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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.
Welcome back from the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of startups.com. Will, I don't think anybody doesn't think it can be pretty hard to make money with a startup company, but it may not always be for the reasons we think. Why are so many people struggling to get rich out there when that's exactly why they started doing this in
Will:the first place? I think we've got a broken narrative. I think somewhere along the way, we built this narrative that it's so noble to not make money. I know that nobody actually says that. Right?
Will:Nobody says that. But, like, it's it's become an actual part of, like like, our fabric. In other words, in what business does a person say, hey. I'm not gonna get paid.
Ryan:Yeah. I I I need to not get paid for a period of time so I can be proud of the work I'm doing before I eventually maybe make some money. Imagine imagine if that was the pitch to people you were trying to hire. How many people would say yes to that?
Will:Remember, we always say that we said that if you're ever interviewing for your own job and you're explaining your job to someone else,
Ryan:no one would accept it. No one
Will:would ever accept this job. And so I I think we need to talk about why founders are not getting rich, and and and why why we are doing it to ourselves. Right? It's not that there's so much money we don't know what to do with. We don't understand.
Will:We forget. We condition ourselves to believe that we shouldn't get paid. And that is a dangerous spot to be in. And I think we should talk about it.
Ryan:Yeah. You know, I think some of it comes from, like, almost a self Right. Right. Right. Feels a bit like a self defense mechanism against the, a very likely outcome for a period of time.
Ryan:The problem is the minute that becomes unlikely, like, we could start paying ourselves, we don't because we've bought our own damn narrative. It's and now and now we're living it to our own chagrin.
Will:The problem is, you know, in the event that it works, it it sounds like it was the right thing to do. And then then you tell this beautiful back story, you know, that this this this created, history of how I sacrificed so long, and I I made it work. And and and there is some honor and merit to that. You and I have both done it. And you do it because you have to.
Will:Again, it's not like there's so much money floating around. We just don't know what to do with it. But what we we quickly lose sight of. And I know a lot of the people that that are listening to this deal with this. Right?
Will:And this is why we talk about this stuff where they're saying, you know, I've been at this for a long time. Like, what the hell, man? Like, when do I get paid? Right? When do I get paid?
Will:There's a few things that we all do, some patterns we all fall into where we self sabotage ourself. I think the first one that may be one of the most broken narratives that we talk about more than most people is this concept of we try to go too big. Right? When when I say that, like, people instinctively say, oh, well, you know, you're just talking about going small. That's not important.
Will:Lifestyle business blah blah blah. I'm like, no, man. You can actually prevent yourself from getting paid by setting the aperture too big. You know what I mean?
Ryan:Yeah. Especially early. I think I think there's a there's a timing mechanism that's that's in place there. We have to be careful that by let's let's put some context to it. Let's let's give some examples of exactly what we mean by by going too big.
Ryan:Right? Like, you could say like, okay, we we've now started to generate some cash, we're actually making money but we're going to reinvest all of that back into growth and we just want to grow bigger and bigger and bigger for an undetermined period of time to an undisclosed size without any real goal in mind. And that keeps us from paying ourselves, right? Like we aim too big with something whereas we we could have balanced that a bit more. And I think it's also important to note, this isn't a binary choice.
Ryan:We're not saying, like, you either have to choose growth or paying yourself. How about instead of paying yourself everything you'd ever wanna make, you pay yourself something. Instead of growing as big as you ever wanted to grow, you grow reasonably. I think that there's there's this whole spectrum and yet especially where it comes to compensation making money for founders, we tend to look at this as black and white. It's like I either am paying myself or I'm not, and I'm suffering because that's that narrative that we bought it to.
Will:You bet. And also, again, it kinda ties into a train that we almost inadvertently get on, which is the funding train. Right? Yeah.
Ryan:Where we say
Will:initially funding makes so much sense initially because we're all broke. Right? We all don't have money. So the idea of funding is, I don't have money. I need stuff, so I need money.
Will:Right? So it sounds fantastic. When we sit down, Ryan, you and I sit down with with founders, and we say, you know, our job is to help you through this process, but part of that job is to let you know what you're signing up for. And so yesterday, I was having a conversation, with founder, and I was explaining to her. I said, look, once you start raising, in 18 months, you have to go raise again.
Will:In 18 months, you have to go raise again. And she was like, wait, what? I was, like, yeah. It's not what you think. It's it's not a one time affair where you go out, you raise that money, and then now you just have money forever.
Will:Right? Like, it is a consequence. Going to
Ryan:your parents to ask for the down payment on your house. Right? You have to keep doing this over and over
Will:and over again. Exactly. And then I'm like, okay. But here's the other side of it. Every time you raise, and this is really, like, the crux of it, you increase the threshold.
Will:You raise the bar for how well you have to perform to ever get paid. And that's the part people don't get. People say, oh, I raise more money so I can build bigger company. But what they miss is, yeah. But in order to get paid personally, back to the whole topic here, on bigger company, your threshold just became exponentially higher.
Will:And just real quick explanation for the folks that maybe aren't super familiar with exactly what we mean because I just don't want it to get lost, Ryan. If, Ryan, if you and I raise money and we raise, say, $10,000,000, in most cases, in order for us to get paid, if we sell the company for $11,000,000, the first $10,000,000 in most cases, sometimes more, goes back to the original investors. The remaining $1,000,000 then gets split up based on what all the investors own and what we own. So if we if we each own 25%, we each get 25% of $1,000,000 not $11,000,000 Right. Now look at companies who have raised 50, a 100, $500,000,000.
Will:And you look at statistically how few companies ever get to an exit of that magnitude, it's like tens of companies in a given year. Right? Or if if you look at IPOs, I I can't remember what that last number was, but I think, like, 57 companies went IPO last year. Right? I mean, what the hell?
Will:Right?
Ryan:Like Compared to the the 1,000,000 that start every year and then the 1,000,000 more that we never even hear about that we're just idea stage, but people put time, effort, and money into.
Will:I'm not knocking funding. I'm just pointing out that that funding has a whole other side of it that actually prevents you from getting paid.
Ryan:It limits so many options in so many ways and it and it's sort of, I mean, it really does force the we bet too big mentality, right? Because at that point, you don't get to change your mind about that. Once you decide to bet big enough that you need funding and you take on funding, you're in it. Right? You now have to get big in order to do this.
Ryan:Like, there's no version of just falling back and saying, well and now it's just a lifestyle business. And you know, you're not allowed to do that. We've talked about this a couple of times in different episodes. The big danger is just taking away the optionality for all the other ways you could pay yourself.
Will:On that note, once we raise money, and this kind of falls in the bet too big category, we typically can't just take distributions. Right? In in the the way normally people would think about that. They're like, oh, well, yeah. Like, once you raise a bunch of money and the company's profitable, I'll just take some of that profit.
Will:Good luck with that. Yeah. That's almost Investors
Ryan:might have something to say about that. They're like, let's see. You could take money off the table having used my money to build the revenue streams that you have now and I get nothing back unless you get a lot bigger. I have a better idea. Let's reinvest all of that money to grow because that's what they're gonna insist on because that's the only way they get paid.
Ryan:So, of course, they will.
Will:Dude, we've been at this for a long time. I've been at this for 30 years. I have yet to see a situation where people have raised meaningful amounts of money, and the investors have said, cool. Now let's just all distribute the the profit we make each year. I would love for someone to email us and tell us it's happened because I'm sure it has happened.
Will:But being in the startup business for 30 years, I've never seen it happen.
Ryan:We probably have some examples. We go deep enough into the into the histories here, but it's not like startup funding in its traditional sense, right? Like I can definitely pull a couple of personal examples. I know where this has happened, but it was like friends and family money or it was a local angel, right? It was somebody who was like they were investing in some version of IRR as they saw it.
Ryan:Right? But that's that's not that's not really talking about here. We're talking about essentially some version of venture funding, whether you've gotten to a VC round or not, kind of doesn't matter if what you're raising is money for venture and it will eventually lead down that path. That's what we're talking about. That's what most people are thinking in most cases.
Will:So what we tend to miss when we're thinking, oh, raise money, etcetera, is if it works, which statistically is is like minimum single digit percentage chance that it's gonna work I
Ryan:didn't mean to say that, but I did. Yeah.
Will:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If it works, it'd be great.
Will:And and that's what you get on the cover of magazines for back when there used to be magazines.
Ryan:I'm just like, I remember that word.
Will:Yeah. Right. Right. Paper. And so, but on the other side of it, the high likelihood, I mean, imagine if if someone just laid this out for you.
Will:You're looking to raise money and the investor actually said to you almost as if they had to do a disclosure that now we're about to give you money. There is a less than 2% chance that this will turn into riches and a 98% chance that for the next 8 years, you'll go on to make no money and be quasi bankrupt at the end of this. Sign here.
Ryan:Yeah. I think a whole lot of folks would sign that. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Will:And look, look, look, this isn't again, we always say this is an anti capital. This is full self awareness of capital. This is yes. By all means, do it. Just know what you're getting to.
Ryan:For better or for worse. Right? For for better in a lot of cases, we're there to help with these things. But we see the outcomes of this stuff. Right?
Ryan:We find the founders who come to us and they're like, what do I do now when they're 3, 4, 6 years into this thing? And they're just now realizing the stuff that we are telling all of you now. Obviously, it's much better to go into that, aware at least if that's a possible or even a likely outcome as you said. Like, that's the 98% chance. Right?
Ryan:It's not a maybe, it's a probably and there's a maybe that it works out differently. So again, not anti capital, not anti funding, not anti investor. We're just pro founders knowing what the hell they're signing up before before they shave their heads and get on the bus boot camp.
Will:And also, I don't think people understand, and why would you? There is a threshold where making a certain bet significantly prevents other bets. So another if you take a founder right now that's raised $50,000,000, right, over the past 7 years. Okay? And you say, how much did you make in, you know, file for taxes and earn last year?
Will:They're probably gonna tell you somewhere between a 150 to $200,000 gross. Just basically whatever salary, they're they're getting paid. And I'm not knocking that income. That's fine. But I would say, why didn't you make $1,000,000 last year?
Will:Right? Number 1, nobody in a venture funded company is making $1,000,000 in salary. I mean, a few outliers, but short of that, almost none. Right? If anything, it's the opposite.
Will:Most of them were getting paid well below what they would otherwise earn earn in market. Yeah.
Ryan:Yeah. You're taking something below market salary because you're trying to build something and other people put their money to you. And this is this is the the contract we signed.
Will:This is this is kind of what it comes down to. So if I were to say, okay. So you raised $50,000,000, you made $150,000 last year. In that same time period, do you think you could have built a company that does $3,000,000 in revenue that generates $1,000,000 of income? Yeah.
Will:Almost everybody's going to say yes, right? They're like, yeah,
Ryan:pretty much. Yeah. Why would I. Am I. For that?
Ryan:Well, because if you can see your future self making a $150 a year, you'd probably say yes to that. That's why. Right?
Will:So here's where I think we get lured into that trap, and it's easy to do. The very nature of a startup is that it is all consumptive. It always needs far more than it has. Right?
Ryan:Are you still hungry? Yes. Are you still hungry? Yes. Need more money?
Ryan:Yes. Right? It's like a it's like a tween.
Will:You bet. You bet. They're babies. Like, our startup is a baby that never grows up. Right?
Will:It's just always hungry.
Ryan:Right? Always.
Will:And so, from the moment we first start, we're constantly used to feeding the baby, if you will, at the expense of ourselves.
Ryan:Again, this part of this comes from that narrative of I must be the greatest sufferer. I have to get you know, I have to pay myself less. I know where this comes from. Right? I think I I honestly think a lot of it because talking to as many founders we do, you do start to hear this thing where it is a bit of a self protection mechanism.
Ryan:That way, when you have to tell the story about how it didn't go well, it's not like, well, you know, we we all suffered the same amount together and it didn't work and that's fine. No. They always want to be able to say like, look, yeah, it didn't work out. I was able to take care of the team until the very end. I had to burn through all my savings to push this as far as I could.
Ryan:And now I feel good about telling my story of failure. Like why are we building a narrative around what will happen when we fail so we can feel better when we do? Not the approach I want people to take.
Will:Oldie in our business because, like, my brother my brother is a chef in DC. Right? He does well for himself. Okay? And at no point would my brother ever be like, man, I worked for this restaurant, you know, for, like, 5 years.
Will:Never took a penny. Was hoping someday I'd get paid. He'd be like, if my paycheck doesn't cash on Friday, that is the last you're ever gonna see it. Yeah.
Ryan:Right? Started started taking groceries out of my own fridge to cook at the restaurant just to make sure that our patrons stayed full. Right? Like, nah.
Will:Any other world, no one would even think about, like, behaving like that. Right? And yet we look at it as as a badge of honor. Now to be fair, a lot of this has to do with we don't have any money to begin with. Right?
Will:So it's not like we're we're even making a decision. Like, the company has no money.
Ryan:Yeah. It's not an option at the very beginning. The the problem is that we perpetuate that.
Will:That's a given. Obviously, the point of this is when it is an option, how we still screw ourselves. So imagine this. You know, Ryan, you and I start a new business. We're 2, 2 and a half years into it.
Will:Business is doing $700,000 in revenue. We've got a handful of employees. K. We have aspirations to do 10 x more. You and I could both take, say, $200,000 each right off the table and pay ourselves.
Will:But our company would never grow. Right? Our so what what do we do? We take $50,000 each. We pour the rest into growth, and the company grows.
Will:And we think to ourselves that was the responsible thing to do. We invested in our business. We will harvest later.
Ryan:Okay? Rinse and repeat. The next 7 or 8 years.
Will:Okay. And so so we do that. We did everything we were supposed to do. We did it right. And in a few years, we've gone from 700,000 in revenue, right, to 7,000,000 in revenue.
Will:And we have crushed it by all standards. Okay. But now we take the money, right? Nope. Why?
Will:Because now we have even bigger liability. Our payroll is way bigger than what it used to be. And now even being able to take 200,000 off the table would crush us. Right. With the size of liabilities we have every month, we can't do it now.
Will:The fantasy we have that's counter to this, the fact and the whole reason we did it is because we believed when we got to 7,000,000, there would be so much extra cash that taking that $200 off will be nothing. What we miss, what we don't understand unless we've lived it, is that as you grow, your liability, your monthly nut, your monthly payments, if you will, your car payment, gets so exponentially bigger that the cost and risk and how many people are affected by taking money off the table is too high.
Ryan:Yeah. The risk profile completely changes. You know, it's funny, man. I I remember at some point when I finally got this right, and I did start taking money off the table, it turned I was afraid to take money out of the off the table. Right?
Ryan:Because because of all those things, like the liabilities, they, you know, what if what if what if what if? Turns out that if I didn't take money off the table, that money always got utilized and it could never come back to you.
Will:It will get spent just not by you.
Ryan:It will get spent. However, I found out when I took money off the table and I put that money where I wanted to, just had it sitting, send in some cases, use some of it. If the company did end up needing some of that money, I could give it back. Right? You can put money back in.
Ryan:Turns out when when money came to me, it got saved. When money was in the company, it got spent in, in, in terms of growth, in terms of whatever, right? You find like there's no, like you said, there's no shortage of ways to spend it and it's always hungry for it. So I think it was just a it was such a subtle and and simple and yet really powerful realization that's like, take it off. You can always put it back.
Ryan:Right? Yeah. There's some taps tax implications, things you gotta think through and and do it right, but it's all very much doable.
Will:For good reasons, we convince ourselves that taking that money, either it's not our money, which is part of it. Right?
Ryan:Or
Will:if we do it, we are we are doing a disservice to the business, which is true if you've forgotten why you started a business to begin with.
Ryan:Yeah. Right. Amazing how often that happens though, isn't it? It's like you you get so caught up in in the doing that you forget the why. And you remember the big why, like I did this to help these people.
Ryan:I did this to to to make this done in the universe, whatever. Yeah. But you you did it as a business, not as a hobby or not as a nonprofit, not as a project, because you were supposed to make some money at the same time.
Will:Try not making payroll one period and telling everybody, you know, it really wasn't just about the pay, was it?
Ryan:Right. Right. Yeah.
Will:See how far that gets.
Ryan:You're here for the I I am a I'm a mission driven employee.
Will:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right up until you don't get paid.
Will:Right? Again, and this isn't me picking out employees because this has nothing to do with them. My point is they have a reasonable expectation for their effort. Right? As mentioned, my brother, like my brother goes to his restaurant.
Will:He he does his chef thing and he expects to get paid. Right? We somehow self build our own engine without the expectation of getting paid by it. Right? It'd be like building a house and not living in it.
Will:Like
Ryan:What do we do? It is tough. It is tough because I I was I was actually talking to talking to a couple of founders yesterday. And one of the one of the topics for discussion was around doing some profit sharing with with employees. Couple of things came up.
Ryan:The first one was just like, you guys don't like paying yourselves market rate salary. So like, why don't we correct that first? There are people in your company who are getting paid more than you are. So maybe we should we should rectify that, but before. More so it was this this notion of like, well, when do we do this?
Ryan:When when should we be able to do this? How do we make that determination? How do we do the the calculus between, continuing to grow? Right? Because I think we can start thinking and it's not an incorrect way of thinking about it.
Ryan:The more we keep in the company, the more we reinvest in the company, it's it's a bit like and it doesn't work exactly. So it's a bit like an annuity, right? Or a bit like a retirement account. The longer you pay into the retirement account, the longer you let that grow and build momentum, the more you have at the end. That's just not quite the way startup companies work.
Ryan:So, yes, you need to do some of that. Right? If you if you take everything off the table from day 1, if you make $1,000 in the 1st month, you take $1,000 off the table And you're like, okay, we just reset the downs every single month completely without any cash to grow on. Yeah. That's pretty tough.
Ryan:Right? You'll you'll you'll always be whatever it was when it started. But I think founders push this way, way too far. And and I think that they think that like I have to leave it all in there. I have to reinvest all of it.
Ryan:This is just about growth. I need to make this thing bigger and bigger. And again, it's like to what magical point where it actually makes sense. To your example earlier, we get to 7,000,000. It's a different number.
Ryan:It's a bigger number, but it wasn't the only number that grew in the course of that time and it's gonna make it harder for you to now take money off the table. I actually think there's something to that. We didn't really talk about it but the sooner you start doing this, then that number can start to scale along with all the other numbers, Right? If you're not accounting for your own salary, you're not accounting for some distribution that you're taking, you're under market, you're underpaid, whatever it is. The sooner you correct that, the easier it is to grow that with the company.
Ryan:I think the the the misconception you touched on this is that we'll get to some magic point and then we can fix that. The problem is the business grows around that hole that you didn't make in your P and l by paying yourself in the 1st place, and it gets a lot harder to chip that space back out 2, 3, 4 years down the road. It is. And I and I
Will:think part of it is like a guilt thing. A lot of times what I'll see is I'll see 2 or 3 founders. And what's interesting about that dynamic is they all have a different situation. 1 of them just went through divorce, needs as much money as possible. The other one's still single, doesn't need any money whatsoever.
Will:Right? Like, you
Ryan:were hanging out with Bezos and Musk?
Will:That's exactly a whole one. They're all kind of in a different situation, let's say. Right? Or, you know, different life stage with the kids, whatever. Right?
Will:It's hard for them to have the conversation. It's hard for them to agree on, like, what's fair, etcetera. Remember, again, not everybody has the same expectation of what the business should or shouldn't do. You know, one of them believes it's gonna be as big as possible, and that's you know, it's gonna be hard to talk them out of that. The other one is, like, I don't know if we're gonna be around in a year.
Will:I'm trying to get as much money out of this thing as possible. Right? It's it's hard to not have that, that same expectation. But what we're talking about is a different version where nobody even says we should be taking money off the table. Right?
Will:That's just dangerous, actually. Yeah. Whenever I listen to the base camp guys talk about this, they're shameless about taking money off the table. And when I say shameless, that sounds like a knock. It is not.
Will:I I'm I'm saying, like, in in the proper perspective.
Ryan:Right? There is no shame in
Will:doing that,
Ryan:and and they're unwilling to bear any un unnecessarily. Right? Why would they?
Will:They had a whole write up a couple months ago about how, you know, they they moved off the cloud. They moved to having their own servers, and their own thing, and they saved, like, $1,000,000, something like that. Right? And David was like, yeah. That was $1,000,000.
Will:Right? That, like, we otherwise would have just been, you know, sending off to AWS that we get to send in our own bank account.
Ryan:It's not being greedy. There's no shame in that. Right? That was just that was put into somebody else's pocket. That's all it is.
Ryan:Common sense. Shipping it somewhere else. Yeah.
Will:There's no version where we take money off the table that isn't otherwise going to be put toward growth. Right? However, the the one caveat and, Ryan, if you think about, like, you know, the dozen years or so we've been running this thing, how many decisions would we have made differently if we were totally broke? And and I don't mean didn't have a lot of money in the bank, but, like, think of, like, when we had a lot of extra people that if we really had to, like, press a button if this were a video game and there weren't humans involved. Right?
Will:And we could've just said, no. That I'm I'm gonna trade that player in Madden kind of thing. We would have done it. So in other words, we were spending that money. We just weren't giving it to ourselves.
Will:We're
Ryan:Yeah. That's you do. Right? You do. And I think that's the I think that's the difficult part.
Ryan:In the in the beginning, it feels very necessary. It feels necessary to build some level of base infrastructure. I think that we just start to flex that muscle so much which is that I'm gonna take and reinvest. I'm gonna use money elsewhere. I'm gonna I'm gonna grow it bigger and then eventually it'll pay me back.
Ryan:We just forget. It it would just stays eventually. Right? Eventually never turns into tomorrow or today until we tell it it has to. And I think this is the the real danger in perpetuating that narrative as far as we typically do with startup founders.
Ryan:It just goes on and on well beyond the point of necessity, and just into a point where you truly just again, if you don't account for it, right? If you just left yourself out of that line item, then that money doesn't come from nowhere. At that point, then you really do kind of have to cut something to pay yourself. Whereas if you built around that and that just was the mechanism, then you wouldn't be thinking like the guys from Basecamp didn't have to say, Hey, in order to pay ourselves, we're going to do something really risky and difficult. We're going to go off the cloud and, and put ourselves, on our own infrastructure and, and we're going to that that'll allow us to pay ourselves.
Ryan:Right? That's, that's a big risk. That's a huge decision to make. Doing that at a point where you're you've already started to pay yourself. You're already at market rates.
Ryan:You've already taken a lot of money on the table. It becomes that much easier because you've now flexed that muscle and you're understanding you've built a business around the ability to pay yourself which guys, to your point Will, kinda when we started this in the first place. Right? We didn't we didn't build these things to not pay ourselves. So the sooner we start doing that, the more we practice that muscle, the stronger that gets to.
Will:Think about it this way. If you're in the early early stages, in in your staffing up your company and you hire somebody, let's say you're paying them $60,000. So $5,000 a month, you feel good about that decision when you made it. Right? And maybe that person's working out.
Will:Maybe not. Right. But at the same time, you're looking to buy your first house. Right. Houses are way more expensive than they used to be.
Will:But and and and you need $5,000 a month to buy your first house. Right? You're living in an apartment with your family, whatever. Right? You have no problem saying $5,000 on a person that's maybe not performing.
Will:But at the same time, you and your family can't afford a house because somebody's not performing. We make these decisions all the time. We just make them on things that don't ever don't always necessarily work, if that makes sense. I just think about that in terms of a story I told you a long time ago. I told you I was having lunch with a buddy of mine who's, like, multi, multibillion dollar company.
Will:And I said, like, we're we're sitting in the cafeteria. He's like, I'm gonna feed 20,000 people, here in this cafeteria today, but I can't afford my wedding. And I always thought about that in terms of, like, this is the the the penultimate. Right? They've built an IPO since he's probably gonna afford his next wedding and the wedding after that.
Will:But it's this idea that, like, I'm spending all this money in the company. Like, the money's there. I'm choosing not to take it.
Ryan:Choose it. Right? And I think that's the part where so many people get this wrong where it's like, no, you're not choosing not to take it. You're using it for a higher purpose. And I think we could always argue like, are you though?
Ryan:Right? Like is that $5,000 for for the underperforming junior marketer really better than your family having a house? Is it is that is that a higher purpose? Like, well, but that'll allow us to buy a bigger house later because eventually that junior marketer will will make us more money and then we'll yeah. Right.
Ryan:Exactly. That's the thing. There's no certainty in that. One thing I can tell you, if you take $5,000 off the table, it's worth $5,000 You invest $5,000 in something else, it might be worth less. It might be worth the same.
Ryan:It might be worth more. We don't know. Right? But so many things are uncertain in startup land. Why do we need to make this uncertain as well?
Ryan:Just pay yourselves.
Will:We do some weird shit in startup land
Ryan:that, like, the rest
Will:of the world just doesn't do. Right? Like, when I talk to my friends that are outside of this industry, they call it the startup industry, if you will, they don't under because they're using common sense. Like, they actually don't understand the things that we do. They read the stories about how things went well and the guy got rich or something like that.
Will:But when you talk about just the average person and how they operate, they're like, yeah. That makes no sense. Hold on. You did work for somebody and you didn't get paid? Like, why why would you do that?
Will:Right? You worked on something for 4 years and you didn't make any money. Anybody like, nobody opens up a Subway franchise and thinks of, like, leaves the store open for 4 years and doesn't decide to sell sandwiches.
Ryan:Yeah. It's like comparing notes as a as a 45 year old father of 3 with, like, a 27 year old single person about what our weekends were like. And they're like, why? What did you what did you do? Why?
Ryan:What is that?
Will:Yeah. No. I agree. Here's what I would say. For folks that are in this and we're all in this, everyone wishes they could get paid more.
Will:Right? Like, everyone should be paid at all and make everyone should be getting paid more. What we're trying to point out is that this isn't just about get paid someday. This is about get paid right damn now because that someday is not a foregone conclusion. Right?
Will:You've worked for the money. You've earned the money. Make sure you take the money because if you don't take it, ain't nobody giving it back to you.
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Ryan:Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.