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, will they say that pets grow to
resemble their owners?
And I think it's, it's also true that that startups
often resemble their founders, or founders often
resemble their startups.
And, and I'm speaking about something very specific
here, which is that startups are just a giant collection
of problems, right?
Mm-hmm.
Problems that we have to, or want to, or think
we should go solve.
But I think something you and I can talk about today
is that, uh, founders are full of problems too, right?
We've all got tons and tons and tons of issues,
challenges, you name it.
So why don't we dig into.
The reality of those things, how important they actually
are and, and whether they're problems or solutions in the
making and, and sort of where,
where do we stand on all this stuff.
I think most founders, uh, by definition have a ton of
problems, and I don't just mean with their startups,
I mean their own problems.
I think my concern having a laundry list of them is
that we've created a society where we're so intent on
saying, you have a problem.
Here's the pill that fixes it.
Right.
I, I say this, you know, having come from the
pharmaceutical industry, right.
You know, so for a decade of my life, I ran in at agency and
our largest clients we're all pharmaceutical, uh, companies.
The script was first convince the patient that they're broken.
Uh huh.
Then of course come back with a solution.
In, in the nineties, you know, we were launching a
product called Prozac, and it was funny yesterday, I was
on the phone with one of our clients yesterday and I was
referencing the fact that, you know, this was, you know,
kind of problem solution.
And we are at the dawn of consumer marketing back then
around Prozac, and they were.
What's Prozac?
And I was like, seriously, you're the first person to ever
ask me that.
Right.
They spent hundreds of millions of dollars so that no one
would ever ask that question.
Yeah.
I I was like, it's the largest, like at the time there's the
largest consumer prescriptive product in, in history.
Yeah.
And the fact that, that you don't know tells me two things.
One, that's not a problem you have, thankfully.
And two, you clearly weren't around in the nineties, right?
Yeah.
You were, you were not alive then.
But, but let me build on that.
The idea for the pharmaceutical companies, and I know everybody
wants to paint them as these like big, awful people, but
like their script was simple.
Convince people that this is a problem.
And by the way, it usually was like for most of their
products, those are actual problems that they're solving
at, at a prescriptive level.
But then sell them the prescription, you know,
sell, sell them the drug.
And where we see that now is on social media.
Social media has an endless stream of people telling you
that you have a problem and they are the prescription
just to solve Yep.
Problems you otherwise never would've surfaced.
I think, I think that's what's so interesting about it, is
that because of these little echo chambers that we get stuck
in and because of the, their ability to reach us over and
over and over again, they take something that, okay, sure,
it's, it's a problem at some level, but it probably wasn't
in your, in, in the near the top of your hierarchy of needs.
Yet, if you hear about it enough, all of a sudden it
does feel like a problem.
So not only are they telling you have the problem, they're sort
of creating the problem, right?
Yes.
Because what they're creating is the intensity
around the problem, right?
Right.
They're creating the desire, the need, or the feeling
that I should fix this, and then they sell the solution.
Right?
That's batshit to me, right?
He's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the
problem and then I'm gonna sell you the solution, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I used to tease my dad when he was still a practicing
podiatrist, like, drum up business, like, dad, just
buy me a couple a box of thumbtacks and I'm just gonna
go scatter 'em all over the streets, near your office.
This we'll drum up business like, like, like crazy, right?
Like create the problem and then solve a solution
or sell the solution.
Let me give you my list of problems because this list
is long, but like kind of off the top of my head, I am as
a founder, wildly obsessive.
Like about anything that I'm doing, even when I
hate what I'm doing, I am wildly obsessive about it.
And you were in town from Spain last week and you
know, you, you, you got to watch my obsession being like
carpentry and everything else.
Uh, you know, in the, in the flesh.
I didn't do anything to dial it down.
You did not.
No.
The tank could dial it up.
Exactly.
More
sawdust.
That's what we need.
More sawdust.
I used to look at my obsessiveness as a negative.
Right?
And so I would look for all these self-help kind of things.
Yep.
I get too stuck on these things, right.
To fix it.
I find that I am hell bent on control.
Now, again, I don't wanna get like too deep with this, but
that was like a facet of my childhood and not being able
to have control, et cetera.
Yeah.
So I'm hell bent on it and I'm like, Hey, you know where
I should go if I, if I have a control issue into startups.
The one place where there is no control ever and it only
gets exponentially worse.
So like something that would poke that therapy.
Well, to be
fair.
You do have control.
You get to decide what to do, when to do, how to do it.
Mm-hmm.
We don't have any control over the outcomes.
Right.
So it does put you in a dangerous spot.
But I can see the allure, I can see the, the draw because
it's finally like, nobody's gonna tell me what to do.
I can run this thing into the ground however
I want.
I have another problem.
Again, this is a long list, but I'm just going
through random ones.
Yeah.
Because I, I wanna set the stage for this that I ignore success.
No matter where I'm successful, no, no matter where it is,
I just, as soon as someone says, Hey, great job.
I'm like, cool, that means I should stop thinking about it.
What next?
Right.
And go find a problem.
Right?
But my failure is on an infinite loop, right?
It, it's, I, I don't know what it is.
Analysis paralysis, baby.
Just, just running those things over.
What could I have done differently?
What could I have differently?
What could I have done differently?
Endless loops.
I mean, this is the soundtrack to most of my nights.
W where do you see the same like, uh, with you?
Oh, I mean, so check, check and check.
Control was the big one for me.
That was something that I, I did work on.
So, so here's what's interesting.
As we go through these lists of problems, I, I find that there
are, are some of these things are actual problems, right?
But I think it depends on where, right?
So needing a high degree of control in my startup not
necessarily a bad thing, right?
Right.
I mean, yes, you can take it too far, just like anything.
But having to a need for a high degree of control in personal
relationships through my life.
Not necessarily a good thing.
Right?
So what I started trying to say was, instead of
trying to fix these things, yeah, I need to figure out
like where they belong.
Because what turned out was like, especially in the
context of the startup, a lot of the things I was trying to
fix because they were bugs.
It turned out to just be features with really shitty pr.
Right?
It was like, I just needed to kind of rethink like
when and where these things, these things should survive.
I think for me, outta the ones that you've listed,
the, the, the ones that, and, and I think there's one
you haven't hit on yet that you'll get to because we, we
both have a challenge around this, which is attention span.
Um, and, and just being able to stay focused.
So it's interesting while we can be completely
obsessive about things.
We can obsess about four or 500 different aspects of
that thing at any given time.
And I think that, again, sometimes that's great,
sometimes it's not.
But I think the one that has bothered me most and that I
thought I needed to fix the most was over analysis, right?
You know this about me.
I will think and think, and think and think, and sometimes
it can cause me to delay action.
However, when I go back in time and I look at
some of those things.
Most of 'em have worked out pretty well and, and most
of them were a result of having analyzed things to
a point where had I just jumped in with the first or
the second, or even the third thought, it probably wouldn't
have turned out as well.
Now there's a balance there.
'cause if I never get off the lab bench, if I just
keep thinking and never take action, nothing happens.
Um, but I think that was one of those where I fought
hard to try to like, just stop overthinking it.
Stop overthinking it.
And then I realized at some point I was like, well.
I actually don't know where the overthinking line is.
So carry on, son.
Keep thinking.
Who convinced you it was a problem?
See, see, this is where I'm interested.
Like I'm interested that, that there are these, you know, uh,
we're called false prophets.
These people that are like, Ryan, here's
what's broken with you.
You've gotta fix this.
And, and this again, I think for a lot of founders is
like, oh no, I have this thing that I have to fix.
And they end up fixing something that's actually
their superpower.
Did you see that?
Yes, a hundred percent.
And I think it was, it was, again, people mostly trying
to be helpful, I think.
But it was cheap dime store advice.
It was like, maybe you're overthinking this.
And of course maybe I was, but there wasn't ever any
follow on when I was like, okay, so help me understand,
like where, how would you approach this differently?
Well, you know, you really have all the context for that.
I can't really, you know, like, okay, cool, so you
just said a thing, you know, now guess what you've done.
Instead of making me think about it less, now I'm overthinking
whether I'm overthinking.
But that came from a lot of places.
So it came from.
People around me, people who are maybe involved in
the same decisions, right?
So let's say I'm sitting in a meeting with a startup
team and we're like trying to figure out what to do, and I'm
going through iteration, after iteration, after iteration.
And sometimes that question would come up, maybe we're
overthinking this, maybe we are.
I don't know.
That's my job.
My job is to keep thinking other places.
Where would be when I would come to somebody with like a
personal pain and say like, you know, I'm really stuck on this
thing and I just can't, and I just blah and I don't feel good.
And they're saying, maybe you're overthinking it.
And again, maybe.
But I think that there were always other root causes that
led to the overthinking that maybe were actually the problem
my entire life.
I've been told by the outside world that everything that
makes me me is a problem.
Think about that for a second.
Yeah, right.
Uhhuh, like, I've never, ever, ever been told in my life that
what makes me, me, me is good.
Okay.
Now let me build on that.
When people look at.
Our outcomes, right?
Yeah.
As founders, if they've, if, if the outcomes are great, we
are applauded for that, but no one ever says Yeah, but along
the way you are all fucked up.
Right, like which incidentally led to that outcome.
So let's try to fix that.
And I'm like, wait, hold on a sec. If you tried to fix
all of the things that were broken in me, I would've
never gotten that outcome.
Now I wanna be clear when I say this, right?
There are things that are broken within you.
Actually can be a, a, a force of good.
And then there's things that are broken within you that
actually probably need to be, need some actual therapy.
Right?
You should fix, in other words, if you have a raging
temper and you want to belittle or hurt people, right, you
should fix that, right?
Yes.
That's, that's worse.
Fixing.
Correct.
Right.
There are like legitimately bad behaviors that actually
don't have cool outcomes that you should probably fix.
Right.
And, and I'll give you an example.
If you have a raging temper and you become a professional
boxer and somebody could say, well, look, you took that raging
temper and, and put it to a.
Place of good.
Sure.
When you're in the ring with the other 99.9% of your day,
you have a raging temper and that's a big freaking
problem you should address.
Right.
So probably even more
so of a problem
because you're a trained puncher.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Right.
So I wanna make sure when we're saying this, we're not
saying that every negative trait is actually a positive
and you shouldn't address it.
There are plenty of negative traits.
Yeah.
That you absolutely should address.
Yeah.
What we're really talking about is there are a lot of
traits that aren't necessarily negative, but we're being
told they're negative.
Yes.
I, I'll give you an example 'cause because you, you
said we'd touch on this.
I have massive A DH, adhd.
Yep.
However, I grew up in the eighties when A
DHD wasn't a thing yet.
You were just someone that couldn't pay attention.
That was it.
Right, right.
So my entire focus, my entire childhood and academic
career was punctuated by being reprimanded for my
A DHD again, for not being able to pay attention.
You know, will sits in class and he is never paying attention,
will gets assigned tests and, and he ever does it.
Will's gets assigned a book.
He never reads it.
And you know, you and I were talking about this, like, I
actually cannot read a book.
It's not that I don't want to, right?
The irony is I can write one, but I cannot read one.
When I read a single paragraph, it doesn't matter what it is.
By the end of the first paragraph, my
mind is already gone.
My mind is already in 10 other places in most cases.
By the time I get through the bottom of a page, I
cannot remember that I was reading a book or what was
on the top of that page.
Think about that for a second.
Yeah.
As a student, as an academic, that is exactly what you scored
on, on your ability to, you know, synthesize and, and
regurgitate that information.
And I actually kind of can't do it.
I'm very bad at it.
Yeah.
However, no one ever stopped to say.
Where is your head at?
What, what are you actually thinking about?
Did you stop paying
attention because you already know all of this and
you're egregiously bored,
or you're taking what you just read and processing
10 other threads,
synthesizing it into something else?
Right.
That was always my challenge.
It was like, because to me, and this is where like
somebody had to teach me what education was actually
supposed to be doing, which didn't align well with what
I wanted, I was like, I think you're gonna teach me things.
I'm gonna then figure out how to use in new and exciting
ways that exactly it.
So the minute I learned something new, and again, that
might've been in the first paragraph, I'm like, what
can my brain turn this into?
That'll be useful.
How is this a tool?
How is this fun?
How is this exciting?
And then I missed the next three paragraphs,
right?
Or, or did I?
Well, right, so, so no one stopped at the time to
say, where is Will's head?
Right?
Oh, he is not paying attention in class.
So he's bat maybe like, why don't we ask him what
is going on in his head?
When I got out of academia and I was able to just operate
on my own, everything changed because for the first time
in my life, I was being rewarded for my head going
in 10 different directions.
Yes.
'cause it turns out those were ideas, those were
actions, those were things that needed to get done.
Right.
That most people were still stuck reading the material.
Right.
I was 10 steps beyond that.
Thinking about like how many different ways we can apply it.
Uhhuh.
So for the longest time, again, I'm just using
this as a reference point.
I kept trying to fix myself.
I kept trying to fix my attention span.
I kept trying to to fix my thought process, and it
turned out that the very thing I was trying to fix
was my greatest asset, right?
Which is bananas, right?
It's right.
It's like, and I think of how many people are out there
that are selling the dream, selling the pill, right?
Pretty much every social media influencer they're trying
to sell while why you gotta be in the cold plunge pool.
Otherwise, you can't get started in the morning maybe, right?
I'm not saying the cold plunge pool is bad, right?
No, I, I, I understand the health benefits, right?
I love a cold plunge, however, I know that.
I use, 99.9% of my mornings have started without them,
and most of the world does exactly the same and
seems to get on just fine.
Every successful thing I've ever done specifically didn't
start with a cold plunge.
Right, exactly.
And again, I'm, I'm picking on the cold plunge, not
'cause it's a bad thing just because it's one of those
things where it's like, I've gotta incorporate this.
Yeah.
I, I've gotta use Tim Ferriss's tips.
I, I need the one hack, I need the biohack.
And I'm like, you can, it's not necessarily bad.
Right.
But there's this massive stream of false
profits right now, okay.
That are telling you all of these things that you
need to fix yourself.
And I, I'm just raising my hand and I'm going, are you sure?
Are you sure about that?
Well, they are, they're sure because they're sure that's,
but they are, and they have to be, I mean, that self-help
economy needs you to be broken.
Okay.
So I, I just have to point this out.
I know most of these people, like most of the people that
you're probably following on a podcast or you know,
you're buying their products.
I know most of these people, and I, and I've known
them for a very long time, not gonna name any names.
'cause that would be the worst thing ever.
Right.
The irony is most of them.
Are the most fucked up people you'll ever meet.
Right, right.
Like selling, like the self-help and stuff like that.
I know how their personal lives have gone and they are not good.
It's not
something you'd wanna replicate.
It is.
Well, it's that old
adage and I, I don't know how true it is 'cause I've
only interfaced with a few psychologists or psychiatrists,
but they say, you know, that the people that go
into that field are the ones who need it the most.
I respect anybody that just wants to help.
And I, and I don't necessarily know that there's like
bad intent, but I just think the irony cannot
be overlooked, right?
That the people that seem to be at the highest orders of
magnitude of how they're, you know, they're trying to convince
you that you're broken, tend to be the most broken people.
Yeah.
Which, which blows my mind.
And I think over time, especially with,
um, social media.
And how I've seen everybody become, you know, the, the
prophet or the doctor or, you know, the, the, the messenger.
I've been like, damn, dude, I knew you from before and nobody
should be listening to you.
Yeah.
No credibility.
How did you hear?
Well, we got an email to that effect last week.
It was like somebody said something about something
they saw on the site, and they're like, but I actually
know that personally, and, and it's, yeah, it's not good.
And we're like,
well, okay, that's, let's flip this.
Instead of saying, okay, yes, there's a lot of people out
there that are trying to tell me that I, that, that I'm broken.
Let's flip it and talk about why some of the things, Ryan,
that, that you and I do, that everybody's been trying to fix,
and again, as it relates to other founders like us, should
not be tampered down, right?
Yeah.
They should be harnessed.
They should be exacerbated, right?
For example, my obsessiveness, my freakish obsessiveness right?
Can absolutely be pointed in the the wrong direction.
But it can also be pointed in a couple cool directions, right?
Yeah.
So if we rewind back, and again, you've been through
this journey with me, so, so you can appreciate this.
You know, five years ago I decided I wanna build a house.
Now how many houses I had I built up until then?
Zero.
Yeah.
Right.
I, I decided I wanted to be, become an architect.
How many houses that architect?
Zero.
Right.
You name it like every single thing that you could wanna do.
Right.
But I, I have a freakish, obsessive personality.
Mm-hmm.
When I decide that I wanna do something, I
just go full bulldog.
So I decided that I wanted to learn 3D modeling
and design a house from, from start to finish.
Right.
So that's exactly what I did.
Right.
I decided that I, I wanted control over every aspect
of building this thing.
So I decided I was gonna learn how to become a
general contractor and GC the entire thing, right?
Yeah.
I decided I wanna build cabinets.
I decided, you know, all these things, right, and I
just decided my obsessive personality that I was going
to get, go all in on that, learn everything I possibly
could, and become competent in all of these different trades
and skills and, and whatever.
That is a weird trait to have.
But when pointed in the right direction.
Yeah, it works pretty well.
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 came to that realization at some point where it's like.
Before I started to fix things.
Right.
I would, I would really try to see like, okay,
I get where these things manifest negatively.
Yeah.
Right.
I can see where that obsessive or, or overanalyzing
something that maybe doesn't matter that much.
Right.
Like.
Going over a conversation that I had where I gave, uh,
some perspective to a friend.
It was like, oh, maybe I could have said this, or
maybe I should have said this.
Or, oh, what if I made him feel this way?
Right.
Just obsessing endlessly.
Yeah.
And re-analyzing and going over stuff.
Maybe that isn't a good, a good use of that, but when I
do the same thing, when I'm pouring over our, you know,
return on ad spend results and I'm trying to figure.
Right.
So there are definitely places, so what I've started to do is,
is try to decide like, okay.
Given a, a particular trait that maybe could need a fix.
Right.
Social media is telling me it needs to be fixed.
This is a problem.
The thing that you do is a problem.
Right.
I always want to make sure that I understand where else.
'cause they, they'll give you the use case
where it's bad Of course.
Right.
They'll come up with whatever the, the, the
place where this manifests.
Right.
The temper.
You're not in the boxing ring.
This is bad.
Yeah.
Right.
Right in the boxing ring.
Great.
I'm always trying to figure out, does the fix.
Erase an edge that I have.
Right?
Right, exactly.
'cause that's not therapy.
That's sanding the edge off my sword and I want to make
sure that I'm not doing that.
And so that's, I'm always looking at it from that lens
to say like, okay, cool.
I can fix this thing.
That's obviously a problem here, but if I fix it here,
what am I breaking downstream?
What else am I not gonna be able to do because of this?
And can I selectively fix, right?
Can I pick and choose where this happens as opposed to kind of
wholesale taking the advice.
Let me ask you a question because I'm curious where,
where you stand on this Now.
I know neither of us are massive social media users.
We're not always out there like everybody else's, but
like, what advice would you give to somebody who's feeling
pressured by all these self-help trends, but isn't sure what
would work for them or, or if they should even be doing this?
How, how are, how are you thinking about that?
Here's what worked for me.
I, I started to say to myself, my superpower
slash deficiencies.
Need a home.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so, so stick with that.
It turns out that my lack of attention span is really
bad in very specific cases.
Sure.
In other words, I don't do workshops, classrooms,
anything that requires my undivided attention.
'cause I do not have undivided attention.
Right.
So I absolutely keep myself outta those situations.
However, how the hell was I gonna keep myself outta the
situation for the first 22 years of my life in school?
Right.
It is literally what I was being tasked with doing.
Right.
Which, but hang on, hang on a second.
So just, just, and, and I want to, I don't wanna dig into how
broken the education system is, but I just want to highlight
how differently people learn.
Right.
So to your point, you couldn't sit in a cloud,
you couldn't read a book, you couldn't do anything.
And yet you taught yourself how to build just a house,
but a pretty big, pretty complicated, pretty de very
insanely detailed home.
You taught yourself all of that.
You learned all of those things.
So I think we have to be really careful when we think about
some of this stuff that's like, does, will, will just doesn't
have the ability to learn.
Bullshit will didn't have the ability to learn
in that, in that way.
Right?
Right.
And so we have to be so careful about what we think of as
like these things that may be short-term challenges or just
even the modality that we're facing that's keeping us from
doing something and saying, oh, I'm not capable of learning.
But we know that's not true.
You're insanely capable learning.
One of the, the, probably the one of the fastest
learners over the broadest number of topics that I've
ever met in my entire life.
Right.
And yet, if I was your third grade teacher, I
would've just put a check mark that said, you know.
Not, not this one.
Yeah, no, that's exactly what happened.
You know, I graduated with a 1.2 GPA.
Like the teachers basically said there's no hope for you
and can you graduate with a 1.2 GPA in the state of Connecticut?
You can.
I couldn't confirm.
Amazing.
I can confirm, but.
You can graduate last, by the way, you know, you
and I, you both have kids.
We have great kids and, and we can see that.
We can see where like maybe our kids are struggling with
one thing, but we start to see them excel at something else.
And I've always been a big fan this as a parent of saying,
I'm not going to bring a better kid in the world by
emphasizing what they do wrong.
I'm gonna bring a better kid by accelerating what they do Well.
Gold from a point of strength.
Correct?
Right in, in, in tripling down on the things that
they are great at, not at the expense of everything
else, but not the opposite.
Let me triple down on the stuff you suck at, at
the expense of the things that you might do well.
So with that said, that definitely applies to founders.
You know, I see founders come into this, into this
business, and everybody comes into it terrified because
there's so many things you're being tasked with that are
not in your wheelhouse.
And so we'll have a founder come to us, Ryan, and say,
Hey, I'm not great at finance.
Okay, then don't do finance.
Right?
Like literally don't literal find out any
other way to do that.
Yeah.
But instead of saying to yourself, you know, I'm really
good at product development or really good at sales, but
I suck at finance, so let me be worried about finance.
It's the same thing, right?
Find out how to supplement that so you can triple down
on what you are good at.
If we only focus on fixing weaknesses.
We risk totally missing out on developing our actual
strengths, our superpowers, and, and let's, let's be honest,
the world does not reward average across the board.
Right.
You're a well-rounded and super average in every way.
Individual.
Right?
Exactly.
We'd love to have you aboard.
Yeah.
It doesn't, it rewards exceptionality in
specific areas.
Absolutely.
Right.
That's why it's important to, to think about those things and
to identify and double down on what actually make you unique,
even if it's unconventional.
Es maybe, especially if it's
unconventional, right?
And so, you know, from my standpoint, I look
at it and I'm saying, okay, what am I great at?
Or said differently?
What do my superpowers require in order for
them to be superpowers?
Okay, so my lack of attention negates lots
and lots of things, right?
But if I embrace the fact that, but when it's pointed
toward the right things.
It's a whole other animal.
It reminds me, 'cause I'm such a huge comic book fan.
Uh, and for those that are watching the, um, the
YouTube right now, if you look behind me, those are
all comic books behind me.
Uh, I always look at, you know, the, the, uh, the superpowers.
You know, the whole thing with, with Marvel specifically
is whenever they talked about characters, they, they
always had a, a character who had a superpower, but it
had some sort of challenge behind using that superpower.
What were you pointing at?
Captain America
and Spider-Man.
Oh yeah.
They're out, they're out of focus, but they're right there.
That's awesome.
But that, that was always the case.
Right?
That uh, and, and what they did a great job of is saying
is like, this person has this incredible capability.
It's the Hulk, right?
Yeah.
Has this incredible strength, but the rage and anger
that they deal with right.
Is, is always kind of countering that.
And when I think about our capabilities, our superpowers,
so to speak, I think to myself, okay, maybe Ryan's
over analyzing things, so why don't we work on the
shit that, that we, that needs over analysis, right.
Like you said, exactly like digging into, you know, uh,
marketing analytics and things that, where that is a strength.
And so if I were to zoom out, I think at some point, and I think
this is important, I stopped trying to fix my problems.
Yeah.
I stopped trying to fix them.
I try tried calling myself broken and I started to say.
I've got all these problems, but the fix is where I point them.
The the fix is, is, is, is where I triple down.
And I think, again, I'm gonna go back to founders for a second.
They're called on to do all of these things, many of
which they're not qualified or interested in doing, and they
put all of their focus on their deficiencies, especially when
it comes, uh, time to becoming managers and things like that.
They're like, here's what I suck at.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, you probably do, dude.
But why don't we put you on the stuff that you're great at?
If you're a great developer, if you're, if you are great
at writing code, why the hell are we making you a manager?
Yeah.
That's like one of the oldest ones in the book, right?
Yeah.
I, I think interesting too, because you do have to be a
little careful here, going back to the build from the point
of strength, because there are times where we just truly
haven't discovered a strength.
Maybe it even looked like a weakness in the beginning,
so I want to be careful.
But when we get into the context of a startup, one of
the things I think is also very important to think through.
Go back to your example, the founder who's like,
I suck at finance.
Okay, we can look at that two ways.
You suck at finance, but you're really good at product,
so just focus on product and that's probably the right move.
Now you might, it might turn out that you're an
absolute savant at finance.
You just haven't been given enough of an exposure, right?
Think about how many musicians get discovered late in life
that didn't know that, right?
All that kinda stuff.
However, building from a point of strength is almost
always gonna be a, a more reliable way to an outcome.
The other thing I like to measure it against is,
okay, even if it turns out you were a savant, you
are just like top finance.
Is that gonna help you do what you need to do now?
Right.
With being amazing at finance within an early stage
startup, is that what's going to move the needle most?
So I think oftentimes we get so caught up in like,
what I can or can't do.
We stop thinking about them in the context and,
and how valuable they are to the startup, right?
If you're an early stage startup, I can tell you finance
isn't gonna be that important 'cause there's not gonna
be that much of it, right?
There's gonna be no beans to count, right?
There's gonna be very little to plan.
When I think about my anxiety.
Right,
just my baked in anxiety.
Everybody's got some version of it.
But again, when I analyze my own, um, we have, we have
pretty special versions of it.
I would argue.
Here's what I would say, I've got two versions
of how that can go.
I can say my anxiety is, is what?
Ruins me, right?
It's keeping me up at three in the morning.
It's, you know, preventing me from sleeping with health
issues like you name it, right?
My anxiety is doing all of these awful things to me.
And all of that would be true.
Just wanna be clear.
All of that would be true.
I'm not, I'm not, uh, discounting any of that or
taking off table, but there's another version to say.
Hmm.
Your anxiety also has some really interesting superpowers.
It's got you thinking about stuff when nobody else is.
Yes.
When everybody else is, is calm and relaxed.
Oh, this problem must be solved.
It's got you saying, yeah, but what if it's not right?
Mm-hmm.
And, and then you turn over a stone wherever.
It's like, oh shit, we didn't even look at that.
Right.
Like it's this early warning system.
That's exactly how I look at it, man.
For me it's, it's predictive analytics
with a heartbeat, right?
Yeah.
I'm, if I'm laying down at night and I start having one
of those thoughts where it's like my heart rate starts to
go up a little bit and I'm like, okay, this is probably
something that's actually important right now, does
it mean I need to stay awake all night and worry about it?
No, and what I've found is that if I just acknowledge
it and then I try, you know, the whole thing, like, yeah,
write it down or whatever.
Yes, some of that stuff does actually work.
Some of that does actually work because part of the anxiety is.
What if I forget about this, right.
Combine anxiety and a DH adhd.
That's a neat recipe.
You are like, I'm worried about this thing.
Yeah.
And if I don't keep worrying about it, I'll
forget to worry about it.
And then what the fuck will happen?
My session?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah.
Last night I was having one of those anxious thoughts, right.
And I, and it was, I was like, say exactly
like you played it out.
Right.
Whereas like, oh my God, I, I need to solve
this problem right now.
Yeah.
And I remember having this conversation with myself
right before I fell asleep.
The key being.
Right before I fell asleep and I said to myself, I've had
this thought 10 million times.
Not this one, but one like it.
Some random, anxious thought, right?
I've been to this rodeo over and over and over again.
The one commonality is in the history of history.
The problem never got solved at this exact moment, right?
Ever, ever, ever.
So I can, you mean while you're laying in bed with
your eyes closed, you haven't solved problems?
I, I, I, I can choose to obsess over it, lose, quite,
literally lose sleep over it, or I can file it for,
again, the millionth time that there's absolutely nothing
I can do about it right now.
Meaningfully uhhuh, if I get sleep, I'll wake up in the
morning and be ready to tackle it, and that's actually the
only time I can tackle it.
Like, again, just because I'm worried about it
doesn't mean I'm prepared to do something about it.
And as I started to build those tools, I was like,
listen, hey, anxiety, thanks for the heads up.
I'll go hand that over to obsessive person in the
morning, my other demon.
Right.
Uh, but, but right now, good.
You did your job,
right?
Right.
You did your job.
Smoke alarm.
Recognize, you know, I actually, I loved the, I loved the rodeo
analogy and I immediately took it to bull riding.
I was thinking, you know what, that's, that's exactly it.
Anxiety is a bull worth riding for eight seconds.
But once you've gone that far with it, yeah, jump off right?
Get off the anxiety bull and then, and then, you know,
put it to ease with the obsessive guy in the morning.
It's exactly
it.
So, you know, and, and I think about it too, where like, you
know, my mind's always racing and, and I, I always explain
what that looks like is, yeah.
If you could watch the television channel that is my
head, it would be as if somebody just hit the channel button on
the remote and just left it down and just every single thing.
Ding, ding, d ding, ding.
Just kept flipping over and over.
Oh, by the way,
you've also got picture and picture turned on.
So there's,
there's, there's no way around that one.
And for the, my entire lifetime, again, I've tried all these
things to try to like you.
Control it, if you will, and concentrate it.
Meditation and everything else, like just does not work.
And, and what I learned over, over some period of
time is it's not what I was supposed to be doing.
The, the question should be, how do I take all those
thoughts like that, that rapid fire and capture them?
Write 'em down.
Brainstorm.
Now I use the hell outta chat.
GT the chat GT Yes.
Is the unwitting accomplice to all of these ideas and chat.
GT is, I I I'm loading up context windows single handedly.
Yeah.
Simply just by brainstorming.
But it turns out somewhere
on their CDN is is a server that just has your name on it.
Yeah, the, the Schroeder Stargate.
So that said, I found healthy outlets.
To point these things.
And it turned out when I found these healthy outlets,
things got real interesting.
And a moment ago you mentioned finance.
You said, Hey, maybe you're not good at finance.
We'll go back to my 1.2 GPA what dragged my GPA down the
most, which I guess if you've got a GPA that low, that
it's literally everything.
Yeah.
But was math.
There was a couple drags on that one.
It was math.
I I Interesting.
Never made it past freshman High school algebra ever.
I took it seven times.
I took it.
In all four grades in all three summer schools,
and I never passed it.
I then went to Math oh five oh in college and
flunked out of that as well.
So, needless to say, not super sweet at algebra,
which would surprise a lot of folks to know that I've
been a CFO for 25 years.
Right?
You try to say, wait, what?
Those
CFOs don't use a ton of algebra terms.
Well,
right?
But the leap is as soon as you put dollar signs
in front of those numbers.
I was, you know, the Stephen Hawking of finance, right?
I mean, not that I'm like the greatest finance
person, but like I really understand finance.
I really, really, really understand finance and that has
opened so many doors for me.
Okay.
But that said, if you said, will, we are gonna put you
in a finance class, your job is to learn finance, and
here's the, here's the trick, but I had no context for it.
Yeah.
I didn't have a reason that I needed to learn finance.
Yep.
I would've flunked seven years in a row.
Well, it was somebody else's dollar signs in front of it.
Who cares about those?
Exactly.
But as soon as you put my money in
front of it, no context, no connection.
Yeah.
Forget about it.
Right.
And I, I use that by the way, in fact, I think you and I
talked about this yesterday.
'cause we were talking about open AI had had launched
their new agents, uh, product.
Yep.
You know, this, the, the nodes and stuff.
And I said, I looked at it, I, my eyes went
cross-eyed and I had, you know, I, I had no interest.
You said, you
was like, I didn't make it through the five minute video.
Yeah.
And I confirmed that later in the day by asking, Hey, did
you get to the part where it showed this, which is about
three minutes and 30 seconds,
you're like.
Nope, Nope.
However, the moment I find a use case for it, the moment I, you
know, I find, um, okay, this is, this is how I'm gonna use it.
Yep.
Totally different, right?
The YouTube rabbit hole portal opens wide Oh yeah.
Will pops in feed first and at that
point turn on the obsession filter and go, yep.
I look at that a lot in kids, by the way.
'cause again, I'm make making that parallel when a kid
says, Hey, I don't get it.
It's often because they don't care about it.
But if you, if you look at what your kids are capable of doing
when it's stuff they care about, I watch my son in Minecraft.
He's building the most extraordinary things.
Yes.
Yeah.
Like, like literally like, and again, I've got a
pretty high bar for what that might be, Uhhuh.
And I'm like, damn dude, that's like legit.
'cause he cares.
Yeah.
Right.
And you watch, you mentioned musicians, right?
You know, I think I told you this story that, you know, years
ago I got to see Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica,
talking to his parents at the private induction of
their, when they were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
And he said to him, he said, the only reason I'm here.
Because every day you played music in the
house, because every day you let me be a drummer.
You encouraged me to be a drummer.
You know, he could have been, we talked about this, an accountant
or something else like that, but it turns out he's one of the
greatest drummers of all time.
I mean, he went to Julliard.
Yes.
I mean, he's pretty gifted because someone encouraged him
to do what he wanted to do.
Someone forced him to do it.
Didn't, wouldn't say,
sit still.
Stop tapping your foot, Lars.
Where will that get you
in life?
Exactly.
But I guess what I'm saying is when it's something that we're
genuinely interested in, we take a a different passion around it.
Right?
And it changes things dramatically, even if
it's the same information.
Right?
So we saw this a few weeks ago with my middle daughter, aria.
She's 10, and it's not that she doesn't like history or
social studies, but it's not been her like favorite thing.
You ask her about what she's learning about,
she'll give you some basics.
She went on a one hour, took, took tour while we had some
friends in town a few weeks ago.
I didn't, I wasn't on it unfortunately, but they, they
went on this little tour.
She came back and she unloaded.
I, I don't know how she told me about Madrid history
for about three hours.
How she learned three hours of, of history in an hour trip.
I have no idea.
But she came back so excited about it.
All these little anecdotes, all these details, exactly the kind
of thing that you could learn from a book, but she didn't
because she was bored to tears.
Right now when she's racing around town.
And it took to getting to see these places
touch things, right.
See, smell like all of a sudden completely different experience.
So even sometimes it's not the information, it's the, it's the
modality, it's the context, and it's the reason behind whether
I want to do this or not.
Correct, correct.
And so build on that for founders who are like, oh,
you know, again, I'm not good at all these things.
Yeah.
'cause you don't care about them.
Yeah.
Once you care about them, and there's two versions of
caring about them, there's one, I, I really need to
get this done 'cause it's important to my startup.
That's actually not what I'm talking about.
Like, it being important doesn't mean you care about it.
There's a million things in my life that are important
that I actually just don't give a shit about.
Right?
That, yes, I should care about them.
I just don't.
But once you actually, you, you find a fascination.
Around it.
Right.
At some point, Ryan, you looked at like Google
Analytics or another analytics package and just something
clicked in your head where you're like, I need to know
everything I can possibly know.
Yeah.
I need to know everything about this.
Yep.
And then it became course after course video, after video
book, after whatever, anything I could find to consume.
But because I had a goal in mind, there was somewhere I
was trying to get, I didn't just wake up one morning.
I was like, I wonder what analytics are.
Absolutely.
And so in, in the same way, like for years, every year
I said, I'm gonna, this year, this is gonna be the
year I learned to code.
Right?
Like, and you and I haven't coded in like 20 years, right?
And so like, this is the year I'm gonna learn Python.
This is gonna, I'm gonna learn whatever, right?
Yeah.
And every year I get into a prompt and I'm
like, oh, that's right.
I have no reason for learning any of this.
Right?
Yeah.
Like, I, yes, like I know it's part of my job with regard
to what we do, but there's nothing that I want to code so
badly that I wanna learn it.
Every time I manage getting through, like installing
the terminal and the packages that are necessary,
and then it stops there.
I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, we should accomplished,
I created the environment that will allow me to code.
I'm not gonna write a single line
right now.
I remember I don't give a shit.
So, so, yeah, exactly.
That's the thing.
I I actually don't have any reason to do this.
Yeah.
Correct.
So I think where, where this all maps back to, which I think
is really interesting, is it is possible, dare I say it.
We could enjoy a certain level of self-acceptance.
Now that is not the same as being complacent.
It's taking inventory of, of the assets that you have
and figuring out how to use them to best effect.
That's way different.
And so I think for, for a lot of us, again, we're so
convinced that we have to fix our shit, that we never
take the time to say, maybe I need to apply it differently.
Maybe.
And again, not all of it.
Yeah.
Some of it.
But yeah, I, I think, you know, a way of looking at,
it's, it's, you know, self acceptance isn't surrender.
It's redesigning the org chart of your personality.
Of your makeup, right?
Right.
To be able to say, how do we, how do I reorganize these
things that exist, these resources that I have, right?
So instead of thinking of these things as, as skills or
flaws, these are the resources that I have, these are the
things that I'm made of.
How do I organize those?
How do I utilize those in a way that stacks up to
being something absolutely useful as opposed to just.
Fighting my wiring endlessly.
Right.
If you stop fighting your wiring and just give it a workload
in SLA, you'll probably find yourself far better off.
Right.
Right, right.
And I, I think from my standpoint personally, the
moment I was willing to do that.
Again, the separation was this, but separation was okay.
There are some, again, my attention span.
There are some places where that is an absolute problem, but
there are also some places where it's an absolute superpower.
I'm going to recognize both.
That's part of the acceptance.
The acceptance is to say that this, this is a thing.
My lack of attention is a thing.
I have to control where it's good and where it's bad.
And I think that's the big difference.
Instead of inventorying everything that ever causes
a problem, holistically calling that, you know,
I have to fix this entire thing is wrong, is wrong.
Some people say, I get too emotional.
There is a time and a place where getting too emotional
is exactly the right answer.
Exactly, and it should be applied accordingly.
But I think for, for founders, one of the hardest things
for us to, to enjoy or, or, or accept is ourselves.
Is for who we are and what we're great at, and
again, in what we're not.
It's okay to be not good at things, but I think once we
do that, once we figure out the things that are strengths
and our weaknesses and, and we inventory when we accept
both, then at that point we can start to become the
best version of ourselves.
Because we know where we're supposed to put ourselves.
We know where we're supposed to stay away, and we can
go all in on the stuff that actually makes a difference.
Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone.
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