Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Well, founders are pretty important to a startup company. They sort of don't exist without them at the early stages, but it Stage, does it become just a thing the founder keeps doing well beyond the point of needing to be there, right? At what point can we just pluck that founder out and everything continues to to go as planned? I think it works never, although it's also the dream, right? The dream is like, I'm gonna build this thing and eventually backfill myself with someone else, and they're gonna do things just like I did in fact, better. Because they're more talented or they're more seasoned, they're more whatever, right? That we're finally gonna put management in place. I, I, I remember, uh, an old friend of mine, you remember Artie Isaac? Oh yeah, yeah, I remember Artie was, was working to find his back at the agency and I was on his board at the time, and, uh, and he was like, we'd like to hire management. He didn't even say like better management because he is already he's like. It's like we need to hire management like anybody talented or or yeah yeah and and and I get that because, you know, we all feel like frauds and like we all believe that we're gonna bring the real person in that really knows how to do this, and it fails like every single time. So today I, I, I think we definitely need to talk about. This never works. Why this is is such a fantasy, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, you know, and we see it manifest in a couple different ways like there's the, you know, the the replace the founder, um, which you do see happen and against your point, kind of like rarely do we see it work out. The other one is ever seen a business get sold and then see bad things happen to it? It's not exactly the same thing. But it's damn close, right? Like post acquisition things just don't go well, right? I, I sold a relatively simple business at one point in my career, um, and within a very short period of time it ceased to exist. Um, because I was no longer at the helm, right? And there were other factors, sure, I'm not saying like, had I been there, everything would have been fine, but there were, there were clearly some things that that happened that probably wouldn't have had I continued to stay the course, right? I think I've tried it if I had to go back over 30 years of my career across 9 companies. I think I've tried to do it, I bona fide, like made a CEO hire, you know, basically my backfill, at least 7 times in my career. So no stranger to this one. It wasn't, and it failed 7 times, right? It it so, so the, the, the conventional wisdom is either you made a bad hire or you just always gotten back involved, etc. Not true. Not true at all, right? Uh, in every case I could not wait to find someone else because I was actually working on something totally different. Like it wasn't like I wanted to sit there and and and um get like involved in what people were doing day to day. I was gonna go run a different company. Like, I had no time to do this, so I could not have been more disconnected and every single time I had to get pulled back in against my will, right? I wanted to come back. Um, but because I, I, I don't think people are taking stock of what really makes the founder contribution unique, how it's kind of not really a job, it's like a DNA of the company, you know what I mean? Yeah, of course, I mean, it literally born from the, the thoughts, the dreams, the vision of the founder, um, and To the extent possible you impart that on the rest of the team, you might try to impart that to a a new hire. I think that's also, you know, it's interesting because I think some people might make the case like, well, but what if it comes from within, right? Like, what if this is somebody else, we've seen this, right, we've seen it from, you know, junior employees who continue to be promoted up and then took over a company. We've seen co-founders eventually, you know, change roles or take on the CEO role and still outcomes are not stellar in most cases, and I think it does go back to that like. The companies do take on a shape, and I think your your DNA analogy here is is the accurate one. they take on an innate form that mimics that dream of the founder and the vision of the founder, the skills of the founder. Once you extricate that, right? You, you take that out of the equation, things change a lot and, and fast. I think at which point, you know, let's let's be clear, at which point the business doesn't need to be like wildly innovative anymore. Then sometimes you can make that transaction or transition. Um, in some cases where the business seems to be run and not grown, not not to say it's not gonna grow, but like just running it day to day. And by the way, that's a totally different aspect of the business, right? Take Apple, right, you know, considered one of the most innovative companies, right? And obviously you've got one of the most iconic founders in Steve Jobs, and then you've got a phenomenal CEO in Tim Cook, right? So, so Tim Cook is a great CEO, not taking anything away from. But he ain't coming up with iPhones, right? Like, like Apple's innovative days are behind it. He'll figure out how to deliver them in mass, but he's not the one who's gonna be like, hey, you know what? Yeah, exactly, and so it it at which Apple's in a tough spot because that business needs to be innovative. Let's take another case of a business that does not insurance, right? So let's say you're running an insurance company, and granted you. I've got some, some good friends, um, who've come up with new models for insurance, and there's some innovation behind it, and that's where the founder DNA matters. But I'm talking like old school insurance, like just regular old insurance, right? An insurance company can run for the next 200 years with no innovator behind it, right? Like they're just, it just needs to be run. Think of a couple of businesses pretty close to you that fit that mold. Well, yeah, yeah, in the insurance capital of the world in Columbus, Ohio, right? So, here's what I would say with that. From a, can someone run a business better than us? Of course, right? But what we're saying is when you take the founder out, the founder DNA, that vision, that consequence, and all those elements, something is lacking and, and you can't put a LinkedIn job posting up to replace that. I, I, I think we have a really hard time as founders. really understanding what that value is or how damn near impossible it is to replace. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that inherently like, you know, founder to founder, we kind of know these things. We may, we may know this about ourselves, but even even then, like, and I I'm curious, like, do you remember what it was? That deluded you into believing, right? That you that you could be replaced because clearly like, it's tough to see from the outside. And my point earlier where there's there's so many things that you just really can't fully impart. You can't pass on to somebody else, you can't transfer vision in the same way that you can transfer a skill, um, because it's not repeatable by nature you're you're constantly looking at something that doesn't yet exist, so you can't like show somebody how to see that, right? You can explain what you see, but you can't give them the ability to keep having vision. So, knowing these things, right, and, and having been through this seven times, go back and try to try to pull out like what was it that made you think like, this time it's gonna work, or, you know, I, I'm not that necessary, and where did it turn out to be just absolutely wrong? Well, OK, so the the first one was, I just assumed. That vision, uh, you know, the vision of what a company should be, how it should operate, how culture should work, etc. was something you could read or deliver and impart and move on. Currently business school agrees with you. Right, right, of course, and made a big business out of it, but here's where, here's where that falls short. That assumes that the that that the recipient has as much passion about what that what became of that vision as you did, right? Years and years ago, uh, when I was doing a startup, and I talked about this before, uh, the startup that I did with Jamie Siminoff, you know, the founder of Ring, and we did a company together and uh it was, it was my idea. I kind of came up with it. I brought Jamie in uh and I brought my other friend Josh in. Um, and, uh, and Jamie became the CEO. Years later after we sold the company, Jamie came back to me, he's like, I'll never do that again. I was like, what's that? He's like, I'll never work on someone else's vision. And he said, cause it sucked because when I'm up there pitching or or talking to partners or whatever, I didn't really care about it, and I, I was like, hey Jamie, the reason I didn't want to be the CEO so I didn't care about it either. Fool yourselves into co-founding a company. Yeah, yeah, we agree again, um, but, but I guess my point is, um, he, he, he was saying there's a lack of authenticity. When it's not your baby. Right? The the there just is, um, and, uh, when, when you're getting up there and you're saying we have to unsubscribe from every email, when it was your idea, you could be dumb enough to be passionate about that, because it was your idea, when it's just an idea. Somebody else's idea. I hesitate to use this analogy because it's got a lot of personal undertones to it. But when you're talking about if it's your kid versus someone else's kid, right? When it's your kid, you're willing to overlook all of their their issues and everything else like that, right? When you're taking care of someone else's kid, you want to protect it, but when the kid's a jerk, you're like, it's a jerk, right? You don't give it the same latitude, and I think there's a lot to be said for that, right? You don't bring it home, you don't bring it home the next time. Yeah, kind of, right? No, seriously, like I, I, I think from my experience in in handing that off, I assumed that when someone took the job, they just got they just like they just Right? Like, like all of a sudden they're like, oh, obviously I'm thinking like back in my agency days. Obviously we're gonna build the most impressive pages that the internet's ever seen, right? That's the vision, that's amazing. And the people that we hired that to do that job, that would have inherited that vision, they didn't give a fuck. I don't care about any of that stuff. Yeah, just don't care. They don't care at the same level, right? And and that it matters so much. Again, if you're just executing, you're doing the same thing over and over and over again, right? are you flying the plane or designing one, right? Are you a pilot or or an aeronautical engineer? Right? And that's what it comes down to, right? If you just know you need to follow a certain set of rules, and here are the guidelines, here's a max altitude, max speed, here's all this stuff, and as long as you stay within those parameters and and you you you operate it well, things will do well, right? But when you, when the destination is unknown, when, when the form factor is still, you know, not completely there, when there's still 2 or 3 more growth phases or a pivot or two to go through before you finally get to that point where you're really doing what you want to be doing. The idea that somebody else is gonna pick up that and and run with it and carry it to where it needs to go, it's ludicrous, right? It's go back to your, go back to your your your analogy around kids, right? You stop parenting just because your kids start going to school, you assume that that person is gonna now pick up and just take them the rest of the way that now they'll get everything they need from over there. We hired the CEO, they're good, right? Now, the, the kids, the kids will be raised by, no, right? Because they don't understand them at the same level, they don't have the same level of passion for the outcome. None of the none of the inherent. Uh, it needs of that child or your startup are gonna be carried forth by that teacher, that that new hired gun CEO. That also radiates externally, you know, when you show up at client pitches, when, when um Tim Cook is on stage versus Steve Jobs presenting Next gadget, it is not the same, right? Now, to be fair, that that guy was a master salesman in Steve Jobs, right? So like, almost anybody would have a hard time replicating that, right? Um, however, it's also just not the same, right? Like, I, I would almost argue and I mean I'm stretching here, but like, if Steve Wozniak, you know, the other co-founder of Apple got up there and presented a new device, there would be something special. About the co-founder of Apple presenting it, even though it was a weirdo, right? No, it's, it's a different spark. Yeah, it's strange guy, yeah, you you would fly over the heads of most people, they wouldn't understand what he was saying, but there'd be a very different level of energy, right? Like you can put, you can put Tim Cook into a into a turtleneck. You cannot make him Steve Jobs, right? The energy is not there, the passion is not the same. And I think as founders we we overlook that, you know, we're just like, oh well, again, um, you know, other person can do my, my CEO role, my managerial role, my experiential role better than I can. And therefore, I guess that all these other things keep happening. The founder is is not a job, it's an institution. It is baked into what the DNA of a company is, and you kind of can't hire for it. But I also don't think that's necessarily what people are trying to backfill, right? When I was trying to backfill, I was like, dude, I wanna go do other stuff, right? Like I, I need somebody to be sitting in this chair that's not me. The motivations are important, right? And the the reason why, but, but I think that's the there's a danger in that too, right? If that's like I wanna go do something else, cool. And that that's a that's a strong motivation, especially for founders like we love a shiny ball, right? We are ready to go chase, super dangerous because then we can decide that like, look, I'm, I'm going for the right reasons. I'm gonna go build something else. This is this is really what I want to be doing. Cool, but like at the cost of what, right? You you're extracting yourself from a situation that still probably needs you. I remember realizing at one point that uh part of the challenge I was having was that, uh, you know, I was having several meetings a week with the team. Um, but the other 300 meetings that only happened in my head, where a lot of the vision was sorted out, where a lot of the, the, the passion was rekindled, all of these other things that were happening were only happening to me and for me by me. Why? Because I was the only one that cared that much, right? I'm the only one who's gonna have a meeting with himself in my own head, right? Like we spend so much time in in our own heads, um, that we forget that there's there's not an audience there. Right, I, I realized at some point that like I was having trouble separating the conversations I'd had with myself and the ones that I'd had allowed with my team, like like. Where was which which one of those actually had an audience? You're just always in pitch mode. You gotta remember sometimes you just pitch into an audience of one and it's just you. That that was always my fatal flaw with you guys. I was like, it's all worked out and you'd be guys would be like, have you bothered to tell us? Oh, right, we just need to execute to the plan, share the plan, right? Yeah, remember to share the plan. Yeah. So the second part that I think that we have a hard time understanding called the value would be the pain of consequence. That a founder or founding team feels that is so dramatically different than everyone else, and I'll give you a tiny tiny example, as the the CFO of the company as well, one of the reasons that I've always been CFO of all the companies that I've done, isn't because I like finance, like, at all. Um, I mean, I do like having the, the wherewithal to know what the finances are, and that's great. It's because at the end of the day, I don't trust anyone else to do it. And not to say that these are inherently there are untrustworthy people. There's perfectly capable people of doing this stuff, right? But there's this tiny little bit of detail that scares the shit out, right? It's no one to turn over that other rock and just take one more peek, right? That number just doesn't seem quite right. Right? Why is that, right? Oh, we have, you know, an expense that's about to run out of control that's nobody had eyes on and and you catch it at the right time. Yeah, no, it's, it goes, it sets it goes back to that level of care, right? But your point, level of consequence too. You be OK, so stick with that. So, um, I can hire somebody to know what the expenses. I do it myself because I know why the expenses, right? Like, why is it there? Why is it that significant? Why, you know, why shouldn't it be there, and who's accountable to that number? the answer is me first, right? But, but, but who else? Um, and the, the reason, again, that's small, but the reason I do that. It is because I know it it'll be no more consequential to anyone ever than it is to me, right? The reason I learned how to become a CFO isn't because I'm any good at math, I'm terrible at math, right? It's because the numbers felt so consequential to me, that the idea of relying on someone else for my consequence, just terrified me. Now I understand plenty of people do it. Yeah, I know, it doesn't doesn't doesn't feel right. Yeah, yeah, and I mean and that's and that's one that's that's one example, right? But I think then you, you know, imagine extracting yourself from everything in the company, right? Imagine you're no longer just not looking at the numbers, you're not looking at the staffing line, you're not looking at the uh at at at the at the customers, you're not looking at customer service, not looking at any of it, right? At that point when the founder is no longer there, these things compound. Really, really quickly, right? It may seem like uh uh it's, it can sometimes it's a big thing, right? Sometimes a big thing comes along, you pull the CEO out, or you pull the founder out, you put in a CEO, some big, you know, black swan type event comes along, um, maybe just specific to the company, and, and, and things go sideways. More often in my experience, it's, it's death by 1000 cuts. It's that lack of attention to all of those minute details where the level of care just isn't there because the level of consequence isn't there, right? I, I think as, as, as founders we have this inherent sense that like, even one thread coming loose on the sweater needs to be addressed. It's really important because it can lead to being threadbare really damn quickly, right? And we care about that. We don't want to end up in that situation. 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 1000. times before you, which means the answer already exists, you may just not know it, but that's OK. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups.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. Here's the way I I always think about it. If an employee, let's say you hire a CEO, if an employee screws something up, they can lose their job, and that is consequential to them. I, I'm not discounting that. If the founder messes something up, they could lose everything, like, they could lose everything, they could lose 100 employees, they could lose the entire company by way of that their entire net worth, um, all of the investors' money, if they have them, um, their house, their retirement, their life savings, everything, right? Um, no matter how difficult your job is, you do have a bit of a firewall that says, if they're gonna go really bad, like if this thing can get sued or something like that, like, I'm just quit right now. There's a safety net, right? There's a safety net there. Exactly, right there, but there is a firewall of consequence that an employee has ergo, the person you would bring in the back bill you, that you just don't have. By the way, it would be awesome. I would kill for that firewall, right? The narrative is so different, right? You know, let's imagine you're, you're, you're a CEO who gets brought in, uh, to take over the startup company. Yeah, they brought me in to try to do a turnaround. Things didn't work out, give it my best shot. I'm on to my next gig, right? That's the narrative there, right? Founder doesn't get to tell a story anything like that. You are chained to the ship going to the bottom of the ocean. And so because of that, the way you would respond to an issue, right? I I I'll give you some examples that are just so near and dear to me. Uh, you mentioned like customer support, things like that. Um, customer calls in and they're irate about something, OK, and in, in support team and our support team is amazing, so I'm definitely not pointing to our support team, um, but, but, uh, support team blows it off and I got screw it, here's a refund, you know, go away. All that person cares about all that person cares about reasonably so is get annoying person off the phone and go back to my lunch break, right, or whatever they want to do. Zero consequence. You're looking at it going, dude, I'm not gonna get paid. Like this whole company is not gonna get paid. I'm not going to get paid, like, I can't pay my personal bills because you decided this person was too rude and you need to get off the phone with them, right? Now again, this doesn't me saying like, you know, um all of these uh uh unstable customers are terrible, are are amazing. Uh, what I'm saying is that the lack of consequence that the customer service person might have versus you is dramatically different. Another example is in a sales process, where the salesperson is like, yeah, you know, the the the the the customer was trying to ask for too much, we just, we just couldn't do it. And you're like, whoa, hold on, that's money, we can do it. If it involves money, we we can do it. We talked about this last week, man, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta do things we've never done before if we want to grow, right? We just did a podcast on this. If it's consequential to you, meaning like if that customer doesn't pay you. You look at that and you say, we have to fix how how we deliver our service, we have to change our product. Remember we dealt with this a lot with virtual, where people would come to us, you know, a virtual assistant business, people would come to us and they would say, hey, will you do do this? And in our front line folks to to to their credit, this is what they're supposed to say, um, say no, we, we can't perform that service. But you and I will look at that and say that person was gonna pay us like $60,000. Yeah, let's figure it out. Um, let's find a way to make that work. Let's find a way to make it work. And so again, when you remove that consequence and that and now we're not talking about front, you know, frontline customer support or sales or something like that, we're talking about the damn CEO right? the person running the company. When you remove consequence from them. That's a whole different, I mean the the the the the weight and the value of that is is tremendous, it's scary actually. And it's not that it's not that they don't care at all, right? And it's not that there are some consequences there, but I think when we look at the spectrum of consequence, they're far, they're far closer to the I have a I have a perfect safety net. Compared to the the founder who just falls off into the abyss. One thing I want to be careful up here is is giving people the impression that a founder has to run around and be in every single place all the time and be micromanaging and doing all the jobs like, yeah, I mean pick your battles. Yeah, you gotta pick your battles, um, but you gotta care, right? And I think to your point, like the moment that that becomes somebody else who doesn't have that same level of consequence. Um, when, when you remove, when, when the buck no longer stops anywhere, right, when it can just kind of keep passing and it just passes off into the abyss and then the company disappears and, you know, well, it wasn't great, but it's not the end of the world for them. It's a really dangerous situation. So, but kind of to the point around the micromanaging, like how do we, how do we draw the line? How do we start to pick those battles? Like how do you decide whether you're looking at customer service, you're looking at the finance transactions, or how do we, how do we strike that balance? Right? And and I think from uh from the the leadership standpoint, again, you pick your battles, you know, you're not in in in in every last detail. However, there's something about Having that ownership, having that that consequence, that changes things. I I I'll give you the interesting example that always stuck in my head, um, years and years ago when I was running Swappolice.com, um, the, the, the company was founded not by me but by, uh, this, this auto dealership, this huge auto dealership network, and I would spend some time with the the owners of the of the dealer network, and they were old school 4th generation car dealers, right? Um, owned dozens and dozens of huge dealerships, right, you know, um, their, their great grandfather had a statue of him in the middle of downtown, right, that, that's how old school this was. Anyway, um, I would ask him how they, they did management and stuff like this, right? I'll never forget what he said to me. He said we walk around. I, I know there's a joke, management by walking around, but he meant it literally. But that's no, it's yeah, that's that that is how it goes. He drives dealership to dealership. And he walks onto the lot, and every time he walks in the lot, he looks, he runs his finger across the hood of a car, says how how dirty is it? He looks to see how many of the uh the the the sales people are out and back smoking, right? He just looks for the little details, because where there's smoke there's fire. In that business it was so amazing at how little it took to know when things were off, right? Like, like those those things that you could see. But the reason He saw it that way, it's cause he gave a shit, right? Like he really, I mean it was, it was his pocket that he was dealing with. When that car was dirty, he wasn't going to make money, right? And that was very personal, kind of like, you could hire a manager to and say look out for these things, and they'll look out for these things, they'll run checklists and they'll do what managers are supposed to do, they just won't care in the same way. That's what's different. Again, at some point in a certain type of business, like you may be able to put processes in place that say like, look, somebody's gonna go down that line, they're gonna make sure the cars are all clean. Somebody's gonna make sure that the uh that the sales team isn't all on a smoke break at the same time. Great, right? But how many startup companies do you know they are in a position where things are that cut and dried, that obvious, that operational? Yeah, yeah, these guys have been selling cars since the Model T, right, yeah, I was gonna say I was, I was thinking like was the guy's last name Ford by chance? Yeah, right, right, right. No, but it's just interesting to me because it was so. clear that it was an owner level mentality, right? That that that that there's a reason he's driving to these lots. They have a massive staff. There's a reason he's doing it because you have to be in the weeds, right? When you try to extricate yourself, which I'm sure they've tried to do over 4th generations many times. You just kind of don't get that level of, I'm calling it ownership, and I don't just mean like in a like a ownership of the company per se, ownership of problems, ownership of outcomes, ownership of innovation, you name it. So let's talk about something that that, you know, a, a hired gun CEO basically nobody else in the company kind of does or even can have, and that's tolerance for risk, right? As as founders, that's part of the game. That was literally how this whole thing started. We were like, hey, this doesn't exist. I might want to go build it. There's gonna be a lot of risk in bull. I accept, let's go, right? Nobody else has that. Nobody else even really can have the same level of risk tolerance that a founder can have, uh, because that's the kind of thing that tends to get you fired. It's, it's interesting because it's almost like, uh, if the person had a high tolerance for risk, they probably wouldn't be interviewing for the job. I say that at at startups.com in our history. What's going on 13 years now, we've hired mostly entrepreneurs. Almost every single person, uh, we've ever hired has had an entrepreneurial background. So I would argue here it kind of doesn't apply because almost everybody here has has had the appetite for risk, which is why they've come here and why they're attracted to be here. However, that's very unusual. Um, in most companies, The person that's interviewing has never taken a risk in their life, and in their mind, even taking this job as a risk, which is, again, I I I can't project my level of anxiety or or risk to somebody else, right? Um, but it, it ain't the same. They they are the same. The changing jobs, yes, there are, there is some risk involved. It is not the same thing as starting your own business. You bet, and because again, we're we're going back to kind of the the core premise, which is when you start something, you chain yourself to that ship, and if that ship goes down, you kind of go down with it. If, if your employee, while often it's like, oh, I don't get paid as much or whatever, it's like, yeah, but you know, you also don't have the downside, which for a mature company is less of an issue for a new company. It's a very different issue, you know, uh, where it could go either way. Yeah, I mean the the risk that a founder accepts from the beginning and in the duration and the uncertainty of when it ends, um, is. Immense, right? I don't know that there's any other larger risks that I've taken. I, I'd say it's was less risky to start a family than it is to start a business, right? There's there's a pattern there, but play great, great, well, play it out though, like in in how it manifests in trying to hand someone else at the job of risk for a person that may not be that that risk tolerant, number one, right? As the founder, we can inherently take risks because we have the benefit of betting on ourselves, right? In in many ways, depending on the situation, kind of can't lose the job, right? If we take a big product uh bet risk, and it doesn't pan out, we take a marketing risk, whatever, a hiring risk, whatever it doesn't pan out, it's on us, right? We own the consequence, right? But we, we, we get the chance to, to roll the dice and live to fight another day, hopefully. And often the the consequence for somebody who's coming in is, is asking for permission to do the thing, right? That's the risk for them, right? Let's just say the the the the new CEO uh asked to go for board approval or something, right, where a founder may not have had to do, maybe they have to go to the founder, I see. All sorts of dynamic structures where uh where decision making was shared in some way, but that's a bigger risk for them often than than the actual outcome. It's like going and saying like, hey, I want to take this risk and and and being shot down might be a bigger perceived risk, so they just don't even do it, right? So they're they're not going to try and they probably don't have the the same the same risk bone. Uh, that that most founders have in the first place. I think it would be safe to say the greatest personification we have right now of risk within an entrepreneur right now is Elon Musk, right? And I'm no like Elon Musk fanboy by any means, but that guy has balls of steel, right? Like, I mean, that guy is willing, I mean, I almost, I almost think he wants to get crushed. I think some of his mind where he just tried to like play with fire until that happens. There definitely seems to be a little bit of masochism there. Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't think, I mean, it's not even like he's on the other side of a different spectrum, right? He's he's in the upside down. He he's the guy is not, not just he he seeks risk, right, because he believes that's where opportunity lives and, and he's not wrong, um, a lot of danger lives there, a lot of failure lives there too, um, but, but he He's he's on the opposite side. I mean, the guy has a taste for risk. You bet. And and so, you know, oddly, and this is, this is kind of a weird segue, uh, Donald Trump was the same way, right? Donald Trump, and again, I'm definitely not worried, but, but what I'm saying is like if you look in his career, it's a dream team co-founders right there. But if, but if you look at his career at the stuff that I mean the guy somehow became president, right? I mean that that that guy's tolerance for like rolling the dice is just unbelievable. Yeah, because anybody else would have looked at that and stopped well before. They would have been like, yeah, there's no way I could do that. Why would I, why would I even, why would I even attempt the risk? I think this is where a lot of people shut down. This is the difference between a founder and a non-founder is that we do the calculation of risk. And we're like, yeah, it's really unlikely that's gonna happen, and there's there's all kinds of I was like, but I'm gonna do it anyway, right? And and that that's exactly what he said. Well, OK, so stick with that. What I'm saying is there is a fundamental archetype of that type of person that's willing to do that, right? You know, we were we're we're uh playing up uh jobs. He was certainly that like they that guy was warned for that, right, in, in what he had done. Tim Cook is not, right, the currency of Apple is not, right? And, and again, I, I'm uh I have huge respect for Tim Cook. He's a phenomenal operator, clearly, and look at his performance, right? But he's not that. And, and the reason I I keep bringing up Tim Cook is because he's so good at his job. Yeah, he's he's a shining example of where it works, and despite that, correct, exactly. But I, but I think it's, it's a great contrast too because like if, if Tim Cook had been in an 84. We wouldn't be talking about Apple right now, right? And I think that where it's fascinating to watch is as founders, because for us, uh, you know, the risk, um, the vision, and all these things, kind of, we kind of just do them naturally, like, in other words, we don't even realize we're we're exercising that muscle or developing that trait, or have that trait. That's the only trait that we have, right? And all of a sudden we're trying to to retrofit and backfill that. With someone new, you know, like like that square peg round hole kind of hire, and we're totally overlooking how different those traits are. And you know, in part of that, Ryan might be just um we're hiring the wrong thing, right? Maybe what we should have been thinking about is I need a a a COO or I need a president or I need a it's not necessarily the CEO title, but I don't want to lose the founder DNA. Out of this company, so I need to operate as the founder. What I'm likely looking for is an operator, that's what I always hear, right? I want somebody to manage the day to day. Yeah, yeah, I manage the day to day. I, I, I don't want to work in the business, I want to work on the business, right? And so they, they want somebody to lay hands on that. Yeah, I think operations is a big one, you know, I think that and and sometimes I think uh an operations person can take this role. The one I'm increasingly seeing and kind of like have eyes on is the chief of staff positions. Uh, where they end up being this sort of buffer between the, the, the founder and everything else that's going on where they are filtering the feedback, uh, you know, gathering the information and then kind of acting as the liaison between. That's been a relatively interesting, uh, thing that, you know, the rule's been around for a long time, but I don't remember seeing them that often in startup companies the last 3 or 4 years. Um, and I I've talked to a lot of facts who seem to be very, very pleased. It's one of those things where it's like, best decision I ever made, right? No, they had said something else 2 years before and 4 years before that and 5 years before that, which I guess that's still fair, still the best, better, better, better. I think that again it's um it's why people hire nannies, right? They're like, yes, I want the job as parents. But there's some parts that I could actually use some help with. I get it. I get when I think about um the idea though of backfilling the founder, I, I, I think it's a huge red flag. Like personally, I, I think when, when, when founders, you know, tell me, hey, I'm thinking about backfilling myself, hire somebody in, my, my first reaction is stop. Which isn't the same as don't, don't do it. It's stop thinking you're just backfilling a job, right? You're not hiring another head of customer support, right? Like that is a job that lots of people can take, can be backfilled, etc. This one is unique and and frankly, I think when when founders don't put, you know, take all these things into account. Uh, that's where it fails, you know what I mean? Yeah, and I think, you know, it's one of those one of those situations where I think if they knew it was gonna fail, they probably wouldn't do it. Now I think there are scenarios, maybe we do want to talk about that, where like, There's some really strong reason where you really like, maybe we go beyond want and you need to not be running the business anymore. That's tough, right? That's tough. Um, but I think to your point, even if you decide you want to do this, you may have some things you really want to go do, or you just really don't want to be running the business anymore, are you willing to accept the fact That her data, right? Science here folks, her data, the likely outcome is that the company is going to suffer and probably fail as a result. Are you willing to accept that as the likely outcome? I think most founders would probably say no. I, I'm sure you've got a collection. I know I do, people who said, you know, did this. Wish I hadn't done that because now the company is no longer there, whether that was, you know, selling the company or or bringing in a new team, or stepping aside, whatever it was that led to the demise of the company. In most cases they said have it have it to do over again, I would do it. I wouldn't do that this time around. And so what do we say to the founders that are in that situation where it's like they're they're in that kind of a need category, right, where it's like, I, I just can't do this anymore, or whatever reason that might be. Sure, um, I'd say start to decouple it, decouple what the job is. From what your contribution is, right? Because they're often different things. The, the, the job is politics and managing people day to day in a bunch of bullshit that frankly other people are, are better at, right? 100%. But being the founder, setting the vision, be able to to to follow um the important details and run something down, run your finger across the hood of the car and say, Hey, something is off and and and be able to go in, you take that DNA out of a company, and I, we haven't even talked about the culture of the company and how you're connected to the employees, to to your customers, investors, etc. You cannot pull that route and pretend nothing's gonna die. It just doesn't work that way. So the first thing I say is to couple who you are as a founder and what your value is from what you're just trying to not do anymore, which is usually pretty operational. Yeah, that's that's a great point. Yeah, I mean the the culture aspect is a huge one. It it's very rare that a, you know, a, a founder replaces themselves with the CEO and none of the team notice, right? It's a big one that's tough to navigate. I mean that and that that alone is gonna skew it's a problem if they don't, yeah, I haven't been for 2 years, um, you've been getting the paychecks. So I think it is, it is tough. It's tough to decide like, and even if you're able to decouple it, right? There's still gonna be some challenges there again, like decoupling parts of yourself and and hoping that everything continues to go right, where like, you know, maybe you stay around to to handle the vision. Um, or you stay around to, to manage some of the really high level politics. Maybe, you know, there's a couple other co-founders involved. We also didn't talk about that. I think we've kind of been positioning this as sort of a, a solo founder, uh, type scenario. It's, it's obviously very different when there's, when there's co-founders involved, not necessarily easier. In fact, in a lot of ways it's probably more difficult, um, because you're at the same time you're trying to extract yourself, you're gonna create an imbalance for for for your your partner and co-founder. Um, so yeah, it's a, it is a it is a tough decision to come to, um, but I think to your point, when once you arrive at that point, you haven't really arrived. You've arrived at the at the indication that maybe this needs to happen, pump the brakes, spent a lot of time really thinking about and trying to, trying to abstract out the layers of kind of what the job is and and what your unique value company. Yeah, I don't think. I don't think there's any founder out there that says, once they get rid of me, everything will be so much better. I think they think, here are things I'm bad at, or here's where I'm burnt out, right? So, so when they when they they pull me out of that, we'll be better off for it, and they are right. They're doing that though, they're doing that, they're making that decision at the expense of what they have, that's that's unique to them, kind of, you know, what makes them a unique asset to the company. So, so what I would say is, if you're thinking about making this move, or if you have made this move, right? Separate the two. Separate what it is operationally that you need to backfill and level up, and you probably do need to do it, but do not separate the part that is the DNA of the company, that is taking the root completely out of the company, and there's no room for that. That is your job as a founder, it's why we exist. Overthinking your startup because you're going. 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 bootstrapped founders and the advisors helping them win in the Startups.com community. Check out the Startups.com community at www.startups.com to see if it's for you. 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