Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the start up therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of start ups.com will Schroeder. Well, hearing a lot of chatter and rattle right now, we are in uh Q one of 2024 and we're seeing some consolidation in terms of the checks that are being written, particularly the VC space and they're not being distributed as widely as some people would like. And there's some complaints that people are saying like, hey, they're giving money to people who have already failed. Why would they do that? Why don't they let some new people try and fail too? They're not saying try and fail, but like, let's talk about why that's happening right now and why that's not really the, the wrong approach. We're
Wil Schroter: seeing more of it now, right? We're seeing more of it, you know, in current terms, but to be real, like this trend has gone on for a very long time where people are always complaining they're like, oh my God, that founder failed miserably and look, they just raised more money and nobody seems to understand why that is and, and I think it's a gross misconception of how we look at founders, how investors look at founders and how we look at failure, right? So I, I think what we talk about today is we talk about why those folks that are getting that second life, that second check, et cetera are probably the best investments possible. And again, I know people look at that and they say, oh, well, how could that be? They failed? And it's like, I don't, how could you not understand how this, how this business works, right? Especially among founders.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I know that's the thing like when I hear this from laypeople, right? People who aren't in the, in the start up space aren't founders. I have a lot more patience for it when I hear this coming from other founders, like, like I don't wanna come down hard anybody but like I get a little salty about this, right? I know you do too. It's, it's hard not to, it's like pick the Super Bowl that Tom Brady lost. And then be like, why would we ever bet on that guy again? I think that the problem is what we see is the failure, right? Well, what we see goes well beyond that, I think what a lot of people see is just that moment of failure and they forget that. Like you're basically saying, like, look, I bet on the Preakness and my horse came in second, right? Never do that again. Your, your horse was the second best horse in the world. Right. That's not bad. This, it's not, it ran backwards. Right. It didn't fall over dead. Right. It wasn't the slowest horse in the world and somehow all of a sudden when things don't work out exactly as we hope when it's not IP OS and acquisitions, it's abject failure. Like there's a pretty big spectrum between those two points. And I'd argue that founders who make it to that level are a lot closer to the success end of the spectrum than the failure random spectrum.
Wil Schroter: Let's build on that because we've just seen a massive amount of carnage right from companies that especially the folks that actually made it to the IP O which is like the Super Bowl. It's the hardest thing to ever get to and have failed. Miserably. A wish comes to mind. Here's a company that scaled like crazy hit. The IP O had a great IP O had a great half second after the IP O and now it is worth pennies on
Ryan Rutan: the dollar wish I hadn't invested in them.
Wil Schroter: Well, I did so I wish I had the money back. And so I look at it and I, and I think to myself, OK, take that founder. Oh, I don't know. Right. I, I know of him but I definitely don't know. Think of how few people could even get to that level, right. Much less mess it up. But we take this cynical view where we say, oh, well, he failed, you know, he, he got AD IP O and it's, it's done horrible. Ok. Right. Again,
Ryan Rutan: revisit the first half of that sentence a couple dozen times and then come back to me, he got it to IP O. Right. Right.
Wil Schroter: And so there's this notion that somebody builds something, they spend a lot of money and this is, this is where people get salty. Ah, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars and it's gone. Yeah, they did. Ok. And it happens and, and I'm not defending those actions. Maybe they were totally boneheaded moves. Right. But I gotta tell you, I know enough of these folks who have done this and their intentions were always pure. Right? They were trying to build something, they were trying to build something great and it didn't work right again. Like, we'll probably beat the hell out of the Super Bowl analogy. But, like they tried to win the Super Bowl and it didn't work. Right. But to think that, like when somebody makes it to that level, right. You know, again, let's go back to the Super Bowl and alley is able to make it to the NFL to begin with, which is like, 0.000001% of society and then gets to the highest level and then loses. You're like, oh, you lost, like, nah, no, not
Ryan Rutan: really. Not not quite, I think the other part that makes it really hard stomach sometimes is when you hear the comments, like, you know, if I'd had that kind of capitalization in my start up. Uh huh. Sure. Number one, you didn't and there was a reason for that. Right. You didn't pitch as well. Your idea wasn't as compelling, whatever it was. Right. You didn't get that money, right. So you don't get to pretend that it would have gone better if you'd spent it. So it just drives me nuts, man. Like I just in general, like as a community of founders, anytime I see somebody else taking shots at other founders, it hurts, right? Like we know how hard this shit is. Stick together, right? Don't, don't kick them when
Wil Schroter: they're down. Absolutely. And so I think what we wanna do and I say it like in the founder community or in the community at large is to give a failed founder this Scarlet letter, right? And, and so the idea is that, oh, you failed. So now you are failed founder. Now, imagine if we zoomed out a bit and we said cool, if we're handing out scarlet letters, here's a few that I'd like to hand out anyone that's ever been in a failed personal relationship, marriage dating. What have you, you now have a scarlet letter. No one should ever date you again because you tried it and you failed. Right? Well, no. Ok. Well, that, that, that doesn't really make sense if you're at a job that you didn't do well in cool, you are a failed employee. No one should ever hire you again. Right. I mean, like, when you start to realize how I'm using these ridiculous examples for the very point that you can't take one moment in time and say that that human is only representative of that one failure. Right. That's insane.
Ryan Rutan: Right. It'd be chalking an entire career up to a single game or maybe a season, right? Or maybe a time with a team, whatever it is, right? And look, I get some of the reasoning behind this too and what it almost always comes down to if I, you know, if you peel back down, you start really talking to a founder who's doing this, who's denigrating some of their founder. What I typically find is that they're doing this to make themselves feel better, right? They're like, look, uh they had all this and, and they failed, makes them feel better about wherever they are right now. But like, let's not do that. We don't need to create, you know, these non objective comparisons with people who really went out and tried to do something to prop ourselves up a bit easier ways of doing it, try breathwork, yoga, meditation, something.
Wil Schroter: No, that, that is typically where it comes from the nature of all of it is just kind of reinforcing our own insecurities and we're projecting outward, but we've also again, the whole false premise which is, oh, that person failed. So they are now a failure, right? And like, yes at that, like pretty objectively, right?
Ryan Rutan: They failed that thing. Let
Wil Schroter: me point the canon at myself. OK. So over a 30 year career, I've started nine companies, four of those have failed. Now let me quantify a bit across those nine companies in really those 30 years. I've generated billions of dollars of revenue, right? Not hundreds of thousands billions of dollars of revenue across these, these companies right now, if you were to say yeah, but he failed at this one. So he is failure guy and he is not to be given any more capital or any more opportunities. You would have given up billions of dollars of revenue. What the, how, how short sighted can you be?
Ryan Rutan: Remember when was it was Michael Jordan go play golf for a while? Didn't that happen? Right. What if we chalked up like his ability as an athlete to the failure at golf or like Bo Jackson went and actually Bo Jackson did pretty well at baseball and football. I'll shut up now where my, my my knowledge and history of sports doesn't work out that well. But like we can't just look at that one experience to your point like a singular experience, a singular moment in time that's encapsulated in, in one failure does not make the person a failure right, does not make the founder a failed founder. So like the idea that investors should just write them off or that anyone should write them off on that premise. Ludicrous. Right?
Wil Schroter: And just the long list of companies that have been created by quote failed founders is hilarious. Right? And it's almost like a rite of passage that you don't build something great until you fail at something first. Right. And, and again, like Mark Zuckerberg had something, I think it was, if it was so long ago, it's called Wire Hog, it was like a MP3 P to P sharing business or something like that before Facebook. Is he a failure? I just want to be because that didn't work. No. Right. Steve Jobs. Again, we're going top the food chain here, right? Jobs started next. Computing, right? How many of you in our audience own a next computer? Zero, right? Because it failed miserably. Is Steve Jobs a failure? Should we not give him any more money? Right. You know, back in the day, right? Like it's insane that we even think in these terms. Now, let me flip it just a little bit. I'm more concerned not with the vitriol from the Peanut Gallery, right? I'm more concerned with how that in that the founder feels about themselves whereby the founder is like, oh I'm failed founder. Fuck that. No, you're not. Yes, it failed. You are not a failed founder. You're a founder who failed that's
Ryan Rutan: different. You're a founder who failed at something specific. Right. And it's one game or one season out of your, out of your career and, and it's the learning, right? Like, think of it as the minor leagues. Right. And then AAA Ball and then pro. Right. I don't know why I'm going back to sports. I really don't, I'm not even sure I got those leagues in the right order. The point being a lot of this stuff is preparatory, right? I mean, you know, the failure does stack up into something unless you were just making the same boneheaded mistake over and over again and somehow got people to give you money to do that, you know, shame on them for not checking better and, and, and shame on you for making the same mistake. But like if you're making mistakes, you're learning, you're accumulating. So, so many things that become highly valuable, not just to investors. You know,
Wil Schroter: the other thing too is I think for founders specifically, our performance is so quantified by the fact that we have a whole company in a PNL and all these things and all these people, et cetera, all these moving parts, product market fit, et cetera that when we fail, it is so obvious, it is so obvious, right? Let me put that in comparison to kind of any other job, right? If you're a doctor, not, not a surgeon, I want to say
Ryan Rutan: there's some objective there too. Yeah.
Wil Schroter: If you are a doctor and you're just not that good at your job, kind of, nobody can tell. Right. Like, if you're a GP and you're giving B minus C plus advice, right. Like you can kind of get by and I'm pointing to a doctor. Right. I'm trying to make a stronger argument if you're an engineer at some random company and you're not shipping code fast enough or your code tends to break like there's no spotlight on that. Right. Yeah, maybe a couple of people in your department are kind of worked up. But
Ryan Rutan: that's it also amazingly think about what those two cases went through to get to where they were, right, an extremely rigorous set of training and yet failures still happen and yet we don't really see them as much right to your point. It's so glaringly obvious in the founder space and remind yourself this is our training ground right? There isn't a school where you go. There are schools that have entrepreneurship programs. Sure, we can talk about the value of those at a different time. The learnings that you take away particularly around things like fundraising, right? Things like scaling right there is nowhere you go to learn how that's gonna work specifically for your, your company. And so the idea again that we're attaching failure to those things, yeah, it was an attempt, right? And it should always be seen that way. Sometimes attempts succeed. Sometimes they fail, but we have to take them right? And again, with very little training, very little preparation. And so, you know, take it easy on yourselves. Founders. If you did fail, it's ok. Again, one notch on the, the resume, right? Not, not forever written in stone, not the scarlet letter that people want to hand you. Right. And,
Wil Schroter: and again, you what I'm really trying to get at is like everybody fails in their jobs at some 0.100%. The difference is we have this massive spotlight on our failures, right? In other words, if Jeff in engineering was six months behind on his project, right, it doesn't show up in techcrunch like as an expose and how shitty Jeff is at coding, right? Right. Even though he's just as much of a failure at his function as a CEO that now again, I'm trying to point out just when folks are trying to assess or look at founders that they give them this kind of unreasonable lens. I, I also say the same goes for like celebrities, right? Where their lives are put under a microscope and they're just like doing dumb shit like everyone else does, right? The difference is their lives show up, you know, every detail. So that said, I, I just wanna kind of take that back to the founder for a second and say, hey, founders, if you have failed, yes, you failed. So did everyone else. The difference is you've just got a huge spotlight on yours. Right. And, and you have more responsibility. Yes, we signed up for that, but also understand that, like we are also human. Correct.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. No, I think, yeah, the cascading nature of founder failures is a big part of it. Right. It's like when other people fail in their job function. Sure, it has knock on effect. Yes, there's ripple there. But, you know, when a founder fails and look, let's, let's also call it what it is. It's typically not just a founder failure, right? It's a failure of the team. Ultimately, the founder is the one who's responsible for it. The founder is sitting at the top of the stack and they're the most visible one in the picture. But, right, everybody contributed to that failure as well to varying degrees. It just happens to be that the founder is gonna carry all the weight of that failure. And when the founder does fail, right? Like we do make bad decisions, we do, you know, and not necessarily bad decisions, we make the wrong choice. Sometimes you're just at that fork in the road and it's like, do we go B to B? Do we go B to C? Let's go B to C. Whoops. That didn't work. We failed. OK. Cool. All right. But that then ripples down to everybody else. And it's why this matters so much more than Jeff in engineering because people lose their jobs, investors lose their money.
Wil Schroter: Let's take that back, let's take that back to the actual investors, you know, kind of the, the core of this when investors are looking at a founder who failed, what exactly are they expecting to get on that second bite of the apple, so to speak on that second attempt from these founders. And I think it comes down to experience 100%. Hm I don't think we understand how much value there is even in a failure to the amount of experience that was gained that sadly, you can only gain by having gone through the experience.
Ryan Rutan: And man, there, there's some like, you know, if you think about the lessons you've taken from your victories and your wins versus the lessons you've taken from your failures, at least in my case. And I would argue probably most founders, we spend a hell of a lot more time thinking about where we screwed up than when things went. Right. Right. We have to, right. We go back and we beat those things up and we, we're analytical about it. We tear them apart and a lot comes from that. Right. Like again, like I, you know, we tend not to see founders making the same mistakes over and over and over again, right? The environment doesn't really allow for it either. And so the experience that comes from, that is one that just absolutely galvanizes people and makes them into better operators, better thinkers, you know, you, you develop frameworks, you develop team, you develop structures, all these things start to come out. I mean, there are hundreds of benefits to running the start up company that have nothing to do with whether it succeeds or not in terms of the founders, knowledge and investors understand this very clearly, right? Like yes, we saw, you know, somebody go into the champion that the title bout and get knocked out. That doesn't mean that they don't get a rematch and it doesn't mean that, you know, right now we've got some video of that. Let's learn from those mistakes. Let's learn how to slip that jab. Let's learn how to do all these things that will allow us to persevere and, and to maybe win the next title shot. These things matter so much and particularly to investors, right? Because otherwise what you're saying, and I think I said at the top of the episode, otherwise, what you're saying is I'd rather bet on the complete unknown. Is this what we're saying they should do, right? Pick some random out of a crowd of founders and say you at that point, what are they doing right now? You're saying, like, let's just make this completely non objective, right? Again, failure isn't forever and experience counts a ton, combine those two things and it starts to make a lot more sense why we see follow on investment with founders who have quote unquote failed, you
Wil Schroter: 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.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 talk about how few of them there are now. Ok. Let me also that right. I'm gonna use one of our favorite examples, our friend Adam Newman at wework, right? So wework has essentially the most spectacular failure of all time, right? And Adam Newman comes back and raises $300 million for his first round. Yes,
Ryan Rutan: that's, it's quite the precede,
Wil Schroter: quite the precede right now. Everyone's reaction, of course, is exactly what you'd expect. How can a guy who just gave up $10 billion you know, raise this kind of money? You know why? Because there's like 10 of him, right? And, and let me be specific about what that means in order to get Adam Newman's experience, you had to a raise $10 billion which kind of nobody did, right? So r right there, there's kind of no other hymn right, like Sam Altman now in a few others, but like the number of people that even can comprehend what that means, right? Are like ones of people. OK. Number two, you had to understand what it meant to actually operate at that level globally overnight, massive brand, massive media speculation, et cetera and be able to manage that dozens of people have dealt with that, right? Not thousands, right? Not at that level, right, at the leadership level, right, at the, at the very top uh level, next, you had to be able to build a brand that did hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, right? Ones, tens, maybe hundreds maybe of people that have ever done that. Right. Again. Going back to the folks that don't really understand what just happened here. You know, as far as the, the experience that was gained, if I'm an investor and I'm like, ok, Adam Newman failed clearly, but guess what? I know he understands what just happened, right, because my next option is to, to invest in Adam Newman who hasn't failed yet, right. Without any of that experience. Right. That sucks. They're not even remotely close.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I mean, when you get to that scale of investment in these types of opportunities, you need someone who's been there and done it right. You can, even if they failed, you want somebody who's at least made it close to summit because they know they know how to get there. At least right now doesn't guarantee that they're gonna summit the next time. Right. They may fail at the same point. They may fail somewhere else, but at least we can go, they've been that far, right. We can trust them to do that or to know what it took to get to that point. And I think it's just like there's so many other things that happen when you've achieved that level of success Because before the failure, there was a hell of a lot of success, right? This is often the case, right? There was success at fundraising, there was success at team building success at network building partnerships and there was success at uh generating revenue, right? They weren't making $0 right? You know, like everyone that I hear is like, oh yeah, they filled because he was meditating on the surfboard was he was he really is that what was going on? And so I think that it's so hard to quantify some of those things in terms of like the value of a founder, post failure. But in the case of like we're talking now like to your point, there are ones of these people think about what has occurred in that, think about what the value of that person is like, if you want to try to objectify it a bit, how many people can he pick up the phone and call that none of the other founders in that same set could Right. If you're thinking about like, who else could we invest in? It's gonna do something similar. Who else has that ability? Right. Who else has the power to do that has the, the employees are willing to follow him again, has all of these other assets that just come along for the ride and again, it's ones, tens, maybe hundreds of people in total. But in a given category, we're single digits,
Wil Schroter: stick with that. So last night, I'm at dinner, I met a founder dinner, right, with a handful of other founders and, and uh all of them listen to the podcast. So yes, guys, I'm talking about you right now. And among us, we've either raised or generated in revenue, probably 10 to $15 billion probably actually a lot more than that. So all guys who have kind of been to the big show if you will and there's like six or seven of us. Right. Right. Like I not 60 or 76 or seven right now. This is because you uh we're in Columbus, Ohio. Not exactly a tech Mecca. You
Ryan Rutan: all fit in a booth at Bob Evans.
Wil Schroter: There isn't an eighth person to invite me because they're literally are no, it's not even remotely close. Ok. Now, when we get together, it's an awesome group. When we get together, we talk very openly and honestly about really the things we struggle with, right? And what I consistently see with that group, it's hard to recognize during that time that you are in such an elite group of folks that even have these problems. And, and again, this isn't me questioning anybody's self-awareness. I'm saying, like you're just used to doing this stuff every day. And again, this is me going back to supporting the founder. You forget that no one else has these conversations, right? No one else has these conversations. Which means if I'm an investor and I'm like, cool, let me invest with. So is somebody with that kind of experience? There's nobody, right? So yes, I go back to the people that may have failed, but they're the only people that have been to the big show that understand why you would make one decision for another. And guess what making bad decisions is how you make good decisions because you know, not to do that again, which is called life. It's amazing. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: No, I, I think it's important and there's another, there's another aspect to that, right? Which is that if you've been down that path with them before, you've been down that path with them before you know, this individual at a very different level and you talked about this before will. But I think that for everyone who's sitting out there who hasn't gone down this path yet, it can be quite confusing because you don't know any investors and no investors know you. And so you don't know what that relationship looks like. So you just assume that's always the way it is. And there's somehow like we have this magical meeting, they're wowed by our pitch deck and then they decide to give us money. And yes, that's part of the process. But then on the other end of that, there's an entire relationship that's been formed there. Right? And just because you didn't win the battle doesn't mean that some camaraderie wasn't developed and some trust wasn't built. They believed in you once they may believe in you may not, right? They, they may also know that like I don't want to invest in that person again, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about these repeat investments into the same founders. And that's a big part. I think, I think the way you put it was, was perfect. It's the devil, you know, sure, I'd call him a devil. But yeah, we'll go with it.
Wil Schroter: I think in this case, folks don't understand the investors purview, right? So let, let me be more specific as an investor looking at deals. The biggest challenge I have isn't picking good ideas that like that's what everybody focuses on. It's picking good people that run those ideas. Now think of how crappy my decision opportunities are. They look something like this. Someone sends me a deck. Hopefully, I maybe got a referral from someone who validated them a little, maybe not so right out of the jump. I have very little back story in this human. Right. Second up the person, you know, we have a couple of emails that go back back and forth. They send me their deck and they present for 30 to 60 minutes based on that interaction, which is like barely a first date. I'm now making about 80% of my decision on them. Ok. Now the other 20% is gonna come through some diligence, et cetera. But I'll be honest, there's not that much time to get that much reps with them as a person and all you're getting is the business version pitching to me. I still don't know who the person is. I have a miniscule amount of human interaction data to go on to figure out who that person really is. And more importantly, we haven't done anything together. So I haven't been through some shit with them, which is how you actually learn who people are, right? If I were to create a parallel universe to this, it's dating. Imagine this is how it works. I have to get married and I'm gonna look at a whole bunch of profiles of people. 12 point powerpoint slides to determine who my mate is gonna be. I'm gonna spend 30 to 60 minutes with them in a single presentation. If you will, of who they are, I'm gonna spend a little bit of time afterward, but then I'm just gonna get married and that's it. That's all I know about this. Person. Right. How well do you think that process is gonna hold up very well? Right. So I illustrate that to say if you now have the choice between going through that ridiculous gauntlet and just throwing darts at a board with no idea who you're actually investing in or taking a second round with somebody that you've lived with now. And even though you had your fights and your troubles, whatever, you actually realize they're a really good person, you know, exactly how smart they are, you know, exactly what they're able to do and you get to invest in them again on something totally different. 100
Ryan Rutan: percent. You know, it's funny, I was thinking about my parallel universe example, would be the soccer team that I've played on here for five years and I've taken ownership in the last year and we're gonna have a way better season this partially because we changed our recruiting. We were using the method you just described for recruiting new players for several years, which is like, yeah, we heard about this guy. He sounds like a good player. Someone else told me that they're pretty good. We should sign them and they should play for our team. Right. Works out about as well as you'd imagine. Right. So, this year, what do we do? We heard about all these people and then we did a really surprising thing. We had them come and play with us. Right. But apart from that. So to go back to the failure thing, we pulled some people from teams that were failing, two teams were being removed from the league because of performance and I pulled players from both of those teams, right. They were failures, but I had played against them and I knew the players weren't failures, they had failed with that particular team. Uh but they were good players and we were able to go and recruit them and that level of experience, right? And I was playing against them, right. So we had this antagonistic relationship at least during games and, but that traveled path together tells you so much about an individual, right? How they're gonna perform, how they play, you know, how they react to good situations, to bad, what it's like to be across, you know, the, the, the line from them. And it's amazing. Right? And it's, it's been a lot of fun to go through that process this year and take some of those failures. And I mean, our team was, was a bit of a failure last year as well. And this year we're looking significantly better, more on that uh in, in upcoming episodes. Yeah, if I don't talk about it again, you'll know exactly how it ended.
Wil Schroter: I've also watched a handful of founders throughout my career that are particularly good at seeing the long view of working with their investors and not everybody by the way. Right. But I have seen some founders in this, I think it's a, there's a lesson here that are like, yeah, the start up didn't work. But my relationship with my investors is paramount and you know, I'm just honest with them, we're disappointed at the outcome. But I I saw to it like a general, one of the people that I saw do this extraordinarily well, was my old co-founder, Jamie Siminoff at Ring. Jamie did like six businesses like prior to ring, the one before that was, was with me. And that said, OK, not great, right? Like not, not, not Ring, but lots of investors had put money in Jamie over lots of different deals that didn't really work out, right? But they kept wanting to put money in with them. And again, back in the day, I didn't, I didn't just understand how it works. I hadn't raised a lot of money before. The reason they kept putting money in Jamie, no matter what he was doing was because he focused on building a relationship with them. Like he focused on saying, hey VC person, what have you? I want to build a relationship with you so that we understand, hey, sometimes these things don't work out, but our relationship does, which is hard to do, easy to build relationships in good times, really hard to do it in bad times. And he was particularly good at it. And I was always amazed at his ability to basically, you know, build something. Have it not work, turn it down and then go right back to the same investor and say, hey, let's try it again and have them say, yeah, sounds good. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: And for the ones that stuck with him, it worked out fairly well with
Wil Schroter: Ring. Absolutely. And that's, that's kind of the thing. Like investors understand that start ups don't work, right. Like I think you have two classes of investor at a high level. You have one class that are professional investors that do this for a living, have lots and lots and lots of reps with how start-ups work and then everybody else, right? The first class that I just described is like 5% of investors, right? The other 95% because that pool includes your rich uncle that's just pissed off at you and doesn't want to talk to you at Thanksgiving anymore, right? Like there's just a whole lot more of those people. They don't understand that start ups fail at a high level and or don't care, right? But the folks that, like, I used to go back to Jamie that Jamie was working with, they were pros, they understood that like, you know, you better player and sometimes that player loses games, but it's still a good player when you're seeing um folks, you know, reinvest in people who quote failed founders. It's for that reason because they understand what a good athlete looks like and they know how to invest in them, you know what I
Ryan Rutan: mean? 100%. And I, and I think it's, it's important to note there that, that they are truly reinvesting in that founder, not the idea also the idea, of course, but I would argue in those cases, the founder was the far more important element that influenced the decision more so than the idea, right? Ideas are everywhere. They're betting on the operator, not on the, uh the idea itself,
Wil Schroter: right? And again, they're betting on very few operators. They're looking at the the pool of investment opportunities and they're like there are one or two people that are available now, you know, kind of like in the transfer portal, so to speak, that I can pick up the Adam Newman's of the world would be the top of that list, right? But as much as people don't really understand it, there are so few of those people and that's why people clamor to give them more money. Be one because they have the relationships with them. But two because they're like, man, I want somebody with that level of experience. I want somebody that's been to a Super Bowl before they're most likely to get back there, right? Versus all these other people that I've got 30 minutes with and who knows what they're gonna do.
Ryan Rutan: They showed up with a football, that's not enough,
Wil Schroter: you know, founders think it's, it's all about, hey, just who has a great idea. It's kind of, there's tons of great ideas. Right. There are very, very few people that have the wherewithal to be able to operate and make these things work and yes, they raised maybe a bunch of money and yes, maybe it's all gone. But there are very few people that could even pull that off that you said earlier when people say, oh, if I had the money, dude, if you had the money you would have failed. Just the same. Probably worse,
Ryan Rutan: probably worse. Yeah. The statistics tell us this. Right. Yeah. Now I think that, um, at this point, like ideas are the table stakes. They are the entry fee to, to even being somewhere you can have the conversation. They are not what gets you there. I mean, when was the last time you saw an idea? Well, we see lots of folks for those of you listening will and I see more ideas than we have room in our heads to contain them. And I am so rarely presented and this isn't, this isn't a bad thing, but it's so rarely. It's just like the idea itself is like, oh my God, I just want to go talk about. This is something I've never seen, never heard. It's, it's so novel, so new, so different and seems so valuable. It's so rare that those things line up that way. Right. It's more like talk to this really cool founder yesterday and I really like the way they're thinking about the problem. Right. I, I don't even care about the solution yet necessarily. It's just like it's the, the way this person approaches it and I'm thinking about them. It's not the idea. It's so rarely the idea. We do talk about ideas. But will, what would you say? The ratio, like one out of 100? It's like one of us. It would just, I'm sorry, like just our slack chats when you and I are back and board like, is it oh, saw something really cool today versus talk to a cool founder, like I would say 99 out of 100. It's founder first. Right.
Wil Schroter: Here's what I would say. I'd say that while we're busy trying to like, you know, knock founders down, so to speak as a community, we should be thinking of this totally differently. We should be thankful. We should be thankful that investors are willing to go back. More importantly, we should be thankful that founders are willing to go back after that. Apocalyptic hell scape that they just went through right in the in all the life that gets sucked out of you to make it through that and have to take that through all the mud and everything toward the end. We should be thankful that there are founders that are willing to suit up again. So here's what I would say if I'm looking at two founders that, that are looking for money and one founder is doing it for the first time which I applaud. But the second founder has been through hell and back and is willing to suit up again as a founding veteran, that's the person that's getting my money. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on start ups.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.com site, you'll find all of these resources available.