Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan from startups dot com joined as always by my friend, the founder and ceo of startups dot com Wil schroder
Wil Schroter: will,
Ryan Rutan: this is a game of high highs and low lows and lots of stuff in between. We often talk to founders who find themselves at these crossroads where there are really big decisions to be
Wil Schroter: made
Ryan Rutan: and big swings to be taken. And yet we constantly will see founders presented with an opportunity and yet they freeze and they're afraid to take the big swings. They're afraid to make those big leaps, even though that's what crosses the chasm to the promised land or at least that's the hope. What drives this man? What's holding us back? Why are we afraid to take these big swings
Wil Schroter: if you think about it? We don't have a lot of scenarios just in our lives where we have to take big bold swings beyond our station. Right? So for example, like in school we are specifically set up in a way where we only level up in a minor incremental way, right? Each year were one grade ahead. Isn't that funny though? Like how is it that every student is exactly one grade ahead by year, Right? Wouldn't it stand to reason that like some of the students should be in fourth grade for like six years.
Ryan Rutan: I remember a couple,
Wil Schroter: but we're conditioned this way and three good reasons in general, but we're conditioned that we're only allowed to take incremental steps and by way of our business, it should only grow at this incremental pace, In other words, we're going to build more product, we're going to hire more people and then we're gonna grow 5, 10%. When it comes to the types of businesses, particularly sales businesses that have big exponential swings. Everything is off the table at this point. So it looks something like this, any consulting business, let's use that to start with, because this is the most common occurrence, Ryan, if it's you and I it's just our consulting business and we want to grow and all we ever say is, well, we can only sell the work that we can deliver with two people, right? Like we can't sell beyond our capacity because we don't have more than two people. Well, we're gonna be two people for the rest of our lives probably less because we'll go out of business eventually unless we take those swings
Ryan Rutan: when
Wil Schroter: We get to 200 people or 2000 people or whatever our growth goals are, is to sell beyond their capacity. And I think that's what we'll talk about today, people's lack of ability and confidence to be able to sell beyond their capacity and really what to do about it. All right. So before we get into this next topic, I just want to let you know what we talk about here is like 1% of the conversation, you know, really, this conversation is going on all day long online at groups dot startups dot com. Well Ryan and I pretty much talk endlessly with founders about every one of these topics. So if by the end of this discussion, you like the topic and you want to dig into it a little bit more with Ryan and I just had two groups start startups dot com and we'll pick it up from there.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, sure. Yeah. I always, I always, you know, describe this as sales has to go and lie just a little bit about current capabilities and the delivery has to do everything they can to make sure that it's true, right to to make it true, right? And then we don't really have a better option. As you said, if we just sell what we're currently capable of, well, imagine what that looks like as a startup, right? Like that would mean that you would have literally stopped at the cocktail napkin idea phase where you're just like, well, I guess I can sell this thing that I wrote down a p I don't have anything else, right? You're constantly, you're constantly pushing the envelope. You're constantly trying to do something that doesn't yet exist. Right? So as you said, let's, let's talk about how we get over some of those things.
Wil Schroter: Okay. I think at the most basic level we were all concerned about is am I lying? And I'm kind of making that kind of caustic. But that's really what I'm talking about. Am I lying Ryan if you and I go to a client and it's a 10 person job and there's two of us and we bid on the project. Are we lying? Because we don't have those extra eight people. Let's just hold that there for a second. If we're launching a new product and it's in beta, it doesn't really do everything exactly the way we want it to do, but we want to get it out there and tell people literally every pro tech product that's ever existed. Right? Are we lying? And the answer is it depends on how it goes,
Ryan Rutan: right hindsight will either make us a hero or a liar.
Wil Schroter: That's exactly it. And the difference isn't so much whether we're lying, it's whether or not we have the intent to back it up, right? And so for for our consulting business, if we pitch that business, if we win that business and once we win the business we staff up for it like every consulting company does, then we're good. Then we weren't lying right now lying would be willfully saying there's no way we're going to deliver this and we're gonna tell people we're gonna do it anyway,
Ryan Rutan: right? We we walk out of the meeting, we high five ourselves and we're like, OK, let's abscond to the british Virgin Islands with the money because there's no way we're gonna be able to do this yet, that that's not okay. Right? But I think we're constantly, again, we have to push that envelope of exactly what's true now, and what can be true in the near term, you know, to go back to the scenario that you gave,
Wil Schroter: there's no version
Ryan Rutan: of us hiring those eight people without winning that project. Right. And there's no version of us winning that project without telling somebody that we can do that and that we have those people that we will have those
Wil Schroter: people.
Ryan Rutan: So, these are the things that we have to do to make the progress into your point. It's mostly done incrementally now, it can feel like a big swing. Certainly going from a two person consultancy to a 10 person consultancy is a pretty big swing. But it's also probably manageable. Obviously in that scenario, in that moment, in that situation, you're going to be evaluating that, right? And it's like, well, you know, we need to find eight unicorns, okay, That's gonna be tough, right? Maybe maybe we don't pitch that, but if it feels achievable, and it, and it is the next step in the iteration in your business. This is what we have to do. It's lying until we make it true. Right?
Wil Schroter: Right. And, you know, we talked about this in another episode, right? Am I lying on my, my fraud et cetera? I think it's really hard for folks to understand this concept, particularly around taking big swings because all the meaningful swings, the things that fundamentally changed the trajectory of our business. and by the way that our lives are based on putting ourselves in positions were not supposed to be punching above our weight class. I'll give an example. Early in my career we had a very small agency, Blue Diesel And we merged with a traditional agency and we had maybe 40 people and we had this bizarre opportunity to pitch a pharmaceutical company called Eli lilly. They're coming out with a new product called PROzac and we had the opportunity to uh, to pitch for that business.
Ryan Rutan: Heard of all of those things,
Wil Schroter: This scrappy 40 person agency that had no business being in that pitch. We took the entire company. We took the receptionist, everybody into the pitch just so we could look big, right? Because these are like massive pitches and we pitched our asses off. Now we knew there wasn't a chance in hell we would win that business because the folks that we were going up to, I think gray was the incumbent at the time were massive agencies. And again, we didn't even belong in the room, but we wanted to show that we could take that swing. We wanted some of the swagger that comes with taking that swing. Funny side note, we end up winning that business wound up being a quarter billion dollars a year worth of business to a 40 person agency. So you stop there and you say, okay, hold on a second, you went in front of a major Fortune 500 company as your entire company. It wasn't even just you in the room instead with full honesty that we can service to your business Knowing that you were 250 people shy of doing that work knowing that you were nowhere near capable at present, like not even remotely right lily. Probably had marketing teams internally that they forgot about that were bigger than our actual agency. Sure.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I'm sure there
Wil Schroter: are orders. Imagine were there? How could you possibly make that statement? You know, how could you possibly get in front of them and say that? And the answer is because we believed we could fulfill it because we believe we could find those people because we believed we were good enough to do the work and people look at that and say, well how could you possibly, how could I possibly know that? Right? How how could you as a founder, how can I take those big swings and not know. The answer is you don't, none of us actually knows that it's going to go the way we want it to. It's like anything else in life. Like having kids, I don't know how it's gonna go. I'm just gonna try to be a great parent and try to make it work
Ryan Rutan: flip that on its head. I'm sure Gray was relatively sure they were going to get the business
Wil Schroter: right.
Ryan Rutan: So even when you are sure you're not sure right? And you know, to circle back to that question, right, Am I lying? Probably at least a little
Wil Schroter: bit and
Ryan Rutan: that's okay. Right. You could probably, I'm picturing some mathematical model in my head right now that says the company's growth rate is probably fairly well tied to the percentage of which they're lying about their current capabilities, right? Had you not gone into that pitch, You'd still be 40 person agency. Right. If you were just selling 40 person agency work over and over and over and over and over again, you stay there. Maybe maybe, you know, a little incremental growth here there. But in order to make these big leaps that sometimes we need to a startup companies. Again, we've talked about this in the past. If you're on a VC funded route, you don't have the luxury of slow stable, organic, incremental growth, You have to take big swings and this is often why we go for the capital in the first place. Right to fund the big swing now, are you sure that's gonna work?
Wil Schroter: Well, you
Ryan Rutan: might have been, but you were probably wrong. Right. Look at the number of VC bets that actually back out that will tell you how many people were lying and proved that they were lying through their actions, but again, not intentionally just through the hindsight of, we took our shot, we shot our shot, we missed. It didn't work and now here we are, right? But this is what it looks like, what we have to do, we don't have a choice.
Wil Schroter: I'd like to reframe then the am I lying and put it in the context that I think is more realistic to what's happening is I'm going to make a commitment. The question isn't whether I'm making the commitment. The question is whether I'm going to back it up. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: that's exactly my
Wil Schroter: Commitment is going to be that our agency is gonna is gonna add 250 people and we're going to be a badass partner. By the way, it's like 30 years later and lily is still a client. So I mean it kind of worked out and when I look at that and say, okay, we're gonna make a commitment, will we be able to back it up? And obviously there's a million things that can go wrong. That's part of you know how this all works. But the next part I think we should probably talk about is how wrong do they actually go? Because I think we think in terms of if I make this commitment and I don't stand behind it or I can't fulfill that it's just full apocalypse totally binary. If this doesn't work, everything goes wrong and the entire place goes on
Ryan Rutan: forever. If I lose this title fight, I never fight again, right? It's just not true, right? We see this in so many other other avenues in life and so many other places and yet when we're the founder, we imagine that if I take this swing and I miss that, its total failure, right? And it's just not the case.
Wil Schroter: You've got to model it out too because I think when people think if I make a commitment and I don't back it up again, it's all or nothing, actually never how it works. I'll give you an example, we'll go back to this, this agency model, right? We didn't expect in a million years to win this business to say we were unprepared for, it would be a wild understatement, but
Ryan Rutan: you were knowingly unprepared
Wil Schroter: for it, right? You
Ryan Rutan: understood that there were things that would have to happen on the other side.
Wil Schroter: We got back on the bus and went home and we're just like, okay, well that was fun. You know,
Ryan Rutan: did you actually take a bus?
Wil Schroter: Yeah, we took it to Indianapolis, It was a three hours. The whole company was on the bus at the time, like, it was like a party bus,
Ryan Rutan: okay. At least it was a party bus. I was I was pictured you guys getting on like the rapid transit and you know, and you
Wil Schroter: know, actually, now that I think I've never thought about this until I just said it, I was studying for what was essentially going to be the last test I ever took in college? Little did I know because I was still going to go to college at the time, I think I was 21 or maybe 22 I remember studying on the bus because I was being made fun of the entire time, right? And I was studying on the bus and remember like we come back and I'm just like, this is how, how unsure I was, I was still in college, like I was still planning on taking my midterms or whatever.
Ryan Rutan: Well in case the pitch didn't go well right, in case you to your point about total failure, if we swing and miss, I better pass this exam so I can go get a job that's hysterical,
Wil Schroter: become a resident advisor or something like that and pay some bills. But whatever my point is so were totally unprepared, here's what ends up happening. We end up getting awarded the business which we never saw coming and we looked around and said, oh ship, How do we turn this small agency into what was essentially become a huge agency? And the answer is let's just one not sleep, but to let's just pick it off every week. And, and for the first year, maybe the 1st 18 months we hired a new person every single day, which is actually kind of a fun and interesting ride, 18
Ryan Rutan: months,
Wil Schroter: right? But the reality though is we didn't have to succeed the next day, we had a long time to figure it out and did stuff go wrong. Oh man, like crazy. Well you figure it out as you go. And so I think when we consider, you know, as founders, hey, if I take this twin, an example, if I take on capitol or if I take on a partner or if we launch the student product and it fails, I'm just completely screwed. It's like not really, something will go wrong. It's kind of the way it goes, not a big deal and you'll figure it out. And if it does fail, It fails by like 20 in our case with lily, it's so long ago, but like we probably failed on some commitments were probably behind on some deliverables, but it wasn't apocalyptic.
Ryan Rutan: It's an abject failure, right? It's just how business works.
Wil Schroter: Here's the way I would catch it. We take big swings and we manage failure, we take a big swing and we manage failure, right? And, and we keep chipping away at, you know what failure looks like. But I don't think we think about it in terms of, we take big swings and we always win. I don't know, a single founder of product that's ever done that, right? I don't care if you're two people in a room building a product, right? Or freaking Apple. Everyone misses, right? And we all deal with the aftermath
Ryan Rutan: big swings and then you make big comebacks, right? And we saw that in Apple's case specifically, right? They had become not entirely relevant to the market, but they were not the tip of everybody's tongue. Uh, stock price certainly wasn't doing what it's doing now. And then jobs came back in. They made some big changes, made some big swings and landed some amazing products that have put them where they are now, right? But it took big swings now. I don't know what they were thinking at the time, whether they thought this is, you know, we're in the signs of the death rattle now, we have to do something if they were thinking it was dire straits, big swing or we're not, but certainly
Wil Schroter: they had
Ryan Rutan: the confidence to take the swing and I'm sure they were ready to manage failure if it happened. They've been doing that for a number of years at that point, you
Wil Schroter: could argue.
Ryan Rutan: So they they were no strangers to that type of failure. Right? Again, not abject and complete total failure, but managing through a period where not everything was going right and coming out with a big swing and then completely changing the trajectory of the business for at least the last 15, 20 years now.
Wil Schroter: You know, by the way, I just want to mention if what we're talking about today sounds like the kind of discussion you wish you were having more often you actually can, you know, we're online all day everyday working through exactly these types of topics with founders, just like you. So any question you would have, or maybe some problem, you just want to work through. We're here and we love this stuff and we're easy to find, you know, head over to groups dot startups dot com and let's just start talking, let's just talk about just so we have some reference points for folks that are listening. Some places where people tend to not take the swing or get maybe a little bit gun shy and, and let's take the sales part off it, just for a second. Cause I think there's some non obvious places your landing page, the claims you make on your landing page, the delivery, you say you're going to make under your landing page, the copy that you write the confidence etcetera Ryan. You see this all the time, right? Where people, they're so nervous about what the product isn't yet because it's not the version they think it is. They forget their customers don't give a sh it, right? The customers want what they want, they landed there because they want this at all. Like we've said this before. Like we're using the 10/1000 version of google right now. Obviously be one wasn't that good, but he had it worked out pretty well for google, right? It changes, you know what I mean? Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: it's, it's all an iterative process. And again,
Wil Schroter: like without taking
Ryan Rutan: any kind of swings without experiencing success or failure. What are you using to, to drive the ship at that point, right? You have to have those scenarios created both success and failure to figure out what to do next, right? Otherwise
Wil Schroter: at
Ryan Rutan: best you're going to maintain whatever you have right
Wil Schroter: now, which for
Ryan Rutan: most early stage startups there, like that would be the last thing I want, right? I don't want to maintain thing in its current state because its current state kind of sucks. Right? So you have to take some level swings, but I think that's a great point. Well, you know, there are lots of swings and we're constantly doing this right. We're constantly thinking about, you know, how we position ourselves, what we're saying and taking liberties here and there. And that's, that's all part of the same thing, right? We have to be able to project a little bit beyond where we are. We have to be able to try a little more than we're doing right now. Otherwise nothing happens.
Wil Schroter: Sorry. It's gonna give you some more examples hiring right all the time, especially in the early days, I don't want to hire this person because if it doesn't work out, they might have to leave and obviously we don't want to see that happen. We end up going gun shy and making higher sometimes important and game changing hires because we're not willing to deal with the aftermath and the reality is the aftermath is never that bad. It's not like we hire somebody and everything looks perfectly fine in there in shangri LA And then all of a sudden one day we wake up and we have to fire them. There's a lot of things happening between here and there would be like, hey, I don't want to get married because I might just instantly get divorced and it doesn't quite work that way.
Ryan Rutan: You've got to invest in the relationship, you've got time. The, the other thing, I'll give you another version of that same scenario and it's around hiring, it's where we get gun shy around the price of the resource we really need and we try to find somebody who's less expensive which look in certain size and stage of business. You can do that, you can upscale somebody, you've got time for them to come along. That rarely works in startup land, you need somebody who knows what the hell they're doing because so much else is in flux, right? There's so much that's undetermined, undefined in the startup. But it's early stages when you do need to make that higher, you want somebody that knows what they're doing. And I've talked about this before in the context of marketing where you get false negatives by not following through on the budget correctly. Not sticking to an initiative, same thing happens with hires. But yeah, we can, we can go there with marketing as well, but stick to the hiring for a second. You can do the exact same thing there, right? You bring somebody on who's to junior of a resource to actually carry that forward to that next level and cross this gap from where we are now to where we want to be right, Make that little lie true. And then you just prove yourself out to be the liar, right? Again? We're not really talking about lies here.
Wil Schroter: But when we
Ryan Rutan: do have these moments in time where we're ready to take a swing and we don't swing quite hard enough, right? So when the time for the big swing comes, we have to remember, we've got to match the momentum of the swing to the to the size of the opportunity as well. And so when we don't do that, whether that's hiring marketing 100 other places That can go really wrong really fast or not, right? It could take years to figure that out. And it's still the same thing, you just end up floundering and not moving forward and again goes, you say that's a 40 person agency, right? That could have been the person doing $250 million Eli Lilly, but we didn't swing hard enough.
Wil Schroter: You know, here's what I would say, it's about taking big swings and managing failure, right? If you really think about it in those terms versus I won't take big swings because it might fail. If we were to say, look, bucket, I'll take any swing, right? I'm gonna swing on on everything. I'm not trying to be cavalier here, but just like taking it all the way I'm gonna swing on everything. And by definition, I'm going to make a lot of Mrs and it's gonna be stressful. It's going to be costly. But I'm not going to stop swinging if some of those swings, you know, kind of overexposed me a little bit. I got to dial back a little bit, you know, in resource again, so be it. But I'm not going to stop taking the swings. And here's why that's so important because the cost of not swinging the cost of standing in place is so high. Right? And now let's let's talk about complacency on the one hand and the other side we'll just talk about which is the same outcome fear right? Where I know I should be doing more. I know I should be taking leaps. But again, I'm afraid to. And what ends up happening is I end up just in the stasis mode, right? Kind of like the elephant with the chain on their leg. And you know, I'm just standing there going I could break free, but I've chosen not to. And that's the death knell for for all kinds of startup. One
Ryan Rutan: 100%. So here's here's an interesting scenario. Talked to a founder about a week ago and similar position where they're they're they currently have a burn rate, right? But they've got about a year of runway with the current burn rate. But they've been on the same burn rate for almost three years, right? They raised some money up front? They've been on the same burn rate for almost three years. Very little upward motion in the business. There's an opportunity now to do something to scale some customer acquisition and the founder is is sort of complacent on the one hand, but I think he's being held in complacency by a little bit of fear. And the fear was if we make this bet, It's going to reduce the run rate to somewhere between six and 9 months. And so the conversation that we had nothing definitive yet. But the conversation that we had was okay. But that at least gives you the opportunity to eclipse that burn rate and extend your runway. Otherwise, right now, you've got two years of history that say, Nothing is changing the market is not changing. Your product's not changing your marketing is not changing. Nothing is creating growth. Right now. This complacency just means you'll survive for 12 months and then go out of business versus trying to take a swing. And so again, not simple. Right? And it's not, I'm not suggesting it like the obvious answer is cut your burn rate to six months and hope for the best. Right? It's not that simple. But if we look at all of the factors at play, we can sort of say doing nothing is just going to result in a slightly slower demise. This is where this becomes a huge problem, right? To your point, will we're trading some uncertainty in terms of will we hit with this swing for the absolute certainty that will fail over a longer period of time if we don't do anything right? So it's taking on a certain risk because we're afraid of the uncertainty of the other right? Which is a really, really tough spot to navigate, but it's super dangerous to do nothing about.
Wil Schroter: Remember for some reason I was at a lecture and I'm wondering if you were there with me, it was a long time ago and it was one of the co founders of Living Social, I mean it's just such,
Ryan Rutan: oh wow, yeah, that goes, yes, I was
Wil Schroter: Groupon, right? And uh he used the phrase, I'll never forget this called making strong moves and he said within the company, they were always focused on what are the strong moves that we're going to make and and at the time it served them very well, I can't remember what happened to LivingSocial, so maybe maybe that wasn't
Ryan Rutan: made some strong moves.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, but at the time they were doing great. And so I think from a startup standpoint, from a founder standpoint, we've got to zoom out a little bit and say, okay, it's not okay if I make no big swings can't do nothing, yep, So I'm going to pick a big swing and I don't have to make 10 at once, I don't have to get crazy with it. I don't have to put myself out of business, so to speak. But I do need to be very, very, very mindful that if I don't have some swings on deck, if I don't have at least one thing that me or my company is swinging toward, yep, my guarantee is I'm going nowhere.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, that's exactly what you're you're guaranteeing at best, I would say stasis right? At worst, it starts to decay, right? If nothing is moving in the direction that you wanted to in your business and you don't have any strong moves on the table is your point, There's nothing on deck that's going to take a big swing. What are you actually doing? All right? You're just treading water at that point and that has a finite lifespan, right? Just like treading water, you can do that for a period of time. But as you and I know very well, you will burn out. You will run out of physical emotional financial capital and and things will start to change for the worst, right, stasis is not a positive situation for most startups, right? Not at that early stage where things are not yet figured out the scale isn't happening. Growth not happening, profitability may not even be happening, holding still in those moments or just maintaining velocity. No, boy, no, you cannot do it.
Wil Schroter: The other side too is if you swing and hit right, it doesn't happen that often. And and here's what I want to be clear about most of the swings we take actually will miss. So this is why I'm saying you're taking swings, but we're optimizing our downside when it happens, you're managing through our failure. But what we keep saying is, but we're going to keep taking the swings by doing that when they eventually hit and they will eventually hit. It is such a game changer for our business. You know, we've talked about this on the podcast before, we talked about, you know, when we bought virtual, You know, we bought a company that 400 people overnight, basically huge swing in those swings go and and it was bigger than our own company and we took that huge swing and it was stressful as hell and a million things went wrong, but it kind of worked out
Ryan Rutan: at least a million and one went right, right,
Wil Schroter: Yeah, yeah, not because we had any confidence or visibility that I was going to work. No one could. Again, we don't have a crystal ball, but we knew that if we didn't take the swing when we were given the opportunity, that there would be a lot of cost to that again, the cost of losing momentum and so we did and it worked out and you end up being a huge accelerant for our company, but also I think gave us a lot of confidence, right? That we could do things like that no different than the story I shared with you before when we were at the agency and we won this huge account And it gave us so much confidence that we could go do more and that was like a $6 billion dollar company. Right? I mean that confidence, that's where it started. That was the genesis of what became something insanely, you know, big
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. And again, without taking the swing, that doesn't happen. Right. I think that's the other thing is that inasmuch as that confidence can compound and and propel you onto greater and greater heights and and to do more and more and give you that confidence to to continue to stretch, continue to reach, continue to accomplish fear compounds just as fast if not faster. Right? Once you get into that fear based decision making mode and you're afraid to take the swing because of the potential cost. At what point do you decide to change that? Right? Once you begin that particular momentum of either just holding still or being conservative and not taking the swings? At what point do you decide to change that? And I can tell you it's typically when it's too late and when you're in a desperation mode. Right? So this was the scenario that we talked
Wil Schroter: through with
Ryan Rutan: this, the founder that I referenced earlier was Okay, let's play it out. Let's let's go nine months from now and nothing has changed. How do you make that decision then, Will you put that money and the and the answer was an obvious, Well, yeah, of course we've gone that far and nothing else has changed then at that point we have to write and now you've got three months to pull up instead of 6 to 9, right? And that's assuming that nothing goes right? Because if it does start to go right, you buy yourself incrementally more runway. That's the other thing. I think
Wil Schroter: this is where that kind of
Ryan Rutan: the big swing big hit analogy breaks down a little bit because well no, I guess not. Let's like if we're playing baseball, let's play baseball base hits also happen right? We can take big swings. Maybe we just get a base hit and maybe it doesn't achieve what we set out to achieve and maybe it doesn't erase our burn rate, but maybe it reduces a little bit right. Those things matter to extends it another two months. So we have a few more months to figure it out. But again, doing nothing rarely an answer that works out well in startup land.
Wil Schroter: I think what it comes down to is we have to be willing to bet on ourselves. And it's hard to do because at the time when we're making the bet
Ryan Rutan: terrifying. We don't look like very worthy bets most of the time, right? It's not like like I don't really like my odds but you that's the bet you have to make.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, you're not the one founder that stressed about it, we all are right. It's not like Ryan and I are sitting here with supreme confidence. You know when we make these swings like fine. I don't
Ryan Rutan: know. The
Wil Schroter: only difference is we've been doing this for long enough to know that when we swing and we missed, we figure shoot
Ryan Rutan: out, Oh, I'm so comfortable with the sound of the bat slicing through the air, right? The sound of the with no longer scares me just tells me I need to reload and get ready to swing again, right? That's it. That's that's the only thing that's changed. I'm not even my my my batting percentage hasn't increased at all. Right, That's not how this works. You don't really get better at taking the swings. I don't think you just get more comfortable swinging. That's it. That's all the changes.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, exactly. And it's worth it. So as far as I'm concerned, the only thing a founder can do right now in order to take those swings is to just say, you know what, I'm probably going to miss And I'll figure it out because if we don't take the swings we're totally screwed. We're stuck in place and there's no version, we're ever going to accelerate the business, we're ever going to grow the business. If we don't have the confidence to take those big swings. one
Ryan Rutan: 100% man, you know, I think like in summary, right? As we think about taking these swings as we think about what this looks like, right? Are we lying? No, but in startup land, the truth is something that we stretch, right? We stretch it to the point where it can be the war drum that we march to as a startup company, right? Where we have the confidence to take these swings to your point, we then manage the failure, right? And when we fail, what do we do? We pick the damn drum back up. We beat it some more. We stretched the truth a little further. We continue until we get what we want, right? But we're not gonna get anywhere if we don't keep swinging.
Wil Schroter: Alright, so that was fun, but let's actually keep this conversation going. You've heard what we think about this, but you know, Ryan and I would really like to hear what you think and we're online, like all day long, pretty much talking about every startup topic you could think of from fundraising, the customer acquisition to just really had to get all of this crazy startup stuff out of your head. And there's tons of other founders just like you they're weighing in on these topics so you'll get a chance to just hang out and meet some really smart founders were also super, super easy to find. You head over to groups dot startups dot com and let Ryan and I hear what's on your mind, Let's get to know each other a little bit and let's just start having more of these conversations.