Welcome back to their episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan from Startups.com, joint as always by Will Schroder, my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Well, we have looked at no less than 100 startup companies at a deep level when we were looking at potential acquisitions throughout the history of Startups.com. So we know a little bit about how
companies get bought and sold having been on both sides of that equation several times. But I think it would be really fun to dispel some myths today for founders around what the process actually looks like. Like how are companies actually bought? How are companies actually sold? Are they actually sold? And dispel some of the mythology and wipe away a little of the fog that exists in this process for founders. It's kind of like fundraising where people get an idea in their head
of how they think, like they sort of made it up, like how they think these things go. And then the reality is so dramatically different. Like most of the people that we talk to that think about fundraising, it's like they think it's shark tag, right? Like you just make this super enthusiastic pitch and the investor is like, yes, I'll invest right now. It's like, what are the work, anything like that? A couple of me in the room arguing over which one gets into your deal. Yeah, that's a
problem. No one has had ever. Unbelievable, right? Nothing like that. Nothing like that. And so same goes with selling a company, which I think there is like this invented mythology of how it must go because for a simple reason, no one's done it. Like how many people would have been involved in the sale of a company that is such a specific experience. And so you start to get these ideas in your head, well, I guess it must be this or I guess it must be that. Well,
good news. You don't have to guess it all because we'll just tell you exactly how it goes. And I think what that'll do as we're all thinking about like what would this thing have to be common order for it, you know, somebody to want to buy it or how would that process work? Do people show up and call us? Do we call them? Like how does this work? We just explain it because it's way different than most people think. And while there's some, you know, variations on the
process, this is pretty much how it goes. You know what I mean? Yep, for sure. Now I think that your point, like this is the kind of thing where you're lucky if you get to go through it once. So how would you have any experience in this? There are people who've gone to it two, three, four times for sure. You and I included, but the vast majority of people are going to have
one shot at this, right? And so then this is why it's important to understand it coming into it as opposed to waiting until next time, which may not, which may not exist, understand the real mechanics of how the stuff happens. Well, sure. And the other side of it is, you know, we're building things thinking that maybe one day will convert them to value. We raised money based on that. If we did that, we brought on team members who that, you know, have a stake in the company. And of course,
our own stake, you know, we're building something saying this could be worth a ton someday. But there's some parts of it that we don't quite think through or we just don't have all the data, right? We went through it. As you mentioned, it's top of the show. We went through and we talked to a hundred different startup companies. And I don't mean a survey or we posted it on Twitter. I mean, we literally flew to meet with and go through the books and talk to the CEOs to buy a hundred
different startups. Now I spent years going through this process. You know, I moved to San Francisco to go through this process. I moved to Los Angeles to go through this process. Like we spent a whole lot of time on this one. So we got an unguilty amount of experience and how founders think about acquisitions being on the buy side of things. Now we've also been on the sell side where we've sold something. But I think it helps to understand both sides to see what the equation is really like.
But beyond that, what I also think is that not understanding how the sell process works. And I don't just mean all the mechanics, but actually that like what it doesn't, doesn't even entail is a big deal. Because my fear, Ryan, is that our fellow founders, they're out there and they have this fantasy
of what selling their company looks like. And it's not even close to reality. I only know this because we essentially surveyed a hundred different founders talking about, hey, how do you think this process works? And so they just set it up a little bit. So we go out. This is the early days of startups.com. And Ryan, we decided that that we wanted to be able to expand our platform do a lot more than we
were doing now, cover the entire startup journey as we discussed it. And we couldn't build all the products ourselves in time. So we went out to buy companies that that became biz plan, that became clarity, that became launch, you know, the different things that we own. And so I went out and I went through my network, my roll of decks and I started reaching out to everybody that I thought was in the startup space. And we'd sit down with these folks. And we'd say, you know, we're
interested in doing a deal. And they'd come back with a number, which was insane every single time. And I remember thinking to myself at first, I was like, am I missing something like? And then what I realized was how those fasten, it's because no one knew how the process worked. They were just throwing spaghetti at the wall, right? Yeah. Right. Now think about this. Right. And think about the most complicated, most valuable transaction of your life that isn't like you getting married or
anything else like that with absolutely zero dated a base at odd. No understanding of how it works, right? Or the understanding that just by throwing out absolutely ludicrous numbers like that, you might blow the deal up right there at the beginning. And otherwise ruin the opportunity to sell your company at what have been a reasonable price. But we got we got some wild responses across the
board, right? And not just around the pricing, right? But sometimes like going through diligence and asking for you to provide things, they're like the lack of understanding of what needed to be hand over. So that somebody could make a decision. And they're like, oh, you need to see that? Yeah, I don't know if we're comfortable with that. Well, it's kind of fundamental to our decision
around buying your company. So if you don't want to cool, but that'd be the part where we piece out because without that information, there's no way we can make an objective decision about this. I always wonder if the founder thought I was using as a sales pitch, but I had a very consultative sale, so to speak in our by process. And it went something like this. I said, look, there's a pretty good chance that we won't buy your company now because it's not a great company,
but because you'll probably find a better price for it somewhere else. And we're actually totally cool with that because the end of the day, think about it. We're in the business of helping founders. That's what we're passionate about. So if in this process, I can educate you on how to make this work better for you and it works better for you. I'm also doing my job. So like, I don't have someone like designed to try to like wrangle your company out of your hands.
And so as we go through the process, I would explain to the founder. I would say, Hey, here are the things that you can multiply your business on, right? You know, revenue and net income and things like that. Here are things that you think have a lot of value, but not if anybody wants to pay for, for example, the word potential doesn't get multiple ever. You don't get to multiply potential. Like we have the potential to be a $10 million company. Let's look at a 10x
multiple on the potential of being a $10 million company. We're now $100 million company. I'll give you a great one. Okay. This came with multiple times. And I always respect it, right? I respect the hustle, right? It just doesn't work. So founders would come to us and they said, Hey, you've got a million companies in your platform. My startup charges $20 a month, which means my value to you could be as much as $20 million a month. I was like,
you missed a part of that equation, right? And again, this is this is me being kind and ingest with with the thing. I'm never a jerk to founders. I was like, dude, that's my value. Not your value. Yeah. I'm the one with a million. That's the reason. That's the only reason we're talking. Right? This is why we also recognize that value. Thanks for letting us know. Right. Right. Well, but what I'm saying, you don't get to sell me my value. Right? I'm the one of the
million customers, not you. But I'm saying, I love the thought process, right? And again, and I love the hustle. So I'm not, I'm not knocking anybody. What I'm saying is there's not much of a manual for this stuff, right? And so our understanding of how we should price or how we should approach this is way off. So with that said, let's start from the very beginning. Let's start with how do I know anybody's even going to call me up and buy my company? Well, you don't. You don't. You don't.
And so nobody really thinks this all the way through because it's kind of hard to envision, but the theory goes in our minds that if I built something of value, my competitors or like kind of quasi competitors, Google or Microsoft somebody is going to come and they're going to want to buy me for, you know, untold forges. Okay. Couple things. Number one, unless they're ready to buy you, there's no deal happening. This isn't like as soon as I choose to sell, everyone comes out of
the woodwork to bid on me, not how this works. All we need is a good advertising hook and then someone will buy our company, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here are a bunch of things that this is not. This is not like selling a house where the moment you go to sell, there's a fixed market. And if you just choose the right price, someone will buy it because there's always somebody that's going to be buying a house. This ain't that. This is a case where there might be three people in the world ever that
will buy your company. And who's to know when they're ever going to be ready to do it? Now, likely that they're all going to be ready at the same time and they're bidding each other up. Pretty unlikely. Now let's shift gears and say, yeah, but what if I market it? What if I take it out to the quote, the market, this is a morpheus thing. Okay. You can do that. You can hire an investment bank, right? If your deal is big enough, usually your deal has to be at least five million
or bigger. There's fewer investment banks that are taking on five million revenue companies lower. But that's here and there. Let's say you find one investment bank takes it. They create your perspective. They send it out so everybody that'll possibly listen to your deal, which usually means tons of private equity companies. And what do you get back? Lots of offers from tons of private equity companies. It's now your thinking, amazing. That's great. I love tons of offers,
except they're from private equity companies. And for those of you that are unfamiliar, so you see the offer. Yeah. It's easy to see the offer. The way private equity companies work, and this is relevant because they're the only active buyers out there. The way private equity companies work is they're looking for stuff that people will sell that's well below what it's worth.
Right? They're the merchant cash advance slash payday advance of buying companies. Now it's cool about them, just like merchant cash advance, just like payday advance, is that they are always available. They're always willing to do a deal. The downside is in you pay handsomely for it. So yes, you could force your deal into the market and you might find a buyer that's assuming your numbers check out and you actually have something worth selling. But even then at which point
you're forcing the sale, you're typically getting the lowest amount possible. The good deals come when someone calls you when you're answering the phone, which by the way, yeah, the minute I hear somebody say I'm selling my company, we're for sale, I can't help but append the word fire to beginning that right. I just you're fire selling our company, right? It just tends to be the way it goes because even if that's not the intention to your point when we put it out there and the market
that we land in our active PEs, we're looking to buy stuff. Like you said, they're looking for a discount, right? This is now the odd lots of selling businesses and it's not amazing, right? So it did it's there, right? It does provide some liquidity at times where often it's very, very needed, but not a great outcome, right? So to your point, when the call is inbound, significantly different experience. Yep. If the person's calling you, you're probably getting a good
price. If you're calling them, pretty much no, you're not getting a good price. Now again, this is generalized advice. It doesn't apply to every situation possible, but I think this notion that, hey, if we're doing things right, we're going to start getting offers left and right. That's just that's not the way this works. I think this notion that, hey, when we're ready to sell, we'll just put it on the market and we'll command a great price. That's not really the way this works.
Has it worked for somebody? Has somebody gotten an inbound call? Of course, they were building something incredible and they had the notoriety, right? Have people taken things out and have they sold? Yes, of course. That's what investment banks are for, right? But generally speaking, just getting a company out there at the right time with the right buyer is very hard to do. Like crazy hard to do. So let's begin with that. Before we get into the rest of how it's done,
just the bar to getting to the starting line is not small. So the idea that, hey, we've created value and we'll find buyers is a myth into itself. Yeah, I was fortunate enough. Maybe you were in the same boat. There wasn't nearly as much narrative around the startup space at the time. We worked building first companies and I didn't know you could sell them. I, naively thought, you had to build a business that made money and then you got to keep some of the money that it made.
Yeah, mentioned that. Turned out that was a good idea. Turned out, that's exactly why somebody eventually called me and offered to buy my business, which was a big surprise to me because until that moment, I literally didn't know that that was a possibility. It did not occur to me that somebody
might want to buy my business from. I think I knew that that could happen in theory, but it never occurred to me that it would be mine, which is funny because now, you know, which 20 something years later, that equation is entirely flipped where I think everybody's starting something is thinking when someone buys my business, right? And again, without a whole lot of information about how this
actually happens. So let's keep debunking here. I agree. But when the time comes, we've got this idea of what our company is worth, which brings us to the next myth, which I call the mythical multiples, right? Where we have an idea of how people are going to value our company and nobody's ever quantified that idea, right? We had an investor that said something like this my favorite. Oh, the data will be worth so much. No, well, only if it's stored in blockchain.
Yeah, only if it's stored in a company that makes millions of dollars. This idea that the data will worth a lot, or my favorite from back in the day, which was just get as many users in the doors possible. The rest will figure itself out. I accidentally melted someone over this one. They were like, look, we're just going to go out and gather as many users we can. And I'm like, okay, but are you going to monetize them? He said, we won't have to.
We're just going to do exactly what Snapchat did and was like kind of similar profiles of users similar to similar to similar that. I was like, so you realize that because they've already done that, that there's not any value in doing it again, those users have already been sold to the one or two buyers that exist out there for that. Nobody else is going to buy them from you now. And they were like, oh, shit. Yeah, because you got to think about what is the underlying value of the data
of the users, right? There has to be something there simply accumulating something isn't enough, right? It has to be able to be martialed into some kind of value. 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. If you take a business like ours at startups.com, we think, okay, you know, what are our users worth? Actually, our users are worth a ton, which is kind of ironic because there's two ways to look at our users, founders like yourselves that are listening. You guys can appreciate
this. One is that we're all broke. We have no money, right? And you go to that one way. The other is, but we're going to start spending as a company, right, which has an exponential amount of spend. So if you look at the AMX statements, so to speak, of, you know, every even small founder,
they've got tons of charges, right? Everything from their striped fees to like, probably not a hub spot yet, but like, you know, they're AWS or their Google PPC, like Facebook, whatever, like, there are so many places they're spending money that aren't like their personal money per se at a company. So you could look at our users and say, yeah, for themselves, they don't have much money, but amount they represent for their companies is a ton. So those users are worth a lot.
For those users worth a lot too. And this is actually where you start doing this math, you know, we're all together last week talking about exactly this. We made a list of every single place that our customers spend money and how much they spend and what that would be worth to someone who could acquire that company, you know, the startup company in order to help generate that spend. We look at that and say, okay, that's where some of our value comes from. Acquire them as a customer,
just a caveat there. Acquire them as a customer, not acquire them. I know we're, we don't want to mince terms here since we're talking about what happens when you acquire a company. Correct. Correct. And so, so we look at our company through various lenses and we say, okay, based on this, based on our customer value, how much is it worth? But one of the things that we're pretty consistent about is what about revenue and net income, right? Like because you can,
you can argue everything else. Now, the challenge with that is most of us aren't going to have much in the way of revenue or net income for some time to come if ever. Okay, and that's a real challenge. I just want to touch on this for a minute. There are kind of two categories of how you can monetize this business. One is financial. I either have top line revenue or net income and that kind of matters. Everybody understands it. And the other is what we just described a second ago, which is I
have some asset that would be incredibly useful to an acquire, right? It's probably not data, right? I have something like the value my users, etc., right? That would be incredibly value to an acquire and I want to push on that makes total sense. But you kind of have to play those out. You have to use real numbers. You can't just say I have a million signups. So therefore my my business must be worth a hundred million dollars. Like literally it's based on nothing. You can't
just make shit up. There has to be something based on it. You know what I mean? Again, it goes back to I said earlier, you're now making a calculation based on the potential of a thing rather than the reality of a thing. And that's just not what happens. That can happen in your mind. And I think this is we see this happen all the time. Founders convince themselves their business is worth this or it could be worth that or to this person. It's worth this. Well, you know who actually decides
how much it's worth to them? Them. They get to decide, right? The buyer gets to decide what it's worth to them. Of course, founders aren't wrong to think in these terms and to think about why that would make them potentially acquireable by that company. But I think kind of the point earlier that you were making where somebody presented our own users back to us and said, so here's the value
to you. So pay me that for it. Well, number one, I wouldn't pay the exact value because then that leaves no value for me, meaning that I just did you the biggest favor ever to happen in a business that you're so that's not going to happen. So yeah, I think we have to be really careful from the founder's side about turning what is potential and like exponentially inflating the values in
our own head. Because again, it can make us it can make us actually hesitant to enter into what would otherwise be good negotiations, good deals because they don't match up with this fallacy that we've constructed in our own little mind palace. In the realities, there's not a lot of data. Right? There's not a lot of data to be able to pull from to be able to say like like in the real state world, we have the MLS in the US, which is market comps of every house and it shows exactly what things
have sold for and it shows exactly what the market's doing. So you can take a 3000 square foot house in one zip code and compare it to a 3000 square foot house and get roughly a market comp. That does not work in this business, right? There just aren't there's not enough volume and there's not enough consistent volume at a specific level at a specific asset to get a market comp. Now no lack of people have tried, right? Private equity companies when they come to buy you will probably
pull three comps, but startups are so different like one to the other to the other. Even if they have the same revenue, the same net income, two different businesses are two totally different businesses, right? So the two don't think up because of that, even a well researched founder, you know, that's trying to figure all this stuff out doesn't have a lot to go off. Now I'll give you some thumbnails and then I'll call people in the audience are going to argue about this. Say,
it's this or that. It's okay. We can't hear him. Here's generally what happens when you think about your business from a revenue standpoint, a good revenue multiple for the top line. Not every business is different, okay, but just general. I'm ballparking here. Okay. A good revenue multiple is typically to be two to three times your top line revenue, assuming you have a fair amount of net income to back that up because the two things are supposed to bounce out and would be anywhere
between five to 10 times your net income again, depending on the business. Now let me sharpen that a bit. Okay. I said two to three, not top line, not five to 10. Does that mean there hasn't been a company at SoulFab? Of course there has. Of course there has, right? But the likely scenario, right? I'll give you a little examples because this is public information. When we sold our first company, Blue Diesel, we're doing 150 of net revenue, not net income net revenues. We had a lot
more in buildings going through and we sold for 2.3 times that just 20 years ago. I tried. Yeah, about 350 million dollars, right? And we're doing about 30 million a year in revenue net income rather, right? So that's about 10 times net income, right? But not a huge premium at two times over, you know, top line that wasn't that much money. And we were making a shit ton of money. And that's a really profitable company, right? My point is, and we are happy with those terms.
Like those are the terms that we sold that obviously. If we were happy, people get it in their minds that, oh, I'm doing four million of revenue. So I'm probably worth 400 million. It's like, dude, you're not even remotely close. Not unless you're calculating that in Turkish lira. And here's where it gets messed up because you hear about a company that's done it, right? And it reminds me of like, like, when people go into professional sports, like, let's say you get
drafted by the NFL, you're like, but Patrick Mahomes made 500 million dollars. Number one, you're not Patrick Mahomes. But person only made 500 million dollars, right? Like, just because one person did it doesn't set the bar for everyone else, right? And so I think when you think in terms of what my company is worth based on other things that you've seen in the market, generally doesn't plan out. It doesn't pan out. It's not one for one. It's the same as comparing yourself to any other
company based on very little data in any other scenario. We've talked about this a thousand times in the podcast that you're not going to see the whole picture, right? You're not seeing everything that was behind the scenes there. Yeah, they might look similar size, similar shape, but who knows what other differences dealt as there were behind the scenes? All the things you don't know that formed the value of that transaction, not the obvious and easy stuff that you can see on the outside.
Agreed. And then on top of all that, even if you made it that far, you've gotten through negotiations and maybe even said, here's an amount that we're willing to pay. Awesome. There's an assumption that you're actually going to get paid or get paid the way you think. Here's the way here's the way we think we're going to get paid, right? When this beautiful pay day comes. Ed McMahon shows up, right? Yeah, I'm just going to say I was going to say shows up with a publisher's
clearing house. Yeah. Yeah. And all I think to myself is who would remember that reference anymore? You and me. Yeah. We're just here to make ourselves happy. Will, did you forget this is a podcast for us? That's it. I was trying to think back to like, like, what would be the 2015 version of a publisher's clearing house check? And I was trying to think of a YouTube influencer or something. Anyway, point is Mr. Beast shows up and open the suit. There we go. Now we got it.
Nicely good. We're relevant. Yeah. But not really. And so the idea is that, you know, on on payday, there's this big check that shows up and tons of fanfare. Yadiya sort of, but not really. Here's what actually happens. Here's what actually happens. When you're going through the deal, the buyer is trying to find as many ways as possible to bring the price down. Now, bring the price down. We have something we call the headline price, which is kind of what you read about in
the papers, the amount that it sold. And then there's the actual price, the actual price is what happens when the deal is actually structured the way a buyer tends to structure a deal. So what does that mean? It means that if I'm going to pay $100 for something, I'm not going to pay it all up front in most cases, right? I will pay maybe half of it up front because the reason we got to $100, which has the buyer, I think is way insane. I can't believe I'm paying that much is because
I'm not 100% sure that after I buy this thing, that it's not going to all go to hell. So I'll give you $50 up front. In the other $50, I'm going to put into something called an urnau. Otherwise, known as separate term for it, a different structure, also be a seller's note, where's I'm just basically making payments over time, right? Now, why does that matter? Well, a couple of things.
Number one, often where the ones stuck there having to earn that out. Number two, during said earn out time, which is us basically being employed as a lackey for the company we just sold to for the next X number of years. During that time, we created a bunch of incentive milestones that we had to hit at an constant operational basis with the company in order to get that other $50,
which we will probably not do because here's the trick that gets played. The buyer, if you're a smart buyer at all, by the way, we've never done this, but pointing this out as a buyer we haven't done this, but I understand the tactic is, well, why wouldn't you want to make $200, Ryan, but make it on the back end based on performance? Why settle for $100? And you're like, well, no, I mean, I'd kind of like to get paid. Well, well, hun, you're saying I shouldn't be confident in
this purchase that it could make $200. It's the oldest car salesman trick in the book. I used to work with a car dealership network and we did swapleast.com. And he said, when a car dealer would come in salesperson to get a job and he's like, well, do you want salary or do you want full commission? Right? Well, I want a salary to be sure. Like, why would you want a salary if you're going to crush it on sales? Why wouldn't you take everything? Why would you be limiting yourself with a salary?
And obviously puts the salesman in it's same thing, right? It's the exact same thing. Super strong arm tactic and it works. It works beautifully. And so, you know, we're trying to get to that bigger headline number. We want to make $100, $200. So we create some sort of structure, you know, that gets that paid over time. Or we're just forced into it because the buyer is basically saying, Hey, if you don't stick around to run this thing, I don't want to just be handed a steaming
pile of shit and I have no idea where it goes. So I need you to commit to this thing. And every founder does and every founder hates it. Yeah. The way that structure works, you're essentially earning them the money to pay you back, right? Which in most cases, we look at a lot of these deals. And we hear the the back side of a lot of these deals. And it rarely happens, right? When they put these really high incentive milestones in there, they sound great. Yes, if we hit it, it'll be fantastic.
It'll be more money than I ever would have seen. And it will be more money than you'll ever see. Right? Yeah. That's unfortunately the way that plays out most of the time. But yeah, you got to get a little see through some of these mechanisms. And I think it's worth mentioning that there isn't a static, you know, form, right? That's the other thing. Like when we sell a house, there's a process. And it's very clearly defined. And there's, you know, state by state, maybe
slight variation, but there's a good statement. There's some stuff that goes on. It's very, very standardized selling a business while less infinitely variable, but it's damn near, right? You can include anything goes. Anything you want, right? And we have to deliver seven chameleons on every July to your address of your specification. Okay. It's perfect. It can be whatever you want. The other side of it, though, is let's say you make it through all that. Okay. Let's rewind.
Let's rewind back to the top of the episode. Someone was nice enough to call us, but probably not. And we had to go shop the deal, whatever. We finally got somebody on the hook that's willing to take a look at our deal. We come up with some multiples. Our first multiples are absolutely batched and sane. They come back to us. They sober us up. We finally realize what our assets actually worth. It's always a fraction of what we thought it was worth. We finally get to a deal.
They come at to us and say, I, you know, $100. Yes, but how we're going to pay that $100. Not so much. Right? So we have $50 up front. The other $50 over a three-year period. I'm like, well, you know what? Okay. Well, we got a deal done. But wait, there's more. Because in we just did a whole episode on this, we don't actually know that we're going to see any of that money. You're like, well, what are you talking about? How can I not see the money?
There's often a long line of folks who get to put their hand out first. They are. Now, to be fair, this is for folks that have raised money. If you haven't raised any money, you can skip past this section or you can watch their losing through it and laugh and be proud of yourself for not having investors. But if you do, you always certainly have terms in your agreement. For those of you who have not raised money, please listen closely.
You most certainly have terms in your agreement that are there for a very good reason, this one, that if you're at a cell, they get their money back first. Sometimes a multiple of that money. So let's say, Ryan, you invested a million dollars into my company. And when we sell for three million dollars, well, in a very typical term, your preference, as we call it, in your investment, would state that if we sell the first million dollars that comes out goes to you to repay your
investment, has nothing to do with how much you own in this particular case. Then, whatever left over, we split based on how much we each own in the company. Okay. Now, you could also have a preference. That's a two X preference, meaning it's two times your investment comes out first because you negotiated it when we did this deal that you want to make sure that you could get a return on your investment if there was ever liquidity. Hmm. Okay. So we just hold for three million
dollars. The first two million goes to you. And the other million gets split. I get a percentage of the last million. Yep. Now we raise three million dollars. You could do the math. We get nothing. Right. So again, I'm saying that's if you get paid, then it could also be structured in a way, where you might as the investor get paid first. And then I basically be making my money out of the earn out money on the back end, which may or may not even come. Exactly. We forgot to talk about that
part, right? Sometimes people don't pay all their bills, even when they're really big bills for things like buying a business. It does happen with fair frequency. You need to learn that less than exactly once in the truth is a lot of stuff can happen in these deals. But Ryan, I think we're it challenges us the most as founders is this isn't really something that we we have a reason to talk about or talk about in detail. But the good news is this information is all out
there. There are good advisors out there. If you're not sure send us an email email therapy at startups.com. If you're even thinking about this process or you are going through this process, let's talk just founder to founder. It's just an offer to help you. No strings attached just to make sure you don't go the wrong direction on this. Because for most of us, we're going to spend years, decades in some cases, building the most important thing we've ever built in our life.
The last thing we can afford to do as founders is not have the information to understand exactly how to do it. 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.