Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast.
This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by my friend,
the founder, and CEO of startups.com will schroeder.
Well, startups are like the only place where you cross the
finish line and immediately get handed a new race bib
for the next marathon.
And are the starter pistol fires
Uhhuh.
My English isn't English today.
You close the round, you're already raising the next one.
You hit the milestone, it resets to zero.
So will in, in 30 years of, of startups, how, uh, how often
do you complete something?
Dude, I'm still waiting to complete something.
Like, I feel like it's, it's weird to me.
Yeah.
It's weird to me that we've all gravitated toward an industry
that doesn't really ever end.
Yeah.
Because I think, yeah.
I think about like regular people with regular like,
like reasonable people.
Let's not call 'em regular reasonable people.
Reasonable people.
Yeah.
Reasonable people with a reasonable job.
Their life looks something like this.
They wake up in the morning, they have a place to be,
let's say their job, right?
Sure.
They show up, they do their work, they go home,
they forget about work.
Uhhuh, hopefully, right?
And then on Friday they get paid.
That is a very reasonable pace and it makes you feel
like he got something done.
It makes you feel like good to go on vacation.
It makes you feel like when you go home, it's just done, man.
Just done.
But we're in a business where no matter how well we do,
all it does is set us up for a much bigger problem next.
Right?
Like if we hire one person, we got 10 more problems.
If, if we launch one more product, we got
10 more problems.
Yeah.
It's endless, man.
It just never ends.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny, I, I think that part of it for
me was realizing that there was, the, the trap wasn't
that we set goals, right?
Of course, we need goals.
We have to have something that we're actually aiming towards.
It was that we expected the goals to deliver fulfillment.
Instead of just progress.
Right, right,
right.
I think that was the challenge for me was that it was like I
expected there to be this sense of completion or this sense
of fulfillment when instead it was just, yeah, it's another,
it's another goal complete.
It's another milestone.
And startups just kind of tend to be infinite games.
Right.
And treating them like,
yes,
finite games kind of guarantees disappointment.
Well, so that's what I was hoping to unpack today.
I, I wanna talk about like, how do we deal with no completion?
No lack of, of an end game.
And if you're new to this, if you're new to
the startup game, you are gonna learn this very well.
You're gonna learn that no matter how much you do.
Yeah.
There's 10 more things to replace it.
It's not just whack-a-mole.
Yeah.
It's you, you hit the mole and 10 more machines show up.
That's it.
With a whole bunch of moles to whack.
Right?
Like it's a bit maddening.
Yeah, and I think there's, there's some broken psychology
that's at the, the base of this that, you know, again,
I, I kind of wanna unpack.
The first thing that I learned about a long time
ago was something called the arrival fallacy.
Yeah.
And the arrival fallacy works like this.
The arrival fallacy works like I always believe.
That if I just get to this insert next step here.
Yep.
That everything will be fine.
Everything else is good after that,
and then every time I do it just resets.
Yeah.
Right.
Over and over.
And for a lot of founders, this is literally how our lives go.
If we just get this pre-seed round, we'll be good.
Right?
Everything will be fine.
We just make payroll.
Everything will be fine.
And yet, 10 years later, right?
It's still going through the same thing.
Yeah, that's exactly it, man.
It's like every arrival is just a, a costume change
for the next party, right?
Like Right,
right, right.
That's
all that's happening.
Right.
It just, the goal moves.
It might change completely, right?
Like, oh, the funding round is the thing.
Well, okay, yeah.
Now that we've got the funds, well now we actually
have to grow a business.
Now we have to go hire a bunch of people.
Now we have to do whatever.
Yeah.
I think it's when we start to conflate milestones
with meaning as opposed to them just being markers.
Right.
And that like, yes, they're, they're necessary.
Yes, we have to achieve these things, but I think we put.
Too much weight on the, the achievement of them or sort of
what it's gonna mean to us, or that there's for sure, for sure.
There's nothing after that, right?
That's, that's the real, the real problem.
Your happiness depends on the next milestone.
Your happiness has a subscription model, right?
So you're just, you're gonna keep consuming, man.
You're never gonna cancel.
But it's not the way this process is built, which I
think is, is interesting.
There was a great, great onion article, like this
is like 20 plus years ago.
Okay.
And this is like toward the end of the.com boom.
And it said something to the effect of Michael Delta's staff.
We became the number one computer manufacturer.
We're done.
Everyone go home.
Right.
It's like, and so the article, right?
It was, it was such a great article.
In the article.
It's basically him saying, look, when we set out to build this
company, I set out to build a number one PC manufacturer.
Right?
And he's like, and we did it.
Now everybody can go home.
Right?
It like, like, like it was a perfect example of
how this is never done.
Yes.
And I'll never forget that the image they had,
like the photo they had was of two guys carrying
out the ping pong tables.
Like, we don't need these anymore.
Right.
Perfect.
It was incredible.
No, this is, those are the take home prices, man.
We don't, we don't need this.
But, but think about that.
Like we don't get the benefit that most people
get of being done.
Yeah.
Ever.
No, no.
We don't get the benefits any of them.
Like it just the rest that comes from it.
But like, look, even at just a very basic level,
our brains get dopamine hits for completing things.
Yep.
Startups are built to deny completion, and that mismatch
for at least, like in my case, I certainly in your
case, it creates this sense of chronic restlessness.
Right.
That's why we're always on the move.
Even when we're sitting down, we're like, what's the
next thing I could be doing?
What's the next thing I'd be doing?
What was the most painful arrival?
In your 30 years where you got there and you were like,
yeah, this is the one that, that didn't actually land.
I, I would say this is as equally sad as it is painful.
Okay.
When I was in college and I remember plain as day,
I remember that if I could just make enough money to
cover rent, utilities, I didn't even have a car.
Rent, utilities, and food, which by the way, collectively,
collectively, was $500.
Wait every month.
Every month.
Not daily.
Every month.
Yeah.
My whole cost of living to live as a human was $500.
Yeah.
In the United States.
Right?
If only.
Anyway, but I remember thinking that if I could make
that kind of money, like I would, I would be good to go.
And, and honestly it took a minute.
Like sure.
It wasn't that fast.
And you know, part of that too is when you're starting
a business, you're often losing money on things.
Yeah.
You're not just, you know, instantly making money.
And so I got there and I was finally consistently making
more than $500 per month.
And I remember thinking, I'm good.
Yeah.
Like, like, what else could possibly happen?
What else could there
be?
Right.
And then within like a week later, we needed to
hire someone, which by the way, it was Damon.
Oh, that's
hysterical.
Yeah.
Right.
That's amazing.
I mean, think like 30 years ago, right?
Right.
Now we need, have no idea what I'm saying.
A thousand dollars.
That's
exactly it.
Uh, so for those of you listening, uh, Damon, who's
a great guy, a, a good old friend of ours, I used
to be one of the folks here@startups.com, so when I was
referring back, I mean, we're going, yeah, way, way back.
But I remember it like he came on and like, I think we
needed to pay him a thousand dollars or something like that.
Oh man.
Per month.
Right.
And I was like, where am I gonna come up with that kind of money?
Right?
Like, and then it reset everything.
I'm like, shit, now I'm, I'm down $500 a month.
Yeah.
That's
right's, right?
I was good.
Right.
And I remember how incredibly I was like.
Is this gonna happen again?
Yeah.
What, like what about you?
What's like the, the one thing you thought if you
could just get there?
You know, it's probably honestly something similar.
Uh, you know, I think it was, I'm, I'll aim a little later.
Uh, because there was definitely that like, let's
just make the ends meet, let's just figure out, right, like
how they, we keep them from turning the, the electric off.
Because by the way, the websites we're selling, they're
hosted on a local server that lives in my living room.
Right.
So if the, if the lights go out, it's more than
just getting dark in here.
It was post hiring.
Right.
And it was then like being able to say that like, not
only do we have enough money to cover payroll, it was
getting to a cushion and I set a really specific cushion.
I wanted, I wanted three months of opex.
Yep.
And we worked like crazy to, to drive enough sales and
like, which drives more costs.
Right.
Did a lot of things.
Then I remember just thinking like, once we have that
three months of money in the bank, where I know that
like nothing, anything that happens, I've got at least a
couple months to figure it out.
That is going to be the thing that just allows this thing to
go into a bit of cruise control.
Oh, the growth that we went through to get there, like
that, what allowed us to bank that cash put us on
a growth trajectory that just kept things moving.
And so then the, the payroll grew, right?
And then the, the opex grew, right?
And so then I'm all of a sudden I'm like.
90 days worth of opex is now like 15 days worth of opex.
So what did I do?
We gotta get 90 days again right back into like, did
I learn from that lesson?
Absolutely not.
Let, can we talk about like where that comes
from a little bit, right?
Yeah.
Why?
So we, we talked about the fact that like, you
know, the fact that we're never getting the dopamine
hit at completion creates this insane restlessness.
And I think that is, that's one of the drivers.
But then there's this other one, which is that we're taught
to despise complacency, right?
Yeah.
Like as founders, it's not, it's not also, okay.
It wasn't okay to just sit and say like, we
have 90 days of opex.
Now let's just keep operating at exactly the same level
we're at and never move, and everything will be fine.
All right.
You are ridiculed Yes.
In this business.
Yes.
And here's why though.
I think because we got into this business by taking someone
else's lunch who was complacent.
Yeah.
You know, and I, I said, you know, I told you ear earlier,
the disruptors, the apex predators of complacency.
Right.
That's
exactly it.
The reason we're in this business is because someone
else got complacent.
Right.
I think about it like when you and I grew up in the nineties,
uh, with our businesses, with the web design businesses,
we watched this happen Yes.
At a massive scale.
What we'd go in, we'd go in and we'd talk to these
clients, and it was these 40-year-old men, which to me
were like a hundred at the time.
It's funny that they're like significantly younger than me
now, but like these 40-year-old men, deer in headlights,
that the internet was coming,
Uhhuh.
I was like, my entire career and everything that I have
in front of me is based on the fact that someone like
you got old, fat and happy.
Yep.
And got complacent.
Yep.
And now someone like us is gonna come in and
eat your lunch for you.
Yes.
Kind of hard to build your entire career based on that,
not thinking that you're gonna be the prey next.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
That a day goes by.
It's about apex.
It doesn't necessarily know it's the apex predator, right?
You don't know what's, you don't know what's hiding
behind you in the shadows.
And I think what's interesting about that is in our
business where everything turns over so quickly.
You know, the newest thing replaces the oldest thing.
We are at the epitome of it right now with ai.
I mean, it's happening so fast.
Yes.
So fast
that even the leaders don't understand how
to keep up with it.
Like even Sam Altman from Open AI Chat, GPT
Yeah.
Is like, we're gonna get eaten by Gemini or Ina
topic or you know, whatever.
And he is like, dude, even that guy's got the problem.
Right.
And it's his product that's eating everybody
else's lunch, right?
Like
Yep.
Tells you something.
It's crazy.
And so I, I think we've got two things happening
at the same time.
One is that we're yearning for an endpoint, a chapter save,
like a a, a, finished, we
want that dopamine hit.
Yep.
Right.
And we keep thinking it's gonna happen, which is,
which starts to build this compounding anxiety.
At the same time, we're like, okay, well maybe I'll take a
beat and celebrate the winning and, and enjoy the moment and
just be glad we're where we are.
Yeah.
And we are constantly reminded you do that and
the person behind you is gonna eat your lunch.
It's, it's not a great recipe for relaxing.
It's not right.
It, it, it can kind of get, it can kind of get thrown in.
Like, it looks a little bit like ambition, but I'd argue it's
just paranoia dressed as virtue.
Right.
Like we don't.
We don't have to do that to ourselves, but we do.
Right.
Virtue.
I love that.
And I think we, we confuse content with complacent.
I think there's, I think there is a situation where we can
absolutely be satisfied with progress and be content with
progress and not be complacent, which to me, like it's always,
I've always put with like being asleep at the wheel.
Right.
It just means you're, you're no longer reacting anything.
You're no longer thinking about it.
You're just saying like, it is what it is.
And we'll just, we'll just see what happens.
Right.
We know what happens.
Right.
Um, we do get eaten by somebody else.
And I picture this over and over and over, I picture
all the big, fat, dumb, and happy businesses out there
Yep.
That are about to get eaten next.
Yeah.
Like one for, for some reason it just sticks
in my mind is TurboTax.
Here is a piece of software that's still
sold as box software.
Yeah.
You can
still it buy it 90 on it
on a physical disc.
Yeah.
Right.
It's unbelievable that, that that product
has made it this far.
Mm-hmm.
Now, in an era of ai, that product makes no sense,
no sense whatsoever.
It couldn't be less intuitive.
Yeah.
Ironically, coming from Intuit, it could not be less
like a dynamic or updated.
Yeah.
It is slow as shit.
I use it every year, by the way.
Yeah.
And it's, it's
still it every, every year,
right?
I am like, how is this product still in market?
And I've gotta imagine within the next 18 months somebody
comes up with something that just sucks in all your stuff,
figures it all out for you, and puts in the, the perfect doc.
I don't know how you couldn't.
And I think about that and I think there's
someone add into it.
That's the, the, you know, EVP of that product
division, et cetera, that has gotten paid so much
Yes.
For so long.
Right.
And you know, big, fat, dumb, and happy.
Right.
And all of a sudden, all of a sudden everything changes.
Now on the one hand, kudos to that guy for enjoying
the hell out of his career.
Really long of time.
He's probably lived a great life.
Yeah.
But for the rest of us, like I am constantly worried
that tomorrow the other shoe drops and I lose everything.
Like I don't have that, that moment of arrival.
Yeah.
Well, and I think it's interesting, like even kind
of regardless of where you are, even if you are like.
Winning, let's say.
Yeah,
right.
In a Darwinian game, even success can feel a bit like
a countdown time, right?
Like I, I remember there's times where like, oh, we're
doing well enough now that we start to gain some notoriety.
Like, sometimes that just feels like painting a
target on your back, right?
Right.
Now people are gonna come out, they're gonna try to
copy, they're gonna try to jump into the market, right?
We saw this with crowdfunding.
Uh, we saw this with advice networks.
We've seen this happen over time with some of the businesses
that we've built, and, you know, it never feels good.
Right.
It never feels good to know that there, there's somebody
even just know there's somebody trying to eat your lunch.
Yeah.
Right.
Whether they succeed or not, it just, there's always
that little bit of fear.
At the back of your mind that it's
Yeah.
Drives other anxiety, right?
We're we're reaching for, for dopamine with one hand
and trying to shove back cortisol with the other.
It's a great recipe for a long-term healthy life,
and it's interesting because depending on how you look
at the spectrum of types of companies that get started
in our world, okay, yeah.
And the one hand you've got the most.
Innovative companies, and when I say innovative, I
mean by like high turnover.
The latest and greatest is changing all the time.
Sure.
Right?
Yep.
Exactly.
Where like the, the top three AI companies are right now.
Yep.
We're just like, every day there's a chance that
something comes out Yes.
That eliminates your market.
Yep.
On the other end of the spectrum is a restaurant.
Yes.
Right.
Other than serving shitty pizza.
Yeah.
There's nothing that is going to be made
obsolete in your business.
Right.
Anytime soon.
So long as you show up in a good product, give cus good customer
service, you'll be okay.
Right.
Now.
So those folks, I'd like to believe, other than, you know,
the perils of making payroll, just the nature of running a
business, maybe sleep better.
But most of the folks that show up in our world Yeah.
Are more toward the other end of the spectrum.
Oh, a
hundred percent.
Where their actual entire business can go away.
Yeah.
Like fairly quickly.
Fairly quickly.
Within a couple years, sometimes less.
And that becomes a very hard place to be complace.
Yeah,
for sure.
How much do you think that the, the fact that we are sort of.
Brutalized into chasing metrics.
Does, does, yeah.
Does that, how much does that feed into this?
Because I feel like part of the startup culture idolizes
grind simply because it's really easy to measure, right?
Yeah.
It's, it's hard to put peace on a dashboard,
right?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
What is our inner peace quotient this month?
Right?
Nobody knows.
I gotta tell you, man.
You and I are, you know, pretty introspective pers people.
And, and I think over the years we've tried to do a better and
better job of saying like, you know, where's my happiness?
Where's, where's my contentedness?
And I think for myself, I've found that my
contentedness has never, ever.
Ever come from my jobing.
Now a sense of validation, you know, I do something
big or something like that.
Yes.
You know, a, a win, you and I have been celebrating
all kinds of wins later.
Yeah.
Fucking feels great.
Right?
But I've never been Content.
Content, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Content like content is how I feel about my wife.
Right.
Yeah.
Like I don't want anything different from her.
Mm-hmm.
Like I am very content with like where things are in our life and
I don't want things to change.
Like I don't want anything to change.
Right.
Content is where I feel with my kids.
I want them to do better things, but I like
they're incredible kids.
Yeah.
Like that level of contentment.
Just does not exist in my career.
What is it like for you?
Like how do you see it?
I hadn't thought about it in that regard, but I think
you're, you're spot on.
Right?
There are things that make me happy.
There are things that we celebrate, but in terms of
contentment, again, I think to some degree it's just
like it's beaten out of you.
We think of slowing down is equal to death, right?
And so.
It's now making me wonder how many things I've sought
out outside of, outside of work that do have like a, a
sense of completion so that I can achieve some contentment
in life that doesn't come from this thing that we
spend most of our day doing.
That's interesting.
But now I think I'm probably.
Pretty much same page, which is that, yeah, I'm not content.
There's always some other thing.
There's some other way.
There's always more or better or faster or cheaper, or there's
some, there's always one more dial you can adjust, right?
There is this, it's a dashboard with an endless
number of buttons that can be pushed and optimized.
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
dayLong@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.
I've always traded.
Need to get it with, don't wanna lose it.
Yeah.
So like for me, like I remember specifically, I've told you this
story before, but like when I was, my dates are all getting
messed up, let's say 25, right?
Sure.
And I go to the, the car dealership and I bought
a red Lamborghini, right?
And I remember, I, I go to the finance manager in the
back room and he slides me the, the payment and it's
like $6,000 a month Uhhuh.
Okay?
My mortgage was $1,500 a month at the time.
Right?
So to give you an idea
adds
up of this, of this delta, right?
That checks out in, in retrospect, what's that?
That checks out.
I, it totally
makes sense.
Yeah.
Right.
In retrospect, I think maybe $2,000 of that was principled.
The other $4,000 was finance fee.
Yeah.
Because they were like, dude, if this idiot pays this,
yes.
Even if we get paid for two months, we're gonna make money.
Huh.
Anyway, while I was doing the paperwork, the only thing I was
thinking was this will last for.
A month, two months before someone comes and
repossess this vehicle.
Yeah.
And it gets taken away from me.
Like, there's just no way a guy like me, like will get, and, and
that was a very serious thought.
That wasn't like, like a flippant ha ha, but
I don't really mean it.
Uh, I absolutely meant it.
It's like, yeah, there's no way there's staying around.
And like every time in my life when something went
well, my first thought is I'm gonna lose it.
Uhhuh.
Right?
Like the, when I look back, I never have.
That's weird.
I never really thought about that.
Yeah, like I never actually did lose something.
Maybe because I was so paranoid.
Maybe.
Or maybe that's just not how it works.
But how about this?
How about spend the next couple of months, try not
to be paranoid and see if everything gets taken away.
And then if it does, then you'll, then
you'll know for sure.
I am so hard coded on this one, man.
I like, so, you know, a lot of times we give people like
life advice or you know, startup advice, et cetera.
Yeah.
But.
I dunno about you, but I often tell people, here's my
experience, here's my bias.
And guess what?
What worked for me or didn't work for me?
Has nothing to do with you.
Just you.
Yeah,
exactly.
Take with us what you will.
Don't use it verbatim.
Yeah.
And I always tell people, I'm like, A lot of what made things
work for me are behaviors I'd highly recommend not pursuing.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
That's a thing.
Yeah.
When I look back at the trajectory, they're like, so
what was your path to this like, and I'm like, let me
not tell you 'cause I don't want you to try to repeat it.
There are easier.
Easier please ways.
Getting and doing the thing that you wanna do than, than
what I did before we move on.
How do we stay hungry without making our team live with
like perpetual scarcity brain?
Let's just pretend for a minute.
We can't avoid it as founders.
Like it is just, we're, we're stuck with it.
How do we keep that from becoming pervasive in
the, in the organization?
You know, it's interesting, man.
I don't know if everyone else feels the same way.
I don't, I, I, like, I haven't seen it.
At like a persistent level over 30 years.
Right.
And I think it's because for a lot of other
people it's just a job.
Yeah.
Right.
It's kinda what we said before, like, Hey, if this doesn't
work out, it would suck that I have to get another job,
but I can get another job.
So like everyone's worried about losing their job, but
at the same time, we've talked about this before, they don't
have the liability of losing everyone else's job too.
Like you and I talk about this all the time, like
even in our own company, like if we make mistakes,
it costs everyone their job.
Right, not just us.
That's a way different like level of anxiety to
live with than just having to deal with yourself.
Also, like if you're on payroll, let's say right at
whatever company and you did what you're supposed to do,
you get high fived and you go home, you can reasonably
expect to get paid next week.
Yeah.
Right?
Like again, unless you've done, you're a salesperson.
If you're a salesperson, you're hitting your quota.
You can reasonably expect, I mean, yeah, and I say
that because it's numeric.
You can look at it and say, Hey, you know, I did
exactly what you said and I'm gonna get paid, whatever.
But founders don't really get that, that luxury.
We could do everything right and still get the, the
rug pulled out from under.
It happens like every frigging day, right?
Like, like people think, oh, you're your own boss.
They're like, no, I just get fired for different reasons.
Yeah, right.
It's not that easy.
Yeah.
And we gonna have to fire myself.
Right?
Even worse.
So what do we do about all this, man?
How do we feel better about all this?
What we offer a little ray of sunshine for founders.
Okay.
So.
The first time it happened for me, the first time that, that
I felt a sense of completion.
Mm,
had nothing to do with work whatsoever.
So when I was traveling back and forth between
Columbus and uh, la.
I was, uh, back at the house in Columbus.
We had, and you already know the story, so I'm telling
the audience, we had this, uh, three car garage at our
house that was totally empty.
Like it was, it was nothing but, uh, studs in plywood.
And I went in there and I, I, one weekend, for some reason,
I had it in me that I wanted to build a, a workbench in there.
I remember, I don't know why I did this first, but
it was genius in retrospect.
I put like an old flat screen tv.
It's funny, I'm calling it flat screen tv.
What was it gonna put a tube TV up there?
Was it plasma?
Anyway, so anyway, so I, I put it up there and I hooked it
up to the internet so I could have YouTube and I was watching
a YouTube guy show like how to build a certain kind of
workbench uhhuh, and I was just following along, right?
Yep.
Again, I, I was handy, but I wasn't a carpenter.
And so after I built the bench and I'd spent
like four days doing it.
I was like, huh, it's done.
Yep.
Like I worked really hard on something that I cared
about, but it's actually done.
Yes.
And it was this weird feeling that I had never had before,
which was called completion.
Yeah.
And I say like a lot of times I'll talk to founders
and they'll say, yeah, this weekend I just like cleaned
up my yard or cleaned up my house or whatever.
And they're like, I just needed to do it.
And I was like, there's a reason for that.
Yes.
Your mind needed to complete something.
You needed to, to to take order to chaos.
And I think that action, cleaning your living room or
gardening or whatever Yeah.
Was something you could actually finish.
Yes.
And it brings a sense of completion.
And dude, as you know.
Once I started, the irony is that I never,
it never ended, right?
Like after that I just like never stopped doing carpentry.
Yeah.
You turned that completion into a never ending train of other
completions, but there's a bunch of completions in there.
At least
when you and I were working together, it'd be like a
year or two ago, and we were like building drawers,
I think for For the house.
Yeah.
It was cool.
Right.
At the end of the day, we had a whole stack
of drawers everywhere.
We had 64 drawers.
Yeah.
I was like, we made some drawers today.
And it's like in, in the drawers, there's
a freaking drawer.
But the point is like it felt so they're done unusual.
They're
right.
You don't ever have to build those 64 drawers again.
Well,
and it was tactile, right?
Yeah.
I remember Jamie Simoff, you, the, the, the founder of Ring
told me, he's like, I've never built something that prior
to this kid in six companies.
He's like, I've never built something prior to that.
It was ever in a landfill.
Right.
Which I always thought was an interesting like way
to describe his product.
That is interesting.
But he is like, I never had something physical
that could be thrown away.
Yeah.
There's something to that.
But I think there's, yeah, from a, from a business perspective,
I think that's absolutely true.
And, you know, completion is such a, it's a
psychological nutrient, right?
Yeah.
Without it, I get twitchy, irritable, right?
Compulsive I, I'll go looking for something to
go just to complete, right?
I think that's what it is.
Like, I'm gonna go clean the room.
I'm go do this.
One of the things I realized that I started to do was not
only did I want things that, that had completion to them,
but that were sort of like.
Monuments or some in some way memorialized things, right?
Mm-hmm.
So like the, you know, building the playhouse
for the kids, right?
Has a completion and it's, then it's there.
I see the damn thing, right?
I watch them play in it.
They enjoy it.
The, the chicken coops, guests physical, I can see it.
There's a whole, there's an ecosystem that
gets built around it.
The pond, right?
I walk and I can sit by it.
So it wasn't just that I needed completion, I actually
really enjoyed when I had something I completed.
That.
Then I could also like go and just be near like, so there's
a constant reminder essentially of the completion, right?
It's like I needed it to be just pasted there in front of me.
It was like, yeah, you did that.
It's done.
Now you're okay.
Well, I tell you what though, what it unlocked for me was
realizing that the lack of completion was an issue.
Again, up until that point, I'm like, by the time I
start doing this, I'm like 20 years into my career.
Yeah,
and I remember like a little bit prior to that,
we had launched fundable.
So just you, you kind of timestamped that for you.
I remember the day we launched fundable, it
was May 22nd, uh, 2012.
Yep.
And it was such a run to get to that milestone.
Right.
And, you know, we just went through, uh, endless
hell to get there.
But I remember the day we launched it, it was
like this, this muffled.
Scream, Uhhuh, and then that was it.
And then like, it was so uneventful.
Yeah.
It was so incredibly uneventful.
And now nothing happened.
Nothing wrong.
Right.
And like a lot of what we do is particularly, you
know, in startups and web startups and stuff like that,
has so little like, like visceral completion to it.
Yep.
And even the wins just don't feel like anything.
I remember years ago hearing Mark Cuban talk about when he
sold broadcast.com and he got a a billion dollars wired into
his bank account, so to speak.
Yeah.
And he said it was the most unfulfilling thing
you could imagine.
He's like, I just sat there hitting the refresh button
over and over and over on my browser until it hit.
And when it did, I was like.
Huh.
Now what do I do?
And, and that's a billion dollars, dude.
Right?
Like, I mean, it doesn't get bigger than that.
And I hear this all the time.
Yeah.
It's very possible to work on something that just doesn't
give completion or fulfillment the way we expect it to.
Yeah.
And dude, we spend an awful lot of hours working on
something that, that doesn't give us that, you know?
Yeah, it's tough.
And I mean, startups really just don't give closure.
It's not part of what Right.
They, what they're able to provide.
They provide a lot of other things, but you need it, I
guess we have to figure out.
Right.
So to me, the startups are the engine.
Right.
They're the things that constantly moving.
Our life has to be those, those kind of stop points and
provide that for us because if nothing ever ends, like
we never get to exhale.
Right?
Right.
Our poor brains, our body's just.
All of it.
Right.
And to me, like completion isn't luxury, it's it's maintenance.
We do need it.
Yep.
To your point, like you didn't know that you needed it and then
you, then you felt it and you're like, oh yeah, that was good.
Right.
And so,
right.
I can come in and come in all kinds of forms, right?
Like for me, cooking a meal, I love the process.
I love the creation of it.
I love every bit of it.
But it also has an end.
Right?
Right.
There's also, you know, sometimes there's a day or
two of it left over in the fridge, but, um, there's,
there's an end to it.
Finishing a workout.
Awesome.
Right.
Going on a hike, writing something we can publish and
walk away from cool woodworking.
Right.
And so, yeah.
To me the magic isn't the hobby itself, it's the
definitive finish line.
Right.
The fact that there is a, like, there it was, we did it.
I think it's two stages.
One stage is recognizing that our work doesn't have
that fulfillment moment.
Yeah.
Right.
That completion, it's done, it's eternal kind of moment.
It's not that like, you know, people like, go, well you,
you built and sold a company, or something like that.
I'm gonna tell you that way less rewarding than you think it is.
And, and I, and I hate when people say stuff about like,
like Mark Cuban, you know, getting a billion dollars and
saying it was unfulfilling.
It's like, fuck you, mark Cuban.
Right?
Yeah.
But he's not wrong.
He's not wrong.
Right.
I don't feel bad for the guy.
Yeah.
And he's not saying feel bad for me.
He's, his point is,
his point is,
dude
didn't do what I thought it would do.
Yeah.
Like, how is that possible?
Like, he's like, I, I see it the same way you do, and
I still can't believe it.
Yep.
So I look at it and I say, man, the first step, I wish I
had known this 30 years ago.
The first step is recognizing that we're in a business.
That doesn't have completion.
Milestones.
Yes.
It doesn't have full like finalized, right?
It's done.
We don't have to do that ever again.
You raise round of capital the moment you're done,
you gotta be back out raising more capital, right?
You hire another employee.
The moment you do that, you now have another liability that you
have to go service with more revenue, like it never ends.
Now, if that's the case and your work doesn't have, you know,
that kind of final completion, relax, you still need that.
Yeah,
for sure.
You're just not gonna get it from work.
And that's what never occurred to me, Ryan.
It never occurred to me that like, I need
that That was one Yeah.
In second.
And it wouldn't come from work.
Right.
Once I put those two together, I mean, my paranoia isn't
gone, but like, yeah.
But, but man, when I'm doing,
but, but it gets at least a little bit of a rest period
when I'm doing fulfillment work, and that is straight
up hardcore labor, right?
Yeah, that's, that's me building stuff, you know?
Yeah.
Just being an insane carpenter.
I do it more so than anything because I love being done.
This past weekend I was building a catwalk of all weird things.
Right.
You know, like the catwalk is my living room.
Yes.
And I was doing like all the trim pieces.
It sucked.
I actually don't, don't enjoy doing that whatsoever.
Yeah.
But when it was done, it looked badass.
Yeah.
It looked awesome.
Right.
And, and it's
complete.
Yeah.
Man, I Right.
I was like, it felt so complete.
Also, particularly in this case, when I'm building something that
I know could be there forever.
That has like an incredible field.
Yes.
That's that, that's what I was getting at before, right?
It's memorialized, right?
Yeah.
Like I did this thing and I'll be able to look at this.
I'll be able to run my hand along that trim work forever.
Exactly.
And, and to that end, like, you know, these are, these are all
little things and I think one of the challenges that I had
early on when I was trying to figure all this out was that.
I kept looking for things that would have a completion that
was equal to the whole, that was left by sort of the, the
lack of it in the startup.
Oh,
yeah.
Right.
In like a single event.
Love that, right?
Yeah, yeah,
yeah.
Like, okay, what can I do that will then be that thing, right?
Is it start the family?
Is it build the house?
Is it whatever?
Right.
And instead, what I realized over time was.
Just plenty of little completions is fine.
Right.
Because
Right.
That relief compounds just like stress does.
Right.
So for me, small finishes were more than enough to refill the
tank and I think that's what I've started to, to focus on.
It's not what you finish, it's that you finish.
That's exactly
it.
Is that you finish it all in.
Yep.
If I stop, say doing carpentry, as you know,
my hobby and my completion mechanic, I don't actually
have other things that I do.
Give me that sense of, of completion and fulfillment,
even though I literally build things for a living.
Yeah.
Like, and what's nice about, you know, doing anything
like that, or even like you were talking about making a
meal, getting a good workout in, playing a sport, you
know, whatever your thing is.
What I'm saying is don't look at that as trite
compared to your startup.
Correct.
Because the dopamine hit that you get out of
that is meaningful, the sense of completion.
It resets.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it puts stuff like back in the tank.
Yep.
And I think for so long, for so many years, like
decades, I kept taking it out and I could never figure
out how to put any back in.
I hear a lot of people talk about this with, uh, with wealth
where they say, you know, I made some money and I bought a
thing, you know, like to car, you know, house or whatever.
And then the novelty wore off.
That's nature of it.
Novelty wore off.
And so I tried to buy another thing to replace that feeling
of accomplishment, whatever.
And then that novelty.
Novelty wore off.
Yeah.
And then what happened is every single time I tried
to spend more go outdo it.
Yep.
To get that feeling back of finality and it just got worse.
And it's actually like a legit problem for people.
Yep.
It's like we all know an adrenaline junkie.
Right.
And like, it's like whatever it took to, to shake them
and, and to satisfy that need, it just becomes more
and more and more each time.
Well, right.
Where that becomes an issue is we're trying to solve a problem.
Yeah.
With a mechanism that doesn't solve that problem.
Correct.
We're, we're trying to buy more stuff and then,
then we'll be happy.
Well, it turns out buying stuff doesn't sustain happiness.
Yeah.
It gives you a short bit of happiness.
Short terms.
There's something really cool about rolling off the
lot in a new car, right?
Yeah.
But within three weeks, you just can't sustain like
that level of happiness,
maintenance bill.
Exactly.
And then you're, you're, you're trying to, to buy the feeling
of rolling off the, the, the lot in the new car again.
Yeah.
And it just kind of doesn't work that way.
Doesn't come with the car.
Um, I always thought, okay, so this was me like again, early
in my career, in my life, I thought that once you could
get like a few of the staples of life, car, house furniture,
so to speak, that you're done.
Yeah.
I remember there's this quote by, uh, Edward
Norton and Fight Club.
Remember when he was going through the IKEA catalog?
Oh, yes.
And he says something to the effect of, he is like, I just
assumed, you know, I, I had the couch, I had, you know, this.
He's like, so that problem was taken care of.
I'd never have to deal with that problem again.
Right.
And I was like, that's exactly how I was, was
thinking at the time.
Uhhuh like, you know, once I got the IKEA couch, I, I'm the nan.
I would be fine.
Right.
But it turns out that burns off.
And you need the next thing and the next thing
and the next thing.
Whenever we're trying to fulfill ourselves with these
bottomless pits, it ends poorly.
So again, I wish somebody told me, dude, find something
else to fulfill yourself.
'cause this ain't it.
Yeah.
And it's true.
You know, I think it's a piece of advice I started
giving myself was stop obsessing about the next
thing you're gonna start.
Start obsessing about the next thing you're gonna finish.
And that helped me a lot, I guess, like, look, as
founders as creative people, as, as people who like to
build and, and are, are capable of doing it, it's
really hard to avoid that, that trigger and that urge.
But I think that as I've, as I've gotten a little older, a
little slower, a little more mature, I've figured out it's
like, look, just there's, it goes back, like there's
that sense of completion.
Like, let's finish this off before we, before
we start playing around with what's, what's next.
My ratio of earning things to, uh, appreciating
them is one to 99.
I I will spend 99% of my time earning things.
Yeah.
And at best, yeah.
1% of my time appreciating them.
Yeah.
Now, when I say earning things, I mean, it could
be literally anything.
It could be a sport that I played, it could be, you
know, something that I built.
A
skill that you've learned.
Yeah.
I will work so hard to win at a hockey game, but when
I win, I won't give a shit.
Like it has no, like the, the effort pays me nothing.
Right?
Like I just, oh yeah, okay.
We won.
Whatever.
I would love to have this like inner compass that said, I will
only work on things if I spend an equal amount of time getting
them as I do appreciating them.
Ooh, ooh.
Which means I work on nothing.
There's a complicated calculus.
Yeah.
I can't do it.
But that seems like a really cool goal.
It does.
I will say this, the only thing in in my life that I
would say I've spent more time appreciating than
working for, and this is gonna sound wrong, is my family.
Yeah.
No.
I mean,
yes, not because I don't work for it because I spend so
much time appreciating, yeah.
Being appreciated for, for my family.
Yep.
Same.
And they don't require like some like life
sucking effort out of me.
No.
I mean, just have great family.
So do you, Jason k said this once, he said kids are
the only thing that that isn't under underrated.
Yeah,
because it's the one thing that can give you back
that's depending your kids.
That's
so true.
Uh, it's the one thing that can give you back
more than you give to them.
Yeah.
Not that that needs to be the ratio, but it's,
it's pretty incredible.
I haven't been able to find that many kind of sources
of completion, of certainty, of like being able to
appreciate that are like so polar opposite, you know,
from what we do in startups.
Yeah.
I guess what we're saying is that startups are marathons
with zero finish tape.
Right?
So.
Expect them to deliver.
A permanent sense of rival is a rigged game, right?
Like we can't have that expectation.
So if you, it's a Rigg game, do want fulfillment,
you have to manufacture some kind of completion
outside the company, right?
For will, it's building things for me, it's playing sports,
sometimes building things, uh, but they have to exist for us.
So don't worry about the next thing.
You're gonna start, worry more about the next thing
you're gonna finish, and if it feels ridiculously
good, and it will also make you better at the marathon.
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.com community.
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