Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan from startups dot com. Joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of startups dot com. Well, it's never easy to run a startup, but certainly there are times when it's a bit harder. Uh We're currently in a macroeconomic environment that looks like we're headed towards recession in the US. It's, it certainly seems to be the beginnings of the recession. The wave hasn't really kind of crashed over yet. So everybody's still like, well, maybe we don't know. And yet we're seeing a lot of startup companies who are still treating this like, hey, let's focus on growth. Hey, let's go chase down rounds. Hey, everything's fine. Let's put our heads in the sand. It's warm here. How do you feel about all this man? Like, what, what, what should we be doing right
Wil Schroter: now? You know, this is happening at a macro level now. So it's happening to a lot of people all at once. But I'd argue and I, I think, I think you'd be on board with this, that this happens for most startups at some point in their journey anywhere where, you know, funding around doesn't go through things get tight. Uh, customer engagement doesn't land. You name it, right. This is the nature of building a startup. Yeah, I
Ryan Rutan: should have cap you out of that. This is, this doesn't require a US recession or a global recession to happen. Right. The microeconomics of your startup will force you into some of these situations at some point.
Wil Schroter: You bet. So, I think for people that are listening today, if you're not going through this, you will, there's kind of the, the love startup physics kind of guarantees you will at some point. And we're talking about living to fight another day. What happens in our startups when we get to a point where it's no longer about growth or optimism or all the things that started this thing, that's the polar opposite, it's survival.
Ryan Rutan: Let's not fade into nonexistence.
Wil Schroter: And what does that look like? You know, how should we be thinking about that? How should we feel about that? How do we lead a team in that environment, et cetera. Generally speaking, most people have never done it thankfully, but once you do, right. And you know this, there is so much hubris tied up and sometimes it's, it's intentional. Sometimes it's not so much hubris tied up in building a startup because you're trying to build for the future. You've got all this optimism, right? At some point, you forget that what you're building is still a dream. Like you have to go make it a reality. This stuff is not a reality yet. And when that, when that dream becomes nightmarish, right, we're gonna flip it a little bit and all of a sudden all of those people, uh that we told we gonna lead to the promised land are like, what the hell is happening because we're trying to figure out which ones we're gonna let go. That's a tough environment. I would say at a high level, I don't think most founders either have been through it or really understand it when it's
Ryan Rutan: happening. No. And I think that's actually a big part of it. So you touched on something really, really important there and we've, we've done an episode on this, which is that, you know, we're, we're making something from nothing. These things don't exist until we breathe life into them. And so very often we're talking a little bit into the future, right? The things that we're saying, you know, the the joke was, you know, we, we lie with the full intention of making it true, right? And we, we kind of have to, right? It doesn't exist yet. So it's going to do this or it can do this or we want it to do that. And so I think that we get into that mode as founders and then despite being faced with, you know, some pretty empirical evidence that maybe things aren't going as well as they could or should be, we continue to lead with optimism. Right. And, and we, we have to, to some degree, but optimism can turn into just being foolhardy really damn quick. Right. So we constantly have to check ourselves and make sure that like, am I stretching the truth or am I lying to myself? Because those are two different things, right. Is this something that is possibly going to happen? And then the probability of that happening is really important, right? If it's, if it's a funding round, that's required to make the next payroll pretty important that we understand the probability of whether that's gonna happen or not when we tell people to show up at work on Monday, right? Like super, super important, right? Whether our next product feature is going to lead to the exponential growth that we have the probability of that happening a little harder to calculate. Also a little less important to the survival of the startup, right? It might lead to mega growth and that'd be great. But if it doesn't hit, it doesn't mean that we're gonna crash and burn. So I think it's really important to keep these things in mind as you're, as you're going through the calculus of where your startup is at. Uh And whether you're being optimistic or just willfully blind to what's going on around you
Wil Schroter: when I sit across from a founder and we're at this juncture where I can see, they, they can't see it yet and it's not because I, I have some sort of E S P. It's just because I've been through it before. And so when I, when I can see that this startup is about to head down this path. Right. The market turned et cetera. And I can tell when they're running out a runway, you name it. Right. First thing I tell the founder is that, let me tell you what's actually just happened. You've lost half of your staff. Like, wait, what? You've lost half of your net worth. Wait, what? You are going to lose the next valuation. You're gonna lose most of your customers. You're gonna lose most of your faith from the external market as far as how the media sees you. All of that's already happened. You just don't see it yet. You, you don't, you don't know what's happening. And when I say that I sound like this Grim Reaper, like I've got some negative outlook. I'm like, man, I hope that's
Ryan Rutan: not so hard. It's already, I hope it's not the case, but you have to say it right? You have to make them aware
Wil Schroter: of this. Here's an example. This could be any startup. It's probably a bunch of the startups listening right now. You had what you thought was going to be more than enough cash to get to your next funding round, right? So you felt good. You, you had nine months of runway, which doesn't sound like a lot but funding environments frothy. And you've been raising pretty quickly. It doesn't seem like a big problem. You've got 80 people on staff, not all the people in the world, but 80 more people than you've ever had before. Right. And so you, you're looking at this going, ok. Well, it's, it's a fair amount of people but I can keep them fed. I've got another round coming at a bigger valuation, of course. And I stop and say no, here's what, here's what actually just happened with where the market is, where life is, where with your company is, et cetera. You're gonna like, oh half your staff, most of them, you probably just hired in the past year. You worked your ass off to get these people. You try to build relationships with them. You made huge promises and you're about to fire them or lay them off in this case. Right. Second. You're bragging about your insane valuations and all this money that you raised, et cetera, all of that's gone. You are gonna get cleared out, you know who's gonna be at the bottom of that uh clear out. You, you, you are gonna be, you're gonna bear more of the expense from a cap table standpoint than anyone. Third. And probably most importantly, you're never gonna have a moment where you feel less optimistic about whether your business is ever gonna make it than you're about to over the next 3 to 6 months when you drop that bomb on someone, their first answer is like, go fuck yourself. But the right, OK. Like, so where should my focus be? And you tell me, I think at that point you say survival is the strategy,
Ryan Rutan: survival becomes the strategy, right? Yeah. At that point, I, you know, talk of growth, talk of, talk of expansion. Anything else is you're, you're blinding yourself to the obvious at that point and you gotta be really careful about that. Placing your bets at that point needs to be all focused on what is gonna keep us above water at this point or what's going to at least minimize the burn rate that we're going to take on through this environment, right? How can we stretch that runway as far as we can if we can't make it infinite off to that infinity point? Uh which is what I love to see startups do where there just is no runway hard to achieve, especially if you've already taken on funding because it just sort of insists that you take on more funding. Let's make sure, right. That, that we are aiming for survival, right? Is it awesome to have lots of snacks in the uh in the staff kitchen if you still have an office? Yeah, it is. Is it more awesome to still have the staff that would eat those snacks? Probably? Right. So like, and it's funny man, but you know, you and I see this, it's like by the time founders come to the realization they need to start pumping the brakes and that survival is actually the goal. Now. It's so often too late, right? That they, they didn't have the canary in the coal mine. They didn't take the advice of the advisor or their friends or other founders. They weren't watching the macro signals and they were just really hopeful that things were gonna work out. And by the time they realized that they do need to take drastic measures, right, which would include cutting snacks up to cutting staff or entire lines of business, right? Really, really unsavory stuff. You're
Wil Schroter: already screwed like this has already happened. The only difference and we'll get to this as we get further into this into the show, the only difference is you haven't recognized it yet. So in this case, with your staff, as the leadership of the company, you have to stop right now and say, hey, are big optimistic growth plans scrapped done. We don't get to talk about him anymore because the market turned, we're not positioned for it. Stack ranked. Let's take a look at what we do know we know exactly what our expenses are, which means that's something we can control for. We know how much cash we have left in the bank, which means we know exactly like what we're optimizing for as far as uh timeline and burn rate. And we know how much revenue we have if we have any and if we don't, how quickly we need to get to a revenue producing product like yesterday. So all those extra features, et cetera out the door, we just need to make dough. That's all that matters. Right. Now, here's the problem at that time in that very moment. All of the structures we've been working on for months and years aren't any of this stuff, right. We haven't been thinking about how do we cut people? We've been thinking about how do we create a, a more lucrative plan for people to join the company? We've been thinking about how many more bonuses and options and you know, in goodies, can we give people in order to
Ryan Rutan: join tools? Can we buy to make our jobs easier? How many more, you know, platforms can we set up to make things more streamlined? We talked about
Wil Schroter: this in a couple of shows ago, but talking to a founder has a huge staff, a, a friend of mine and he's got about 400 people and they're doing a town hall and in the town hall, mind you, the world is imploding during the town hall. One of the folks asks him, when are we going to move to a four day work week? Not if went. And he's like, dude, do you have any idea what's happening right now? And I remember that same week and I think I I mentioned this in another show. Uh Mark Zuckerberg was holding in all hands for, for Facebook. And someone asked essentially the same question and he's like, are you out of your mind,
Ryan Rutan: out of your mind?
Wil Schroter: But right, it illustrates something really important. We set that course up until now, this is the big difference here. This is the the most important part. Up until now we set this course of, we told people there was gonna be unlimited snacks or unlimited P T O or, you know, whatever we said was good times, uh, you know, friendly. Now, it's not now getting a paycheck is good times friendly, but no one understands that we, we kind of understand it chance. Our leadership doesn't get it either.
Ryan Rutan: That's the thing if, if the founder still hasn't realized that the idea that the team is, is, is aware, is extremely small. And even after the founders realized it, and even after we start to take action, it still may not be clear to the team, right? Like the I or gal asking about the four day work week to which I would have responded, you know, what a 20% pay cut across the board would help us a lot. That's a great suggestion.
Wil Schroter: I mean, that would go over well, but I, I don't think, I don't think either the founder certainly. And again, I'm putting this on the founder to start because if it doesn't start with us, no one picks up this ball. I don't think the founder or the leadership team in most cases has any idea the, the degree or severity of what they're about to deal with, right? What's really, really coming down the pipe now with that said, if we don't do anything right again, if we look at this and say, oh, let's just keep things going. You know, we're the Titanic that just hit the uh the iceberg at that point. But if we go the other direction, we say shit, we have to actually button down everything, batting down the hatches, right? And we have to make sure right now that every single cost that can be spared is, is, you know, off the side of the ship. And what happens is we don't understand that survival is the strategy. We don't understand that we don't understand that it's no longer about growth doesn't matter that we were trying to hire. We had 40 open hires last week. We have 40 empty seats this week, it's very different. All that matters is that we are now around long enough by cutting costs by extending runway, by trying to get to profitability if we can. So that we're gonna be around long enough to build a company that we invested so heavily. That's a huge difference. It's a huge, huge difference, really hard to
Ryan Rutan: make, you know, it's, it's interesting that I went through this exercise probably 23 weeks ago with a founder. Luckily, she still has a very small team and staff cuts weren't part of it. But as we started going through their expense stack, we eliminated all kinds of stuff. And, and the thing about this was that we had had this discussion and I had suggested going through this very exercise three months earlier and we didn't, and she's quite regretful now because it will help now. But it's gonna help a lot less, right? Because we've already, we're already in the path. It's like the sooner you can do this, it's like it's like explaining to somebody how compound interest works, right? Once they see it and they're like, oh my God, that it's insane. Like that's, it helps so much. Great, fantastic, same thing here, right? When we start to compound those savings, the earlier we make these decisions, the earlier we make these changes. Uh and the, the leaner we stay and look, we're pretty militant about this. Right. Well, you're, you're our CFO uh you, you keep a pretty close eye on this and it's, it's rare that we let costs run without questioning them every couple of months times like this, we may have to cut into the muscle a bit. You know, we're usually looking for fact, we're like, ok, what can we trim? What are we not using? Right. Do we have 15 licenses for some piece of software that nobody's accessed in two years? Let's get rid of that. That's always good practice. Now, you may come to a point like today where we have to cut a little bit further and that was what she was forced to do. And so some uncomfortable cuts, there's gonna be some things that make work a little more difficult, things less efficient. Uh, there were some nice to haves, there were some needs, uh, that won't be met now for a while and that is what it is. But to your point, it will allow her to get through this for longer. I don't know if it will allow her to get through this, but at least extends the game, right? Uh It's not game over. She got to put a couple more tokens in the machine and she gets to keep playing and that's the important part. That's all
Wil Schroter: that matters. And what happens is when we look at this shift, this, this 180 degree shift, which often can happen within the same month, the same quarter. I had it happen to me in my first business. Everything was going great up to the right. We had 10 month of payroll and all of a sudden the world stopped. 9 11. World stopped dot com. Bubble crashes, everything stopped. And all of a sudden we're talking about layoffs when two months prior, we had 100 and 50 open hires, I mean night and day. Now you're seeing it in startups and you're seeing this new effect in startups where you're seeing startups now do a second round of layoffs and they're getting brutalized for it because they just did their layoffs three months ago and now they're doing another round. Why? Because they didn't take it seriously the first time. And often what happens is they're still thinking about things. The way they used to be, the way they used to be is like three months ago. Right.
Ryan Rutan: That's the thing that the time frames, the time frames are fairly short in this, in these cases.
Wil Schroter: Funding environment dr dried up like that overnight. Now, folks are saying, well, we still think we can get good terms in the market. No, you can't. You raised that ridiculous terms in this last round and good for it, right? If you can get it, get it, the downside is now you're in down around territory now, down around territory is a desperate and shitty place. It's humbling as hell. I've been there. It's humbling as hell because you've got two constituents that you have to deal with. Neither of them that are your friends right now. You have your existing investors which you sold on the big dream on that big valuation. Now you're about to get imploded, you then have the other side which are new investors which are like I'm not writing in on any of those valuations. And Ryan, you look at every major company right now, either pre IP O or post IP O everyone has gotten down rounded to 50 and great companies. Stripe, got down rounded Stripe, those guys print money, right? Like quite literally. And so what happens is this goes back to the Hoover Hos. We have a situation where as founders, we got this incredible valuation, we gave out stock based on that incredible valuation. Everyone was excited. Investors were excited because they thought there was another round coming. Well, now it's not and now we have to shop for any money we can get on any terms we can get and founders mess this up all the time. It's brutal. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: this kind of goes, goes back to Hubris, it goes back to pride which I I'm I'm treating in a slightly different way. It's the, you know, wanting to defend that valuation for themselves, wanting to defend that, that, that valuation for their, their previous investors, right? Because nobody, nobody loves to go back and say, hey, you know, it was really cool when you invested this at that $100 million valuation, I'm about to do something with some new people that's gonna slash that by 90%. How does that sound? Right? Not a fun conversation, but it's better than slashing it by 100% where the company ceases to exist, right? So it kind of like survival becomes the strategy at this point. The down round is, is necessary, right? If it's the difference between survival and not, you know, I'm not sure that we would call the down round a win, but it's sort of a super necessary evil at this point. Right. It is the answer and it's, it's not pretty, but it's gonna do the job. Right. It's gonna give you the cash. You need to stick around long enough to see it through.
Wil Schroter: Here's how we're looking at it though. Ryan, let's say you and I are co-founders in some, um, business and we're into our third round of funding. We did preceed, we did seed, we did series A at this point. You and I each have, let's say 20% on the cap table. And we're like, uh you know, but at least we made it past series A, you know, it's, it's double digits, you know, and we're a pretty healthy shot. We'll probably get an even better round um, on B and C and, you know, we'll still be in a good double digit place. Not anymore
Ryan Rutan: Q shit hitting fan
Wil Schroter: because here's what's about to happen. What's about to happen is we're gonna go back out to the market and that insane valuation that we've been running up, you know, year over year is just gonna get slashed second, the amount of money that we are going to raise before, let's say our A round was 20 million. Now we're talking these basically merchant cash advance level kind of bridge rounds where we're getting spoon fed money sometimes from our existing investors rarely from our, from new investors. They don't want part of our shit sandwich and, and think about it as we're cutting staff, as we're trying to do everything we can to stay alive. Who's looking at that going? Oh, that's a good investment. Let me get on, on that
Ryan Rutan: team. Nobody, nobody. And it's the right thing to do and yet it sends, it sends such a bad signal. Right. So you're, you're damned if you do and you're damned
Wil Schroter: if you do. First thing we do, we go out to the market and we say we had 80 people. We've now got 40 people. Uh We think we're probably a year and a half away from getting the break even which before we used to make a butt of our jokes. And now it's the greatest thing we could possibly accomplish. And we're going to the market with that. The worst thing that can happen as a startup founder as a startup company is having your story be told. Our greatest, uh you know, monetary ability is to be able to create money, print money on optimism on what it could be. The moment it turns to what it is, no one's interested. And I gotta tell you this is, this is the story from uh seed stage startups all the way through to IP OS as soon as, as soon as a company no longer has the what it can be, you know, glisten Pixie Dust. To it. It gets forgotten about quickly
Ryan Rutan: when we have to invest in the reality of a business. The valuation changes pretty significantly. Right. Not the potential of the business, as
Wil Schroter: evidenced by every company that's ever gone from Silicon Valley to the NASDAQ and watch the, the Wall Street folks just eviscerate them with what the business actually is. Read. Uber, read, I mean, you name it. But the point is we're at a point where we need cash. We probably waited too long as everybody does. So maybe if we acted quickly and we made cuts, we'd have been able to have, let's say 12 to 18 months of the runway. But we've never done this before or we just, you know, Hubris or we just made the wrong bet or we thought more money was gonna come in and it just didn't, stuff happens. It's not always, you know, we, we're not always jerks about it. We're sometimes we're trying to do the right thing and it just doesn't work. It doesn't matter how it happened, it's better as that it happened. And now here we are, we've got six months of runway, maybe less. Even with our reduced staff. We've got next to no time to go out into the market and try to raise capital. What kind of valuation are we looking at with under these conditions?
Ryan Rutan: Right? It's a percentage of what it used to be.
Wil Schroter: We are in the payday loan business
Ryan Rutan: at that point basically take whatever we can, whatever money we can get. Yeah. And it, it, it's so tough to watch founders go through this. It's so painful because it's, it's a series of compounding problems. You've got the compounding fact that you didn't make the cuts as soon as you could or should, you didn't start the round as soon as you should have. And so you burn more money than you needed to and now you're gonna take on less than you wanted to at rates that you never would have considered in the past. Yeah, it's uh not an awesome spot to
Wil Schroter: be in, you know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's ok. 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 dot startups dot 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. It's also not an awesome spot for your investors to be in because from an investor's standpoint, as you guys understand their portfolio theory, generally speaking, one or two companies out of 20 investments will make back the entire portfolio typically at the V C level. But that's historically been the math. We'll see where that math shakes out for this next dot Cohort. What you wanna do is you want to double up on your winners and you want to cut pay with your losers if you and I have six months left uh of runway and we've just cut our staff and we're trying to get to break even. Which side of that do you think we're on? We're not on the winner side, we're not on
Ryan Rutan: the, on the, hey, let's make sure they stay around side. Yes,
Wil Schroter: we are on the, get the fuck out of that part of the question for most investors. So most investors at the angel level at the V C level, et cetera are saying to themselves, we love will and Ryan, we love the idea, great concept, et cetera, but you know what shit happens and now you are where you are and we're out, it's not
Ryan Rutan: dissimilar to the decision that we go through as founders when we have to let go of people for economic constraints, right? Like they may have been great, we may have wanted to keep them around, but for right now, the right decision is to let them go, right? So this is the version of getting laid off by your investors, uh both current and future, right? They're looking at you and going like, hey, look under other circumstances, this would have been very different, but this is in other circumstances, this is these circumstances and it's, it's no, or, or these are the terms, right? And again, not favorable. And I, I'm sure you're still seeing it too well, but I'm still getting on the phone with founders as recently as yesterday who are still like, trying to push valuations that just seem ludicrous to me. Like they're still, they're just like, they're just having trouble seeing it because they want it to be true. Right. They want to get it true that they can go and get the money. They've worked hard. They've been busting ass for 34 years. They're at that point now where it's like, OK, we have all of the checks, uh the boxes, checked series is lined up, we're gonna go do this and they find out they're gonna have to raise it on a down round, right? And maybe through no fault of their own. This is the other side of it too, right? Some, some of these s starts may have done all the right things and the macro environment is just kicking them in the face right now, which sucks.
Wil Schroter: Outcome is the same, the outcome is the same outcome. It's our fault or not. The difference is, it's how we react and what I would say and I'm sure you agree with this is doing nothing, is death, doing nothing is death as soon as you say. Huh? That's a pretty big piece of ice in the water. I think we might have hit that. Right. No. Carry on. Nothing to see
Ryan Rutan: here folks.
Wil Schroter: This is the difference between those who survive and those who end up going down with the ship is not understanding that you hit the iceberg to begin with or more specifically not doing something about it. Like a lot of folks are like, oh man, like, you know, we're, we're, we're in a tight spot with our cash flow. We're in a tight spot with customer orders with where we are to get to break even et cetera. But I think if we just hold it out, we'll be ok. No, you won't be ok. Yeah, just, just
Ryan Rutan: still and see what happens. I'm just gonna hide over here in the corner and wait for it to blow over.
Wil Schroter: Let me paint two scenarios. If just you had a hint that things might not be going up into the right. Just a hint. Not even like this is really bad.
Ryan Rutan: Just a hint. Chicken little is not running around yet, yelling at the sky is falling, but there seems to be something
Wil Schroter: off. You bet and everyone like every podcast like this is trying to tell you like, like to your face like please like stop the path that you're on. You have 22 choices. Choice number one, circle the wagons as fast as possible. Cut it, cut expenses way deeper than you want to uncomfortably deep. Which by the way sucks. There's nothing cool about it. There's, there's nothing like, oh, I've done this before so it's ok. It sucks. I hate sitting across from people and telling them they don't have work. I hate deflating the dreams of all the people. I work so hard to help inflate. Right. I hate it. It's awful but I have to do it. The other side is, you know what? Let's add more optimism, right? Let's stoke the flames a bit and let's just say, let's work harder and let's push through this. That sounds awesome. But you haven't solved for anything. You've basically just said we hit an iceberg, let's hit the gas and see where this thing goes, right? Let's ride through it and see what
Ryan Rutan: happens. That might end up being worse than doing nothing. Right. Doing nothing, at least would imply that you were just gonna stay at that same burn rate, right? You start to go crazy and say, hey, let's fight our way through this, right? You mean wear yourselves out and die sooner? Cool. Great idea. The truth
Wil Schroter: is it's incumbent on us as leadership to know when it, when it's time to call it to, to zoom out, right and say shit, things aren't bad yet. But I don't see a version where they're going to get exponentially better, which probably means they're gonna get exponentially worse. So we have to make some really uncomfortable decisions. Right now, they suck. There's nothing about it again. That's, that's good. But we have to make them because if we don't, if we just hang out and let's see what happens. If we cut too early, too fast, we can hire people back. We can because we're still around, we still exist. But if we don't and we keep all those people because we were afraid of making a decision because it wasn't in us to make those hard decisions. We won't be around, it won't really matter how fast we reacted because we won't be around, which is the whole point of survival. You know what I mean?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I, I wish I had some data on this and I don't, I could probably dig some up. Uh But I would love to see what the correlation is. If we look at a particular indu industry segment, I'm gonna talk about bigger businesses for me. Let's talk about some of the corporations that we've seen go through massive rounds of layoffs. I would love to see the correlation between the ones who do this first and where it's like the fifth or sixth or seventh company in the sector, right? And sometimes they take pride in that like we held out the longest. But my guess is if we were to look at this data empirically, we, we'll find that the people who cut first end up doing better in the long run, right? That it's the company that cut last, who ends up being the one who has the second and the third and the fourth round of layoffs. Um, I've certainly seen this play out in startup companies where it was like they tried and tried and tried just to hold on and ignore the signs of the last minute and then things ended up much worse than they otherwise would have. But my guess is if we were to pull the data and look at this, that, that inaction that doing nothing just worsens this so much to your point, we can, we can push the undo on a lot of things full failure. There's no undo button for that. Right. We don't get to control Z going out of business. Unfortunately, it'd be great, but we don't. Right. So we have to take these tough decisions, we have to make these big cuts, these hard moves in order to be around long enough to repair things, to fix things and eventually move forward.
Wil Schroter: Right. Well, that's why we have the leadership titles that it's incumbent on us. Our job is survival of the entity. Our job ideally would also be a survival of the entity in everybody else's profits. But sometimes that's just not realistic. Sometimes the world changes and we have to make really hard decisions. And if we don't make those decisions, if we make those decisions too late, that is a failure. That is a dereliction of our duty at its core as much as it sucks, as much as it's tough. It's what we have to do. And the only way we can do it really, really well is to do it fast, to do it early and to do it in a way where the only focus for us is to say this is gonna hurt, but we'll be around long enough to make it work later. So, in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on startups dot com. That includes all of our education tracks, which will be funding, cut customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. There's so much stuff in there. All of our software including BIZ plan for putting together detailed business plans and financials launch rock for attracting early customers and of course, fund for attracting investment capital. When you log into the startups dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.