why we should, you know, again, vilify you for what you've done. And all I can think to myself is that is bananas. Yeah. It's the polar opposite of how folks should feel. Exactly. They got the, the, the house and the white picket fence, damn them. Right. Right. Isn't that what we were here to do? Yeah.
Right. Is this the whole [00:04:00] point? So what I think we can dig into today, and I know we're going to have a lot of folks listening extra close today, because again, there's strong opinions about all this, but what I think we can dig into, and I'd love to explore with you today, I'd love to talk about where this comes from.
I'd love to talk about just maybe from the founders perspective. How we see our different outcomes when things go well, when things don't go well, right? And what kind of support we get on both those ends, a bit of a loaded question. Let's not talk about those in proportions in which they happen in real life, because we spend a lot more time talking about how things don't work out.
Right. And then another thing I'd love to dig into, and we can get to this further in the discussion, is what does deserve mean? Like, like, how do you, how do you deserve? An exponential outcome. How could everyone be okay with that? Everyone, uh, mostly mapping back to you. But as we get into it, let's start here.
I think the part that a lot of people don't understand is that when founders like us, if we make it and we finally get to the point of profit, there are so many hands in our pocket Right? Sticky little [00:05:00] fingers. Sticky little fingers in those hands. Ryan, when you think about the first business you built and you made some money, how many people showed up in how many different versions to take that money from you?
Yeah, uh, well, let's say the tax agencies would have been roughly, like, What was it been like five or six different taxable entities that were there for bills do? Yeah, they don't, right? They're just like, you know, pay taxes, right? Yeah. As a W2 employee, you pay your taxes, right? But then even think about that.
Think about how that breaks down, right? There's the federal tax. There's your state tax. There's city tax. There's your, uh, Medicare, Medicaid, there's your social security, right? All of those things right now, multiply that by about five. And now you're dealing, now you're looking at what a founder is dealing with.
I can still remember the first large contract that I landed and then having that money flow in and then starting to think about like how happy I was going to be to pay some of it out to the team. Cause most people work on kind of like a contract basis early on where it was like, you know, when we had money come in, we divide up and figure out who's going to do what, and then you get paid.
And then I remember like looking at the [00:06:00] chunk that was going to just evaporate back to the government. Right. And I'm like, I get it. I get it. Right. Pays for some important stuff. Yep. And yet. Oh, it was so, it was so demotivating because like it arrives and I'm like, yeah, but there's about 39 percent of that that I just, we can't do anything with that's going to be earmarked and sent away.
You bet. And to be honest, like when I say I don't mind paying the taxes, everybody minds paying taxes. It'd be disingenuous to say that. What I'm saying is I don't like paying as many taxes as I do. And then having someone tell me to go F myself that I'm not paying enough. What a lot of people from the outside, certainly not our listeners.
Don't understand is how many times we get taxed more than the average person, right? Right, right, right. Whether we're profitable or not. Okay, and what was funny when I was 19 when I was starting my first company Of course, I had never heard of any of this. So my reactions to all of it were just priceless Okay, because they were so young and honest who Exactly.
It didn't occur to me that like [00:07:00] corporate taxes were in addition to personal taxes. I just assumed we paid the corporate taxes. Like that was the tax, right? No, don't worry about me. Uncle Sam, my company paid the taxes, right? Yeah. No, like, yes. Now it's your turn, right? So if we go down the stack and I don't have the full list in front of me, but I've been doing this for 30 years, so I'm pretty familiar with it, like Think of how many times we get hit by the taxman, okay?
And I say this to reference the fact that this is before we've even become profitable, okay? That's what people don't understand. They're like, Oh, well, you're okay paying all those taxes, you're making so much money. Dude, I'm still trying to make money at that point, right? Like, I'm going broke paying these taxes.
Right at the gates, I gotta collect sales tax. Now, typically, that's a pass through, but I still gotta collect it, okay? And when I buy stuff, of course, I also have to pay sales tax, so I'm paying for that. But I pay way more sales tax because all of a sudden as a business, I have to buy so much shit. Yeah.
And so all of these things that I have to buy to build my business, they're not tax free. So now all of a sudden my taxpayer number goes up exponentially. Okay, people don't think about this, right? Then the next [00:08:00] thing, I go to hire somebody. And when folks see their paycheck, they see their taxes. And that's kind of all they pay attention to.
And I get that. I did, right? When I got my 5 an hour paycheck from my shitty jobs, right? All I noticed was what was coming out of mine. What I didn't understand, and I didn't understand as an employer, were what's called employer taxes. And the payroll tax that all companies have to pay, and it's damn near impossible to avoid paying, It is massive and you have to pay it, right?
And I remember all of a sudden getting all of these notices from all of these taxing agencies. I didn't even think they were real. I remember like, like, uh, state of Ohio sent me like a past due bill and they were like, you owe like 2, 700 for unemployment tax. I'm like, I'm not unemployed. Why am I paying tax for other Nobody on my team's unemployed.
Why would I pay unemployment tax? What is that? Yeah. It's bananas. So, like, forget income taxes where, you know, we say that the entrepreneur made too much. I don't think most people realize how many times they paid taxes before they even had income. You've got [00:09:00] all your payroll taxes, you've got all the sales taxes you've paid, etc.
Then, depending on how you're incorporated, you might have a corporate tax, if you're a C Corp. So, on average, that comes out to about 25 percent of your income. Then you get your income, and then you file taxes again. You get, then you get federal, then you get state, you get local, etc. By the time you've paid your sales taxes toward income, you've paid your payroll taxes, you've paid your corporate taxes, you've paid your federal taxes, state, local, etc.
You've likely paid, depending on your bracket, Like 70 percent of your income in taxes, and there's an idea that that's not enough now. I know as soon as I say that's not enough We've got whole political parties Geared up around that statement both sides there I'm not trying to make a political statement what I'm just saying is it's a lot of money It's a lot, right?
It's a lot. So I think that the point here is that, like, for people who are criticizing this, who are thinking about criticizing this, um, think about what you're actually criticizing. Think about what that founder's actually gone through, what they're actually taking [00:10:00] home, not your perception of it. And founders pay a lot more taxes than that too.
We pay taxes and risk, right? We pay actual taxes. Yeah, absolutely. We pay our, let's put it this way. We pay our dues in taxes and in risk. And so like criticizing us for our profits feels like some sort of really unfair double jeopardy to me. Right. That's what it feels like. It's like, look, we've already gone through the pain of this.
I did what I was supposed to do. I heard the letter of the law quite literally and, uh, ask anybody who's not done it by the letter of the law, and I'll tell you how much more painful it gets. Uh, knock on wood, haven't been down that path. And so like, just the idea that there's going to be somebody at the end of this, who looks at that and goes, yeah, not enough.
You didn't deserve this. You don't deserve that. Right. Like they, most of them don't know it comes from a place of ignorance. And like most things that come from a place of ignorance, they're ill received. I get that. But, after being taxed like nine times, by the time I get my money, it's kinda hard for me to say, oh, and now I feel bad that I didn't give enough.
Like, dude! [00:11:00] What is left? And remember, it's all scalable, so as I generate more income, whether or not I generate it personally or not, but as the company grows, etc., I just contribute exponentially more. I think where this gets a bit thrown, where people don't see it in the same way, is when we look at, let's tax big corporations, let's use Apple for a second.
I'm not putting Apple in the same boat as a founder who may own all of their companies. Because in my mind, when you hit a certain size, like Fortune 500 size, it's all of a sudden like nobody owns it anymore. Like, it's a percentage of a percentage. And almost at that point, it feels like community money.
It, I mean, if in the case of a publicly traded company, it literally is on the prorate basis. Right, right, right. And so, so that I kind of get like, um, hey, if you're taxing them more, you're like, you're not really impacting any one person significantly. But when it comes to the founders, and I'm kind of saying small business, but I think small business has like a bit of a broken [00:12:00] moniker, which is like, it's two people in a room, like, like in some retail store somewhere.
Like, yes, that exists, but you're talking about all startups. Right. You also rarely hear them making enough money for anybody to go, they don't deserve that, right? When they finally sell that thing at age, you know, 70, uh, for 300, 000, nobody's like screaming about them. If you think about it though, I'm just using tax as a proxy.
I don't want to get too hung up on the tax process because that's not really what this is about. But the implication by all those taxes is that is someone else's money. It's hard to feel good about it. You're just earning on behalf of somebody else. Yeah. And if you're not sure, try not paying it. You'll be reminded very clearly by armed men at your door that, in fact, that is someone else's money.
You haven't paid it yet. That's all. You're paying for it one way or the other. However, with the feel good about it part, I'm using the tax as a proxy to say, it's hard to say I haven't paid enough when I just paid out eight times, right? Like that's hard. Now, if you [00:13:00] really want to throw some salt on the wound, we keep talking about it as if we're talking about Elon Musk.
Right? Oh, he's got, you know, billions of dollars, whatever. Yeah. You have to pay most of those taxes, even if while you're doing it, you're going personally bankrupt. Right. Right? No one cares how much you personally make. You still have to pay all those employer taxes. You still have to pay sales tax, etc.
Right? And people are like, oh yeah, but you can use the write off to, to, uh, to get a tax break, etc. Like if you have a loss, try paying for groceries with a write off. Yeah, it says here, I made negative 180, 000 last year. I believe that entitles me to a loaf of bread, sir. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Take your wife out to a beautiful dinner, and when the check comes, say, hey, here's my tax write off, my little tax incentive for, uh, I'm just gonna need you to help me balance out this loss a little bit here.
Let's get me back to zero, guys. Let's go, right? So, let's flip it, though. Let's talk about the other side, which is the business doesn't do well. How much [00:14:00] support gets wheeled in for us then? Again, and I'm willing to lay it on thick this time because this pisses me off. Cause I've been on both sides of this.
It should. Yeah, it should. And when things went to shit, there was nobody to be like, let's help you out, son. Right? Society's not prepared to support founders in times of crisis, even if they are willing to request some of the spoils during victory, right? It just, it doesn't work that way. And it is, it's infuriating.
Again, nobody was there asking you, is this too much risk? Should you stick your neck out? Right. But they will definitely have an opinion about your success. 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 [00:15:00] familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.
For the first few years that I was doing my first startup, and I would argue I was as fortunate as it gets. But for the first few years, by the end of like, I'm going to say year three, by the end of year three, if I can kind of timestamp that moment, that was me. I was maybe 22 years old. I was in at least a hundred thousand dollars of actual debt.
When people hear a hundred thousand dollars, it's still a lot now, but in the 1940s, it was a lot more. It was like a billion dollars back then. Right. And it wasn't the kind of debt that you could negotiate your way out of. And Ryan, you can appreciate this. This was back when you were on campus. You could get as many credit cards.
This is before like the credit card companies really understood what they were doing. And they were like, Hey, these are newly minted wage earners. Let's fire every credit. Do you remember they would just send you credit cards? Like they would just send them to you. You're just like, all you need to do is sign it and start spending a lot on it.
It's yours. Right? I still, until a few years ago, I [00:16:00] finally let it go. I had the, the, the old college t shirt, uh, the one from, uh, Animal House. It was given away for free on the Ohio State campus and didn't return for signing in for a credit card. I no longer have the credit card, but I still have the t shirt hat.
I still have the same bank account as my corporate account. That I signed up for as a freshman in college on the level at Ohio State. So that's got to be Huntington then. Can't think of anybody else that was still around. Huntington. Bank one bank. The same name. What's interesting to me about this though is in that time where I'm sitting, three in the morning, staring at the ceiling Being like, what the hell did I get myself into?
And I'm 100, 000 in debt. The only job I had previous to this, I got paid 5 per hour because that was prevailing minimum wage. To give you an idea of how far back we're going, right? And I use that as a metric because remember, I risked everything to build this. And with that as the likely tool to dig yourself out of any hole that you got into, right?
So, anybody here can do that math. It's a lot of hours. It's a lot of hours. [00:17:00] Five dollars an hour to recover from that. Freeze frame that moment. And so, the company would go on to do amazing things and it defined my career. But at that moment, what were my options? In other words, if everything would have shut down and and I think, you know, we shut down in various forms probably every eight weeks, most startups do, right?
If we had shut down at that moment, who would be standing in line to help me out? Nobody. The deserve people don't show up. The deserve people aren't, they don't, they don't serve as both ends of the spectrum. They don't, when you, when you succeed and they come and tell you, you don't deserve this to have happened to you, you don't deserve this money.
When you fail, they don't come and say, Hey, well, you really don't deserve. for this to happen to you. Let us, let us help you or at least let us console you. The deservers aren't, aren't there then. Apparently I deserve failure. Yeah, of course you deserve any success. And again, that mentality to me is dangerous at best, because at which point we feel like things that we have, you know, risked and earned, et cetera.
[00:18:00] Aren't earned and by virtue of that deserved. I think that's a dangerous spot to put people in, right? And I have lots and lots of friends. I know you do too, that are successful founders and they've developed a guilt complex around their success. 100%. And I watch this, I watch this very closely. I watch their mannerisms, their speech, everything about how they treat their own success.
This idea that we've invented something called the humble brag. We're no longer even allowed to, like, we have to put an asterisk next to an exclamation of our own success. And I don't mean as opposed to, like, rubbing in people's faces. That's just a dick move, right? That's just, you know, I'm not for that at all.
What I'm saying is, like, we're not even allowed to talk about the success without having to interject some sort of, like, humble brag, slight, like, offset. And you know what's funny, man? Like, this doesn't exist in other places. Right. In other places where, but like it takes somewhere, like some of these outcomes are very similar, [00:19:00] right?
There's a lot of risk in entering a couple of other fields where the payoffs are huge, but they're few and far between. Right. If you set out to be a professional athlete, Good luck, right? And if you succeed, you will be compensated extremely well, right? The likelihood that you are one of the very few who actually get compensated for all the time, effort, work that was put into that very low, right?
Recording artists, actors, right? Yep. Same thing. They're going to get compensated extremely well. If they're part of the 0. 001 percent that actually make it to a point where they commercialize it at all. And yet I don't hear the same thing there. Right? I don't hear anybody saying that Kyrie Irving doesn't deserve his salary.
Steph Curry doesn't. Maybe there are. I don't know. I'm just a sports guy. But like, it doesn't seem to be the same thing, right? And maybe it's just because they understand like waking up early and going to the gym looks like and putting in physical effort looks like, hey guys, you know what? We do the same thing as founders.
It's a different looking gym, right? It's got, uh, it's my, my, my gym is called QWERTY, [00:20:00] QWERTY. Yeah, I think that's what it's called, right? I've written right across the top of my keyboard. And so like we're putting in the time, we're putting in the effort, we're putting in the hours, we're putting in the risk, the heartache, all of it.
Right. It all exists in our sport too. Just seems to be treated so differently. This is me saying poor founders again, just like. Why does anybody need to feel guilty about their success? It's ludicrous to me. It feels odd to me because it feels that guilt factor, that villainy, is increasing. And like I said, I think that is dangerous.
Now again, I'm going to go back because I know invariably again that we're in a very politically charged time right now. There's going to be folks that are going to be saying, Oh, well, you know, you think big corporate, you know, is, is should take over everything and, and, you know, business is better for everything.
No, I don't. No, I don't remember thinking that. Just to be clear. I didn't think that. All I'm saying is that founders who earned their money. Deserve their money. . Yeah. It's it now how they choose to spend it, that's up to them. I don't care, I don't have an opinion on any of that, but, but this, this idea that, that we should feel guilty about it.
Fuck that. Yeah. . Yeah, [00:21:00] exactly. Any other way. It really doesn't have a place. It, it really doesn't have a place. And, you know, it's, it's funny to me, I think, and as I think through the, the, the analog that I just gave, it's, it's because we're not as entertaining. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If we were more entertaining, nobody would be, nobody complaining, I guess they wouldn't go, well, we don't, we don't benefit from that in the same way, right?
Like, you know, I, I can watch, I can watch Kyrie do his thing and that entertains me. And so therefore he he's, he's earned his money by, by entertaining the masses. Well, do I not entertain you? Do we not entertain you as founders? Like how do we as a society? There is that, but like, I think that's like, we, we also, we do, we do benefit from these things.
We demand innovation, right? We demand technological progress. Yep. And yet we do these things that absolutely undermine the very reasons under which founders undertake these types of progress, innovations, and it all that we do bring to bear in, in the economy, in society. Right? Like, it's, it's nuts to me that it just gets written off as like, well, [00:22:00] yeah, okay, kind of, but, right?
Well. Take that phone out of your pocket. Toss it away. How did your life just change? Right? Take the apps that you use all the time. The software you use. Right. You like online banking, you're welcome. All of these things exist because someone was willing to pay the dues in risk and taxes. Right. To bring that to you, right?
So what they deserve on the other end, none of your damn business. I also want to be clear. I don't think either of us are isolating founders as being more deserving of it, right? I put this across the board, and I know you do too. Everyone who works hard enough for their money deserves their damn money. I don't care what you do, right?
Can you imagine if we took this same kind of vilifying experience and we applied it to a single mom? Right? How, like, insanely heretical that would be to people. If I were to say, see that mom? She's making 20 an hour. That's twice as much as people make it in other countries. She doesn't deserve any of that money.
The world would come and assassinate you in your home. It's, that can't be a sale. Right? [00:23:00] And having grown up with a single mother, I can appreciate where that's coming from. But, she worked for her money, she put in Anastasia's work, and she earned her cash. She deserves every single penny of it, right? As does anybody else that earned money that they have.
And the perception changes, is when that money becomes what people think is too much. Right? When they say, like, Elon Musk is such an outsized example, right? Because, like, he actually is a villain. I have nothing against the guy whatsoever. I'm just saying, I'm joking when I say this, like, he's like a movie villain, right?
Yes, I can't wait. Part of me actually hopes he goes full supervillain at some point, because it's going to be so entertaining to get to live out some of my favorite movies as a child. I'm absolutely going to have a ball with him. If he does not build a secret headquarters that has his face carved into the side of a mountain, I will be so incredibly disappointed.
I'll fund it. We'll find a way. Um, no. What I'm saying is he's a character, right? But he doesn't represent most of the people that go out and [00:24:00] try to risk something to make some money. Also, most of the people that we're talking about here aren't billionaires, right? I'm talking about the husband and wife who built a business.
They make 700, 000 a year, which is a ton of money. Less than it used to be, but a ton of money, right? And if I meet them, we're at dinner. I always take a special moment to say, I want to be clear. You earned every single penny that you have, right? And you should feel great about it. You should never have to apologize for it, you know, et cetera, right?
You shouldn't have to humble brag for it. Don't be a dick about it, right? Okay. But at the same time, do not forget that that's there because you put it there. And that's the next part I want to bring up. Within founders, we didn't just get a good job. We didn't hit the Powerball, right? We created something out of nothing.
It couldn't have made our job harder to make money. So when it actually does happen, when it comes to fruition, you kind of have to look at that path being like, Damn, like, that was literally the hardest way you could have gotten there. Calculated risk and relentless effort, right? And that's, that's [00:25:00] what it looks like, right?
It is absolutely not a lottery win. When we go back, if you zoom back out and we say, does that coupler, does any founder deserve that outsized income? I honestly cannot think of what you could do Any more than you would have done to deserve it more. I agree. Right? And I'd like to understand what the calculation could possibly be to say, If they did those things, and they generated it, who deserves it more?
If by virtue of doing it, you don't deserve it. How do you deserve it by virtue of not doing it? That's what I'm saying. Like, where does that come from? And look, I get what people are saying. I get the fundamental arguments here. And I don't disagree that there are imbalances in the world and society. Oh, no doubt.
Some of those can be fixed. Right, 100%. I breathe that through my own life, my own philosophies, my own politics. But take all that aside, like, I think part of what we're talking about here is that it's not that you have too much, right? It's not that somebody has too much. It's you're saying, I Or someone around me has too little.
And what's funny is that I think that [00:26:00] people don't actually know the math on this, right? They don't actually figure out like how you do the math in this. I'm not going to go into like, you know, we've already tried this at various times throughout history with communism and whatnot, right? It's tough, right?
But just the math version of this, just the math where it says like, well, let's redistribute that so that it's more fair. Okay. More fair to who? Again, like if the person putting the effort is doesn't entitled to it, where does where does fairness stop and how far down the line you go? Most of the people that I hear shouting about this, if we were to really do that and say, like, how do we just more evenly distribute this?
They would be part of the redistribution, right? That's what they don't get. Like, if you look at how many people make outsized outcomes and you're like, well, if you gave all the money of the rich to everybody on the road, everybody had like five more dollars. That's not going to change shit, right? So if you really want that to happen, it turns out that people well down into the lower middle class would also be redistributing and giving what they've got.
You know what? I have never heard any of them say that [00:27:00] they think that would be fair, that they don't deserve what they have and they'd like to give it to somebody else either. Right? Again, like I truly believe there are plenty of things that need to be fixed. This isn't political. This is just the mathematical truth of the matter.
You're not going to fix it by, by vilifying the founder and saying, you don't deserve that. You should give it all back. I mean, if they did, you know what happens? Nothing. Drop in the bucket. It's a multi stage problem. I think you and I both agree on is that we can't create a society. where people feel bad about being successful.
Now, again, that's not the same as go be an asshole. It's just saying, we want to be careful about how we shape that narrative, particularly around startups, because certainly in the United States startups are the lifeblood of this country. And so the idea of turning our greatest champions into our greatest villains has a very, very big consequence to it.
Very dangerous repercussions to them. Correct. Secondly, for the folks that come up, guys like you and I, Right. And build something and create wealth. I don't think most people understand is we can't wait to help other people out. Yeah. You and I built a company to specifically [00:28:00] do that, right? There's this idea that this, like this kind of concept or caricature of rich evil founder that like, you know, wants bad in the world.
You and I talked to countless founders. Do you know any of them that have that curly little mustache that are scheming on on how to like, you know, take over the world and do bad things? So I've never met one. Only two, but I hung up the Zoom calls immediately. I'm not helping you. I see where this goes.
I'm not saying they're all great people. I mean, there's, there's bad people all over the spectrum. What I'm trying to say though, is I think what we want to be able to do is we want to look at folks and we want them to be prideful of what they burned. We want them to feel like they have ownership of what they burned.
And then if what we're saying is there's this income gap, which there clearly is, I mean, there's no question, right? How do we address it? Get them on board, get them excited about contributing to that problem, which by the way, most of them already are, but there's two ways to do it. And again, this is, this is a little bit political, but I'm trying to kind of avoid some of it because it's not really.
Careful. One is you can force it out of them, you can extort them, which is essentially some version of the tax system depending on how you look [00:29:00] at it. I'm only saying that for as much, forget extortion because that's a strong word. But, you don't have a choice. The taxes aren't optional, right? If you don't pay it, it will be extorted from you.
Yes. The second version is essentially what's now the charity system. Where, you know, we can choose to, to, um, contribute. And, we can choose how we contribute that money. There is no lack of charitable giving. There's a massive amount of it. Now, is it so much so that, like, Everybody's wealth is being cut in half.
No, right? Is it supposed to be? Here's the way I look at it. To be honest, I don't believe I have a claim to somebody else's money. I just don't. I grew up poor. At no point did I ever think to myself like, Hey, here's a guy who made more money. That should be mine. I never think that way. However, I do like the idea, a lot, of creating lots of ways in which people can meaningfully give back and balance out that equation.
And of all the folks that I've talked to, and I've talked to many, I've yet to meet anybody that doesn't feel good about that. So, so I think that the mechanisms are there, but I think what's happening is we're starting to get a little bit too far from, Hey, you're [00:30:00] celebrated for, for doing something well.
And again, now you're vilified for it. And you're starting to retreat and defend. I think people are like, okay, now I have to defend my territory versus share it. And that's a dangerous spot to be overthinking your startup because you're going it alone. You don't have to. And honestly, you shouldn't, because instead you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes, connect with bootstrap founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups dot com community.
Check out the startups dot com community at W. W. W. Dot startups dot com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.