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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.
EP275_Who's Working For Who (Audio version)
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Speaker: [00:00:00] 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, this is going to be an interesting one, because this is a topic that has been sitting in our queue on our desk. For some time now, which is unusual for us because normally we come up with the topic, we're like, let's tackle that right away, but this is one where we don't yet have a fully definitive answer to, so chase it today and we're going to see if we can finish this thing off, put a bow on it, you know, we're, we want to dig in today and really discuss.
Who works for whom around here? All right. Does the founder work for the startup or does the founder, or does the startup work for the founder? And the answer is, uh, why can't it be? I
Speaker 2: struggled with this one. Like I've been sitting with this topic. For like three years for three years. And I hate to make this political, but, but this is actually, it was the, the, the recent election and the run up to the election in the U S that was, that's been [00:01:00] sparking it made me think about it more recently.
And they were in, I think we were talking about this another episode, the argument kept being that all these people, uh, these rich people made their money on the backs of their employees. And I kept thinking, I don't think that's true. And I get, I don't want to get into the politics of it. Cause that's, that's not my point of this, but I started thinking about it like, well, wait a minute.
Well, who's working for who? I'm like, are those people working for the founder or is the founder working for them? Because it kind of makes it sound like the founder is working for them. Like the founder owes them. And I'm like, well, is it, isn't that what a paycheck's for? And, and again, but it really started making me think like, who is working for who?
Yeah. Right? And, and what does that look like? And then I started thinking in terms of, well, boy, I know an awful lot of founders, and if you ask them who's working for who are, are they working for the startup or is the startup working for them? They're not gonna tell you that the startups working for them.
Speaker: they're very rare. It's interesting. I don't know a lot of founders that would, that would be able to say that even if they [00:02:00] did, I'd be like, sure I can, I can think of a few who probably would say that because they want it to be true, but that the vast majority of them, it would be, would be false. Now, I think you and I both know.
Some entrepreneurs, we both know some, some business people who maybe at this stage is in their career, their business is largely working for them, but nobody that I would call like pure startup founder, number one, cause we do draw that distinction between like, you know, the accounting consultancy being an entrepreneur and, and, you know, say a tech product to solve for some new AI thing as being a startup and nary the two shall meet.
But man, yeah, I don't know too many who could truly say that now again, we do know some that have had big financial outcomes, but that's not necessarily the startup working for the founder either. Right. And that's right. That's a moment in time kind of thing. Like, okay, well, what happened up until that point, right?
Was that just the one momentous event where it's easy to point to and go, okay, well now clearly the startup is working for you. It just put 200 million in your bank account. Cool. But that's so rare. 99. 999 percent of
Speaker 2: people. That's what I'm [00:03:00] saying. Also, when you started this business as the founder, you didn't start it to say, how can I find a business where I work for everyone else's paycheck?
Right? Yeah. No one was that altruistic. No one was like, you don't be really cool. I want to quit my job and go start something where I stay awake until three in the morning at all times. It mortgage myself silly. To make sure everyone else gets a paycheck. I'm gonna
Speaker: reverse Tom Sawyer this shit. I'm gonna reverse Tom Sawyer this thing.
I'm gonna do all the work and they're gonna get, yeah. Yeah. I don't think I've heard that
Speaker 2: one
Speaker 3: either.
Speaker 2: And yet, all of these founders find themselves in a position where they're like, I work to make sure everyone else gets paid. Yeah. And they're like, how did I get here? What the hell happened? And so again, I got into this, this weird like thought process, like how many founders are out there?
How many founders listen right now that are thinking to themselves, wait a minute. Who works for who right here? Because like, in theory, in theory, I mean, you know, the old [00:04:00] school version where we're like, we're like, operator has a factory, and factory workers work for operator, right? And you know, old man operator has an Excel widget.
Yeah, right. One of my favorite shows to watch uh, with my family, particularly my daughter, um, is uh, the, the, the men, the men that built America, she hates that title, because, Built America, right? Yep. But, um, it does, does leave out quite a few people. It's pretty specific. Right. Um, but there's these great, very, very fictionalized accounts of all these great industrialists Yep.
That, that built America. And it's exactly that. Right? It's the carnegie's and ham and fisted
Speaker: robber barons.
Speaker 2: Right. Exactly. It's exactly that. And, and, and that is what people picture. When they talk about like the people that don't pay their taxes and it's like it's almost like this like beefdom right and there's these serfs that work for like ham fisted person who's like forcing them to work in like the mines for like 18 hours a day, right?
It helps if you put in a monocle, I've heard. It, it, it, it [00:05:00] sells the story. That's exactly what it is, right? Everybody's the monopoly man, right? Yep. And I'm like, my God, it is nothing less. It's nothing like that. It is such a caricature of a bygone era. Yeah. And what I picture Is whatever the polar opposite of that is how a founder in this day and age is actually working and that person is broke and their parents are paying their bills and they are so stressed and so anxious and so over a barrel and the person they are working for the founders working for are their investors, their debt holders.
They're employees, they're customers. They're like, no one works for me. They don't think about that at all. Yeah. And that's
Speaker: interesting, man. How
Speaker 2: did
Speaker: I get here? I think at the, I think at the early stages is a contract that we accept. Right. It's, it goes back to these like. These, these things that we assume will be short lived or that there, there is a life cycle that it'll go through and then things will change at some point.
And unfortunately, I think so often [00:06:00] in, in founder space, we, we permanent ties things, right. We, we accidentally write shit in stone, because I think at the beginning, like we all get it like, okay, there are no employees, right? You are CEO, chief cook, bottle washer, floor sweeper, everything you do it, you do it front to back.
The impression is then over time, I will bring in people who will do those things and eventually I'll do less, they'll do more and then I'll go from working for the startup and then the startup starts working for me. There's some truth to that. There's some truth to that, but I think that it implies that we're also replacing things that we were doing.
Like, let's be realistic about that. When was the last time you remember replacing something that you do? Now, we hire people. But generally speaking, it's not to replace the things that we're doing, it's to do things that we weren't doing, right? It's like, uh, sure. Well, I'm, I'm, I've, I've concepted this thing and I've done some, some sketches of it, but I, I can't actually design it.
I can't actually code it. So now I need a designer. Right. Those are things that I wasn't going to do. So a lot [00:07:00] of that is, you know, the expansion and like the team that we ended up working for or that ends up working for us, depending on where we land with this is largely just additive in nature. And so there isn't really this transition that I think we all assume will be there.
It's like, yeah, I got to grind it out for the beginning. And then at some point it'll start to work for me. Someday never comes right. And I think that's what, unless, unless we specifically plan towards that point. And I would argue that most of us don't
Speaker 2: or
Speaker: never, never get the luxury. Right. Yeah, I guess that's more what I mean.
It's like, not that we don't plan for it, but like that plan can't really be made from the beginning anyway. So like, and then at this point of net revenue, we'll do this. Well, okay. What all went into that net revenue? Well, I have no idea yet. Okay. Well then how are you planning for that point? I'm not really sure.
Speaker 2: Let's take this in two sections. Okay. Sure. Let's take section one. What was the initial plan? How is it supposed to work for the founder? What was that contract we wrote for ourselves or, you know, our intent? The second part was what happened where it became some other contract. At what [00:08:00] point did the founder work for the startup and how did we get there?
And then let's compare the two and see what the hell happened. Yep. All right. So, so let's start with, with what the initial contract was. Okay, because that's before it got perverted. That's before, you know, the life happened. Okay. Here's what I think the contract was, at least this is what it was in the nine times that I started a company when I first started every time.
And I'm guessing this is what it was for other people. You tell me yours, Ryan. It was, I want to build something that will profit me. Profit means a lot of things. You know, I'll, I'll, I'll use the most obvious money. I want to build something that will make me more money than I could have otherwise made doing something else.
Now that's not entirely true because truth be told, there are other things in different versions of my life that maybe I could have done that maybe would have made me more money, but I was able to, I was willing to forego some of that for some of the better lifestyle choices, which is also part of the profit.
I think about that being my own boss. I think that's one of the,
Speaker: and I [00:09:00] think that's an important piece of this is that sometimes we have to kind of reframe what that contract really looks like and what we're talking about when, when we're saying it's working for us. And I, well, in what ways is it working for you?
Right? Like financially rarely at the beginning, especially it's usually the opposite. It's a financial disaster to start. And so I think that is, that's an important aspect of it. I'm not sure how we'll account for all of that stuff, because that's, that's going to vary person to person, right? There, there are going to be some people out there just like, I had four bad bosses in a row.
I just, PTSD will not allow me to walk back in. I can't do it.
Speaker 2: I can't do it. So stick with that one. I love that one. I love that one. I want to be my own boss. Yeah. Let's stick with that. Because, you know, in a minute, we're going to go take on an investor. And that goes right out the door. Okay, I want to make my own decisions.
In a minute, we're going to take a co founder. And that goes right out the door. Yeah, and employees and customers. We did a whole episode on this, right? Control goes away very, very easy. Control goes away, right? But this contract that we're mentally writing to ourselves about who [00:10:00] we want to work for, how we want the startup to work for us, felt pretty explicit.
Yeah, we clearly made the sacrifice with this implied contract in mind. At no point did someone come to us and say, you know, you understand this all goes away. And we said, yep, totally. I'm totally cool with that. I no longer want this profit to go to me. At no point did we say that. No, we didn't. And yet,
Speaker: and yet, right?
That's, that's the way it works. This is the problem with contracts you signed to yourself, from yourself, by yourself. Right.
Speaker 2: Well said, well said. And okay, cool. So, right. Um, now at that point in our minds, We say this company is supposed to serve my goals. Yet we fast forward some period, five, ten years later, whatever it's going to be.
And it does not. Right? It is, it is ruining our health. It made us broke. Everyone tells us to go F ourselves. Right? Yeah. What? Why? Yeah.
Speaker: Ryan, I just reread the contract. It doesn't say any of that. It [00:11:00] really doesn't say any of that. I just reread all six of my contracts. None of them said that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Ryan, go back your inventory.
You're thinking about when you, when you started your first companies, what were your goals? How was the, how was the startup supposed to
Speaker: work for you? So I'll skip over like some of the super early entrepreneurial things. Cause those were really just like cutting teeth, uh, trying to figure out like, can I have any kind of an idea and make some money off of it?
And that was really all it was. I was also 14. So, you know, I had a lot. Yeah. So when we go back in time, it really did have a lot to do with Two things in my case, one, uh, the opportunity and what it would provide me, of course, but the idea that I could go and chase something that nobody else had done or hadn't done quite like I wanted to yet, right?
Like the, the competitive aspect of it to some degree was a big part of my contract, which is like, nobody else has figured this shit out yet. Let's go figure it out. Right. Or nobody else is doing this quite the way that I want to. Let's, let's go do that. And that was a big part of the contract for me was the excitement of being able to [00:12:00] define for better, for worse, for right or for wrong, how things would happen.
Right. Right. To the extent that you could. And of course, at the earliest stage, when it's still just an idea, you do have that full flexibility, right? Like it was as I defined it now, it very quickly changed after that. Like the minute I had first client, first employee, first, We'll get to that in a second.
Yeah, we'll get there. Yeah. Yeah. So that was it for me. Like when I go back and it was like when I considered the, the options, right. And I do, I remember some of these like really, really super clearly. All right. There was a scholarship to, to leads for an MBA was one of the decision. It was one of the branches on my decision tree at the time.
Or I could go to Taiwan and help these three entrepreneurial companies try to market onto us shelves and get acquired by aces. Guess which one I did, right? I did not do the leads MBA, right? Because it was something nobody had done before. It was, it was more entrepreneurial. I was going to go and get to lead this team of people and try to build out this, this marketing effort and, and launch these companies and then try to [00:13:00] Asus, which we did with two of them.
It was super cool. Right. That was it. Right. So there was these really specific situations where I was balancing kind of like, there's, obvious commercial value and this other thing I could go do, right? Like having an MBA from, you know, a well, well known university in the UK would have been a good thing.
Good networking, expand my, my network internationally. And yet, right. And here's the thing. This is where this kind of gets crazy. This is why I'm spending as much time as I am. That was a very clearly defined contract. That was a contract I understood. I signed the paper. I give up two years of my life.
They give me a bunch of money and I get a network. I get some, some credentials behind my name. I can go ask for a higher salary, all that stuff. Yeah. Pretty well defined, right? A lot of people do this every year, right? So there's no question about what comes out of an MBA in most cases, right? Within, within some limits.
And instead, I chose the path of absolute full uncertainty because of the promise of a few of these things that are baked into the contract, like you described, right? Like autonomy, self, self driven, uh, [00:14:00] you know, being able to make this part of my identity and build what I wanted to build in the way that I wanted to build it.
And yet, right? Again, that, that contract is so short lived that it's hysterical that we even weigh them Any kind of commensurate value, let alone, that's the contract that won out in my case. Like, why do we do this to ourselves? You know,
Speaker 2: something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new.
Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you. Which means the answer already exists, you may just not know it. But that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups.
startups. com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it. So we set out for these goals and, and we expected a reward. I didn't expect the reward. Okay. Let's pause there. Let's talk about the other side of it. Where all of a sudden [00:15:00] a few things happen where all of a sudden the startup said no, no, hold on a sec You need to work for us.
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about how that happened, right? How it happened to all of us Yeah, and in more more specifically we let it happen. Not we let it happen. We wanted it to happen We did it for the right reasons. Okay, but those reasons Changed the dynamic And in some cases, directly, directly impacted our ability to be the ones who had the startup working for us.
So, let's go with the most obvious ones. We took on an investor. The moment we took on an investor, we hired a new boss. We just said, I now work for that person. Yeah, I will make you more money with your money. Now, that wasn't what we were thinking. No one says, hey, let me go find a new boss. But that's exactly what we did.
And anyone that doesn't think that is out of their mind. The only people that don't think that haven't had an investor yet, right? One who's had a big enough [00:16:00] investor and they'll tell you, that's your new boss. And so the moment we did that, we said, look, I now have to satisfy this other person. And again, if you haven't taken on investors before, you just don't understand the liability yet.
However, it's not just them. The moment you hired somebody, you created your first liability. You had to make payroll. You had to make them happy. You had to cater to their needs. And all of a sudden, you had to do this new thing. You had to worry about their welfare. Now that's part of your job as an employer.
Right. Just like if you have a kid, right, you have to worry about their welfare, but hold on at the expense of yours, you didn't think about that some
Speaker: zero sum to that game at some point, right? Like there isn't a magic bucket of money that it comes out of, right? Right. So have you ever paid somebody
Speaker 2: at the expense of your own pay?
Yes. Over and over and over again. Yes. Yeah. That moment where you're like, wait, [00:17:00] what just happened?
Speaker: Yeah. What just happened? Particularly, man. Oh God. I remember it. I remember it so crystal clear because we had won a new contract. The amount coming in from the contract looked like it would be enough to make up for a couple months of back pay for me, right?
That I had foregone to, to be able to augment the team in order to win this new, bigger contract and then cost started to overrun and we needed to bring on another person and another person and another person. And next thing, you know, that back salary that I caught up, I gave it to myself. And then I had to give it back.
Somehow that was even more painful. It was like, in order to make the next payroll, I had to, Hey, some of the back salary that I had recompensated myself for, I had to put back into the company to make, to make the following payroll. And it was just like, not only did I wait for that money, I waited for it.
Then I got it. Then I had to give it to somebody else. Look, it all worked out. Damn. Was that not part of the, what I thought I had signed up [00:18:00] for, right? That was, that was not, it's, it's, it's so crazy is that so many times it's like, again, we make these deals, we make the contract with the, but this will change over time and with the assumption that once it changes for the better, it will never change in the other direction.
That was one of those moments in time where I was like, okay, we, we surpassed the point where I couldn't pay myself the salary anymore, and then I paid myself the salary, and then I realized. Nope. We didn't actually beat that boss yet. We still, the Piper still
Speaker 2: wants his due. It's a couple of things. It's that moment when, when you pay someone else.
At your expense, meaning at the expense of you getting paid. And you realize, wait a minute, that person doesn't work for me. I work for them. That's how that works, right? Like, at which point they get paid at your expense. At the expense of you losing. Yeah. They don't work for you, you work for them, right?
Like the first time I experienced that concept was at such a low [00:19:00] dollar figure. Ones of thousands of dollars. Yes, same. But it might as well have been a billion dollars because it was all the money in the world. It was the balance of my checking account at that time. Right. And for me, it happened at a point where I had to make payroll by taking out a first USA credit card.
Right. I mean, first, I didn't know if first USA is a bank, even exists anymore to like, to give you an idea. Do you still have the t shirt they gave you for signing up for the car on campus? Right. Um, so fit. But think about this. Like I had to take out a credit card for money. I obviously didn't have and like transfer money to like, get it into a cash format that I could give to somebody.
And so my only thought at the time was that I owed this person ones of thousands of dollars, which might've a little bit in ones of hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. It doesn't matter that when you don't have it, you don't have it.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: It don't have it. Right. And it was a lot of money relative to how much money I had.
And, and so I could pay that person. Only thought at the time was. I have to pay this person. It didn't even occur to me that I couldn't pay this person. This isn't a matter of [00:20:00] dishonesty. I'm just saying like in terms of payment, it didn't occur to me that if you owed somebody money, that it couldn't be paid just yet.
You just don't pay like, Oh, well, I can do that. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I will be long and you shouldn't do it off. It's not that if it occurred to me, I wouldn't have paid it. It's just that it didn't occur to me. You couldn't. So, so I paid the person the money and now I had like a few thousand dollars of a balance on this credit card.
Now, a couple of things to note at this moment, cause this is all relative. Okay. At that moment, I'm looking at like this is back in like days like 28 percent APR or whatever it was. I'm thinking it'll probably take me like three to four years to pay this off. Snapshot that for a second. That person got a few thousand dollars that they probably spent by the end of the month.
It's going to take me years to repay that with interest thousands of dollars more, right? Again, I want to stick with this, okay? If ever. Now on top of that, right? That's not money I made. That's money I lost, right? So, so again, I'm not paying this out of profit. I'm paying this [00:21:00] out of loss, right?
Speaker: On
Speaker 2: top of that, I also didn't make money.
Right. So not only did I lose money, then I have to pay interest on that. I lost money
Speaker: and I'm currently not replacing at, at, at any kind of rate. Right. Yeah. Okay. God. So, okay. Let's see what
Speaker 2: that now immediately. Someone's going to look at that situation and say, well, you got into business. So you should know that, right?
Zero sympathy, not looking for sympathy. All I'm trying to say is when the founder gets F'ed, everyone is like, ah, well, he should have known the founder, right? F you flip that around, flip that around. The founder makes 3, 000, right? And they're like, yeah, well, you owe people money, right? You know, you made that on the back of your employees.
What the hell? Yeah. Yeah. Come on, man. Like, how does that work?
Speaker: Right. That is at the crux of this entire thing, isn't it? I mean, which is that we're in these non negotiable positions in so many cases where it's like, well, [00:22:00] we're the only room for negotiation. Let's put it that way. Like we're the flexibility of the situation.
We're the ones who are willing to sacrifice where other people won't. And the idea is because it's for the upside, because it's for the flexibility, because it's the contract, we've got all that stuff. And like, yeah, eventually we will, we will benefit from it hopefully. But again, at the time we make the deal, that's, that's not what we, that's not how we think about it or how it looks, but at some point, like.
There aren't employees who are just like, well, yeah, you know what? I'll just, you've done this for a couple of years without a salary. I'll do it this
Speaker 2: year. My turn. Right. I I've never had somebody go, Hey, well, I heard you lost a whole bunch of money. I'm going to wire you something to make, make you whole.
Yeah. Yeah. I've never heard a founder ever, ever, ever be like, Oh my God. And the coolest thing, you know, it was really down to our luck. You know, after the company folded, a lot of our employees chipped in and made sure we made our mortgage payment. Yeah. No one. Ever. Yeah. Look, again, this isn't like a, a woe is founder thing.
What I'm trying to point out [00:23:00] is this is a very one directional contract, right? This is a very, if what we're saying is, Hey, no, one's going to give back to the founder. Then what I'm also saying is the founder's also got to say, Hey, if this thing's, if, if you're only looking at it one way, saying that the startup's not going to work for you, then you also got to say, well, if you're working for the startup, it's also not a fair transaction either.
It's got to be balanced in some way. And I'm also not saying it has to be one way or the other, which is why this was so hard to come to a conclusion on
Speaker: this. Why can't it just be both? Right. Why can't it just be equitable? Why can't it be, why can't the giving be circular? Why is it unidirectional?
Speaker 2: Here's why I still haven't come to the conclusion.
Here's where I've seen it work when a company is so frigging profitable that there's so much to go around. Which happens so rarely, right? It happens so rarely. So like it's like when you become a Google and you make so much money that yes, the founders are infinitely rich, but [00:24:00] they're so benevolent that they give everybody steak dinners for lunch, right?
And like and make everybody millionaires and there's so much money that everyone's just so fat and happy that it just sort of doesn't matter. And even then they complain. Right. That's one out of millions of companies. It kind of never happens. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The folks I'm talking about are not them. It's almost like when you get to that point, you don't have a problem anymore.
Right. I'm talking about the folks that are on the other side of this equation where the startup isn't working for them, where they're on the ass end of this. And they're like, how do I get out of this? Where they're on the part of it where they're like, yeah, I'm just working for my investors. Like my team makes.
3X what I do, right? Like, what happened here? Like, I'm so upside down in this thing. Like, why is it, like, this is, this is so typical of like a series A, series B funded startup. Where the founder's like, I haven't had a pay raise in five years. I'm the lowest, I'm the lowest paid member of my team, right? Yeah, like, like, what the hell happened?
It happens a lot. And, and they're kind of like, somehow, somebody ripped [00:25:00] up my contract of like, this thing was supposed to work for me. And like, am I supposed to feel good about this? Like, is this like, Oh, you did it to yourself. So just. Eat it, right? Like, cause no one else has eaten it, right? Everyone else either quit or like, you know, whatever.
And I think this is just an interesting proposition where we resign ourselves to the fact that this thing that we created, this contract that we created, we lit on fire. Seems bizarre to me.
Speaker: You know, it's funny to me that we, we tend to treat it very, very differently. If it's a corporate environment, you know, the larger company, you know, that we all started small, but if we're talking about a big corporation versus a startup company, and I think part of that is the perceived direct benefit of the founder, right?
Is it's easier to villainize that, that one person versus that faceless CEO you've never heard of or whatever. Where does it come from? Because part of what we're talking about is just the perception and the way that founders are treated, right? Going back to your, your, your, the politicized version of this, where it's like, [00:26:00] well, you know, a founder should take all the risks.
And we, you know, we, we, we blame them for failure, but we also don't want to celebrate them for success. So what the fuck, right? What the fuck, right? Where does that come from? Like who are we actually trying to say? So I guess part of this is like, who are we trying to satisfy with? Who does this work for?
If you and I were to answer this question today, who are we actually trying to answer this for? We're trying to provide a, a, an appropriate answer that the public can tolerate. Are we trying to provide an answer for, for the, the, the people who work for a startup founder who, you know, you may be disappointed that this is working for them or not, or is this for the founder?
Like I typically, we're talking to the founders, but I'm actually trying to figure out, like, who's actually asking this damn question, right? Like founders right now,
Speaker 2: unfortunately,
Speaker: a lot of founders, but, but I guess my, my point here being. We're asking the question, but like, who did, who did the founders care about satisfying with the answer?
Cause if we were to just say, all right, logic would dictate logic and maybe a little greed would dictate if we just said, well, let's just always [00:27:00] make it work for the founder. Clearly we're not doing that. And so why, who is it that we're worried about satisfying with this answer?
Speaker 2: Well, let me be super, super specific because I'm freakishly biased.
I only care about founders. Yeah.
Speaker: Just
Speaker 2: be clear. So that's kind of
Speaker: my point. So then the answer is easy. Make the startup work for you. Do whatever you have to to make it work for you. If we're that biased towards founders, and we are, then that's the answer. But it
Speaker 2: isn't the answer. It doesn't work. And I say that not without empathy for everyone else.
I say this with the heavy bias toward the founder journey. Because when we talk to, you know, countless founders. What we find is that the founders get split apart by so many entities in their lives, right? So many people in their lives, they're trying to satisfy so many people. And it's not that they're so selfless and they never think about themselves.
That's not it. It's that they get torn apart trying to satisfy so many different things in their lives that it's very hard for them to kind of recenter and say, how did I [00:28:00] get here? You know, we talked in our last episode is where's the why? Why did I do this to begin with? Right. That's a lot of what this is, is like, wait, what are we even doing here?
Like, this isn't the product I wanted to build. This wasn't the mission that I started with. Right. When I say all I care about is founders, what I'm saying is, My job, our job, right? You know, with Ryan, what you and I do and what we do at startups. com is to grab founders by the shoulders and pull them back and say, well, let's, let's take a step back.
Like, how did we get here? Let's restart, right? I
Speaker: think, I think one of the places where I, I struggle when I'm, when I'm working with other founders is when I, I see them in that position where not only are they now in that spot where they are clearly like objectively down to the, down to the finances, that all of it.
Clearly working for the company, right? Not the other way around, right? Where they're working for the benefit of the startup, not the startup working for the benefit of the founder. And it's unclear whether there's even a pathway for correction. And I know you, you, you see this too, where now all of a sudden we're in a scenario where it's like, Is there even a [00:29:00] course correction to be had here?
Can this thing ever work for the founder? Right. It's just because you and I both know people who have spent 10 years more than they needed to on a startup company that was never going to end up benefiting them. Correct. They get caught up in all that emotion around like the employees, right? I, these people's livelihood depend on me, right?
The investors, this person's, you know, financial outcome depends on me. The, the benefits that they achieve from me depend on me. And at some point, there just, there isn't any room left for the founder and in that equation anywhere. And that's a really tough one to see because at some point we have to go like, if there truly isn't, and we've done an entire another podcast on this, I won't, I won't go too far down this trail, but what it costs everybody else versus what it costs the founders, let's just say like.
Startup shuts down tomorrow. Everybody lost their job together. Founder included, right? They lost their job, but what did the employees not lose? They didn't lose their identity in most cases. They probably didn't lose their credit [00:30:00] score, right? They probably didn't lose, right? All that other separate, all these other things, the relationships that it costs along the way, all the other things that we talk about, all those other intangibles and tangibles that end up being the, the costs of, of a startup company.
And so I think that's where it's like, when we go back and we do this calculus around, like, well, what do I owe everybody else? Like I, I'm here to, to serve everyone else because, because that's the way this has to be, you know, that's the, it's the, it's the deal I made, except that it wasn't the contract I signed originally.
But it's the one that was presented to me shortly thereafter, right? And it's just a big question of, you know, going back to the, like the, why are we here? Right. And unfortunately It's one of those things where like cumulatively a lot of times for founders There's still enough Why like what why because I care about all these people because I care about my investors because I care about that And the one the why that can go away is the why they were doing And I think that we have to be so careful.
I don't want to turn this back to last week's episode, but we have to be careful not to lose sight of that or the answer to this question actually stops mattering altogether.
Speaker 2: Right. I agree. Look, I think for the most part, for most founders, [00:31:00] We all start off with the same job of who's working for who. We all start off with this startup is going to work for me.
We might have some slightly more altruistic goals of how we want this startup to work for other people, but generally speaking, we start off with the startups going to work for me. But by definition, when we add one person, that's not us. We all of a sudden create a whole legion of new bosses. And the problem is, over time, we give all kinds of power to those new bosses.
And day by day, give that power away to those bosses over time. And in that time, we begin ripping up the very contract that we created to build this company. And in due time, with enough time, with enough power given up, We become not just employees to our companies, but slaves to the very company that we built.
Our job as founders is not to work for our startups. Our job as founders is to build a startup that works for us to build something where people can work with us, [00:32:00] but to make sure we're the ones running the thing from the time we start it to the time we exit. Overthinking your
Speaker: startup because you're going it alone?
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