Are Founders Aligned with Those Around Them?

Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will Schroeder will, one of the hardest parts of being a founder is building the company while realizing that you're not. Fully in sync, lockstep synchronicity with the people around you. And you know, we hear people say things like, you know, build alignment. They forget to tell you in their brochure is that alignment is, is largely fictional.

And like we love, of course we love to imagine that we're all on the same team, but like ever watch the ship take on water, it becomes really apparent. Who has a life fest and who doesn't goes down with the ship super fast.

And so after decades of trying to force alignment, I think I've realized it's less about sinking goals and more about managing fundamentally misaligned expectations. Yeah. And foundations, right. The big, the big question is, you know, are, are we really aligned with everyone around us, our employees, co-founders, even our spouses? Right. Are we

right? You know, you and I did a whole episode on this as it related to investors. Yes. 'cause investors love to say, you know, we're gonna be on the same side of the table and we're aligned. And I'm like, no, you're not. Not a good remote line. They're cheating because they mean that, but it's a round table will. So it's not, it's not fair. It's a round table. So just by definition, we're all on the same side of Same. Yeah. Right. Right. That's right.

Right. And I just think about like, I thought that argument was so hollow uhhuh, and it sounds cool, but it's just so incredibly untrue. Yeah. But with this episode, I think we need to go beyond the investors because this same. Fake alignment problem where we wanna be aligned, but we're just not. Just not is, as you said, as much of a problem with co-founders, with employees, with spouses.

And I think we should talk about spouses too. Yep. Because they're like the unsung hero or villain. Yes. Depending on how your relationship goes. They're an ever present high leverage personality in all of this. Right. Yeah. You know Ryan, I've never thought about it like that. A high leverage personality. That's absolutely true. That's really well put. It'll be the last time I say something that's smart today. So yeah, we're all done. Take on. Thank you.

Thank everybody for being part of the service podcast. That's a wrap and I'm done. So lemme say this, I struggled with this concept of alignment for. Decades because Yeah. I wanted to believe, and I think a lot of other people do too, I, I wanted to believe optimistically that I could have this like symbiotic perfect alignment with all the people in my life and Sure. And if that, and if that alignment didn't exist, it was just some sort of like Lego piece I was missing to complete the. Right.

It never occurred to me it does now that the alignment was so far off to begin with, that crossing that, that, that chasm, it was way harder than I thought it would be. And, and again, I think today as we unpack why those chasms are so significant, even in stuff like co-founders we're supposed to be in the same place. I think it's a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is.

And, and I think it's another one of these things I, I, I seem to keep echoing this, but it's one of those things that starts at that really early stage. Then we carry it forward in a lot of cases unnecessarily.

I realized at some point that one of the reasons I was looking for that alignment, the reason I wanted it so desperately to be aligned was that at the early stage of a startup, very little is working. Right? Right. And so it was almost as if, as long as everybody else was aligned with me, like as long as everybody else sort of like felt like what I was doing was the right thing. Like it was some form of another, like a validation or maybe it was just even as simple as like.

If everybody else could have the rose colored glasses on, I could keep swimming through the Meyer, right? Just like somehow I needed that alignment psychologically less actually, like from a, from a practical standpoint, I didn't actually need them to do anything, right? Like, I don't need my spouse to be aligned with me so that I can go do the thing I have to do, or that she can do the things that she needs to do.

I just wanted it to be, I wanted it to be so that I could feel good about going and doing what I had to do. It wasn't fundamentally gonna stop me from doing it. Yet it can, it also feels a lot different when it's, when it's not aligned, right? There's one thing why I don't need all of your support, but getting negative support where you're actually tearing me down is definitely a problem. You know, Ryan, I'm, I'm gonna rewind back circa 20 12, 20 13, some, somewhere in that era, okay? Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Um, deep in the archives. Deep in the archives, and you and I are just starting to hire this new entrant to the workforce called millennials. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Now, now, and again, I hate when people do this like, like generational class warfare, et cetera, but, and I know a lot of our audience are, you know, are millennials. So, so bear with me when I say this, right? Ryan and I are, are, are in the, the Gen X category. None of this matters.

I'm just pointing out, this was our first time, like in our thirties. Yeah. Hiring a generation that wasn't us. Right. They were just entering. Right. There was finally, they were, they were now of legal age to hire, and so Exactly. We started doing so. Right. Yeah. And so this was the first time in my generation, right. And I remember having these conversations with you.

Where a new generation comes to work and they brought this new concept that we had never heard of before called work-life balance and, and, and what work-life balance means is I don't wanna work as much. I've never heard someone introduce work-life balance. That also includes, because I wanna work more. Right. Can you lighten my life a little so I can put more weight on the work side, please? Exactly right. So anyway, that's here nor there. Point is we start hiring a, a bunch of millennials.

And by millennials I just mean like 22 year olds at the time. Okay. Yep. At the time, that was it at the time. Uh, they're in forties now, but at the time they'd come to work, they were fine. Right? All, all good, all green light signals, but the craziest thing happened. At six o'clock, which we, sorry, we worked at, uh, nine to six at six o'clock. Everyone would pack their laptops in just all at once. Just like, yeah, lemons.

And you could separate without having to say a word, who is Gen X and who is millennial. Right? Because the millennials, like you were still sitting, you were Gen X if you were Exactly. No one said a word, right? Like no one had to say a thing. No, but the, the reason I bring this up is it was the first time that I had ever seen such a. Dramatic distinction between my vision of alignment and their vision of alignment.

Okay. Yeah. And so I leaned in naturally and I asked some folks, I was like, so, you know, you're leaving at six. It was like a half day. I mean, I'm, I'm kidding. But like, you know, that's, that's kinda like, uh, and they were like, yeah, that's 'cause I'm an employee. You know, I, I'm not the owner. They said this in so many words, but it was the first time they'd ever heard someone verbalize that. Now I was like, huh. You're not wrong. Yeah. You, you've got a point.

I don't like that it's pointed at me, but you've got a point, right? Like, I, I don't get to leave the movie halfway. I, I have to stick until the, the credits roll, right? Like, why do you get to leave? It didn't occur to me that our incentives were different. Like up until that point, I had never had to have that conversation. And what I'm saying is just, and there's nothing wrong with what they did.

My point is that they did it right and it, it forced me to realize that we're not in alignment. Prior to that, I'm not even kidding. For like, like 15 years, I would work until midnight with my entire team. And now mind you, we're all younger, but so were they right? Like, and no one would think twice about it. There's a guy at a Santa Monica named Jason Nazar. Yeah. Um, Jason started doc stock.com and then, damn, I just blanked into the second company started. I think he sold 'em both.

And uh, I remember one time I was in Santa Monica, that's when I was living there and uh, Jason's like, Hey, let's grab some dinner. We got to dinner, it's like nine o'clock, a little bit late for a dinner, and after dinner he's like, uh, uh, I gotta head back to the office. I'm like, oh, did you leave something? He's like, no, we're still working. Story just, just because I had to see this and we were walking past his office Anyway, I go, I wanna go see what this looks like. Right?

I go in, Ryan, his entire team was there, like, no different than when I'd stopped by at like three in the afternoon. Right? Right. And I'm not saying this is healthier. Good. No, no, no. I'm saying somehow he had aligned his interests and, and like his interest of being a founder with their interests of, of wanting or maybe having to be there. Yeah. But now I can't even fathom that. Like, I don't even pretend like those interests are aligned.

No, I, and I think that was part of the challenge, right? Is that early on, right, I used to expect my staff to have to be as, all in as me and, and anyone around me, and it was participating anything with me. I always expected everybody else to be as in as me. I told the story once about getting dressed down by my coach after, after trying to push the team too hard and, and basically having me explain exactly this to me is like. The consequences aren't the same for everybody.

Not everybody wants the same things out of this that you do. Not everyone's gonna get the same things out of this that you do. Therefore you can't expect 'em to put the same things into this as you do, right? So me expecting everyone to be as all in as I was, wasn't fair, wasn't fair for the, the, the team wasn't fair for my staff. Later. They didn't sign up for what? I'm just gonna say my level of consequence. Correct. Right, right. In either direction. Right.

If it goes really well, it will go better for me. If it goes really poorly, it will go a lot more poorly for me. Right. The the way. Yeah. It'll, we are, it's, it's funny, you can kind of think of, it's like a pendulum. We are way out at the very far reaches the pendulum. So when it swings, we swing all the way. There's somewhere down near the bottom. So yeah, it goes back and forth, but it's like being on deck versus being in the crow's nest. We're in the crow's nest, right.

So when the ship tilts, we go all the way. And I think that. Once you realize that and you stop expecting that alignment, it, it got a little easier. I'm, I'm not gonna say it got easy, it was still hugely frustrating for me, but it got easier. Yeah. Okay, so, so stick with that then. So I think my challenge, and I think a lot of others is, Hey, we're all in this together. We're all gonna build something great. And it's like, yeah, sort of.

Actually, I'll give you another interesting point about this concept of. Ownership, if you will. And I don't, I'm not talking about equity, I just mean like ownership of the, of what you're building. Okay. Like, just like genuine passion for what it is. This concept of not my baby. And, and by the way, not my baby does not mean that I wasn't the person that started it.

But what I'm saying is there are folks and like you and g and you know, folks like that, that have full ownership of what's here, right? Yeah. Like even there from the start, you, you've built this thing, this thing is a part of your DNA, but it stops there too. The, the other people that are in after, after, after, don't have that. Like, don't have it like it's my baby two kind of DNA. Yep. And for a long time I just assumed if you were on payroll, you had that DNA. Right.

No, it's, it's not it. And you know, it's interesting because I think that, you know, some of it is that that ownership. There's a particular type of ownership that I'm gonna, I'm gonna call out here because I, I think that commitment gap isn't necessarily about loyalty. Right. Right. Yeah, I agree with that. Totally. It's, it's, it's the, the ownership is, is about the risk. It's about who owns the risk in a lot of cases. Yep. Right.

Who actually owns the downside of this thing, because that is going to really and truly determine. How committed someone is. Now, I, I think you're talking about a different type of ownership, which is also extremely valid, which is just having been and built and, and, and been part of it. And literally it's part of your DNA, you're part of its DNA, right? Like you pull this out and like that's a, that's now it's no longer the same company. That's a different aspect, but equally as important.

Well, my frustrations have been, have been going in these conversations with an expectation that they, they saw things the way I did, and again, the consequence was a big one. Yeah. I'll give you an example, like. 10 years ago, I remember you, me and a couple other, other leadership were on a, a chat. This was on a Saturday. Okay. And something was going wrong with something maybe like our, our ads weren't firing or something, like there was some like issue.

I remember like, like chatting with, with all of you particularly, you know, one of the folks in in the group was like, Hey guys, honestly, this is like a weekend. You know, I wanna be off on the weekends. I don't wanna, um, do that in my response in so many words, but not these words. I'm just trying to like paraphrase was, if that's your response, you shouldn't be on this chat. Meaning like you shouldn't be in leadership. The point of leadership is that you do have to take these calls.

You are tied to these consequences. Yeah. Right, right. You don't, you don't get to call off. We lose level of shit. Like it wasn't, it wasn't like we were like, Hey guys, what do you think? Should we plan the Christmas party for the 15th or the 18th? It's like, Hey, there's a fundamental challenge like we're taking on water. Yeah, exactly. You up, we're picking on water. Yeah. And so, but again, it's back to that reframing.

So now what I've come to, to realize, and again, this will start to, you'll start to see this. Theme permeate through everything we're about to talk about. What I've started to realize is I have to be super honest about what those differences are. If we can't make payroll, they will lose their job. And there is nothing, there's nothing inconsequential about that, that's meaningful, right. That's, those are people's lives. But if I can't, uh, make payroll, I lose everything.

I, everything, I lose everybody's jobs, right? Yeah. I lose my own job. I put myself into personal risk, like, you know, I can't just quit and restart. To your point. Everyone else has some version of a life raft. I'm going down with this thing to the bottom of the ocean. Yep. So yes, I'm freaking out about it on a Saturday. There's a reason someone else isn't and I need to check myself before I have that reaction for sure.

And I, I think like as, as time goes on, one of the things that I've realized, particularly within the, the employee sec, I don't need everyone to. Agree. I don't need everyone to have the same level of commitment or consequence. It's about them showing up. Right. It's not about everyone agreeing. Yeah. It's about everybody still showing up. Right.

It's about being there, doing the thing that I need, and me being very clear on kind of what I need and letting them be very clear on, on what I need from them. Sure. But, but it is still frustrating and you know, it's funny, I do believe that part of this comes from a really good place, which is do you just.

We're seeking out that, so like the, this desire for alignment, particularly amongst the team, forget the, the spouses for a minute, forget the, the, the people who aren't directly, directly, like in this, like literally turning the screws in the bolts and building a machine with us. I think part of that is this sort of like desire for camaraderie, this desire to feel like. Everyone cares enough to, to really wanna do this for all the right reasons.

So again, I think, I think part of this does come from a good place. This isn't me saying like, I need everyone aligned so that we can get things done and grow faster and make more money. It, yes, that is one of the byproducts, but I think for me it was just always about like, it always felt good, right? Right. It was like you ever pull like a study all night? Where it was like, let's, let's ace this exam. Okay, well that was the thing that used to happen.

Or just, you know, let's, let's stay up until this thing ships. But like at that level where it wasn't out of some sense of obligation, it was a sense of desire and pride that happened at an individual level. They culminated in a group of people doing something pretty awesome together. And I think that like part of me will always want to recreate that, right? Right.

Part of me will always wanna say like, let's do stay at the office till midnight, and then I'll look at labor laws and go, yeah, let's, maybe not. Yeah. Um, but okay, so let's take that off the table though. Let's move up the chain to a co-founder.

Okay. And here's someone, let's say you have 50 50 stock. Like, you know, we're, we're taking off the, Hey, you have more than I do, kind of thing. And so at that point you're like, well, well then we're definitely aligned. Yeah. Uh, because we have the same amount of stock upside, downside is the same. Let's assume every dollar in dollar out is the same. And I'm like, yeah, no you don't. On paper, those should align, but that's actually not what creates co-founder disputes more often.

It's an expectation. It's being in the same boat and looking at different maps. Yep. Right. It's, it's, look at it that's like, it's, it's super frustrating, right? Yeah, yeah. And for both sides, clearly. Right. Except when just wouldn't you, like you and I we're always the, the ones that are right about it. And so then like, it's, it's more frustrating for us because it was their misalignment. I was like, okay, so here's what I would say. The thing that I've seen.

The most is an expectation of contribution. Ryan, you and I, you and I are 50 50 co-founders on something, and we both have an expectation about how contribution's going to work. And here's a couple places that backfires and, and using you and I as a metaphor for like every co-founder, the first place that backfires is number one. Everyone thinks they work harder than they do. We, we did a whole episode about this. You know, talking about like people's perception of how hard they work.

So like I come home to my spouse, I'm like, oh my God, what a long day. And my spouse just assumes that must mean that I've done all this effort. Right? Right. But I could have worked for two freaking hours, but I could, I could have professionally complained about it when I could home. Right? Or in my mind, I quote, work really hard. I mean, Ryan, you and I have both dealt with this. In fact, I think we've done podcasts about this.

I've had days where I've felt like I've just gone through a slog all day and have nothing to show for it. Nothing to show for it. Yeah. Some people, that's their career, right? They're busy, being busy, and in their mind, yeah, like, I worked hard, but you didn't get anything done. Like, yes, you spent time in a place that doesn't mean you had output. It's gotta come down to, to transformation, right?

Something has to have changed based on what you did and hopefully positive transformation, not just something changed. Ryan, you ever play a soccer game where you worked really hard but you didn't score any points? Yeah, most of them. And I'm not the goalie, right? Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say. But, but you know, same thing. And so my point is, that's usually where it starts, this, this misalignment, is that our expectations about our output and someone else's output don't align.

So it's like, I'm doing everything right and they're fucking everything up. Okay. So, so that's one part, but another part, I'm just gonna give you the two categories and let's kind of, you know, build into a little bit. But the other part is, uh, an expectation on how this company should be run. That has so many tentacles.

That's everything does from how our culture should be to whether we take on money to whether do we pull out cash now or do we reinvest it for the future or to what our product's going to be. You know, you name it. Right? And those expectations can become so dissimilar. Our alignment is damn near impossible. Even though on paper we should be on the same side of the table.

I think that's the, the bigger one for me, because I really do feel like when, when the friction isn't about effort, meaning like what are, what are our actual daily contributions? Because to your point, everybody's gonna have a different view on that anyways. Right? Like the way I feel about what I did today may or may not be accurate. So the way you feel about what I do today, probably even less accurate, right? Third party. So it's like.

It's super tough, but when, when the friction isn't about effort, when it becomes about direction. The fundamentals of how are we running the business? Who are we running it with? Who are our clients gonna be? Who are our staff gonna be? All of these little things that, that are so, so involved in whether the company works or not, or how well it works, or how well we enjoy how it's working. That was what I meant before when I said same boat, different maps, right?

Even if we're putting in the same amount of effort, let's say we do get that to parody, like just every day, somehow magically we hit exactly the same level of of effort. We're both rowing exactly the same speed. It turns out we're rowing different directions, we're going nowhere. To me, that's the most critical misalignment between, between co-founders and I think it's the harder one to diagnose.

Because what people will tend to look at is the other person's output and they'll go, whether it's either working or not. What they don't look at in most cases is, is that working towards the thing I am working towards as well? Like, are we even pointed in the same direction? If I can quantify their effort, and that's all I looked at like. Good Will went 60 miles an hour. I went 60 miles an hour. Right? Too damn bad. We went opposite directions. Right? That's not good, but that's good point.

I think that's the part people fail to look at, right? That's the part people fail to analyze. 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 dayLong@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. Okay? So when we think about that. And we're like, Hey, shit, I, I really don't have the same type of alignment as my co-founder. Again, I think this is, this is the, the recurring theme I was talking about. The first thing is to recognize that, right?

To be able to say, I wanna be on the same page of, of course I want a page, but I'm not, right? Like, I don't believe they work hard, or I don't believe that we should raise VC, or, I don't believe this product is, you know, ever gonna work. Like, you have to be really honest about the fact that you are not on board with alignment before you try to force this alignment.

I see this, you know, and we will get to, to, to couples in relationships in a second, but like, I see this in relationships all the time where you've got, uh, uh, two people like somebody and their spouse and they can't reconcile because at the end of the day, they just don't agree. And they're like, you know, we wanna have a happy relationship, marriage, whatever it is. And I'm like, you're not going to, you fundamentally don't agree. Like your, your foundation is broken.

And that's what we're talking about here with co-founders, which, you know, the, the mirror between co-founders and spouses is so freaking tight. 'cause it, you know, it is that kind of symbiotic relationship and I think it's hard to get right. The person you spend the other part of your waking hours with, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's your daytime spouse.

You know, I think one of the challenges, I'm gonna go back to what I said, you know, the top of the episode, which is so many of these things come from the early days and just get perpetuated. Now this one's a bit different because it's, it's an inverse curve. I think at the beginning, co-founder alignment is actually very good. Because there's damn near nothing to to misalign on.

Right. You're like, do you think this is a crazy idea that has almost no chances of succeeding and we should just try it? Yeah. Right. That's all there was to think about. Right? There's nothing there. Yep. There's no consequence yet, and I think that that's one of the, the big challenges with this is that founders miss the opportunities or don't take the opportunities to reassess that on an ongoing basis. Yeah. I mean, talk about something that needs real time monitoring.

It is co-founder alignment because it's something that by just nature of how a startup builds, it erodes or grows further apart as time passes by virtue of growing the business. Yep. Some, in some ways, your success is what will drive you apart. I don't mean that that like success necessarily has to, but just by getting bigger and having more dynamicism in the startup. You are inherently driving more variability, more opportunities for us to be misaligned and go different directions.

Do you ever see this get caught in time? I'm trying to think of like, have I seen like founders catch this in time? I feel like there's like two types of founders. The ones that are like, they were just measuring it and they're constantly talking to doing it, and there's the ones that get to like the cataclysm and they're like, holy shit, I don't even recognize you anymore. Let's try to figure this out.

I think everybody waits till it's too late because no one, this is, this is the whole point of this. This episode is, no one anticipates why it would be a problem to begin with again. Right? We go in this with the, oh, you know, we're 50 50 partners, so I guess everything is settled. That that's the least of your concerns. Best case that's, you know, that's settled. Uh, worst case is even that's a problem.

But, you know, as we're talking about this, as we're talking to relationships, let's take this over to spouses because I, I think we're gonna see a lot of parallels here. Yeah. But what I would say, and we said this at the top of the episode, spouses are like the co-founders. No one talks about. For every founder there is someone at home and, and we say spouse, it could mean, you know, whatever your version at home is. Your, your emotional support that isn't your direct coworker type thing.

Right? But let's just use spouses here for a second. One of the things that, that we don't consider when we go into this is whether or not our spouses are really on board with this. And I'll give you a a very common example. A common example is a, I'll use my own wife. Sarah just cares about two things, safety and security, which are kind of the same thing. Right. She does not wanna rock the boat. Her answer to everything is what's the safest answer?

And, and that's already my answer before you've even given me my options. Now, the irony here that she married a guy. Who has done nothing but roll the dice his entire life, opposite's attract because it to be true. Right. It, it, it, it's unbelievable. And when she, you know, when we met each other, when we got married, I was already like 10 years in my career as an entrepreneur and I was all in entrepreneurs. Clearly I was never gonna have a day job, so to speak.

So. She knew what she was signing up for, but it hasn't changed her approach. She's not like, well, you know, we've married 14 years. Like, it's not like Sarah now is like, oh well, you know, screw it. Let's roll the dice. You know, her answer is no different now than it was 14 years ago. David got married. When you look at this with Nagas as she considers how dynamic what you do is and always had been, how does she relate to it? Are you guys aligned on startup work? No, we're aligned in it.

This is what we're doing. Are we aligned in terms of, of how we, we tolerate the pain of it? Absolutely not. Yeah. Right. Like it's, it's easy when it's working well, right? It always is. I was just gonna say the same thing. Right. I, I think that's, I think that's an important thing to think about. And this, this goes for co-founders. This goes for, for spouses, your, your person, whoever that is, whatever that might be. With co-founders, we're, we're dividing equity.

The spouses were, were not necessarily, I mean, in under certain legal circumstances sure. You're also dividing your equity with them, but you are dividing pain. Right. The tolerance of pain when things aren't going well. Right. So when it's going great, get easy. Yeah, who cares? It's not problem. It's easy to share the good times when we're in the other 95% of running a startup.

It's not just about dividing the pain, it's about the fact that even if we were to divide the pain equally, pain tolerance isn't equal, right? Rarely are we, are we able to tolerate the pain in the same ways? And I think that that's one of the, the things that we see. I think that even the degree that my wife and I are aligned. Nagas is tolerance for pain around a specific kind of way. Anything that's a threat to stability. So very much like Sarah.

Anything that's a threat to stability, uh, safety and security for our family is going to have very little tolerance, right? That gets a Yelp really quick. And this is from a woman who did three natural childbirth. So she doesn't, she doesn't yelp easy. Right. So like she can tolerate some pain. Yeah. But there are particular types of pain that she's extremely susceptible to.

And that's, and that's one of 'em. And I think that was one of the things that I, I started to realize is like, to me, the startup is so closely tied to my identity and, and to her, it's not right. It, it's just an existential. Threat to stability in a lot of ways. Now. It also, it also does provide, it also does a lot of other things. It it does, it does some wonderful things too.

But I think that there is always this sense that it is very much a sword that, that that cuts both ways and that there's a very, very strong fear around it, cutting that direction. One of the things that's been really successful for me with my wife has been repeating out loud what our differences are. Yeah. And, and lemme spin and not to be confrontational, to be reassuring. So when we're doing something and I'm always, you know, you, you've been in this for me for a long time.

I'm always doing something frigging weird when I tell her about it. Not inaccurate. Yeah. When I tell her about it, she is like, huh, well that's an idea. Yes. That's, that's, you had a thought it's something you could do. Right. Please don't tell me you've already done it. And so, yes, but, but did you say theoretically, please? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So here's what I always open up with. I always say, look, while we have shared goals. Uh, in life, you know, as a family.

Sure. I understand that some of these goals are just my goals. You mentioned it a second ago. You talked about kinda like your ownership and the, and the outcome. Yep. Your identity. Those are things that are important to you and I, but they don't necessarily matter to our wives, right? Yeah. Like, here's an example, Ryan. If you and I service a million founders or 10 million founders, we're gonna have some sort of reaction to it. Yes. Like there's some, it's gonna spark something inside us.

Everything from pride to reassurance to, uh, you, you name it, right? Like all these, these good emotions. My wife doesn't give a shit, nor should she, by the way. Right. She wouldn't even know it's, it's the same. Oh, wow. Whether it's 10, a hundred, a billion. Right. It's no context for it. And again, nor should she, but this is my point. Right. Why would she.

Whenever we go down one of these paths, when we're having these discussions, I always like kind of zoom out and I say, look, I understand that, that my goals and my aspirations are different than yours now hopefully the result of my aspirations help with your aspirations, right? Yeah. But, but, but, but they're not the same. So it's not fair for me to say, for me to say, well, why don't you just back me up? 'cause our goals aren't the same.

Like, I'm trying to do dumb shit in hopes that it will make money, you know, which will help our family. But there's a lot of ways to make money that are a lot more safe than, than what I'm gonna go do. And I'm choosing not to do them. So by default we're, we're not aligned. And when she hears that, it doesn't mean she instantly agrees with me. But I think it goes for miles to hear that someone understands why you're not aligned as we're saying this now.

I'm wondering if the if, I mean, clearly we've sort of said that like hoping for alignment might be part of the problem in the beginning. Because when we start to talk about misalignment, and I'm not even sure that's fair, right? Because we aren't necessarily misaligned. Misaligned suggests that we were supposed to be Oh, it's on the exact same axis. Yeah. Right. And it somehow we veered off. The word that's springing to mind now for me is asymmetry.

Asymmetry, acknowledges that we're operating on different planes entirely, right? Like we're you and I are operating versus where our spouses are operating, right? Where there are some common goals, we are doing things on entirely different planes, different vectors, right? Again, maybe a shared outcome. Keep family alive the way you and I are doing that, and the way they're doing that. Completely different things. Absolutely. It's different stakes, different consequences.

Different time horizons too, right? Because there are decisions you and I are making that have like these in our own minds, these far reaching consequences. Like, I'm gonna start doing this thing now that maybe will pay off long time down the road. Right? And they're like, how do we manage, you know, children today? How do we manage the safety of the family today? Oh, they're also thinking long term as well.

I also think the other problem with with misalignment, just as a concept, now that I'm thinking through it, is that. Somehow it implies it can be fixed with better communication or realignment. Whereas asymmetry says, this is structural. This is literally how this thing was built, and it's gonna stay this way. All we can do is sort of acknowledge, right?

I think to your point, acknowledge, let's just acknowledge, let's just acknowledge the fact that we are dealing with an asymmetric situation or a misalignment. I think that's about as close as we can get, isn't it? Right now, at, at this stage in our life, me being in, in my now early fifties and, and, and you around the corner to them coming right up. We are at a stage in life where all of our peer groups are roughly at the same age.

And I, and I know this applies to folks listening, so I'm gonna be sensitive when I say this. This is that era where everybody starts to second guess their marriages. Just, just fundamentally, the kids are a certain age, the marriages of a certain age where everyone's like, shit, is this it? And I have conversations with all my friends around this and, and Right. I've got a massive friend group. A massive friend group. I know you have a huge friend group too.

And I gotta tell you, all the couples that Sarah and I know, and we're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of couples, we can't name three that are happy, that are, that are aligned. That's a pity. That's fucked up. Okay. Yeah. However, however, it also goes to point to how hard this is, right? I think in the early days we go into this being like, well, I wanna be rich. You wanna be rich, you know, blah, blah. Like, we're lying, right?

As if that's, that's the end of it, right? Again, man, but look, think about it though. Like just from a, just go to a pure mathematical state, right? At the origin point, everything's aligned. It's the second you start to move further, that that's when the line, it can't diverge until that when we're at zero, everyone's aligned. Right? It's easy. It's, it's, of course we are.

When I was a little kid, I, I would, uh, walk up to another little kid, doesn't matter where we were, and I'm like, I like Mike Tyson's punch out. He is like, I like my Tyson as a punch out. Let's be best friends. Let's be best friends. That was, it. Did, was there another way to meet children between 1986 and 1990? No, and, and, and just like I didn't use one. I watch it with my son now. It's the exact same thing. Right? He is. He is like, I like Fortnite.

Is the other kid's like, I like Fortnite. We're best friends, right? Yep. So the point is, to your point, we get this origin. We're both on the same page, but we haven't introduced any of the other, the factors. But I think what happens is because we fail to realize those really important nuances, we don't acknowledge 'em, which I think is important for all these categories we're talking about.

I think acknowledging it is by far the biggest part, and I would say one part of that is acknowledging it to yourself. And being, being okay. Like, 'cause a lot of people will be like, oh well that person doesn't work as hard as I do, so fuck them. Like, no dude like that. That's the broken, probably not premise that like, that's why you're never gonna work. Make this work. Right.

The second part about it is communicating that acknowledgement to them, Hey, I understand why you don't work on Saturday. Honestly, I have to do it. 'cause my consequences are higher. You don't. Yep. But if you would, you'd be doing me a huge favor. Yeah. That is way different than, why aren't you working on Saturday? You create the acknowledgement. Same thing with my wife.

Hey, I think we should go risk our personal money as a family on investing in this initiative, but I know that there's a lot of places we could put that money. This is probably a riskier one that I feel good about. That makes no sense to you. So I'll understand. If you're hesitant. It's not an affront to me. It's because your risk tolerance, your needs, your outcomes are different than mine. Right. So there's no version where I can come to you and say, what's wrong with you?

I, I should already know that going in. Yeah. If I've got like, you know, any, any level of empathy. Yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting 'cause I think sometimes. There truly are times where we're just looking at the same problem differently, but I feel like with this mal-alignment or this asymmetry, that it's not just that we're looking at the same problem differently, we're we're actually looking at different problems, right?

We have the same circumstances, but we're actually looking at different problems, meaning that the, the outcome that they're most concerned about on the other side of this thing. Is different than, than what we're looking at. Right, right. So the problem being a conduit to whatever that transformation of the future looks like, that's where the, the difference is. And I think that's, for me, it was a hard recognition to have. Like I had to all, all of a sudden understand and acknowledge that.

It's like there are times where when co-founders, employees, staff, friends, wife, children. It wasn't that we were looking at the problem differently, it was that we were literally looking at different problems. Like we were just fundamentally wanting to go and do different things from this new origin point. Yeah. I that where the problem is now all of a sudden we're, we're diverging there. That's something you just kind of have to respect. There's not much way around that. Right.

Well, sort of trying to just literally realign people to make them you, which, well, okay. That's what I'm saying. Right. Like I, I went through probably the first decade of my, of my career frustrated Yeah. That everyone wasn't. On my plan. And, and so I kept trying to like force feed all of these people into, into my version of how I thought things should go, and then being continually frustrated every single time that they weren't going my way.

And that's not the same as saying, well then I just defer to everybody every time. That's, that's not the same thing. Sure. But if, if you were to say, Hey, my way or the highway that ends poorly, yes, you can force enough things, but eventually that will break for sure. Because if you manufacture alignments, you somehow cobble it together, right? It's gonna bend back outta shape. Right? The type of alignment will fade. Uh, the thing I like, empathy lasts.

We know this, so if you can't, it's point. Always share the same goals, at least share the understanding right, of those differences. Then I think you, you've got, you got something you can build from. At that point, I always say, you cannot change people. You can only change your understanding of people. And so I'm not gonna change my wife to be this risk taking maverick. Right. This is not going to happen. Right. And by the way, who the hell am I to even suggest that she should change? Right.

Right. That, that would, that could actually go perfectly horribly for me. Right. For all we know, right? I my only control valve. But I can change my understanding by saying, Hey, this is what makes my wife tick. These, these are the things that concern her. These are the things that excite her, right? Like and understand that, that when I bring to the table shit that concerns her, I shouldn't expect a high five answer, right? I should expect right. A pushback because that's who she is.

Conversely, when she has a conversation with me, she should know that my answer is gonna be, fuck it, risk it all. Like, let's see what happens, right? Let's see what happens, right? Let's see what happens, because I'm okay with that because I, yeah, I'm okay with what happens on the other side of us. See what happens. 'cause I always figure it out. But again, I think what's killed me for a long time, I get it now, which is why we're talking about this now.

What killed me for a long time was one, not acknowledging myself in the second. I wasn't good. I am now. I wasn't good at saying I understand where you're coming from, Uhhuh. I understand why what I'm asking is antithetical to how you're built, and I recognize that. I would say my batting average for people giving me the same consideration is almost zero. Yeah. I didn't say it work the other way too. The other way too.

Well, I haven't had an employee come to me and say, you know, will I understand that your consequences are pretty significant and mine really aren't that high, so I'm gonna work a little bit harder just to help you out. Pretty much heard that. Never, yeah. I don't think I've heard that one. I don't think I've heard that one. No, but look, that goes back to understanding and acknowledging and respecting that difference. There's, there's a reason they're not saying that to you. Right? Right.

Yeah. There's, there's a fundamental, there's not a reason for them to say that to you, I guess is a different way to put it. Great way to put it. Great to put it, yeah. And so I think that, yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, so like, you know, I used to think that like, with alignment, it was, I just needed to convince everyone that my way was the way to go.

Not, not being like, like a jerk about it, but just like I, I thought, I thought that was my job was to convince like the team that this was, you know, the future path to work really hard. All these things, and I realize just a little bit of it is. But like 10%. Right, right. Like enough to say, Hey, just by the way, here's the direction I'd like to go. The other 90% of like making them do it because I wanted them to didn't, never went well. Like it. No. I dunno how people think that worked.

Well, no, I, I think we have to stop. You just have to, at some point you just have to stop trying to. Erase or correct the misalignment. I think now asymmetry is literally architected into a founder's life. Like what we are trying to do by its nature is asymmetric, right? We're trying to take something and it's nothing and make it into something huge. Right? Asymmetry at its at, its its best, right? We're gonna just absolutely try to, to scale something.

I think the real trick is not letting it break relationships as we go, because I think that perfect alignment is, is it's, it's a myth, right? I don't think it's something we even. Can force function evenly. Not if we try really hard think, we'll break ourselves doing it mutual respect, like that's always in style. Right? Right. That's how you keep building, um, to the point where you maybe you do reach alignment. 'cause again, it's really easy to be aligned in the good times. Right. Right.

You gotta get there. No one's ever had a, a huge problem because we're making so much money and we just don't know where to put it. Right, right. And if you do no. In the brown bags. No. In the green bags. Ha. Happy. Oh, you know what's so funny? This just reminds me of the dumbest story, Ponzi, I can't remember the guy's first name, but like Jeffrey or something like that. Ponzi actually had this problem. You know, the Ponzi scheme comes from a guy named, uh, last name Ponzi.

And, and as the the myth goes, there was a time that Ponzi was making so much money that his issue was, he couldn't figure out where to put it 'cause he couldn't put it in a bank. So he was like stacking it in apartments or something like that. Like yeah. Oh, that's amazing. My rats and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, that was, um, that was, I suppose in extreme cases it could also cause fighting.

But I guess the point, you have so much money, you don't know where to put it, and the rats are eating it. You're probably not fighting about money. Yeah. You're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. So, so here, here's what I'd say like for all of us that, that are trying to like fight this battle. The way to win this battle is to fight it less. The way to win this battle is to zoom out and say, here are the things that I can control. Way less than any of us think. Think it is.

And here's the things I can't control. The reality is you can control your own perception. You can't control other people. So if we want alignment, alignment has to come from. Our understanding of what can be controlled in. And by way of that, what can be compromised in what can't. And the sooner we get to that point, the sooner we kinda like take our hands off the wheel for a second. It's like, you know what, I'm not gonna get everything I want out of every everyone.

So I wanna get as much as I can out of everyone. That will be the only thing that will ever get, that will get even close to a perfect alignment. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone. You don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes. Connect with bootstrap founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups.com community.

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