Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the start up therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of start ups dot com. Will schroder will we know lots of founders out there? Building, building, building big, big things. Not least of which are the dreams that they hope will come. At the end of that Golden brick road, they're paving daily with their blood, sweat and tears. However, what, what are your thoughts of this man? What what happens when we get to the end of that path? And it turns out there's just more path that now we have these things and it didn't really change things in the way we thought it would what then
Wil Schroter: it's dangerous because think of how much time, how much sacrifice we put in to getting these things. Like we've all got these dreams, right? We've all had this idea of what things will be like if we're finally successful. But what for wrong? Like what if that dream is actually bullshit? Well, I mean, think of what a myth like optimizing this much, really risking this much, risking our health, our wealth, our relation literally everything we could possibly risk for the dream of what this might become on the other end with often no proof point that that's actually going to make you any happier or anything else like that. It's easy to say. Here's the dangerous, it's easy, easy to say that if I have more than I have now, that more is better, easy to say. But how often in life have you gotten to a place where you're like that? I'm good. You know, I didn't have more before I have more now and I've never wanted anything ever
Ryan Rutan: again. Never. Right. It's counter to the entire, the entire philosophy of humanity, right? It's just not how we work. Unlimited desire for expansion. That's what we are, that's it.
Wil Schroter: And now think of every time, you know that you had that milestone, how much it costs you to get there, right? How much it costs you to get to that milestone? And it's almost hard to conceive of a longer, more painful journey than building a start up as a mechanism to get to something. If you are 100% sure when you get there, it's gonna have been worth it. So I think that's what we'll talk about today. We'll talk about what of all these things that I've been dreaming about that are gonna happen? This magical other side of the curtain are kind of bullshit. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: Well, stick on, stick on that for a second because I think there's something really interesting here. I think that's where a ton of this comes from because deep down inside we recognize this is gonna be a lot of work. There's gonna be a long period of sacrifice. This thing may not hand me anything back for a long period of time or never. Therefore, in order to justify this to myself and likely to the people around me, I have to be able to talk about what's going to happen on the other side of this. So there's gonna be something that's commensurate with it. It's it's the balance, right? We have to strike that and it's a super dangerous mentality because that's not the reason that you should be doing this, right? If that is the reason you're doing this rethink that uh but more to the point like let's not wait until we get to that Shangri La outcome, understand what these things actually represent to us, which is what we're gonna break down today,
Wil Schroter: which is interesting to me because one of the things that my wife and I have done, I, I've done prior to, to, to being with my wife has been try to find a way to test in some capacity whether or not what is on the other side of the curtain is actually what I think it is. Ok. So I I'll give you some milestones, right? A lot of us when we're teenagers. If we get our first car right. Our car is less about freedom than it used to be. But back in the day, it was your only version of freedom pre cell phone, right? That back in the day is dinosaurs. And so getting your car was such a massive upgrade and it really was like, like, like when you finally got that, that first option for true freedom and autonomy, it was phenomenal, right? And you dreamt of it and you got it. But it wasn't like once you got it, you're like, I'm good. I got the car
Ryan Rutan: just gonna cruise now literally and figuratively. That's it. It's all I got. Yeah.
Wil Schroter: So we do what all of us do and this is kind of the point we swap that milestone out with another milestone. Now, the first few milestones come fairly quickly for a lot of people. There are things like getting a car, graduating high school, maybe graduating college, et cetera. And so the pain reward function is fairly short and fairly well defined. And there's been a lot of people that have done it before us. The only consistent thing is across the board. Every single time somebody gets to that point, it's never enough but hold that for a second. It's not just about being enough. It's do we have any idea if that's really what we want? Think of how much time gets spent college is a great example, right? Think of how much time people spend in college for a job they've never had. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: Which may not even exist when they get out. Right. Like, especially
Wil Schroter: now. Right. Think, think about a doctor, an attorney spending seven years and now probably $300,000 plus in order to prepare for a job that they've never actually had. Ok. Now, that's very similar to what we're doing with a start up. Except we're risking a lot more. If you risk all your time and money to get a law degree or medical degree, you're gonna probably get a job. Right. You're gonna probably be paying that debt off forever, but you're still going to have income. We're in the unique position where we have the equivalent of going to school for seven years, spending all of our money, ha having no way to pay it back and probably being broken, destitute at the end. Is that no great to show for it?
Ryan Rutan: What a
Wil Schroter: dream? Yeah. What a dream. That's essentially what we're doing with the start up is we're putting in all that effort for an outcome that, that we very loosely defined. And in many cases don't even know if that's what that was, what was worth risking to begin with. You know?
Ryan Rutan: Exactly. I mean, and unlike, unlike the other analogs, there, there isn't a certainty on that. Right. There is some certainty if I start university and I do what I'm supposed to do, I finish university. Right. If, if I, you know, I want to go buy a car. I save my money. I can go buy a car. Right. These are relatively certain outcomes. There is absolutely nothing certain about your start up. And yet somehow this is how we convince ourselves that I'll do all this stuff and then I'll get the Shangri La moment and that's what makes it worth it. Right. Without, again, to your point, actually knowing whether that Shangri La moment will be the thing that makes us happy secret. We're gonna break it out for you. It won't, right. You'll just want something else. How many founders do we know who have exited? Will are any of them sitting around like, you know what, I'm just floating out just floating through life. Just can't think of anything other to do than meditate all day and, and walk my dogs, right. It's sweet. No one, right. Nobody.
Wil Schroter: What I hear consistently. What I hear consistently is I want something that I don't have obviously. Right? But, but then if I push a little bit and I say, how do you know for sure that that's what you want. You want this food so bad, but you've never taste tested that food. Now, imagine for a second that you're gonna invest all of this time and sacrifice and compromise and all the things that you're going to do. Ok? But you don't actually know if, when you get the reward, it's either what you want or the amount you needed to begin with. We talked, we've talked about this a million times in other episodes where we say people say, oh, I need to make 10 million, uh, uh, you know, net, once we sell this thing, do you, do you have any idea exactly what you'd buy with $10 million?
Ryan Rutan: Show me the Ledger. Right.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, because I, I can tell you straight up, you probably don't need $10 million. But the point is the amount of sacrifice we're gonna make to get to $10 million right? Is extraordinary. What if all we need is $651,000 also, by the way, not an insignificant amount of money, right? But definitely not $10 million either. Yeah. Very different if we actually knew that if we knew like ahead of time, that's, that's the amount of money we need and anything more than that is gonna bring us no net, you know, positive joy. Think of how differently when we would attack this whole thing and how crazy is it? Rhyme that the most sacrifice we're ever gonna make for our lives is often tied to a goal that is the least defined thing that we've ever done.
Ryan Rutan: It's, it's just some imaginary thing, right? And, and we watch this play out, you know, you just go back to your example, right? Like, you know, you pine over a particular car, right? You pine, you want it, you, you it's all you can think about. Right. You've looked at the magazine, you've, you've, you've gone and, and walked past a lot, whatever, right? You've, you've thought about it, you finally get there and finally, in this case, being compared to a start up, a very relatively short period of time you get it and then what happens? Right. And suddenly everybody else is driving one of these damn things and it's no longer valuable to you, right? And now you know that and you feel that and you understand that, right? So when in, in the same sense, like, did you ever test drive it? Right? Did you rent one for a weekend? Did you do anything else? Because these things are all very possible and in the same way it should be possible to test and it's, it's an MVP, right? How do you MVP? How do we minimum viable Dream? How do we get to the point where we can play, test some of this shit? And see, do I actually care about it as much in reality as I do in Dreamland? And I think this goes back to something I said at the very top of the episode, which is that we may not even really care about those things, right? I think. And by and large, we don't, we simply created a stack of things that were valuable enough to balance out the risk and the effort we knew we were gonna have to put into our start up, right? They were just prizes that we needed to balance that scale. Nothing more and what a dangerous way to end up spending a big portion of your life to build something that may ultimately give you what you asked for, but not what you wanted. Right. Wow.
Wil Schroter: Let's, let's build up the cost of being wrong, right. That's what terrifies me. The cost of being wrong about my goals, about my goals. I'll give you an example of where I've tested this growing up as a super poor kid. I always pictured and this is funny as a kid. This is me. I growed up like in the eighties and nineties. I pictured Beverly Hills 902 and oh the show back in the nineties as being like the pinnacle of luxury, right? And to be fair, like it's still kind of considered that like super posh, whatever, not far off. Right. Right. And so so II I pictured that life and, and as a kid that was so far from me, right? But I pictured that would be the pul amount of success to be able to live like that posh lifestyle, right? And I pictured like jets and like Lamborghini and all this cool stuff, right? And it was easy for me to picture because I knew I'd never get it. So I was just like went out, right? But then a couple of weird things happen in life, right? And I had an opportunity. Uh This is like eight years ago, about eight years ago. My wife and I actually moved to Beverly Hills now. A lot of people were like, oh, that's bougie as fuck. Forget about that for a second, right? We were literally trying to test something and here's what it was. We had been Ryan as you know, you moved around a few times to it and I want to talk about those moves, but like we'd moved to a couple of different places. We lived in Santa Monica for a while. We lived in San Francisco for a while and we're kind of getting to a point where we had to pick a school system for our kids, et cetera. And I remember saying to Sarah, I was like, you know what, like let's get a house in Beverly Hills, right? A tiny house like that, you know, not like a sprawling estate or anything. Just, just a location, right? Hosted Stan land. Uh that's as big as our apartment and let's test it. Like, because in my mind I've got it that like, I've got to work so hard and do so many things to accomplish and get to that life. What if I don't, what
Ryan Rutan: if you don't? What if it turns out that's not what I wanted at all?
Wil Schroter: Yeah. Like that's what terrifies me for a long time. I thought I wanted to live in San Francisco and then I lived in San Francisco. I hated it. Right. And I don't think I've been back to San Francisco. I, like, I got my marriage license in San
Ryan Rutan: Francisco. I know that you haven't, I know that you haven't been back there since you left,
Wil Schroter: back since. And so, but again, in my mind I built it up to be all these things. Then we tested it. Right. And we lived there for a few years and we got to see like what it was like and what it was not. And then, like I said, never thought about it again.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Aren't you glad you didn't sell the house, uh, in, in Ohio before you did that? I mean,
Wil Schroter: it's amazing. Yeah, exactly. For just that reason. So we moved to Beverly Hills, uh, summer. My daughter had just started, uh, first grade, so we enrolled her in school. Uh, will, my son had just been bored and, uh, we lived Beverly hills' Life. Right. And at first it's awesome. And I'd acquitted to this, I'd acquitted to when you go on vacation and the first day you get to your resort or wherever you're staying. It's amazing. And you're like, oh my God, this is so much better than where I was given the photos that I've seen where you live. Maybe it's not,
Ryan Rutan: I'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah.
Wil Schroter: But I remember thinking like this is incredible. We're like the nicest restaurants and everything's cool. Like you know, whatever. And so, and we had lived in L A before for like, five years so it was L A wasn't new, but Beverly Hills was kind of new and it's novel and it's weird. It's quirky and it's all its way. But this interesting thing happened after, like, month 123, whatever. Once you, once you just live there and that's kind of, you know, where you go to sleep every day, all the novelty wears off and then what creeps in. All the reasons are a huge pain in the ass. Right? I get up in the morning and my driveway is as big as my length of a car. Not even our garage, two car garage so small that I have to like, thank God I've been a leaner version of myself. I had to like, squeeze between a washer and dryer in my car door to get in my car.
Ryan Rutan: Like you have to shuffle step to your, you have to shuffle step to your car every morning.
Wil Schroter: Right? Oh my God. Everything about it was a giant pain in the ass. You know, Sarah, my wife was like, man, all I want to do is go to Target. It takes five minutes. I want one thing. It takes an hour and a half. I'm an underground parking trying to find it's a whole thing and she's like, this is annoying as hell. Needless to say we don't live in Beverly Hills anymore. Right? But, but my point is what if, what if this whole time I've been sacrificing in picturing what it would take, you know, to, to live that forever and to be fair, we lived in a tiny house to test it. It wasn't like, you know, again, we live in some palatial estate so we got in kind of minimum viable product of living there. But it told us all we needed to know there's no version. We're like, well, if the house is 10 times bigger, then we're, it's gonna be much better. We're like, fuck this place. And you know what? Have never thought about it since that's my point, which
Ryan Rutan: is that, that's the point right, right there now, you know, and once you know, you will never not not know again, right? You will always know the answer to that question, which is I don't need to be there, right? I think we talked about this in so many different ways. But knowing what you can say no to is so important as, as a supporter, right? And so when we, when we know like I don't need to try something specific to create that outcome anymore, right? There are a lot of other things I can go try. Uh But in the same way you can, you can test those as well. So it was, it was such an incredibly valuable lesson and you guys did it the right way, right? You did it in a way that wasn't permanent, that didn't create an entire upheaval in life to hit the undo button. Right. Just controls either way. Right back to Columbus, right back to the same house where your daughter was born and everything was fine. Right. Super easy. Unfortunately, we see founders doing things quite differently. Uh, a lot of the time, right, which they start to make these big permanent decisions, these big long term bets based on things that they just don't really understand and it has all kinds of really far reaching consequences.
Wil Schroter: 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 start ups 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. I hear it all the time. Um These are just life stages. If I just get married, then everything will be fine. If I just have kids, then everything will just be fine. If I just hit this revenue level, everything will just be fine. You know what's funny? It never seems to work. And here's what I'm saying, I'm not saying, don't get married, don't have, these are wonderful things, uh, or make more money is better than me. Making less money at what cost? That's what we're talking about. Like, my dream is to get exactly what I need and not a penny more. However, you would calculate it with the least amount of effort and sacrifice to get there. My fear is killing myself, which I did for a long time. That's sort of the, the point of this is killing myself to get to a dream, to get to an outcome. If I even get there at all, that turns out wasn't worth killing myself for, right. So be able to fast forward is a big difference. Tell me how you did it because like, you know, prior to living in Guatemala, you, you had your own spiritual journey to kind of find out where you need to land.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me from a location standpoint, it was fairly apparent to me early on. I'd always fallen in love with it, always gravitate towards like the the the foreign student or my best friend's family who was from Italy. There was just this desire for like different culture, different things. So I play tested that early and I understood that there was this affinity, this draw this curiosity in me that wanted to explore those things in a way that I wasn't finding satisfying in the US. And so I've done, I don't know, a dozen forays out and back now I've been out, you know, I think for almost as much of my adult life as I've been in the US at this point. And I did figure out that for me, that was the answer. I do like being other places. I've also figured out, I don't necessarily like being other places permanently. Right. I like to move around a little bit. But so here's the thing that we play tested. Even after having discovered that, then it was like, well, the obvious next progression is like full digital nomad. We're just in the wind, we go wherever we want, right? We were no longer in the office in Columbus. We're in Florida and then we're in Guatemala and it was like, ok, we figured out we're pretty good at this pick up and move thing. What if we just did this all the time? What if we just didn't have a home base? What if we? And so luckily my wife was like, ok, simmer down, put it back in, in second gear and let's, let's test that notion before we completely cut cables here. Let's test it. And so we did a couple of like working vacations where we would go places and I would just do my normal thing and we would just be in other locations. Right. Well, it turned out that there were parts of that, that were very nice and there were parts of that that were extremely unsettling, like, constantly having to wonder where the hell was that place? We need to go get the thing again or who do we call when the kids are sick? Or where's that store that we like to get? Where's that place we like to eat? Right. So there is something to having some level of roots. Now again, for me, I've proven it doesn't need to be permanent, but I also can't be completely transient, right? We, we figured this out, right? Like that feeling and, and kind of, you know, the same thing. We've, we've run into the situation where now the, the kids that are, have this super inconvenient thing that they have to do called go to school and it turns out that that's easier when you're just in one place. And so that took away some of that flexibility. And so that became a decision too. And so again, like, I'm really glad that we didn't, you know, pull up complete roots and just say like, let's just bounce around, let's test it by doing it right in the full sense, right. Let's, let's sell everything and let's just start moving. I think we would have found out 3 to 6 months in that it wasn't a good decision and it would have been a lot harder to control the way back out of that. So I'm, I'm glad that it went that way. You know, we figured out that yes, we like the flexibility. Yes, we like living in different cultures. No, we don't need to change that every two weeks to satisfy that need.
Wil Schroter: Right. And I, I think what's specific about start ups is that the nature of how we assess risk or plan for risk or optimize for risk is so unique, like we said earlier than any other job or anything else that you would have. So for example, for us, if we say, hey, again, I need to make $10 million. Ergo, I think I need to raise capital, I need to, you know, create a big outcome and create exit or whatever. And I think to myself, what if you're wrong? What do you mean? I won't make $10 million. No, by the way, it, that's not an assumption. The, the statistically you would definitely not make $10 million right? We're
Ryan Rutan: saying if you do.
Wil Schroter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a tiny percentage chance you do. Um Either here's the difference, either way you're gonna face the sacrifice, you're gonna lose something no matter what, whether you gain something is a big question mark and statistically you won't. Which is the problem. If I know that I'm gonna lose this much, I better be damn sure. That's what on the other side of that cost is worth it. Think of how many things in our life that we're banking on it being better without actually knowing probably one of the greatest within start up world we've talked about is selling our company. Once I finally sell my company, then everything will be great. And it's so funny because I, I talked to you, we both do countless founders and that's never actually the answer now to be fair. Most of them wouldn't, like you said, hit the control Z and go back and some, I, I
Ryan Rutan: want to try failing this time instead of selling my company. See what that, maybe that's the key to happiness.
Wil Schroter: A while back. I think the last episode we talked about this guy that I met with recently 66 years old, he ends up um selling his business after 25 years and he's like, I, you know, finally sold it and I'm like, cool. What do you want to do now? He's like, I have no idea. Now, think of how 25 years, dude, 25 years and you sold it and you have no idea what you want to do afterward. What was the point?
Ryan Rutan: Oh man, the analog that comes to mind here is like 25 years ago, he walked into a bank. He took out a massive mortgage and he worked really, really hard every month to make the money to pay that mortgage. And he paid and he paid and he paid, and he finally paid off the mortgage and then they handed him the keys to the house. And told him where in the country it was and he went there and it turns out he doesn't like it at all. Right. That's what that feels like to me right now. What do I do? Right. You put all this time, all this effort just to find out that. Now this didn't bring me the thing that I thought it would, which was peace, tranquility, stability, you know, sense of purpose. Right. In, in a lot of cases, we trade those things when we sell our start. We talked about that before too. I
Wil Schroter: had this happen to me early in my career. I was like 25 I think, and it was such a, a life changing moment. We were running the agency and we had a, a big company called Compuware. I don't know if they're still around anymore that wanted to um the buyer agency and, and pay a good premium for it at the time. So we're, we're debating it internally, et cetera. And again, it would have been a good deal at the time, but that's here nor there. But I remember getting on a plane going to a client meeting back and I was always on a plane and I remember having Excel up the also fun fact, I remember my laptop only had about 28 minutes of battery life. So I had to come to this conclusion very quickly. Um Anyway, so I go on Excel and I'm like, ok, here's what, you know, my proceeds might be. How will I spend all of this money? This is such a perfect moment. Right. And by the way, everyone should go through this exercise. So I said, I'll tell you, what were
Ryan Rutan: you on the airplane at this point? Yeah. Were you in coach? Oh,
Wil Schroter: yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was 100% coach. Um, the only time we got to fly private was when it was on the client's time when it was on our, that's the chief is gonna be anyway. Greyhound
Ryan Rutan: pass will let
Wil Schroter: us do so. So I in Excel one point. Oh, I'm trying to write down what are, what's every single thing that I've ever wanted in my life at 25 years old now, a couple caveats here. Right. Number one, I grew up super poor. So like my expectations were incredibly low. Number two, this is before Google and the internet barely existed. So you didn't have all of these like social media influences and things like telling you all the things you're missing. You kind of just didn't know. Anyway, here is my list. I had house, I had boat, right? Just I heard people buy boats. I've never even been on a boat. I didn't even know what that meant. Right. I had like a couple of nice cars and like a few other things. Right. And no, I remember a DVD player like I'm, I'm never, I'm gonna buy a top of 1000 dollar reference DVD player. Right? And I remember like that, but here's, here's the funny thing, this is the part that people don't really do this exercise properly. Once you get past those big ticket items, the next items drop geometrically, right? Once you get past house boat or whatever the hell you think you need. The other thing is drop geometrically. The other thing you do is most people like, say, well, I need like $3 million to buy a house. Number one, you don't, there's plenty of place you could buy a house for $3 million. Number two, you don't pay cash for these things. You don't buy a boat, you lease a boat, you don't buy a house, you mortgage a house. So you need the money to make those payments and put the money down, not pay for the whole thing anyway. And because if you have that much money to put down, you should be investing it, making a hell of a lot more money than you'd be saving on a mortgage payment. My point is once I wrote everything down, it was hilariously small. That's
Ryan Rutan: the thing, man. Yeah, of all the things I need. This list doesn't work. I'm only gonna be able to spend a tiny portion of my $10 million.
Wil Schroter: Right. Yeah, I was like, my final number was way less than a million dollars, like way less than a million dollars. Right. And I remember thinking damn, like, I don't have as expensive tastes and, and I tried to list everything I could think of. Like I went out of my way to like, exhaust this thought process and it was so cathartic because I was like, huh, what am I trying to achieve? Like, I literally just wrote it out and it's not that much, I mean, it's a lot relative to where I was, but it wasn't that much money. And the same thing happened again when, when Sarah and I went to Beverly Hills with the family. And I said, well, dude, if we're not living here, if we're living in Columbus, Ohio, our house there is 10 x cheaper. You just did
Ryan Rutan: something really, really important, which is that that list was relatively big relative to where you were, right? And this is the thing that we always have to keep in mind. And this is why once we get these things, we tend not to be satisfied with them is because then we're somewhere else and then our dreams become relative to that point, right? That Watermark keeps moving and therefore so do our dreams, right? And so at that point, the list that you wrote was a couple of $100,000. My guess is if you were to write one now, it would probably be a little bigger, right? It's probably not $20 million bigger but bigger, right? Because relative to where you are now there would need to be some reason to justify taking all the actions and doing all the things, right. We also have kids and lots of other stuff that we're responsible for. Now that turn out to be kind of expensive.
Wil Schroter: Banana is expensive and really get a lot of what we're doing is we're talking about this in monetary terms. But, but I also think that like when we talk about, well, here's what I want my lifestyle to be where we say, oh, you know, I want to be able to go fishing every day. You do now because, because you can't go fishing every day. Trust me. After the 28 times in a row of fishing, you're like, you know, ok, I, I've done enough goddamn fishing.
Ryan Rutan: Play tested that turns out for me it's, it was once to, twice per week, was more than enough in about an hour and a half each time. That was it. That's all I
Wil Schroter: needed. You got to play test it if you never tested it. And that's really what we're talking about. If you never tested it, you wouldn't actually know that. But you'd believe in your mind that this thing that you don't have is so valuable again because you don't have it right, because you don't have it. Exactly. Then all of a sudden you get it and like anything else in life, think about all the things that you've gotten in life every time you get something you're like, oh, this is amazing. And then like a month later or a year later you don't think twice about it. It's my kids with every toy they get, they have to have this toy and the moment they get it they don't give a shit about it, which is, which I get, which I get, however they didn't have to sacrifice anything for it. That's what we're talking about. If these things come naturally in due course, it's great. Fine. OK. Wonderful. Right. But if you're compromising something, if you're saying, hey, I'm gonna spend less time with my family because I have to have this thing. But you've never confirmed that you actually have to have this thing. You've never actually like play test to that, that sacrifice the, the less time with your family is literally not worth it. That's dangerous to me. You know what I mean?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, for sure. That's the thing like we, before we go and make all these sacrifices, we have to make sure again, like there's a few, there's a few things that we need to be really careful with here on the probability math one, just the likelihood that we ever actually hit that point to get that thing that we're talking about. 12 that we actually want it once we get there. Right. When you compound those two things together, there's a whole lot of risk involved in that equation from the moment we start out because there's a hell of a lot of uncertainty between then and there, the, the other side of it is. Right. Once we start to play to some of these things, things change. Right. And that's not the only thing in your life that's going to change. Right. Let's just pretend that you had never gotten that Lamborghini at, at 22 23 24. Wherever that was. Right. Would you still want a Lamborghini now?
Wil Schroter: So much? I totally want it. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: But where would you put the Children? Right? Like there's so, so there's just there's things that change, dictate dreams. Well, I I quite literally bought my wife a, a two seat car after the birth of our third child. Why? So the kids wouldn't fit in it, right? That was the point. It was the car that only the two of us could get in and she understood the significance. The second I handed her the keys, she walked out the door and she was like, it only has two seats. She says with tears of joy in her eyes, right? That was the point. So, you know, these things, the target continues to shift. And so I think that from from my side, one of the most important things is to, to constantly be recalibrating those goals too. Right? Let's go back to the fishing one for a second, right? So the the fishing when we moved to Florida, I, I love the fish. I love saltwater fishing. I love to eat saltwater fish. So it works out pretty well. I figured I needed to go fishing every day. So I had to figure out how to do that. I figured I'd need a boat to go fishing. Uh, so I need to figure out how to do that. There are all these other things it turned out, I didn't need to go every day. Play tested that I didn't need a boat, play tested. That turned out a kayak was what I loved because of the ease, the accessibility, the piece, the tranquility, the fact that it generally only seated, one was also kind of nice. I did eventually get one that I could throw all my kids on or my wife and that was fun too. And I like the physical activity of it, right? I liked all of it. I also didn't like being that schmuck at the boat dock waiting for 45 minutes to come back in. So, you know, it was great. But again, like the dream shifted. Once I started to experience it, I got parts of it and realized that parts of it were absolutely fantastic. Parts of it weren't, but it continues to evolve over time as you evolve over time, right? Is your ability to, to actually enjoy those things come online. Sometimes the need to do them also fades. We've talked about this before too, like like at points where you're extremely stressed out and you're buried in work and you're just grinding away the idea of being on vacation forever. Sounds great because it's so far from where you are. Now, when you're in a position where you're enjoying running your business, things are relatively stable. You don't have to be awake, sweating at four o'clock in the morning, every night, staring at the ceiling wondering if, if the company is gonna live the next day. All of a sudden the vacation isn't that far relative to where you are. My wife and I joke now when we leave our house here we go on vacation. We're usually happier to come home very frequently. Coming home. We're coming home to somewhere nicer than we go on vacation. Right? It's hysterical. We, we, now we generally travel for experience, right? We're gonna go like there's something we haven't seen before the kids want to see. Here's a place we haven't been like went to Costa Rica for gymnastics and then we got to see monkeys. That was all my kids cared about. We went for the gymnastics and we were like, take us to see monkeys like you got it right. When we travel back to the US, it's to see family, right? It has a purpose, but it's not because we need the escape anymore. And so that is a relative change.
Wil Schroter: The challenge we run into as founders is we set these goals, we set these, use these big audacious goals, particularly for the company in, in outcomes. But we rarely actually know whether or not, if we achieve them, whether they are worth sacrificing to begin with. And like I keep saying, the value of anything is the fact that you don't have it. The problem is when you do. So I think for any of us, if we're gonna say I'm willing to put it in a sacrifice, but we haven't play tested the outcome. We don't have some certainty that that outcome is actually what we want, but it is a giant waste of time. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on start ups dot com. That includes all of our education tracks which will be funding customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. They're so, 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, fundable for attracting investment capital. When you log into the start ups dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.