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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.
Startup Therapy EP269 - Audio
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to their episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of startups. com. Will Schroter. Will, I don't think anybody listening is unaware that there are some major sacrifices that get made as we build our startup companies. And I think that most of us probably have some sense for.
We're some vague version of the what it is we're trying to accomplish and, and the win, meaning that it's something more than we have now and that it's later, but we're not very specific about these things in a lot of cases. And, and I think that there's a, there's a danger to that in, in being amorphous around what it is we're actually trying to accomplish.
And by. Yeah, it's basically saying, I'm going to join the most grueling race, the Iron Man of life, if you will, the hardest thing I could possibly do, yet I have no idea what the metrics are, or when it's going to actually be over, or if I even won, I'm in first place, and I cross the finish line, and I don't even know it.
It's an interesting spot, and to kind of tee [00:01:00] this up for folks, you know, that are listening, this was top of mind for me, uh, you know, last week I turned 50 years old, which is a, which is a specific milestone in life. Can you say that again, Will? That number didn't make any sense to me. It doesn't make any sense to me, man.
Um, it just means I'm really old. But, but, I think every decade is cathartic in its own right. But this one's cathartic because for the first time in my life, I'm out of later right now. Now let me, let me be really specific what that means for my entire life. Since I was 19 years old, I was able to sacrifice nonstop in epic ways.
And Ryan, I know you, you, you have to, and I always had a built in excuse for my sacrifice, and this is kind of the core of what we're going to talk about today. I always had a built in excuse, which was it's okay that I'm not doing whatever now, because I'll be able to do it later. I I'm willing to make this investment because later.
I'll be able to cash in those chips. Later, things will be so much better. And it turns out, later is a very dangerous excuse. [00:02:00] Because we never really know when later is gonna come. And we never really know when later comes, whether or not whatever we thought we were going to get, even matters. Yeah. Once later comes due, right?
Is the balance of what we've accumulated worth it? Is it what we actually wanted? You bet. We've, we've talked about this on a podcast in the past where it was around like the idea of play testing some of these things that you think you want. I mean, this is around the what, right? So what is, you know, I want enough money to retire on.
Okay. Well, let's quantify that. And let's play test retirement, right? How much do you actually need? And what are you going to do with retirement? And is it actually what you want after you've got it? You know, we use the examples of things like your move to, to LA, right? Which you thought was going to be like the pinnacle of life.
And this is what I want to do. And then you get there and it's, and it's not right. Yep. Good to find that out now, not later. Me moving to Florida, we talked about it. Like, you know, my version of retirement was being able to go kayak fishing twice a week, which doesn't require retirement. It just requires a kayak and a nearby body of water.
Yeah. And [00:03:00] so I think that it is so important for us to quantify these things so that we can start to do the math on like Yeah. Before we just start to do the endless sacrifice, because believe me, like we both know that that part's there. That part comes regardless. Whether you figure the shit out or not, what you actually want, the sacrifice will be there.
It will let you sacrifice whether you're clear on what you're trying to build towards. And I'm sure I said it on that podcast. One of the things I realized over, over time is that there is no interest earned on life and happiness deferred. Yeah. It can compound certain things, right. But you don't get those moments back.
We know this. And so I think that we need to be very, very careful in calculating what is the reward that we hope to get from this? When must we expect it by? And what do we do to actually get to there by that point and achieve that thing? And again, just make sure we're actually going to want it once we get there.
I bet both of us have a ton of examples of people who have done all the things, gotten to the thing that they wanted. And then we're like, well, now I've got it. And It's not quite as cool as I thought it was going to be. In almost [00:04:00] every case, by the way, just to be clear, in almost every case. Let's start with the first part of this, which is the sacrifice.
Like, you know, what, what does that look like? What's the psychology behind it? You know, what, what were our expectations going in? How was it so easy, so to speak, to make those sacrifices without any guarantee of return? Or more specifically, even when we got the return, if someone were to say, you're going to have to do X, Y, Z, and you'll get a million dollars.
And then you're like, okay, I want million dollars, but you didn't exactly know what a million dollars was going to do for you. And so it just looked better. So you said, okay, I'll sacrifice for something better, but when you got it, you're like, wait a minute, I can't do anything differently than I could have done before.
Like, what the hell did I sacrifice all that stuff for? Exactly. I don't quantify my sacrifice. And compare it to someone else's everybody's pain is their own, right? So again, when we're going to talk about your sacrifice my sacrifice, whatever or anyone's sacrifice not for a second Do I think oh I sacrifice more than you and therefore I deserve something or I [00:05:00] sacrifice more than you and therefore i'm Better at sacrifice.
I don't even know what that that would mean right like that The sacrifice is relative to what you would have done had you not sacrificed There's nothing to do with what anybody else is going to get it's all relative to because I sacrifice my life is different You Some things are less than they would have been.
Hopefully, theoretically, some things are more than they would have been. And then it's the calculus of that change over time and saying, like, is that what I actually wanted? Right? Did that give me the thing that was actually, was that beneficial for me to make those sacrifices? I was at dinner last week with a friend of mine who's in his mid fifties now.
I was on his board for many, many years alongside the founder of CompuServe, if you remember. 430 reservation, more or less for the two of you, old timers. And so, uh, anyway, the founder that I was at dinner with brought along his nephew who was like 26, 27 years old, which also means I'm old enough that, that people's nephews or nephews are full functioning adults.
Uh, Nephew's a great guy, uh, fantastic guy, super smart, and uh, an entrepreneur himself. While, while Dave, the guy I was talking to, uh, while he and I were, were, were discussing just like [00:06:00] kind of building our companies and scaling things, and you know, he had a phenomenal exit a few years back. His nephew was sitting there very intently, like, like listening to everything we were saying.
We were talking about the sacrifices we made and, you know, kind of how long those slogs were. And you could tell the look on his face, he was like, what? Yeah. Right? Like, I mean, well, by the way, nephew, this wasn't in the handbook. Like we didn't know exactly how long or how much we were going to have to sacrifice, nor that there would even be anything at the end.
Right. And like, I think that's also problematic. I think that's something we should, we should talk about is that the sacrifice doesn't come with a guarantee, right? Like neither you nor Dave knew that there was actually going to be a pot of gold at the end of that sacrifice rainbow, which is just one color dark.
The only guarantee is the cost. Yeah. The cost is guaranteed. The sacrifice is the guarantee. Right? And so I think that there is a bit of a danger and then like even sitting there and listening attentively. Now imagine, imagine this is somebody sitting there listening to two people who are on the right side of this equation.
Correct. Right? And going like, wow, you had to do all that to get this? Yeah, and by the way, at [00:07:00] the time we didn't even know we would get this. That's the real rub with all of this. So there was a couple of things that I'm as much watching his expression, his reactions and his interactions than anything else in this conversation, because a couple of things were interesting to me about kind of just how the situation came about.
He is also an entrepreneur. He's been running his own business for a couple of years now. He's running essentially a general contracting business, right? Okay. Um, something very near and dear to my heart. So he's a hardworking guy. I mean, he's literally, you know, getting covered in sawdust, you know, sweating it out, right?
For, for bucks, which, which I respect, but also he's 27. He's at an age where life's different. You know, they don't do this kind of stuff as frequently as they did back in my day. Right. And so what was interesting for him to, to witness. Was how Dave and I were talking about our sacrifice. And we weren't bragging about it.
We were just being very matter of fact about it. And he was like, I'm not sure all that makes a lot of sense. And he wasn't wrong. Like, we were like, can't argue that. Yeah. What we did to our health and everything else like that. Can't, can't argue that. Yeah, look, I think the other side of it is like [00:08:00] we, we certainly can't just make this about like being a founder or being an entrepreneur is all sacrifice up until some seminal moment where then later finally arrives, the reward arrives and then we're either happy or we're not with it.
Right. I think get your take on it. But I imagine you'll agree. A big part of this is like, what are you doing on the way? Right. Like if, if I was at this point in my career, if I was hating something I was doing on a daily basis, there wouldn't be a sacrifice that that wouldn't be a sacrifice I'd be willing to make to get any type of reward.
Right. Again, like as you get closer to later being now, which I think we're both basically there. Yeah. We're, we're now living in the later we're, we're, we're in the upside down. And so because of that, like, I think you do start to, Think about sacrifice a little bit differently, but I don't want to paint an overly, overly pessimistic picture of it either.
Like I think the things that we sacrifice with an expectation of these larger returns at the end also have to be married up against what happened along the way. Right? Like how many wins did you have along the way? This could be personal wins. Those could be outcomes you created for clients, people you work for, you know, [00:09:00] certainly you and I get together.
Tons and tons of energy every time we jump onto a one on one call with somebody within the accelerator and help them solve a massive problem, help them figure out their own sacrifice and reward calculus, help them get to an exit, help them just hire that first person, whatever it is. There's a lot of reward along the way.
So I do want to be careful about stripping this down to just this very binary thing of all sacrifice input, hopefully big exit outcome, something at the, at the end of the day. So it's, it's not kind of a straight amortization in that way for me, at least. Yeah. I mean, again, it also comes down to what specifically you sacrificed.
Okay. So if I go back and I have, and I do my calculus to say, you know, um, you know, what, what did I sacrifice specifically, let me give you a couple examples of things where I can look back and say, shit, I'm never getting that back. And that's a big part of it. Right. Sacrifice number one. From when I was 19 to 26, I basically didn't take a day off.
Like, it didn't even occur to me that, like, Saturday or Sunday was a day off. Like, I just worked through every day, all the time. We were playing in our rookie [00:10:00] seasons. You had to. That's a sacrifice, but yeah, there were real costs to that too. Right, which is why I give it that time frame, right? Okay, so from 19 to 26, arguably the most formative and important pivotal years of my career, right?
You know, kind of set things in motion, and things went really horribly and then really well, right? So again, having seen both sides of the equation. That said, I went to college, but I was never at college, okay? Yeah. Like, I don't have a single college memory, right? Other than working. Like, other than working.
I'll give you, I'll paint a quick picture. My first day at Ohio State in the dorms. It was my sophomore year. Everybody else's freshman year. I transferred from University of Connecticut. My first day in the dorms. I'll never forget my roommate, Jimmy Bell walks through. Jimmy Bell was a lineman for Ohio State.
He's like 6'6 320. It's crazy to think that was an 18 year old kid back then. Yeah, right? But he must be like 22 feet tall by now. I know, right? And I remember him basically like kind of like ducking to get into the doorway and being [00:11:00] as wide as he was tall, right? Yeah. Nicest guy in the world. We became great friends, right?
I remember like the look on his face when he walks in. He walks into my shitty dorm room. And he's like, what is going on? I've got a credenza, a fax machine, a phone, I've got a filing cabinet, I've got my PC, which was, you know, in, uh, 91, 92, it was pretty unusual, or 93, I guess. Which hall are we in? Because I want to, I want to get, which one?
DePaul, DePaul South Campus. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this, this room is, is all of, uh, eight by nine. It's tiny. And he's like, what is going on here? Right. Cause I basically turned my dorm room into an, to my office. Yeah. I was like, bro, I got to make money. I was selling mainframe computers over the phone back then.
Uh, that was my full time job. And so I was like, you know, smiling and dialing, making a hundred phone calls a day. But my point is, while all my friends were doing cool things, all the things you go to college to do. I did not. In fact, I never even had a sip of alcohol until I left college. I probably made up for that, but like, Hey, uh, [00:12:00] well, want to come play beer pong?
What's beer pong? It's a combination of drinking beer and playing ping pong. What are beer and ping pong? Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea. I like the whole thing was lost on me. And I made some great friends, friends I still have to this day, but if they were here to like testify, I'll give you a good example. You know, Dave Rinaldo, right?
Uh, Dave listens to the show. He's a friend, friend of ours, a founder himself. My first year at Ohio state, when we were leaving the dorms, it didn't occur to me that when like holidays happen that you have to leave and go home. Well, I had no home to go to. And Dave was like, well, what are you going to do?
And I'm like, I don't know. He's like, do you want to come home with us for Christmas? Right? Like, I don't know. It's like taking the orphan boy to his home. So anyway, so Christmas day. Do you have a reasonable broadband and a room where I can make phone calls from, Dave? Even dial up, right? Anyways, so Dave's so kind.
He brings me back to his house in Cleveland and his parents are great. And I'll never forget Christmas morning. His mom summons him into the guest room where I'm sitting there. I'm [00:13:00] sitting on the floor with my laptop writing HTML code. And he just puts his head and he's like, Bro, do you know it's Christmas?
Yeah. I was like, I had no idea, right? I was totally lost at work. Is this the day we played the beer pong? Yeah, yeah. I will never get that time back. Those are really important years that I missed with my brother, my mother, my father, everyone. I didn't see anyone, ever. And I won't get those back. Now, it'd be hard in any context.
To be able to say, Oh, that was worth, it was worth not seeing my field. We had an asshole would say that, right? Like, like you can't say that it was true. You can't say it. Right. But anyway, my point is I never had a moment in the quad where some amazing thing happened. I never had one crazy night with my college buddies.
Right. None of that happened. Erased from history. Yeah. Can't get it back. Right. Now you look at that and you say, yeah, you kind of had some cool stuff happen too. So you do balance that. Yeah. You have to balance it out, right? Like it, it is, there's a lot of sacrifice. It's not pure sacrifice. And look, in some cases it is, right?
Because for everybody that did those things and got an outcome, we know statistically speaking, there were [00:14:00] a whole bunch of people who did all those things, made the same sacrifices and walked away with. Almost nothing, right? That's just the nature of being a startup founder. And look, you start to multiply that over a long period of time.
And I think for, you know, for what I'm going to call our younger listeners, younger at this point could be 20s, 30s, whatever. Most of the population will, I don't think you have to say that anymore. Cool, folks is moving. For those of you listening, because anybody older than us probably can't hear us. It's probably true.
For those of the folks that are saying like, oh, you know, I'll make it back up later. This is where that argument starts to get dangerous. Yeah. Right? And again, I could go on and on about all the types of sacrifices along the way, but they were many. Okay? And for folks that are in their 20s, the problem with being in your 20s and making sacrifices is you have your whole life ahead of you, which gives you a built in excuse to make those sacrifices and kick the can.
So that's what I did in my 20s. I kicked the can in my 30s, kicked the can again in my 40s, kind of kicking a lot of [00:15:00] They can't do right being like, I'm okay doing this, working this, whatever, because there will be this bigger thing later. That's worth it. Which brings us to our next chapter, which is what happens when you are called to the carpet?
To find out whether all your bullshit excuses were worth it. The moment of truth. Judgment day. Yeah. Uh, well, depends a lot on exactly what you sacrificed and exactly what you gained. And I think to some degree how clear and eyes wide open you were. about the costs and about what you were actually trying to accomplish and how close those two things are to kind of balancing out.
I think there's a lot of cases where, you know, if you see a really outsized outcome, uh, you might say like, well, all the sacrifice that you made was, was worth it until you ask the person who actually went through it. And it's funny, man, because we know some people with some like really, really big outcome, the dream outcomes.
And even then, in so many of those cases, like the, the reality of it, the tail of the [00:16:00] tape, they go back and be like, yeah, I probably would not do that again. And it wasn't worth it, right? So it's for what it's worth. Be careful about being clear about what you want at the end, because I think that was the common thread amongst all those tales were like, I didn't really know what I wanted, right?
I just was like, I was aiming for growth. I wanted to be bigger. I wanted more, but I wasn't specific about how much more nor what That more represented to me as the individual, you bet it just became the pure metrics chasing of bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah, it does. And it creates a debt. That's what I want to talk about for a second.
It creates a debt in life to yourself that most people never pay back. So at some point in life, you look around you and say, okay, like enough is enough. Like at some point, like sacrificing more either. I have nothing left to sacrifice. Like I. You know, I'm broke or I'm, you know, whatever, or you just stop and you have a very realistic question, which is now what like, okay, like I've, I've sacrificed like crazy, I've done all the things that everybody said I was supposed to do, or I thought I was supposed to do [00:17:00] like, when do I cash in these chips?
I'll tell you a quick story about when this actually happened to me. I had a very like deliberate specific moment. Like when it was now it's time to cash in the chips. Yeah. Was it worth it? Ryan, you're familiar with the story, but for the folks that listen, I'll, Take you back real quick. So Ryan, you remember like in my somewhere mid 40s, I don't remember when Sarah and I decided to move back to LA.
We ended up looking for a house forever. Finally found a place in Beverly Hills. It wasn't our first choice if I'm being honest. It was just, oh, you went to Beverly Hills. It was like a third, fourth choice. It just not a lot of houses in LA. It's what we found. But it's a nice enough house. Not very big as LA tends to be.
And we moved there. Now here's where this got interesting. Part of it was, and this was, you know, as Sarah and I were discussing this, I was like, you know what? Living in Beverly Hills, even though, again, that wasn't our number one choice, we actually wanted to go back to Santa Monica. Living in Beverly Hills was never our goal, but it's kind of an interesting life goal.
It's like an interesting bucket list thing that we didn't really know we had, but like, here's what I said, and I thought this was really interesting because it paid [00:18:00] huge dividends in the end. I said, fuck it. Let's just go. Let's basically leave. Push what I call all the sliders to the right, you know, when we talk about like our life stats or whatever it's like that and it's like ain't nowhere to go after this right like if after we've gone to Beverly Hills, we're like it doesn't work for us, then it won't matter anymore.
There's nowhere else to go, right? It's kind of a top of the food chain kind of moment, right? So we looked at it as like a grand experiment, right? Let's go out there. Let's experiment with it and let's see if it's worth it. So we do, we get out there, you know, my daughter's summer starts school there. We already had a ton of friends in LA from when we lived there before.
So it was great. You know, it was great. But about a year or so into it, we get to this point where my son will, I started getting a little bit bigger. It started a little bit tight in our, our three bedroom house. Toddler boy energy is tough to contain in a house of any size. Oh brother. And you know, my wife's, my wife's an angel, but Jesus.
So we start shopping around and for folks that aren't super familiar with that market, there are no new houses, right? The only new houses, there are an old house that got bought, demoed and rebuilt. There are no [00:19:00] new subdivisions in Los Angeles. So we look for over a year, can't find anything. We keep getting beaten down and trying to find, you know, price point, whatever.
We finally find a place. Now, when I tell the story, I want to remind people at like how modest. The size of this house is it's a four bedroom house on a postage stamp of land. The entire front yard slash driveway is the length of a car, a car. I remember in a specific car, like there are some cars you couldn't have because your bumper would hang over.
The back of the yard is maybe 30 to 40 feet deep. It included a pool, but the best part about it was there was like a 40 vertical mountain at the end of that 40 feet. Like this thing was something like, like blasted a mountain and like shoved the house up next to it, right? You had a view, it was like a giant wall in the back, right?
And in your distance to either neighbor on either side, you could spit too. Unfortunately, this house is in Bel Air. So take all of those, all of the things I told you and now you have [00:20:00] an eight figure house. Yeah. We had been so beaten down in, we, we lived there just in Beverly Hills and everything long enough to forget what houses cost, right.
What, what house, everywhere else in the world costs, like Yeah. The fact that this is a $580,000 house in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. And, and we were like, you know what? We're so lucky to have found this place, . Right. Finally, this is, this is where our family can, can down. Right? How quickly lose perspective.
Isn't it funny man? And I always say, if you want to feel the poorest you possibly can, just punch 90210 into Zillow. Yeah, there you go. I know what your money buys you. Stirrhome, 22 million. Yeah, oh my god, it's, it's bananas. Anyway, so, point though is, we decided this is it. This is home, this is gonna be our, our future.
Family's future and what have you and around that time as we're kind of looking at clothes and all this good stuff Sarah and I sit down and I'll never forget We're on like a little weekend trip that we took and Sarah who as you know is the smarter of us It just is like, you know, this is cool and all but like for real.
This is dumb. Yeah, she's like, what are we doing? Yeah, what are we doing? Seriously? What are we doing? Like she's like [00:21:00] we have a perfectly good house in Columbus We still at our house in Ohio. She's like, let's just go back there, right? That costs of zeros of eight figures, you know something that's really fun Funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new.
Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups.
startups. com. So if Any of this sounds familiar. Stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it. This is the reason I'm telling that story because this was my moment. This was specifically my cash in the chips moment. I did all this stuff. I did all these things.
It has to add up to more than just going back to the house that I already have in Columbus, right? I was like, look, this was the point. The whole reason for the past two weeks. Almost 30 years at the time that I've been sacrificing and giving up everything and [00:22:00] risking everything and Working five companies at the same time do all this crazy shit, right?
Was so at this moment I could cash in my chips, right? Cash in my life chips Not just dollars, but like life This was the reward the trophy if you will for my sacrifice and I said more specifically If not now when because we didn't get any younger Right in number two if this wasn't the point What have I been doing for the last 20 some odd years, right?
And my wife, who has an amazing ability that she doesn't even realize to boil things down into the simplest terms possible, said these words to me. She said, Now that you know that you can, you're good. Now that you know you can, you're good. You did it, but you don't have to go any further than knowing that you can.
The point was that you could, not that you should. And I was like, that doesn't sound nearly as exciting as It's something much cooler in mind. It got really interesting because like my world came crashing down in a weird way. Right. Like in a way where I'm like, [00:23:00] how could I have been this unprepared or said differently?
Why did I sacrifice or all that stuff? If the time came, like when the moment of truth came. I had nothing to show for it. And fun fact, we moved back to Columbus a week later. We've been there ever since. Right? Like, because my thing was like, well, hell, if we're not going all in, might as well go all out.
You know, we packed our stuff and moved. It was really interesting to me because it was the first time in a very deliberate way, all of my sacrifices were called into question by me, right? By me. To be able to say, I thought that was the point that I could do this extraordinary thing and, and make that sacrifice pay off.
And I gotta say, I felt like, and if I don't, I just kind of cheated myself. I could have bought a house in Columbus with a hell of a lot less sacrifice. That's, that's what's a bit crazy about the whole thing is that sacrifice is done on a safe note basis, right? It's, it's a future priced round, right?
Because at the time we're doing it, we have no idea. What the value of that sacrifice is actually going to [00:24:00] end up being. And then we get to that point where the settlement comes and, and we see what that looks like all of a sudden, for me, a lot of cases, it was like the, the size of the sacrifices felt like they got bigger, right?
It was like, Oh, you know, as I go back and revisit these things, like, Why did I do that? Why did I forego friendships now that I've seen what the actual value this is as, and because like, then the return on it started to get smaller and smaller and therefore it magnified the actual cost of some of those sacrifices.
And it can be a really, really tough moment. I think that in a, in a. Curious to see what else, what other catharsis you went through at that point. Like, did you get to a point where, like, that led to you to some comfort, or did it just sort of recast the past in what was rose colored glasses on the way forward?
Is it all just kind of a sepia tone, old timey photo now, all the sacrifice, all the things you gave up along the way? Yeah, what was interesting about it was, it really fucked me up. Yeah. Because, like, in [00:25:00] theory, here's what should have happened. Here's what should have happened. By all rights, and I get this, right?
Like, I'm pretty self aware here. I should have been like, oh, I'm so thankful, I'm so grateful, like, you know, blah, blah, blah, and, you know, drive off into the sunset. That is not what happened. What actually happened was, I was like, my whole world came crashing down. I'm like, all the things I was built to do, to achieve, to get to goal, Got taken away.
Yeah. Right. Cause I'm like, wait, okay. Now the finish line doesn't matter. The equivalent of you won the Superbowl and you realize you hated winning Superbowls. Yeah. Well, I'm not going to go back to football practice tomorrow and not win a Superbowl, like it's, it's the point. Right. Yeah. And so it really blew up.
The entire kind of fundamentals in the infrastructure that I had built mentally around my ambition. What I also learned, I learned a lot of things, but one of the things that I learned was that not having stuff is a great way to blind yourself to working more. It's so easy to say, I don't have car, house, life, whatever, vacation, whatever it is that you say you don't have.
You can instantly justify [00:26:00] sacrificing or doing something to get it. What we don't understand or we don't, we can't comprehend is once you have it, did it solve what you thought it was going to solve? The answer 99% of times for every single person is no. And what sucks is you only get to learn that having already sacrificed to get it
Like that's the founder's paradox. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah. You, you find, you find that at the wrong time. It's funny too, 'cause like. We, we sort of see this like as parents, we certainly see this. Like we actually learned this as kids, sort of maybe what we experienced as kids. We learned it as parents, which is that like the value in the thing is, is not having it right.
It's, it's way more valuable. Like the, the toy, the kid wants the candy, the, whatever the thing is, the minute they get it, it's valueless and they're just on to chase the next thing. And so I think that's why there's, there's, and we've said this already, but there's so much danger in. All of this deferred living, all of this deferred happiness, if that is what, in fact, what you were doing, as we've said, there's lots of different kinds of sacrifice that happened along the way.
Those are some pretty common ones, at least in my case. And so it comes down to, you know, this, this kind of balancing of the accounts at the [00:27:00] end, but like being really clear, as clear as you can be coming into it, this is actually what you want. Knowing now that just the, the accumulation of stuff isn't going to make you a happier person.
It's not going to, to move the needle meaningfully in life. And I think that that was the, the catharsis for me was this realization that like I should Instead of trying to optimize for, for later, optimize for now. Right. It's not to say don't plan for later, but like make sure that you're living in a way that you want to be living now and not for some maybe future that once you have, you might not even be satisfied with.
Right. So that you don't have to go through all of those. Oh, fuck moments. Like I did all this. I sacrificed all this shit. I did it. Did everything I was supposed to do. I got the thing I wanted and it's no longer what I want, right? Because I was unaware. That's why the play test you guys did in, in Beverly Hills was so valuable because flip that on its head and let's say you're still sitting in Columbus and that judgment comes due and it's like, should we do this?
Should we try this? If you hadn't had that year experience out there, you guys may have made a very different decision, which is like, if not [00:28:00] now, when, right? And you wouldn't have had the, this isn't worth it. This isn't like, this isn't what we want. We already have this other thing because it was still at that point, a just pure imagination.
And so much of what we do is driven on pure imagination, right? We get used to that as founders. I think our whole business is pure imagination at the beginning, right? So everything is something it's yet to be. For sure. It's a double edged sword. So on the one hand, that hope and optimism and kind of like blind, like, you know, futurism helps drive us.
It helps us run through walls that at the time we need to run through, right? So it creates a superpower. On the other hand, of all the things that we spend so much time trying to quantify as founders and entrepreneurs, our happiness tends to be the thing we suck at the most. Our ability to be able to say what actually makes me happy into the penny, what does that cost?
So if I were to take that exercise, something I've done for a very long time, but I'll give you a moment in time where I first started to understand this. Although when I explain it to you, you're going to be like, okay, What have you been doing with it? No, I'm like, I think [00:29:00] I'm like 27 years old. Right. At the time we had an office when I was running blue diesel, the agency, we had an offer to buy the agency and for a meaningful summit, I think it was like 50 million at the time or, or, you know, or around that, and this is like maybe 99, if I'm getting my dates, right.
And I remember I'm on a plane to yet another client. That was back when I was like on a plane, 250 days out of the year. I remember I got my laptop open. I'm in Excel. And I'm like, okay, what am I gonna do with all this money? You know, once we make this, what am I gonna do with all this money? And I remember I make a spreadsheet of every single thing I'm going to buy, right?
All the obvious stuff, boom, Lamborghini, you know, all this stuff, right? Everything down to a DVD player. And I love saying that because you got to remember back then, like a DVD player, like a high end DVD player was like a big deal. That was a big deal. Anyway, anyway. I add it all up, but then I, I had this interesting thought.
I was like, okay, that's just stuff to buy. Like once you buy it, you have it. Like there's, what are you going to do once you have it? So then I create like another tab, which is like, how am I going to spend my time? And I list out all [00:30:00] the stuff that I'm going to do every day. Uh, I'm going to work out. I'm going to play hockey.
I'm going to read. I'm going to hang out with my friends, whatever. And I'm like, wait a minute. This stuff doesn't cost anything. Yeah, it's free. It's like, I'm like, wait, so all this, how I'm actually going to spend my time costs zeros of dollars, but buying all this stuff to drive myself to, to where I'm going to spend time costs millions of dollars, right?
Or the house where I'm going to sleep in to wait, to get up, to do stuff that costs nothing costs millions of dollars, right? It was this weird kind of like, now by way of that, you'd have thought I would have had this great cathartic moment that would have made me go, Oh, Life is free and I don't have to worry about it.
Right? I did none of that. Here's what I did I was like, well shit if life is free. I might as well roll the dice. Yeah I mean there's something to that right there's something to that and I think look you're also built for this, right? Like you you do enjoy the you do enjoy the process if this had been you know, yes There was a lot of sacrifice, but it's not like this has been 30 years of misery either All right, just this one hour a week you spend with me.[00:31:00]
Yeah, pain incarnate. Yes, it, you know, wasn't all misery, etc. But I think part of it, Ryan, that people don't quite understand from the outside. They look at it and they see, well, you're able to buy a nice car, a nice house or something like that. And so therefore all your problems must be gone. What they're thinking about in most cases is I don't have that thing.
So once I have that thing, problems must go away with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not the way it works. You got to understand, for most folks, I always think about this in terms of professional athletes, of which I'm clearly not one. I'm like, people from the outside be like, Oh, it must be great to be like such a gifted athlete to be able to perform at that level.
I'm like, You know how much torture that person has to put themselves through in order to perform at that level, right? I couldn't spend a week in their mind state, right? When we're living in Beverly Hills, right? And somebody's like, oh, you know, must be nice. I'm like, listen, I'm grateful for all of it.
Don't get me wrong. This is, this isn't a lack of gratitude at all. I don't wake up in the morning and just get like, [00:32:00] Carried to my office through butterflies, right? I am stressed 24 7. My anxiety meter is at 11 all the time, right? Like all I'm thinking about is what can go wrong, right? Because now that I have more stuff, I have more to lose.
And so I'm even more stressed about it. And look, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it's not the Shangri La people think it is on the outside. There's a tremendous amount of anxiety and stress that goes with it. And it kind of doesn't go away. Here's what I'm going to say. If you were the person that was built to get to that level, you have all the baggage that comes with being built to get to that level for sure.
Yeah. And I think that's part of, it's so hard to see from the outside. And like, we talk about this, like you can't just take the Instagram version of this thing and say like, well, I want, I want this, I want the results, but I won't put any of the work. Right. It's like everybody watching P90X is like, yes, abs, no to working out.
Right, and so like you used to have to drive past Channing Tatum's abs on like a weekly [00:33:00] basis when you were up in the hills, didn't you? That was pretty funny actually. Our neighbors were Calvin Harris and Channing Tatum. That's amazing. I was like, the chances of me staying married to my wife are zero at this point.
All she needs to do is go jump the fence. No, but like from my standpoint, I looked at that moment in time being like, I guess this is as good as it gets. Here's what's really interesting for folks. And I love being honest about this stuff because I wish more people were just honest about like, like how it went.
Sarah and I would sit on a Friday night and we'd sit in our living room in Beverly Hills and watch Netflix. And I'd be like, dude, this is the most expensive Netflix we're ever going to watch, right? How much brighter are the colors? How much clear is the sound when you watch it close to the source? Is it, is it better?
I'm not knocking it. I'm saying, like, there is a point where you're just gonna go back to doing the same stuff you were doing anyway. I'll give you another example, because I remember at the same time, the guy, he goes by, uh, Notch, who is the founder of Minecraft. At the time, same rough era, he had sold Minecraft for a billion dollars to Microsoft, and he moved from, like, Sweden or [00:34:00] wherever he was from, to LA.
And not just LA, he buys, at the time, like, the most expensive house in LA, which, or the most expensive on the market house, that was like 75 million dollars, and he outbid Jay Z and Beyonce to get it, right? And it was bananas, like, it was bananas bananas, right? Anyway, he moves in, kind of this frumpy 35 year old, you know, dorky kid, uh, right?
Into a place that he has no business being in, right? Jay Z made sense there, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, they do an article, uh, interview with him like a year later, and he's depressed. He's miserable. He's like, look, all I did was sit home and code the whole time. Yeah, right. The same thing I did back in my apartment 10 years ago or whatever he was doing, right?
He's like, nothing changed for me. Obviously, I made a lot of new friends that all of a sudden liked me a whole bunch. He's like, but short of that, I just went back to doing the same stuff I was doing to begin with. You're gonna revert to what makes sense in your life. Yeah, I think that's the thing is that people assume that because certain circumstances change that all of a sudden we change, like, [00:35:00] well, I will be a different person.
I will become a renaissance man who does nothing but paint and ride horses and hunt fox, right? Or whatever, right? Yep, yep. It just, we don't change that much, right? All of a sudden your circumstances change. Yep. It just turns out like They're still kind of the same, same person yet. And I mean, you may grow after that.
You may have more time to explore and do those things. But like the, the, the delta between life before and after tends to not be that much, not because it can't, but because we're human and we just kind of want to do the things that we've always done and that we know. And that's what we like in life.
Yeah, I think generally speaking, there's, you know, there's nothing wrong with sacrificing to get more. It's the nature of being a founder. I mean, like there's, it's inherent in what we do and I actually don't believe, just so we're saying the same thing. I don't believe that you can get to extraordinary ends with no sacrifice.
I've never seen it happen. No. Right. And so, so this, uh, this idea that I'm just going to have perfect work life balance, which just means work less, and I'm going to get to extraordinary, uh, ends does not happen. I mean, we are in that business and have been for a very long time. It does not. Right. So [00:36:00] you have to sacrifice, you know, in order to get those big returns.
What we're talking about though is what are those big returns specifically? How much more does that buy you? Cause I'm telling you, like I'm doing the same stuff now. As I was doing 30 years ago, when I was dead broke, getting the same amount of enjoyment on them, I just do them in a nicer house. Yeah. Like, I'd be short of that.
Nothing about my life has changed. I sit around, I do woodworking, I play video games, I play sports, etc. Yeah. None of which costs any money whatsoever. And it's all stuff I could have done all along. Again, I do with some, some nicer tools or I go on a nicer trip, but short of that, my life is identical to what it was before.
That is nice. Here's what I would say for all of us that are going through the sacrifice and we're all going through the sacrifice. Sacrifice is fine. So long as we know exactly what we expect to get out of it in the return on that, the value of that. Is commensurate with what we're willing to sacrifice.
And if we're like, Hey, look, man, I'm only willing to sacrifice [00:37:00] 50%, you know, whatever that amounts to, because that's all I'm willing to give up to get more. That's fine. That's actually fine. You will get what you invest in it, and you'll get no more, but that's also okay. I'm not worried about that person.
I'm worried about the person that sacrifices 110%, and in the end gets 10 percent back. Cause you don't get that time back. You get one shot at this life to put everything you have into it, but you also get one shot to get everything back. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone? You don't have to.
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