Welcome back to another episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is RyanRutam from Startups.com. Join as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Will Shroder, will as of recording this episode, we have just entered into Q4 of 2023. It's tough times out there for startup companies and we're talking a lot and lots of founders. How often, how many people are thinking right now? Should I quit? Should I let it go? Probably all of them. In some
capacity, like, I don't mean it. Everyone's running for the hills, but tough times, everyone's wondering, is this still a good idea? If I'm being honest, the answer's probably no. And I know people are listening and going, what are you talking about? I'm going to get pumped up in this episode. I don't want to be told that I should be calling it quits, but I think there is a legitimate line that we will try to define here between quitting in that feeling of failure,
et cetera, and just letting go. The latter being, you know, it's probably time to move on, but how can we feel good about the decision? How can we not feel like we're quitting in those notions of being a failure versus just moving on, letting go in doing something that's essentially a very rational, mature decision. And I think a lot of this comes from our perception of those two
things, you know what I mean? For sure. For sure. But I, you know, in the startup space, there's no, there's so many more signals that you're going the wrong direction than you're going to write. I think this is all running into this conundrum. It's just like, you know, I don't feel like doing this anymore. I'm tired. I don't want to do this anymore. It's starting to hurt me health-wise,
relationship-wise, whatever it is. But then always that thought in the back your head. But if I just push a little more, maybe, you know, around the next corner, around the next corner, it's funny. This is me every time I go fishing. Even if it's the worst fishing day ever, I'm like, one more cast. I'm just just, just, you know, the last 7,000 haven't worked. One more cast. I just, and this will be the time. This will be the one that bites. So how do we start to toe that line?
Here's where it goes horribly wrong for me. And let me explain to you, somebody, that's my personal therapist called Dr. Ego. And she lives in my head. And she only wants to have a session at like three in the morning when I'm staring at the ceiling and being like, what the hell did I get myself into? I don't know. I feel like she comes out of the time. I feel like I've spoken directly to her on at least a few occasions. Maybe my wife. No, no, I just made your ego. Yeah, yeah,
you go, yeah, trust me. And it's this amazing thing because like I have more conversations with, you know, I'm joking or like Dr. Ego to myself than anyone ever, obviously. And every time I have this conversation, I have, you know, the angel and the devil. The angel is this very rational person that's out to protect me. And the angel is always like, look, this has been a bad idea for a long time. And you keep torturing yourself. There actually isn't any upside for your health,
for everything you should move on. And then the devil and the devil is what makes me a founder. Okay. The devil is what got me to where I am. And the devil is like, come on, dude, are you serious with this? Yeah. Right. You're gonna quit now. Yeah, you're gonna quit now. Come on, who quits? Like, who's ever done something great by quitting? Right? And I'm like, I don't know, I don't tell you. You know, look how far I've gotten this to this. I'm like, wow, yes,
sort of. You've gotten this into some trouble. So I look at it and I think to myself, I know the difference in the two, what I'm trying to, wait, do I keep moving with this? Is emotional? And it's a level of self perception. How do I perceive the difference? And despite that, don't make a lick of difference. It doesn't. No, the same spot. You go still
gets to shout a little louder. Yeah. I think it's tough. You know, at the early stages, we've talked about this a lot like the early stages, there's times you just have to put in in order an amount of effort, right? You have to throw yourself at there's no version. Like, like you said, this is part of what makes us founders without that, you know, obstinate drive that says, despite all the evidence in front of me right now, I'm gonna keep going. At the early stage,
totally fine, right? Because everything's a variable, nothing's a constant. I think that the, the line starts to appear at the point where we've turned some of this stuff into constants. And if all of the constants tend to be negative signs, this is where we have to start paying a little more attention and saying, there may be an objective decision to be had here that says that this may not be the right thing for me. The problem is, we talk about this all the time,
a lot of this isn't tied up in objective logical decisions, right? We are deciding based on ego, we're deciding based on emotion, right? And again, like that is the fuel theory stage, but at some point we got to shift off the booster rockets that are filled with nothing but hubris and hope and actually start to say, like, okay, does this even make sense to any level?
Are we getting any type of traction? Is there anything about this that I still want to be doing where I'm getting punched in the face every day and starting to be tired of it, right? How about this? If it were a job, and I say, hey, I called you, said, hey, Ryan, I'm working at, does even matter the name of the company because I don't want to corrode the, the, uh, it was a job no one would ever invest. No one of you even received their benefits package.
They would all, they would all be exactly like, like, I haven't got paid in three years. I've burned through all my savings coming to work every day. My health is in shambles. I'm going through divorce because of this guy. I never see my wife, you know, so on and so forth. I'm thinking about maybe quitting and you'd be like, are you out of your mind? What are you still there? Why now? Yeah. What's going to wrap you?
You know, in any other context, we would look at the same conditions and we wouldn't even think twice about it. That's why I'm saying the ego, which is I built this, I created this, I invested this, sunk costs fallacy on top of everything. It's not the same. We don't walk away from a startup and the same way we walk away from a job. Now, some people are very attached to their jobs and if they lost it, you know, they'd be upset about, I totally get that. Man, this is a little bit different.
Most of the time, this is a little bit different. A lot different. Even, even just one simple factor, which is that if you lose your job or you quit your job, you can generally like everybody kind of does it to somebody or you justify it. You know, I wasn't the right fit, wasn't this, wasn't that. There's sort of culpability that could exist somewhere else, right? We can blame somebody else for the reason that we're leaving that job. We're going to leave your startup.
That's 100% your fault. All your effort, right? Either worked or didn't work in your perception because of you, because the decisions you made and this work, it's really dangerous, because you and I have both. That's a really good point. Ideas that just don't hand out, right? And we push it well beyond the point of reason by just saying, because this was
my idea and it has to live or die based on my own efforts, not always the case, right? You can just have something the market doesn't want, no matter what you do, you're not going to get that. No, that's where we pay. We talk all kinds of the things, but for purposes of today's episode, I think it's a really important distinction that because it's all generated from you, it's all by you, it makes it really hard to walk away because there's not really a scapegoat available,
right? Yeah, it's crazy too. So we take that to the grave, so to speak, right? We're like, oh, no, because it's all me, because it's my fault, I deserve this outcome. That's dangerous. I deserve this outcome. And technically, you do. You literally created this outcome. I mean, but by virtue that you deserve it, to an extent, the problem that we have because of Oregos is that we are so willing to just keep digging in and keep tearing at ourselves and
keep making it worse as if the torture is this penance for our outcome, right? And honestly, like I would love to say it's here and there. It's everywhere. I've never seen a founder at the end of their rope, so to speak. We're things we're going pretty well, right? I'm not obviously the definition of end-of-year rope, but everyone by the time they get to the point, the discussion that we're having now, do I quit or do I let go, is a mess? Is a mess?
And statistically, with the rate of failures, it's kind of the more likely outcome. It's everybody's mess, right? This is the likely outcome. Yeah. You'd be like getting married and being shocked that you're getting divorced. Nobody wants to get divorced, of course, but statistically, that's probably going to happen. The population does. Yeah. So I think addressing that is important. I think knowing that this is the
likely outcome helps and yet that still feels like an everybody else problem, right? Everybody else is going to suffer from this. I am not going to. And we kind of have to have that mentality at some point, right? Because if we just go, should I start my startup company? Well, let's use math. No. It stops right there. Why? Because math, right? Math is going to tell you you should not do this. And so we get so used to ignoring the
math. We get so used to ignoring the objective evidence and just going with our gut, right? Which is just a different name for our ego in this case. And just saying that like, look, I believe I can do this. I want to believe in myself. I want to believe in the product. Other people have told me that I should believe in this, right? They keep keep going, keep going, keep going. And again, like there is value in that fairly stage, but this shit has a half-life,
and it needs to be less than your half-life. So that doesn't end up consuming you to the point where you can't walk away from this, right? Like all these notions around, you know, you were saying before, like your ego's going to tell you not to quit. Quitters never accomplish anything. All right? You know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger or permanently injures you. All right? It's a different way of getting at it. Yeah, kills you or it does kill you, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What doesn't kill you sometimes also kills you. Let's talk about what the difference is. What is quitting? You know, because that's really what we're talking about. Like, I think we all think letting go is kind of like this zen kind of like thoughtful outcome. And I've never had that outcome personally where I felt good about it. So let's talk about the part where we all feel bad about it. You know, let's define what that is. Let's define what quitting
actually looks like. In our minds, quitting means this. It was supposed to go well, but I was too weak. I'm using weak to mean a lot of things, but I was too weak to see a through. I was supposed to play the rest of the game, but I was too tired and I couldn't make it. So I had to leave, right? That's quitting. This notion that that should have been able to do more. And I chose not to. Now, the really small, but a pretty important part of that is that had I stayed, the outcome would
have been better. Right. At I stayed, the outcome would have been better, which I have zero proof of, but I'm a hundred percent sure you actually have some evidence to the opposite, right? You got some evidence to the opposite. You've been at this for five years. It hasn't worked yet. What's five more weeks going to do for you? Right? Probably nothing. So an example is like if I were to do ghost of Christmas future, and I would say, look, I can tell you for sure this is not going to work. And
right, I think you and I are ghosts of Christmas future for a lot of founders. And we try to be cool about it though, right? We try to be cool. And we're like, okay, you know, maybe consider this, consider this. But in the back of our minds, we're also like, man, dude, like this isn't going to end well for you. We always try to encourage people and give them the right path. We don't want to lead people astray. We'll shoot them straight. But at the same time, we don't want to kill people's
hopes and dreams for them either, right? Because I never want to be in a position personally where I sent somebody down the wrong path at the cost of what they were going to otherwise achieve. The way how we see it is the responsibilities to maintain the flame, right? But sometimes it's not going to catch where it is, right? So we got to maintain the flame. We want to keep the spark within the founder. But sometimes you have to have to be straight feedback. It's like, it doesn't look like
it's working. What are you going to do next? Right? How do we transfer the energy, the passion, all the stuff that you have? You would be a good founder. It's just this isn't the right project. And so it's again, like, how do you deliver that feedback in a way that helps people see this probably isn't going to work? You know, as bad as seeing extra pride more common than seeing
somebody quit early, I'm not sure that I could ever measure that. But you definitely know when you run to those founders who've been at this project for way too long, well past the point of no return. And it's the worst thing to see because you know that it's likely to have an impact on the next one and not in a positive way. If there is a next one, right? I've seen people just shoot their shot.
They just burn out and it's like, man, I would have loved to have seen what they built next. But there's not going to be a next because the first one of the second winner, whichever one we're on right now, went well beyond its prime. And now they're just carrying around the baggage and the scarring from that. 100%. I think that again, this concept that why don't want to be a quitter? Okay. And again, the problem with that thought process, the problem with that thought process,
is it assumes quitting is bad. It assumes quitting would have otherwise translated into a positive outcome. If I were to say you're at the casino table and you're losing, the longer you stay there, the more you're going to lose. You're like, well, I don't want to quit. No, you're going to lose more. There's no version where it all turns around and it becomes awesome. You're going to lose all your money and the longer you stay, the more you'll lose. But that was the last few times. Well, the next
time it's going to be different. Yeah, of course, of course. Right. But here's the thing. But if you knew for certain that it wasn't going to work, you might feel a little bit better about it, right? But you don't. And so we create these silly fantasies that usually only the founder creates or the remaining investors. And they said, but if, but if, but if, right? And look, I've been past that point. You know, I've been past that point where I had kind of lost everything and had to fight it all
back and get it back. And you know what? If at that time, a smarter version of me could have stepped in said, dude, it's probably time to like pull up the stakes and go do something else. It would have actually been the right decision. Yes, things turned around and worked, right? But statistically, I was down like a 1% chance that that was all going to work. And it was not a good idea. Because the 99% of chance that it didn't work would have put me in six figured debt by the time I was 22
years old in a way that I would never paid off, right? It literally crippled me for the next decade or so of my life. So it wasn't a good bet, right? It happened to work. But chance of that ever happening again is almost zero. 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 a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's okay.
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. Right. Yeah. The hindsight does not provide clarity here. That's really the problem, right? Because, you know, we can quit. And then two years from now, something happens. The market were like,
oh, if I had just hung on, right? If maybe it would have worked now. Well, maybe, maybe, who knows? There's just so much speculation built into that and even looking back at it, you can't really clearly analyze that and say, ah, that was the right or the wrong decision. I think it has to be based on a couple of things. So for me, you know, looking at the energy that you've got right now, depending on how long you've been doing this, that's going to be a really good indicator of whether
it's really, whether you're quitting or letting go. To your point, letting go is something that should be seen as a little bit cathartic and kind of peaceful, right? You know, I'm sitting here in the lotus position, letting go of my startup as opposed to banging my head against the wall and quitting. But I think that when we look at it as a whole, right, founders who are in that position where we've gone far enough that we've proven some things, maybe not in our favor, likely not.
But we now understand some of what's going on, right? It's not completely nascent. This isn't brand new. And we've never not talked to a customer that we have talked to people. We sold some stuff. Things are happening. This is not catching the way we wanted it to. At some point, you have to ask yourself, like, even if I do stay around, can I actually, right? Do I really have the energy,
the mental fortitude? And if I do push beyond this, at what cost, right? What point am I going to start to really hurt myself and my chances, like I was saying earlier, my chances are going to do something else, right? I mean, I've seen this too, where it didn't just impact their startup career, impacted all their career. They burnt themselves out to the point where they couldn't even pick up the sticks and go find a job immediately after because they were so wrecked, so burnt out
from having pushed well beyond that mark. Again, look, a lot of sympathy for this one, a lot of empathy for this one because I've done it too. It's so difficult because, as we've said, even when you're looking back at it in hindsight, it's not entirely clear whether the decision was correct or not at the time. Okay, well, let's build on that in the hindsight. And was this a good idea or not? Couple of things we can consider. Number one, was it taking away from my life, right? Check
all the boxes. Okay, emotionally, was I in a good place? Obviously not if we're having this conversation, right? Second, are my relationships in a good place? Obviously not if we're having this conversation. Are my finances in a good place? Obviously not. Like, this is again, using another analogy here, this is your friend who is in a very abusive relationship and they won't let go because it might
get better. Right. I just have to do something else to fix them, right? Yeah. The only guarantee is that you're miserable right now. So let it go is taking stock of what's actually happening right now and saying, you know, this actually isn't okay. I'm not okay with this. And by the way, nor should you be, nor should you be okay with this. Your startup is literally making you miserable. Don't pretend like it's the only way of life. Crazy ideas. Number one, you can do literally
anything else. A better outcome than you have right now. Okay. Second, you can start another startup. Maybe it's not the next thing you do. Maybe get a job and then start a startup. So be it. The point is most of our pain that we have at this point is not only self-inflicted because we quite literally brought it on to ourselves, but it's accepted. We're letting ourselves accept that this
pain and this misery and everything that we're doing to ourselves is okay. And we're justifying it with this kind of amorphous outcome that we can either point to define or actually substantiate in any way. And so we convince ourselves that this must be okay to feel this way. You know, it's toward a higher goal. And I'll be honest, they usually isn't. It's usually just sucks. We're just too pigheaded to call on what it is. Yeah. Statistically, we know the answer, but
emotionally, we want it to be different. We need it to be different. Our ego has to have it be different. And so we continue to push. I think you said something really important there, which was if you find yourself miserable, right? There's a difference between being tired, you know, working through difficulties, having challenges, and feeling miserable, right? I think when you get to that point where you're like, I just don't want to do this anymore. There's enough wrong at that
point. You really have to lean back and ask why, right? Is it just that you're seeing? And sometimes looks a little hurdle, right? Talk to founders all the time or like, look, you know, I love building the product. I love doing the customer interviews. Now I'm at the point where I have to go start to sell this thing. And I'm super scared. I'm super nervous. I've never sold. I don't like it. I don't want to do it. And they start to get that feeling, right? And so before they embark on that, if I
found a word to say like, you know what? I just, I think I'm going to throw on the towel. That's quitting, right? Right. Right. Now, if I have sold for a year and it's still not catching, it's not working. I'm trying. And it's it turns out it's not me. Redstone, just my inability to sell. Or the market's selling me, right? That's a good time to let go. Or even if you just can't make that work, right? And you're miserable now because of this. And you realize there isn't really a
way out of this, right? I don't have enough money to hire anybody else. There's not any other way around this. It takes sales to do this. We can't get there, right? Now's a good time to start thinking about letting go, right? At the point you become miserable, right? Because it starts or hard, right? It's never going to be just like, this is Shangri-La and Rainbows. It's always fun
and easy. We're not saying that, right? Don't look for that period in time because you'll never find it, but you don't need to wait until you get to complete rock bottom and basically you're, because I don't know, man, I feel like more founders are literally forced to quit than decide to quit, right? It's not even that they let go. It's sort of taken from them, right? Just everything's gone. It emotionally bankrupts. Financial bankrupt, physically bankrupts. Like, this is not quitting either.
This is literally just dying alongside your startup. You know, there's another side to it too. We've talked about this before. The difference between playing the win and playing to not lose, typically when startups get to this point in the life cycle, we talk to the founders, we ask them the question, we say, is there a winning scenario anymore? Are you really just here because you're not willing to lose? That's very different. Startups don't win by not losing. Like, there is a time to play
defense. Most startups are in it right now. But if you're at a point, and I've been there, so I'm very familiar with this point, if you're at a point where you're like, I just don't want to see this thing fail. I don't want to be a failure, right? That's your ego, of course. But at the same time,
you're not playing to win anymore. There was a time when you started your startup, we got fired up what the product was when you're getting your first customers, when you're out pitching investors, whatever you're doing, where you had a fire in your belly that said, I want to build something. I want to make something amazing in the world. You were playing to win. That a bunch of shit happened. And then all of a sudden, you know, revenue didn't come in, funding around busted, whatever.
And now you're in a position where you've forgotten about winning your ego so wrapped up in not losing that you're not willing to let this go. And that's where the self-torture comes in. I've been there, a couple startups ago, when we ran out of money and we were running around for way too long, trying to raise money like 18 months past the point where we had been out of money and we should have been, we should have hung up our spurs. And I'm running myself into the ground. At some point,
I remember looking around at me like, you know what? I don't even think this is going to work anymore. Like, I'm, I'm nowhere near it's going to work. Now I'm just doing it because my ego tells me, I can't afford, you know, to let something fail because I've never failed at something at this magnitude before. And that's actually what I'm trying to achieve. The moment that that is true, it's kind of game over like a walking dead at that point. And it's a big real spot.
It is not super real. And I think the kind of the final phase of that one before the actual failure is then not only you're not, you're now playing not to lose. At some point, you actually admit that you've lost and I just kind of trying to close the gap or control the spin on what the loss looks like. And then I've watched founders do this for like over a year period where it's just like, they're just trying to control the descent. The thing is crashing, but they're like, maybe we can,
and maybe an attempt to water landing. I make this look a little bit better. Never ends well. Yeah. And look, that's natural. None of us want to fail. None of us are just so zen. We're like, oh my god, I worked at something that I cared about so much with all these people that I pulled into my life. And I just don't care about letting it go. That does not exist. Just so we're being clear, right? Like what we're saying is there's a point though on the other end of the spectrum where you probably
should be thinking in those terms, right? And I say this in Ryan, a lot of these episodes, I think we're talking to either past, present, or future versions of ourselves. At the past 30 years, my career, and I say, man, how many times would it have saved me by orders of magnitude to have been able to sit down and be honest about where the situation was and just walk away just to let it go? And I'll say this, I'm just to take this a bit further, all the times that I have, all the times
were actually did walk away and say, you know, yeah, maybe there's some upside there. Maybe, not word. I'll give you some examples. Ryan, I think how many people that have come through startups.com, you know, folks that we've hired, that we've had to let go. And no will will to anybody. This is not where I'm headed with this, but we parted company and we thought, you know what, we're good. Yep. That was the right decision. Yeah, for all different reasons, right?
But we were never like, oh my god, worst decision we ever made. We have to go back and get that person. And it wasn't like an ego thing. We actually never happened. Just never happened, right? Letting go, you know, realizing that, hey, we made a bad hire or, you know, a bad timing, whatever. And these are all bad people. I just want to make sure you know, this isn't like a bonnepick. But you realize we had to let that go. Like you go and more example, when I was wrapping up at the
agency, we had a ton of people there and we were ready to go public. We hadn't go in public like two years later after I was gone. I thought to myself, man, I had stuck around for like a few more years. We'd have gone public and I could have cast in more stock and I could have done all these things and you know, I could have helped run a public company and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, oh, I'm waiting, a little revisionist history here. I hate working there. It was
good company, whatever. I just personally, in the time of my life, I just did not want to be there. And I just heard Brian Chesky from Airbnb who quoted on the other day, but I just heard him say, something again today where he was, you know, as a founder of Airbnb, he's like, I got a point. I didn't want to be here anymore, right? You know, this thing had become something I didn't want it to be and think about it like his version of quitting would have been like quitting and only
taking $10 billion dollars. Right? So like it's almost hard to like, bad them, how he could feel bad about that decision at that level of success. And yet he feels exactly the same. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, you know, it's interesting, but you get to that level of scale. Now he's not quitting because it's failing. He's quitting because it's succeeded. Right? He's quitting now because likely the fun part for him is now long in the past. And now it's just operational efficiencies
and all of these other things. And still again, like this is where the ego comes in. I'm not talking to you, Brian. I don't know. This is a goal here, but like we can imagine a scenario whereby you as the founder in this case, Brian, you get to that point where it's like, I no longer want to do this. I don't like this part. This is the ops part. This is, you know, now we're at scale. Now this is about efficiency, but part of you goes, but I should be able to do that. Right? I got us this
far. I got us to, if I got us this far, right, I can get us to the next, the next stop. And it's such a dangerous mentality because he'd clearly recognize like this is something I want to be doing. I am not enjoying some human hating this actively dislike in what I'm doing. And yet there's this voice in the back of your head, right? The devil's on the shoulder going, yeah, but why can't you do this, pal? Well, it's wrong with you. I tried to do my math. I was about 2728 years old when I left
the agency. By that point, we had about six or 700 people. It was a big agency at that point, but it was very corporate, like very, like everything we were doing, it was also like the 90s, like it was still fashionable to be corporate. And so it just felt like I was going to a bank every day. Like it's so cool at all. Gosh, I left my badge in the car. I'll be right back. No, we literally, we had badges, we had a whole thing, right? It was as corporate as it gets. And how we got there,
because it kind of doesn't matter. The point is we were in there. And I'd be in these very, like, you know, stuffy meetings talking about, you know, future financials, ironically in all of our board meetings, we never talked about the actual product of the company, which was us doing creative, but that's here and other. And so, but I got to a point where I was just like, you know, I don't want to quit this because this is probably the greatest opportunity I'll ever have.
And size wise, that actually was, you know, I've never been a CEO of the company that big sense, but I look back on it. And I'm like, there are a lot of things that I could have done there. And all of them would have made me miserable. So, you know, I looked at it as letting go. I got to do a hundred other things that brought me way more pleasure on my own schedule, you know, on my own terms, et cetera. And so while there was that part of me that says, oh, I guess you're quitting,
there's got to be another part of you that says, yeah, but what is that unlock? Dude, if all you are is miserable right now and quitting or whatever you want to call, let it go. Allows you to go be happy. Dude, life's too short. Right? For sure. Good shoes. Happiness. If you go back in time and you think about the difference between the agency and the last funded startup, one you let go of as it was still moving forward, the other one, you let go of to avoid being drugged at the bottom by it.
How different was the experience? Right? Like I it feels like in my recollection, my own experiences, letting go of something that was still an ongoing venture was a lot easier in some ways than letting go of something that was failing. Yeah. Well, because in the one case where the agency was doing
well, you went out on a high note, right? Your Tom Brady winning his last Super Bowl, right? Like, I mean, nobody is like, oh, man, you know, looking down on you, though I call it shit, I can't believe what he did, right? So that was fine. Was there more upside to extract? Yes. Would it come out of the cost of all of my happiness? Absolutely. There's there's no question about that. I just met more like
the emotional component of it. How much easier was it to let go with the agency than it was to say, there's no heartbeat here. I got to let this thing go. You know what? Two totally different spectrums at the agency. I was just bored. There was no pressure. I was just bored in that startup and the venture fund to start up. I was just straight up humiliated, right? Like it was just,
that was in a dark, awful place. And a lot of founders have been there before. It's real. Again, I don't know why I keep picking on Chesky, but his whole thing, his rant over the past few weeks, has been what a dark place he's been in at a point where the company has been at its, you know, at its highest. That's most successful. I find that to be interesting because again, there's a point where the things that we create undo us, the things we create undo us,
they actually take away from us. They don't give back to us anymore. And here's what I would say, at which point with our startup, we're running anywhere in our career, but let's say definitely within our startup. And it is, we're getting to the point where it's no longer fun, but it's no longer adding to us. It's no longer giving us that spark that makes us want to jump out of bed in the morning. It's no longer telling us that this could be something great. And all
that it's doing, it's taking from us, it gives nothing back. And there's no indicator that we're ever, ever, ever, ever going to get on the right side of it. Leave. Let it go. Quit. I don't care what you call it. Just get out of it because it's a bad idea. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on startups.com. That includes all of our education tracks, which will be funding, customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly
finances. There's so much stuff in there. All of our software, including Biz plan for putting together detailed business plans and financials, launch rock for attracting really customers, and of course, fundable for attracting investment capital. When you log into the startups.com site, you'll find all of these resources available.