Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to their episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Routan joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Will, it's no secret at this point anybody that listens that you and I spend most of our days talking to startup founders about businesses new and old, you know, gone and and imagined and yet to be. How often is it that the very first idea that we come up with, the very first plan is the one that's gonna get us all the way to the promised land.

Wil Schroter: Damn near or never, never. It surprised me,

Ryan Rutan: right?

Wil Schroter: We want to have the fantasy of it, right? The fantasy is this, like when people say like, hey, you know, you started a successful business, you know, how did you come up with the idea? And I always tell the same thing. I said, I didn't like, oh, somebody else came up. I was like, no, the idea for this business didn't exist, so I came up with a dumb one. Yeah, yeah that that got us here. Um, and I always use that as a way to explain that, that the businesses were supposed to build. are an evolution of learning about what's supposed to be built. Like it would sound awesome if it was just like, hey, here's exactly what I'm supposed to build, and I'll just go do that. It reminds me of like, if someone was just starting off in their life and you're like, hey, I'm not gonna make any mistakes. I'm just gonna start with exactly what I'm supposed to do for every decision and execute perfectly.

Ryan Rutan: And by the way, you're about 5 years old at that point, right? So you've got all the life experience you'll need. You know everything that's coming. Yeah, it's funny that but but it it is sort of par for the course, right? This is most of the conversations we end up having. Founders believe some version of that.

Wil Schroter: Here's what I think the problem is, you know, kind of what we'll unpack today. I think because we get so sold on this idea that the product has to be exactly this way, we prevent ourselves from keeping our minds open saying, does it? Or like, are we actually holding the startup back because we're unwilling to let it evolve.

Ryan Rutan: Oh, that's an interesting way of looking at this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to what extent are we not not just that we're not moving it forward as fast as it could be, but that we're actually holding it back. OK, I like that. I like that.

Wil Schroter: Here's a dumb example cause it's probably not even true, but I just, but I, I want to point it out. When Uber started, if you recall way back in the day, Uber started as a, a way to basically make Black cars, right, like private black cars like Lincoln town cars, accessible. It wasn't intended to overturn the taxi industry at the time. It was very hyper specific. It was everyone's private driver. That was the initial tagline

Ryan Rutan: was the tagline, that's right of

Wil Schroter: of Uber, right? And so in that initial reckoning, if you were uh Travis and Garrett from Uber, the the the founders, and you were thinking to yourself, OK, this is it, we're gonna be all about getting all these black cars. That are typically unaddressable, and like it's very

Ryan Rutan: hard to get to, hard to book,

Wil Schroter: tons of downtime, and we're gonna give you essentially a quasi taxi, but a limo to get where you want to go. And we're like, no, that's the business. It's not another business. Think of what was lost, what would have been lost if they stuck to that model. Dude,

Ryan Rutan: I would have walked so many more places in life if Uber hadn't existed as it does now. It would have been awful.

Wil Schroter: There's a million cases and, and I bet a lot of the Listening, they're a case of this right now where they're saying to themselves, but this model is not working. This model has to work, and it's like, maybe, or maybe the model that's supposed to work, lo and behold, isn't about giving people access to limos. Like, like maybe there's a different version that would be 100 times more valuable if we just let it evolve. And I think we have a hard time letting it evolve. Because of, you know, this kind of myth of the perfect plan, you know what I mean?

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, for sure. And and I think that's that's where it starts. It's like we, we spend so much time thinking about it that of course we must have thought everything that we need to at this point. Now we're gonna start building it, so we've made some plans, and I think you're, you're right, like part of that challenge is in that perfect planning that we've done. Actually starts to blind us to to real feedback. Like, and it's so funny sometimes, man, like I'll I'll talk to my getting customers um sessions that they do on Mondays and Fridays, we run into this all the time where they're like, and they're just not getting it, and I'm like, OK, what are they getting? What are they taking away from this? What are they telling you? They're telling me this and this and this and this. I'm like, OK, have you, if that's what they're telling you over and over again, are you starting to internalize any of that feedback like, or are you just saying no, they're wrong? Yeah like because here's the deal. They still have the credit cards that they need to vote with to prove that you're right, and they're current consistently voting no. So let's go with maybe there's some validity to that, and it's just tough, and I get it, like, you know, after you put so much time into it, there's the whole sunk cost fallacy, there's the I don't want my baby to be ugly thing. I've already told everybody this is what I'm building. How could I possibly build anything else? Yeah, the, I cannot overstate the necessity of like that early and continuous user validation.

Wil Schroter: Let me give you an example. The most common scenario that I hear, and I'm sure there's folks listening that that have been through this. The most common scenario I see is, but I just raised money with this idea. There's nothing more humiliating, OK? And I'm just gonna call because I've been there, than saying to investors, this is the future, going and proving that this is the future, only to find out it's not the future. In fact, you were. Way off and having to go back and say, just kidding. Now this is the future.

Ryan Rutan: That's

Wil Schroter: hard to

Ryan Rutan: do. It is. It's hard to do, but it's important because what's the alternative? If you've realized that's not the future, you're building towards a future that you already know doesn't exist. At some point, are the investors going to be happy that you go back to them and tell them, I was super wrong and I already have your money, so I'm gonna go try to be more right. Now, not exactly the kind of thing that inspires a vote of confidence at a lot of levels, but on the other hand, like that is what gives them a chance at getting a return on their money. So it look, they may not be happy to hear it, but they're going to be happier than you just plowing forth into something you know is not gonna work.

Wil Schroter: This took me a long time to internalize because early in my career, whenever I was making any kind of decision for the company. And I was communicating that to my staff and I had to change my mind later. It made me feel weak. It made me feel like, uh, as a weak leader, which to be fair, I was like 22, 23, 24, so were you. So that's kind of, we

Ryan Rutan: were weak leaders, right? Like that was, that was just an accurate assessment of the situation.

Wil Schroter: I felt rightfully so, that I had to overcompensate for my clear lack of experience, right, especially again back then, different era where like young CEOs didn't exist, and so you were a sideshow at best to begin with, and you, you were exactly what people expected to fail, like for all the reasons, OK? It was really hard for me back then to be able to say, hey, that was a mistake, let's move left instead of right kind of thing, because at the time, I was so preoccupied with me being wrong, that I wasn't willing to let the product or the organization be

Ryan Rutan: right. I got a piece of feedback early on that It was so beautiful, and I, I probably didn't appreciate it for what it was in the moment. Early, early, early, I wanna say, I don't remember what they were calling at the time, but early uh was a an uncle of a a close friend of mine in university, early at Salesforce, like really early, like Chirevenue officer before that's what they called it, something like that, right? Just somebody came in. I was trying to explain to him and he was debating back with me and, and, you know, he was significantly more experienced and just super, super smart dude. He said he's like, look, I'm hearing what you're saying, but at this point it feels like you're trying harder to be right than to find out what is

Wil Schroter: right. I love that. I love that, right? And

Ryan Rutan: I was like at the moment I was like, oh that's. Stings, once the sting wore off, probably years later, I mean, it's something I still hear that at times now when I find myself pushing back against something, I can hear his voice saying, are you trying harder to be right or find out what's actually right? Damn it, I think I'm doing it again.

Wil Schroter: And what's interesting to me about that is it's, it's all tied back to our ego. Yeah,

Ryan Rutan: right,

Wil Schroter: like we have this sense back when I was making those moves early in my career, and, and I had to make a change of sorts, my issue, I would say was like 80% my own ego, like how it affected me, and 20% my concern as to how it might have affected the business. I don't know that I could have changed that. I mean, part of that was just my own evolution.

Ryan Rutan: I, yeah, I think it is because in the beginning a pivot feels like a confession of failure, right? To ourselves, to anybody around us, and I think that that can't be ignored. I think what you eventually realize after you've gone through enough of them, is that it's not a confession of failure, it's it's a calibration towards what might actually work better. And once you realize that you become a bit more comfortable with it. Again, there's still times where like Like that's uncomfortable, particularly if you've just been out like shouting to the rooftops on LinkedIn or you've raised funds. The articles have been written about it, right? Like you've gotten some publicity and now you're going, well, shit, that's not exactly what we're going to go do now, but right,

Wil Schroter: we had this happen with a company we did called Afford it, and it was essentially what Affirm is today, buy now, pay pay later, years before Affirm, and uh we got into the business. And it was going great, like we're selling tons of products, but then there's the part where you have to pay later, which means we have to collect, and any kind of credit business isn't a credit or banking business, it's a collection business.

Ryan Rutan: Yes. It's what it comes down to hard to get people to take money to get

Wil Schroter: cool stuff 100%, right? Like, like any loan is about collection, not disbursement. Anyway, we got into the collections part of it. And all of a sudden we're on the phone collecting from single moms who were using this to, and this wasn't like a story, this just kept happening, that we're using this as a way to like buy an Xbox for their kid for Christmas. I grew up with a single mom, and so like I knew this process really well, and the last thing that I wanted to do. collect from single moms. Hey,

Ryan Rutan: you're behind on your payments. Oh what? 00 really? I'm, yeah, never mind. bye,

Wil Schroter: just kidding, right? And so, so, OK, so, so here's the thing, we had raised a bunch of money from really prominent investors on a very big concept that was working. That's the worst part, that was working. And we had a bunch of term sheets for a Series A at the time. At the time, I'm like, Oh shit, how do I get out of this? Like, I don't want to be in this space. I don't

Ryan Rutan: wanna, I don't wanna do this anymore.

Wil Schroter: I was like, now, to be fair, that decision got made for us because we were headed right into the financial crisis, like 2007 era. Everything dried up overnight and like we couldn't raise any more money wasn't

Ryan Rutan: a whole lot of money being tossed at subprime lending. No, there, there were unless you were the governments of Iceland, Ireland, and Cyprus who were like, I'd love to buy some D-class repack. debt. That'd be great,

Wil Schroter: right, right. And so anyway, none of it was, I wasn't willing to let go even though I didn't even want to do it. Like that's the worst part. I didn't even want to do that business anymore, but I just raised a bunch of money. I just got into LA at the time and I was everywhere at all the events and everything talking about this business. I put my entire ego into it, right? My reputation, everything into this business, and overnight I was like, I just made a giant mistake. And I wasn't willing to let it go because of my ego.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I, I think that's it it comes down to like if if I'm thinking of it from a spectrum perspective now, and it's got, you got ego on one end and you've got, I'm gonna call it agility on the other. The closer we can get away from, you know, the further we can get from from ego and get closer to agility, I think we're we're better off. But it's hard, right? It is a struggle to let go, and I think to your point, it's really hard to do that until we've sort of gotten punched in the face by by getting it wrong with ego and maybe accidentally gotten some wins from agility. In your case, like you were forced out of the business and and look, you don't need to spend a long time answering this, but what do you think would have happened, had we not run into the, the whole financial crisis, right? Like, had more capital had been available now you were already kind of like, I don't want to do this anymore. What's the crystal ball? Like the, what would have happened? Would you have continued with the business? Would you have become a firm?

Wil Schroter: No, I, I would have. I wouldn't have become a firm and again I when people like, oh, I had this idea before that I did this idea before that, sure, that was the easy part. What Max Lein did, you know, with a firm. Was a 100x what I would have ever done with Ford it, right? Like, I mean, to be fair, that's like me saying, well, I had a pretty good game, and so I guess I'm Tom Brady, right? In, in this equation, he's Tom Brady. I'm some idiot that plays flag football with a bunch of 50 year olds, right? Like, not the same athlete. So my point is affirm would have been just fine. Who knows what had happened to us, but I can tell you, and, and I'm, I don't like to admit this. I don't like to admit the fact that I would have pressed forward and did, not because I thought it was the right thing for me, the market, the world, etc. but because my ego was so attached to it because I had so many people that I had committed to that I, I wasn't willing to stop. And it running out of money was kind of the only way that was gonna get me out of that. And, and even then. I spent like 18 months, 24 months nonstop, banging my head against the wall to try to like get capital before we eventually gave up. So I didn't go out easy either. Like it was guns blazing. That's,

Ryan Rutan: I mean, that's the paradox, man, of of building products versus building your identity into it. That's a big part of it where we're so wrapped up in it, it's like we we can no longer isolate ourselves from it. Makes it really hard to let go because we're essentially saying I'm killing off a part of myself in order to kill this thing off. That's a hard decision to get to.

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.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it. Let's stick with this. This goes back to the dream. The dream is, hey everybody, this was the original idea, this was the original plan, this is the reason you quit your last job and joined to work for equity or whatever, you know, it's the reason investors put money in. It's really hard to say that that plan didn't work and expect the same level of enthusiasm for new plan, right? It's so much easier to say, let's just stick with old plan because it was the oldie timey original and force that through. It takes balls. To be able to say I was wrong, OK, this full stop right there. I was wrong and that's OK. I wasn't willing to do it. I am now, but at the time I was not for

Ryan Rutan: sure. It's, yeah, and man and like again like in hindsight, way easier to see, but like clinging to that original version isn't loyalty, it's not toughness, it's not strength of character, it's potential self savage. Taj, right, but being able to see that in that moment, it's up there amongst, I think the hardest of the challenges that we face as founders, particularly because it often comes at such an early stage, yeah, that we have so little else to go on other than our own enthusiasm, our own ideas, our own thoughts, and a little bit of feedback from the market. And then that little bit of feedback from the market is going counter to what we hoped. It's brutality at its finest.

Wil Schroter: Well, OK, so let's build on that. I want to talk a little bit about why I don't have the same issue now. Where was my evolution so that I could get to the point, and hopefully other founders listening can kind of get to that that same point. This came from a few different places. One, it came from, once I started to understand. That clinging to the original idea just cause it was the original idea was just dumb, right? Like it wasn't, I couldn't come up with a good reason other than it sounded cool, that it was actually the best, most strategic, most mature way. Again, in most cases I was attaching it to ego. Now when I tell people about this ego, etc. invariably I'll hear a lot of people say, yeah, well, I don't have the same ego to it. First off, bullshit, OK. Second off, second off that ego. This kind of is. But OK, so, but here's what's changed. Fast forward years later, and we start Fundable.com, which would later become startups.com. Now by this point, I had seen in a bunch of my own businesses, things just evolve, right? Things just go a different direction and that be better. So we launched Fundable.com. It's a crowdfunding platform. This is like 2011, 2012. It turns out it was just a bad idea. Idea and Ryan, obviously I'm saying this to you because you were there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. A bad idea being it just wasn't like that viable equity crowdfunding would not go on to an entire

Ryan Rutan: market wasn't what everybody thought it was gonna be. But

Wil Schroter: even especially back then. So with that said, because I had the benefit of seeing what happens when I don't evolve, that time me and certainly you and the rest of the team were very open. To trying something else. That's essentially what led us to startups.com, which is, you know, much different, much, much better, more viable business that is about to celebrate its start of its 14th year, right?

Ryan Rutan: 22 from now I think, yeah,

Wil Schroter: right, exactly, but stick with that for a sec. Had we Be like, no equity crowdfunding, you know, once you start, start a plan, you don't change it and you see it through, we would have gone out of business.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, we're like, come hell or high water. We would be sitting in high water in hell right now.

Wil Schroter: It's like 30 other companies who who tried the same thing did, and the only difference between us and them was our willingness to be able to say, what if it's something else? What if the answer is elsewhere?

Ryan Rutan: Go back in time because for me, there were a couple of specific things that happened, I think that that helped me with this. One of them was a few situations started to appear, partially just from experience, partially just from time in the game, where the adaptation became proactive, the evolution was proactive not reactive. I think part of it was early on, I was being told I was wrong. I was what it was the market, investors, people around me, whatever it was, I was being told you're wrong. And so the evolution was basically somebody else telling me I needed to evolve, or something else telling me I needed to evolve. I think as I grew, and as I built more and more, what I started to see was there's actually some signals of this from the market, right? Things like going out, doing customer interviews before you start building shit, really talking to the people that you're building for, making sure that you filter this down to a really like, not just ideal client profile, but like early adopter, the people who are really gonna go after this thing at an early stage, knowing that we'll move beyond that, but to gather that feedback and so the the pivot would become sooner, and before I had decided and done so much and become kind of fixed in my thinking. One, but also because it felt proactive. I had gone out and discovered reasons why maybe I needed to evolve as opposed to being smashed in the face with a sign that says evolve or die. And I'm like, well then I guess I'm dying.

Wil Schroter: Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about like what letting it evolve actually looks like, you know, what does that mean? At the, the very least it's about giving up some control over what you believe the idea absolutely has to be, right? It's, it's about stepping back and saying, look, I think if we really We want to see this thing survive and thrive. We have to let it grow into what it wants to be. Now, now sometimes what it wants to be doesn't look like what we wanted to build. Of course,

Ryan Rutan: man. Like your first plan is, is, is a guess at best, right? Only the market can confirm or deny that guess. Like we can't sit around and think through it and be like, OK, yes, now we're right. Will and I have sat down and we thought it through, and now we know we're right. Bullshit, you can't do it.

Wil Schroter: You know, and again, sometimes what it wants to be. A collections business for single moms, you want it to

Ryan Rutan: be not only not what you wanted it to be, but something you won't even tolerate it being. That's that's what I'm gonna say, right? OK, I'm done. I'm out.

Wil Schroter: I've seen a lot of cases where people build a product and there's some services to help get the product to go, and after a while they're like, yeah, it's kind of just a services business that kind of has like a product chotchke to kind of get it started, and I don't want to service the business. That's OK too, you know, meaning that if that's not the business. You want, if you don't want to collect from uh payments for Xboxes for single moms, don't do it, right?

Ryan Rutan: It would have been a great pitch deck like intro page single moms throwing money at you,

Wil Schroter: yeah, putting the screws to single moms, yeah, actually, you know, we had a couple of investors who, while we were on the campaign trail raising money, kind of said exactly that. They were like, hey, well, at the end of the day, won't you be collecting from people that couldn't otherwise make their. Payments, etc. right, which is a reasonable question. And my whole point was, yes, there are people who need to buy things that don't have that amount of money, but we're gonna do it in payment terms that they can actually afford, like on very tiny payments over, over a short period of time. And that was true, but that doesn't mean everybody's gonna pay us, right? And so at the end of the day, you're still gonna collect from people that just didn't want to pay you, whether they could or not.

Ryan Rutan: Put on your loan shark suit and start knocking on doors. Yeah,

Wil Schroter: exactly

Ryan Rutan: what it

Wil Schroter: is. So part of it for me, as I've been, you know, involving myself, has been taking my ego down a notch, right? Be like I don't have to be right. The product has to be right. I don't have to be right, which is the advice that you got. And I think part of it too is detaching yourself from the product, meaning like if this doesn't work, it doesn't mean I suck. It means a product I built isn't working, not the same thing.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I think that that separation of self is one of the hardest things to do, depending on where it comes from. I like, I think there are times where, like, you build something more opportunistically and maybe you're not as personally attached to the outcomes. I'd argue that's a bad business to build in the first place because you're probably not gonna survive it. But like, I, I think that's, it's a necessary piece, right? We have to be able to to to separate ourselves to a healthy degree at least. So like, look, I want to be involved in this, but I'm not this, right? There's an old farm joke that talks about involvement and commitment, and it's uh it it's good. To breakfast, right? It's like the chicken is involved, the pig is committed. You gotta be the chicken, right? You gotta be the chicken in the startup case.

Wil Schroter: Within our own company though, Ryan, one of the things I'm very proud of that we've done culturally is, while we all, you know, have a million opinions, strong opinions on things of what we think should be right, what the product should be, etc. I think partially because we worked together for so long and we've seen this, you know, work so many times, we're naturally slightly less committed that way. In other words, we're like, like you and I yesterday we were talking about um landing. Pages and and what the messaging should be, etc. We both have ideas of what could work, but we've both done this enough to know. He, we know, right? Like, put it up for some testing.

Ryan Rutan: That's what I'm saying try everything,

Wil Schroter: try everything and

Ryan Rutan: and and separate ourselves, and that's the thing like at the end of the day, we've gotten to a great place where we want to find out what's right. I don't care which one of us is right. I'm not like, oh, another check on the on the wall for me was wrong and I was right. Like, who cares? We just want to get to right, but that goes back another couple steps. Right, that goes back to the point where we're saying, what matters most to us. In this business, and, and it was something that we fundamentally early on we said like, do we care about crowdfunding? No. Do we care about customer acquisition for startups? No, not, not really. Do we care about any of the other things that we built? Not in that sense, but what we care about is the is the outcomes created and for whom? We care about founders. So at the end of the day, like when when we can separate all that and just go, is this gonna be the best thing for the people that we're trying to reach? It's gonna help them understand what we do so they can get to value quickly and go on and do what they want to do. This makes it a hell of a lot easier, right? But that goes back to the core principle that you talked about, which is not being stuck on whatever that first thing we thought was, and then trying to force function that into people's lives whether they need it or not.

Wil Schroter: Does that another way would be saying like, like if someone were to say, hey, this is, you know, this business I'm building, it's going great, etc. and my question will always be compared to what? What else did you try? What else have you done to prove that this is the best thing for you? Uh, like I I'll give you an example. When people talk about the startups.com model, like what we do. They could pose the same question. They could say, well, you know, aren't there other things you could be doing that would make more money? And my answer is yes. If that were

Ryan Rutan: only selling

Wil Schroter: Xboxes

Ryan Rutan: to moms, single moms, right?

Wil Schroter: Yes, there's a lot of other things you could do that would make more money that we don't necessarily want to do, see selling Xboxes to moms, right? Like, so it's not always about you again, uh, the answer is always what makes the most money. Sometimes the answer is, is what makes you happiest, makes you more satisfied, what you believe the customer, uh, deserves. Things like that, but what's important is that you're challenging yourself, right? That that you're saying, hey, we believe this is the path, but have we challenged other paths to confirm that this is the path? Because I, I think that's, I think that's where companies lose their edge when they say, hey, this is the way we've always done it, so this is the way we do it, which is exactly how the company that's gonna eat your lunch, right, gets introduced. I always think of companies like this is maybe a bad example, maybe not, of Intuit. You know, into it's actually a phenomenal company as far as its performance. Like the, the fact that it was able to buy companies like Credit Karma or or MailChimp and things like that just shows like how much strength there is. These weren't transactions. They were not small transactions, but at the same time, here's a company that still builds TurboTax like it's being installed on Windows 311, right? It's not. Like nobody there is like, hey, shouldn't this be like a super cool like web 3.0 style UX or something like they're like, nope, Windows 311, right? 14 floppy disks to install it, right? And they still use the same jokes when it's loading. I love turbo. I I love the idea of TurboTax. I use TurboTax, but it is easily the most outdated piece of shit software I've ever seen, and I can't figure out how that isn't a call for literally a million other companies to be able to dominate that space, but, but, but that's my point. Here is a product that clearly has not evolved, uh, which to me is dying for a competitor.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, and yet for whatever reason, I mean, I guess part of it, there's just there there's there's a lot of, a lot of weight to the incumbency there, right? So that that's part of it. But yeah, they don't they haven't evolved, right,

Wil Schroter: but if they don't change and I think for many of us, change is scary. Uh, change is not only scary because it's tough for us because as leadership, you know, we're taking a gamble every time we make a change. It's tough for us to be able to take the entire organization, all the people associated, customers, investors, right, and get all of them to change and get all of them on board with that change, because they look at changes being scary as well. I think in general, this kind of Comes back to the fact that founders, if we're gonna evolve, right, if we're gonna, if we're gonna change who we are, you know, we've got to be willing to evolve. Ryan, I can't think of anybody that has done really well, that hasn't been willing to kind of burn it all down at least once to do it differently, you know.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, yeah, no, for sure, in the startup space, absolutely not. It's uh it's part of it. I think, you know, but, but let's let's stick on that. The the burn it all down and start again thing, right? Where do you stand on small versus radical pivots, right? Like I feel like this is in in the startup space, we often just see like there's these wholesale changes and sometimes that works out. We hear the stories where it works, right? And the ones that that where it doesn't work, we, we don't hear about them because they just disappear. But like, how can we try to approach these things from a minor tweak versus a total overhaul perspective? Because to me, that's always significantly easier, right? Behavioral change, the fear factors, all that stuff goes down. But how often in your, in your recollection was it sort of, we can do this by making a bunch of little turns versus trying to shove the Titanic all at once past the iceberg.

Wil Schroter: I think it's a great point. I think that the best way to start is by showing up today, tomorrow, and opening the conversation with your team about whatever topic it is, no matter how minor. Say, hey, let's level set here, uh, step one, none of us knows the answer. We all have opinions, we all have strong opinions on what we think the answer might be. But the answer itself, we can't know until we've taken action and responded. So if we're gonna pivot to a new product, you might have a strong opinion of why it won't work, but let's both agree that neither of us actually knows. Right? So we can't argue this or prevent ourselves from evolving from a position of certainty. You can't possibly do that because blah blah blah, right? You can't possibly do that and there might be risks, but it doesn't mean you can't possibly do that. And so I think for for all of us as founders, if we're going to evolve, if, if we're going to be able to adapt and change the organization, or maybe prevent ourselves from staying on this ridiculous path that is not getting us any further, that's putting us kind of like out to pasture as we Speak, or it's not making any money or not keeping us viable. If we can't take our ego off the table, if we can't get to the point where we're willing to make a wholesale change for the better of the company, even if it's at the expense of us, then we're never gonna adapt, we're never gonna evolve, and we deserve that faith. But if we can change that, if we can change that process, if we can change that process ourselves and be open to making those changes and evolving the way we need to, then our business could be 100x what it is today, if we just let it.

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