Welcome back to another episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joint as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of startups.com will shroder. Well, urgency tends to be the soup of the day every day in startup land. And yet I believe that there is a real cost to always having this really short-term vision and without putting our milestones far enough out that we kind of have that real
true North Star. At what point can we afford to switch to having a longer view? And what's the cost if we don't? I mean, that's the problem. Like initially, it's all about survival. And we stay in survival mode because we have to. You know, when you think like compared to a job, we're at our jobs, the company is already going to exist. We just have to do our jobs, right? That's essentially kind of the focal point. In this particular case, we take it a lot further. In this particular case,
just doing our jobs is enough. We also have to do our jobs and make payroll and just stay alive, long enough, et cetera. But we wind up being in this fighter flight mode for so long. And then we combine it with this narrative that's a little bit broken. A lot of what we talk about here. We're start of just have to move fast all the time at the expense of everything. Sure. Now, we lose sight of having a long-term vision or just a longer play. So we get totally distracted,
totally distracted the entire time with all of these short-term plays. And we never wind up building anything. We just wind up being the company that's trying to survive at the expense of everything. Sure. And that has that has a real cost at some point, right? Because then it's,
you know, all kinds of analogs here, right? But if you're you're so focused on kind of the task at hand, that you're not investing or really even paying attention to it and manifest itself in different ways, if you stay in survival mode, that can have the cost of not really having a clear vision of what you're building towards. Sometimes even if we have a clear vision, what we're building towards, we stay in that survival mode. We're not really stacking up the bricks in a way that actually makes
this into something longer-term, defensible and all that, right? And I think that's where the real challenge begins is that we never transition out of that. And again, look, peace. If you've just arrived on the island, the first thing to do is to figure out, you know, it's a little bit of shelter in some water, right? But we can't stay in that mode for very long. If we expect to grow up, it's said differently. If we stay in that mode, we should expect to not grow up business.
I think it's tricky because there are so many distractions in this issue of survival that it's hard. It's hard to zoom out and say, wait, what are we doing all this for again? Right? And so I think today, let's talk through all of the categories, if you will, of distractions, of the things that actually keep pulling us away from our long-term vision for kind of, you often, what we set out to do to begin
with. Because for example, if right now we're running out of money, all we care about is raising money. Sure. Right? So it's all we're thinking about. Now, think of how many ways that morphs into a distraction from the long-term vision. At the very least, if I'm out pitching investors, I'm not building product, right? If I'm not building product, that means I have nothing to hand
to customers, which is what this is all about to begin with. So that's a distraction. And then, what if the things that I'm trying to chase right now, you know, to stay relevant, are trends, investors, all these things, which by the way, aren't necessarily synced with our long-term vision. So I think part of this challenge, man, is being in a mode where we are so distracted, we just watch the entire timeline of what we're supposed to be doing. Pass us by.
I agree. Yeah. And unfortunately, it feels like the nature of startups, like the very ethos of the entire thing, is that it pulls you away from that long-term vision, right? Everything that's required to achieve long-term vision is some form of a distraction. Right? And so it just takes constant recentering and reminding yourself, like, we talk about this whole time with founders,
going back to the why, right? Because if you lose sight of that, right? And I know it sounds a little woo, but when we lose track of that why, like what it is that we're trying to do in that very long term, not just build the big business, right? But I find, because that's easy to get distracted by, well, raising money is what's going to allow us to build a big business. Well, maybe. But if we start getting focused on the raising money and not with that enables, right? And in terms of
without enables, what is the long-term outcome of that enablement? This is where it goes off the rails really quick. And we see founders just end up mired down in a bunch of activities that in and of themselves would have been valuable to the business. But not if we get stuck doing, right? And not if we forget the connectivity to that final goal. So the investors are one
obvious kind of distraction and a necessary, necessary evil, right? And again, even even the investors would explain that, hey, you know, like I get it, you have to spend a bunch of time raising money in order to be able to build the product you want. Totally get it. But it is a massive distraction. And here's where it starts to become more of a distraction. This is where I get anxious when I watch founders do this, where they start modifying what the long-term goals of the company were,
based on what they think will raise money. Right. This happens all the time. In fact, these were two-year-old need funds plus hype cycle. And you've got a perfect storm for getting hell it is extracted. What startup is not an AI startup right now, no matter what your business is. Doesn't matter. It's hilarious. I thought you were making pita pockets to sell for the food
cards. Yeah, but we're using AI to drive customer insights. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And so if we rewind back two years to the last hype cycle with crypto, every business had that beyond the blockchain. Right. Every single founder I would talk to you say, oh, yeah, we are a blockchain enabled company. I'm like, why? That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any sense. We would get pressured. People like, oh, you know, startups.com, where are you guys with crypto and blockchain? I'm like,
nowhere, it makes no sense for our business whatsoever. Nothing about what we do needs to be on the blockchain. Exactly. Or in the metaverse or in that right? Like it's exactly what it really makes no sense. It's pressured to jump into these pools that nobody's tested the depth on yet. Well, it's a few things. If we were out there and we needed, we needed to raise capital and we knew that saying that we are on the blockchain would do that. Guess what? We'll probably be on the
blockchain. I don't know if that's the cost of entry to the room. You do it, right? If that's what it costs to buy the ticket to gain entry to gain audience with the with the umperors, then then you do it. Sure. But that's what I'm saying. This is where we're trying to have long-term focus. But now, we're getting pulled off, of course, by this other bullshit. The hype cycles are bullshit. The problem is most founders, they're founders for the first time. They don't understand the
difference between an opportunity cycle and a hype cycle. And often they're the same thing, right? So right now, AI is at almost its apex of hype cycle. Now, to be fair, AI is useful. I mean, I'm not going to compare AI to blockchain because they're very different. But like every other hype cycle, it will wash out and you'll start to realize the use cases are really strong in a few areas like they always are and actually kind of useless in others. Yep. When we when we had the
mixed reality or VR hype cycles, it was going to change everything. It was going to replace phones. And then people actually used it for a while and they're like, they have actually not right. Yeah. We're wearing the analog of a 1980s cell phone strap to my head. Right. Not exactly my idea. Amazing. But again, we keep trying to please the wrong party. And I think that really takes us off mission. If we're wondering who we should be pleasing, it is either your customer or your
employees. Right. One of them too. Ideally, ideally both. But if what you're working on isn't it'd be a test of one of those two, chances are you're probably on the wrong track. Yeah. You're been distracted. Yes. Yes. You can check that off. And this is what happens. I mean, so just to carry this point a little further. Right. So there are a lot of ways that we get distracted at your point. Like sometimes we need to do these things because we need to do these
things. Right. If it's what's going to gain us entry to an investor conversation. Okay. Right. If somebody on the team really wants to explore how blockchain could maybe get involved and we give them a little time to do that. Okay. I think where it becomes really dangerous and we see this happen a lot is where we cross the line from doing this because we need to for some short-term purpose to becoming permanently distracted buying it and believing the bullshit ourselves.
If we had to say this to get into a room with investor, that's one thing. But if you start to redirect our entire product vision towards this bullshit that we created just to gain entry to a room, now we've got the start of what can be a really long drawn out wrong way path. Right. Right. I agree. I also think that at some point all of these distractions don't take us anywhere. That's actually what concerns me. So the idea is start off need to move fast and do all these things.
And there's truth to that. There's of course there's urgency. Nobody can question that. But where I get anxious is when we confuse urgency with just straight up short-term decision making. Right. Just lack of vision if you will. And so the comparison I would use you and I've talked about this before is the difference between building Hutz versus Castles and the analogy for folks hearing this basically goes like this. You and I are stranded on island. Initially we just need shelter.
Right. We just need to build a hut. We need basic shelter and we need to make some short-term decisions to do that. But every time there's going to be rain every time there's going to be some storm, we're going to lose the hut and have to build it all over again. We're never really getting anywhere. We're always trying to kind of rebuild it. That's the short-term decision cycle. What we want to be building toward are Castles, something that has actual staying power.
Something that by the way takes a really long time. It takes a really long time. Right. It's just the two of us on an island. It's what else we got to do, right? For seconds island. It's hard for us to set back and say, you know what? We got to get out of the hut business. Yep. We got to get into the castle business because Castles are what stand the test of time. Castles are something that we can rely on for the long term. What does that actually mean?
Building Castles means things like building product that we're not constantly ripping back out on a regular basis. Building around long-term value with our clients versus some short-term trend that we think might turn some heads. If I give that an example in current, let's make everything AI. Yeah. Okay. Why? Does that have to be AI? It does absolutely. Right. Exactly.
Therefore, we will. Let's get distracted. Exactly. So the challenge, the challenge with building something seminal, something that will stand the test of time is sticking to your guns. For sure. Is being able to say, hey, yeah, this probably won't pay short-term dividends. But if this is really the product, the company that we want to build for the long term, we're going to have to invest. And it's going to suck because the short-term wins are so much
more fun. The hard stuff is saying, like, take startups.com. We're in year 11 of startups.com. 10 years ago, we made plans to more or less be where we are today, right? To be able to have the fortitude and the stability to be able to make decisions for long term. Our team got together this week, fluent from all around the world, yourself included. You and I got to hang out. And we talked about, hey, what do the next five to 10 years look like for us? Right? For sure.
Making decisions that will take five to 10 years to manifest. I think one of the tricks is that we have to make short-term decisions at certain points. There are things that we will have to do for survival, for safety, for a lot of reasons. There are things that have to happen in short-term. One of the things we can do to improve that is to try to say, what's the best short-term decision we can make that feeds into the long-term
vision? Right? And sometimes that doesn't mean it's the absolute best for the short-term. But we have to balance that short-term because to your point, if we just keep saying, well, we can just build another hut. We can just build another hut. We can just build another hut. We just end up with a bunch of huts. Right? And the value of that at the end is, isn't you're zero? Right? We have to say, okay, we need to build something like a hut. But how can we make
this in such a way that it could eventually turn into a castle? We got to keep the castle in mind as we do this. So sometimes there's a little bit of a trade-off saying, well, we could do this thing, which would make us a little bit more short-term cash, or we could do this other thing, which will make us enough short-term cash to clear the fence. But we can keep pointing towards the moon. Right? It's funny. I often get asked, I'm sure you do as well, what the core qualities of
a founder. Like, what does that skill set that every founder needs to have? What's that one thing that they all do? Sure. And that the answer has changed significantly over the last 25 years. But the thing I found myself consistently saying, and it speaks directly to this point, probably the last 10 years, is the ability to zoom in and zoom out quickly. To be able to say,
I can look at the short term, I can act with urgency when I need to. But I never keep acting with urgency for so long without zooming out to make sure that I'm still pointed towards that long-term goal. Right? Let's make sure that this HUD I'm building today is actually a closet in the castle. Right? Let's make sure that the great cash flow I'm building today supports the longer term
vision of how we want to sell and who we want to sell to for the long term of the business. And I think this becomes really important in terms of being able to make those good short term decisions. Because we have to, right? There's no version of not ever making a short term decision.
It's a start. They change all the time. The environment changes so many variables. We have to make sure that we're not completely changing the equation all the time, particularly not just for some flight of fancy because AI, because blockchain, because VR, because whatever the hell comes next. 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. I think the great stuff gets built with a willingness to adhere to the long-term decision,
right? Which is always harder. This would be the subject. It's always harder to be able to say, yeah, this is going to pay off right away. And by the way, sometimes it has to pay off right away. There's certain things you can't wait for. But that said, if all we're doing is short term, and we never plant those seeds, nothing ever happens, right? We're constantly in a short-term business. And that ends poorly. I think the other side of it, and I think these two things run in
parallel, is it takes a really long time to build a good business. In case people wonder what I'm talking about, I'm saying a minimum of seven to ten years to build a new business. And I know it would be awesome if we could just get it right in year one. Right. That point's sit back and it's not going to happen. And if it does happen, it is a fluke. It's not because you were so genius. If you're not sure, try to do it twice. It's just, you will not. Please call us back.
Exactly. Good luck with that. But the point is, it's hard for us to sometimes remember in such a short-term thinking business, the startup business, that the true value gets unlocked seven, ten, fifteen years out. Now, a lot of people don't, you can't conceive that because they've never done this before. And they hear about startups growing overnight, it's always funny when they say, we're growing overnight and getting so big, so fast. And I guess that's the way it goes. Those
are anomalies, which is why you hear about them, right? It's the thing that everybody did. No, no, don't care. Or you mistake the timeline entirely because you're basing it on when you heard about the company, right? And you dig into the issue like, oh, this was actually four or five different versions of this same company earlier on. Maybe there were a couple of co-founders worked on something
similar, but disparate at some point. Yep. Then came together, right? It's very rarely, or 30-year career history in a particular field that leads to starting the startup and then the domain knowledge that it took, right? The overnight startup. I mean, maybe there are a few that we've seen that really did, like in that 12 to 18-month period, from pure conception to scale happen. Right. Right. Look, we're talking about, like you want to talk about just, you know, any
company that gets to that point of success, we're in a tiny infinitesimal percentage. And then multiply that by another tiny infinitesimal percentage. I can do it. I can speak. And then we end up with the number of those that happen, right? It's ones per decade. I wish I had had this disposition earlier in my career. Yep. We actually understood how long it took to build things. And I could have had, I don't want to call it patience because I don't
think you and I have already under as patients. But I think understanding is probably a better way to say it. In other words, you know, when we just got back from our leadership, get together and and we're looking at kind of long-term, all of us can understand at this point that things take a long time, things worth building, take a long time. Any company that's of merit right now, that's probably sitting as an app on your phone probably has a five to seven year minimum window
that it took to mature to get there. There are exceptions, but there's not a lot. It usually takes a very long time. And that's okay, right? I think when we get caught up in this cycle that everything was supposed to happen instantly, and we're trying to make decisions to kind of falsely fast forward or artificially fast forward, how long things should take, we wind up disappointed. You know, part of what we do with that is we burn ourselves out with these short-term expectations.
For sure. Probably the best way I could make an analogy here is if we think that the startup race is only a 100 yard dash, then we're going to prepare ourselves and we're going to exert based on a finish line that's a 100 yards out. Will you will quickly learn, is that a 100 yard dash is more like a 100 mile dash? And if you go full guns, not just you, but your whole team, it doesn't end well. I've gotten analog on this one. I will routinely try to anticipate whether I'm going to
be subbed out in the second half of the soccer match. And oftentimes we only have a couple of sub. So it's happened before where I'm playing like I'm only going to play 50, 60, 70 minutes. Right. Then something happens. Somebody else gets injured and the sub that I thought was going to be for me has to go play for somebody else. There's nothing quite like that feeling of giving it your all so that you can get to the finish line. And then you get to the finish line and they're like,
yeah, you're about halfway there. Right. You don't want to end up in this position because look at the early stages, there's so much to do, right? There's so many things. But we know Jack shit about what it's actually going to take to get the business there. We make educated guesses. You know, we try to turn variables into constants. We're doing all the things that we have to do. But I've seen it happen time and again, where you just pour so much energy into that stage.
By the time you turn enough of the variables into constants and you've got a bit of a path forward that you now have an absolutely dog tired founder trying to figure out, okay, now I know where I need to go. But I'll be damned if I have the energy to take another step. I can't move further forward with this thing now because I've just completely spent myself at a time where the energy wasn't well-directed. Now, this isn't me saying like, hey, just conserve yourself until later because
then there won't be a later either. Yeah. We do have to strike a bit of a balance. And I think to your point, we just we can't we're never going to be patient, right? It's not our thing. Right. But we have to be realistic about how long it takes. And we have to be realistic about pushing ourselves beyond the empty point of the gas tank where then we get to these critical moments. And we just don't have the juice to make it happen. I gotta say, for the last 30 years,
I go to bed every night, disappointed in myself. Okay, so let me explain, right? It doesn't matter what I come to. So will cells becoming a founder to the upcoming masses of one of the founders. Come on in guys. It's fantastic. You can you can enjoy a 30 year stretch of self-loathing. Yeah. But it's I same, right? I get it. And it's like, it's the anti-explanatory. You always wanted to do a little bit more. Hang on. I want to put a little bit of a twist on
this because it really isn't as as negative as it sounds. We care, right? And there's nothing better than being able to wake up and have something to care about. So much that you go to sleep wishing you had accomplished more, right? I think that it's really a beautiful thing. And it's one of those things where, again, even having done this for so long, in understanding this stuff, I mean, hell, we're doing podcasts about how you need to pace yourself
and what your expectations are. So what I'm trying to say is it's not that I don't get it. I do. And actually, I get it. But I feel the same way everybody else does, which is no matter how much I do, I feel like I couldn't have done more. I could have worked faster. I could have done this. Even though I know that I couldn't, even, again, I have enough operating history to know what my benchmarks are. If I'm saying, hey, I should be running a four minute mile. And in 30 years,
I've never run a four minute mile. Right. That's some point. It's kind of like, no, you're not four minute mile guy. We have to recognize what's possible. I think that's part of it. But let's use another analog. You and I spend a bunch of time in the in the wood shop over the weekend. Right. And there were things that we could have done faster. Right. And we could have done faster. I think this is always important to think about like we can always want to have done more,
gotten more accomplished in a certain block of time. What we never really are honest with ourselves about is how would that have changed the quality of that outcome? How would that have changed my quality of understanding? How would that have changed my knowledge that came out of that? Right. And you and I did a lot of things over the weekend that were counter to speed, but were pro quality. Right. We said like, look, we could do this this way. But back to the earlier
point of are we building a castle? Right. If you're still laying the foundation, this is not a good time to cut corners. Right. This is not a good time to to do things in a way where you're going to have to replace it later. You're going to have to rethink it. You're going to regret it. And so I think we also have to be really realistic about it with ourselves and say like, okay, I didn't get as much as I wanted to done today of what I got done. This is what I try to do with myself
every night of what I did get done. Did I do the best I could? Am I happy with the outcomes of what happened? Forget about the quantity. Can I, can I look back at the quality and be like, yeah, I did that right now. If I don't find myself checking that box, now I actually have something to kick myself in the ass of them. Yeah. And the other side of it too is, you know, I said, I should have worked a few more hours. Fine. But they're just going to cost me the next day. Right.
It's not like there's this infinite bucket. Right. And I think one of the hardest things it there is for me to do, even at this point, my career is to pace myself. Actually, maybe more specific, I'm actually decent at pacing myself now. I'm not good at forgiving myself for pacing myself, which is a whole other thing, which which goes back to, you know, you and I've talked about this before, I have two modes, work and guilt. I'm in one or the other. Me, they're working or
I'm guilty that I'm not working, right? Not an awesome place to be. And I'm sure some of the folks listening are like not in their heads going it. Yeah, that's exactly me in the rest of them are going that poor bastard. But they're both right by the way. But it's hard for me to to continually remind myself that this is a marathon. And it's always been a marathon in nothing that I've ever done done well happened overnight or happened quickly or actually happened as a result of short-term
decision making. Everything that was worthwhile, whether I meant to or not, was actually a result of what was essentially a long-term commitment to seeing something through. Not because I changed the homepage or a landing page real quick or shift the model to block chain and all of a sudden everything worked. That literally never works. No, it doesn't. Starts with vision, right? Leads to planning. Then there's effort. Then there's analysis and adjustment. Then you're
planning again, but you got to keep that vision piece in there, right? As we were talking about before, zooming and zooming out. And to your point, like it takes time, especially building something of quality takes time. So if what you want is a big outcome at the end, expect that to take time. If you want a big outcome and fast, you can want that. The vast majority, the probability,
statistically speaking, math is going to tell you highly unlikely, right? So, you know, how many people do you know who have spent a lot of time planning a trip to those pyramids that they threw together? Like the ones that they built in four or five years, do you remember those? Nobody remembers this. They don't exist. Maybe they did. They don't anymore. There's also rarely anybody to remind us how long it takes to build things, right? Because
everything around us is the narrative is counter. That's the challenge, right? Investors want us to move fast. The hype cycles want us to move fast. Social media wants us to move fast. Our internal staff wants us to move fast for different reasons, right? For their own reasons sometimes. As founders of CEOs, as managers, wherever you are in the process, you're under constant pressure to move quickly. But it's very rare that someone says at what cost? Sure.
Hey, we can scale up. We can raise a lot more money. We can do this faster at what cost? Right. When you talk to people who've been through this before, who've raised a lot of money, and have seen what happens when you move too fast, they would have killed for someone to raise their hand. That could have actually slowed them down, which is rare. In the first and right slow, but at what cost? There are lots of decisions we can make right now
in our business. That might make us a little bit more money faster. It might make us grow a little bit faster, etc. But at a cost, in that cost can be any number of things. Hiring is a huge part of this, not just the speed at which you hire people, but who you hire. We need this person who really balances it. And the balance between speed and quality, right? Hiring a bunch of people, none of whom pan out, what did that buy you? But we see startups do this all the time,
post-funding. They're like, well, the expectations we're going to grow really fast now. The way to do that is to add a bunch of capability and a bunch of hands. Let's do it. We throw money to a problem and we grow a team, but without considering the quality, I mean, not without considering it, but without giving it proper consideration. Again, we're using time as the benchmark versus quality as the benchmark. There has to be a balance between
the two. We can't just sit around endlessly and think, we'll just wait until we find the perfect person. You're like, Ryan, you said that eight and a half years ago and we're still waiting to hire that human. I haven't found them yet. Yeah, fair, fair. I think that, you know, again, if we zoom out, like part of this is the team agreeing that we've got 5, 10, 15 years to do what we came here to do. Sure. If everybody has super short-term thinking and their only thinking is,
hey, let's get into this thing. Let's raise. Let's try to exit as fast as possible. It sounds wonderful and if who wouldn't want, you know, money faster, of course, right? It just leads to a lot of shitty thinking. There's really no other way to describe it, right? I think there's so much churly in an experience that comes with being able to say, I want to build something of value. Yes, at some point, if given the option, I would love to extract some, some, some, my own value
at that thing. But I want to build something of value. And in order to do that, I'm going to have to dedicate the next 10 years, minimum, by the way. And I just want to go on a tangent for a second. The idea that you only dedicate 10 years to anybody, if that sounds like a ton of time, it's even more hilarious. Like no one used to look at a building of business and say, I'm going to dedicate an entire 10 years. People used to build businesses and many still do, I just want to be
clear. And they say, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to building this business. Imagine this. It took you 12 years to go from being a kindergarten or to being a knucklehead high school graduate, right? Right. Took that much time to make that evolution. We're talking about building a business that adds immense value to the world. Let's put it in its rightful place and terms of a timeline. I love when I see truly generational founders and I don't mean generational
founders as in they'd handed off wealth. Yes. I mean, like the the ruper mordox of the world, who have built empires over 50 years over a massive period of time, right? And in my mind, you know, Warren Buffett would be a great example is, have built a kind of value, an enduring value that only that kind of contribution, only that kind of vision over that long of a period of time can do. Now again, if you go do it faster, do it faster, but you probably won't. So the next
best thing is be able to zoom out and say, okay, we want to do something extraordinary. How much time do we have for it? And we say, it's going to take us a minimum of 10 years. Again, if we get something done sooner and something crops up, cool. But I think if what we're trying to say is, I want to do that 10 year thing that everybody's talking about, but I want to do it too. I guarantee that's going to fail. It's going to end horribly. You're going to try to take a bunch of short cuts.
You're like, Oh, raise a ton of money. That'll make you go faster and we'll get there quick, more quickly. No, all you're going to do is you're going to raise a bunch of money. You're going to spend it poorly because you're trying to rush something that isn't supposed to be rushed. And then you're going to look back and say, Oh, what the hell happened? Cheek. I wonder. You're
ran too fast. You try to take something that takes 10 years. Get it done in two years. And every time I hear somebody talk about that type of acceleration, here's what I actually hear them saying. I would like to put myself in a position to make big decisions with less information and less resources. Yeah. That doesn't sound like it's a piece of success in my book. I think the other side of it too is it takes a little bit of pressure off your shoulders and the team's shoulders.
When I look at something like if I look at our business right now and I say in order to do something meaningful from here, I think we've already built a meaningful business, but in order to build something meaningful from here, it's going to take me 10 more years of investment, you know, to get to some of those milestones. Okay, let's pause with that for a second. That means while I want to get a lot done this month, this year, it's one of 10.
Right? If I change that math and I say, no, I want to get there by the end of next year, that is very different math. Those are totally different expectations and it's going to force me. It's going to create a force function to do a lot of things that probably aren't in my long-term best interest. And that's where this thing starts to really fall apart. I think for all founders, I think all founders, the key is to be able to first recognize that things take a long time.
Right? And that's okay. And that's okay. But the second part is to be able to pace yourself, is be able to pace yourself and say, look, I want to build something wonderful. It's going to take 10 years probably longer, takes less great, but it's probably going to take 10 years probably longer. And I'm going to create a plan and I'm going to create a touchstone within the organization, where everyone will make decisions. We zoom out first and we say, does that align with the 10-year
plan? If it does go for it, if it feels forced, if it feels like we're rushing, it feels like we're trying to take 10 years and compress it into two, it's probably a bad decision. 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 BizPlan, 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 startups.com site, you'll find all of these resources available.