Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com, Will Schroeder. Well, I don't think anybody listening is unaware that there are some major sacrifices that get made as we build our startup companies. And I think that most of us probably have some sense for some vague version of the what it is we're trying to accomplish and and the win, meaning that it's something more than we have now and that it's later, but we're not very specific about these things. In a lot of cases, and, and I think that there's a, there's a danger to that in in being amorphous around what it is we're actually trying to accomplish and by when.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, it's basically saying, I'm gonna join the most grueling race, the Iron Man of life, if you will, the the hardest thing I could possibly do. Yet I have no idea what the metrics are or when it's gonna actually be over or if I even won. I'm in first place and I, and I crossed the finish line and I don't even know it. It's an interesting spot and to kind of tee this up for folks, you know, that are listening. This was top of mind for me, uh, you know, last week I turned 50 years old, which is a which is specific milestone in life.
Ryan Rutan: And you say that again, Will, that number didn't make any sense.
Wil Schroter: It doesn't make any sense to me, man. Um, it just means I'm really old, but, but. I, I think every decade is cathartic in its own right, but this one's cathartic because for the first time in my life, I'm out of later, right? Now, now, let me, let me be really specific what that means. For my entire life since I was 19 years old, I was able to sacrifice nonstop in epic ways, and right, I know you, you, you have too, and I always had a built-in excuse for my sacrifice, and this is kind of the core of what we're gonna talk about today. I always had a built-in excuse, which was, it's OK. that I'm not doing whatever now, because I'll be able to do it later. I, I'm willing to make this investment because later I'll be able to cash in those chips. Later, things will be so much better. And it turns out later is a very dangerous excuse, because we never really know when later is gonna come, and we never really know when later comes, whether or not whatever we thought we were going to get,
Ryan Rutan: even
Wil Schroter: matter.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, once later. do, right, is the balance of what we've accumulated worth it? Is it what we actually wanted? You bet we've we've talked about this on a podcast in the past where it was around like the idea of play testing some of these things that you think you want. I mean, this is around the what, right? So what is, you know, I want enough money to retire on. OK, well, let's quantify that and let's play test retirement, right? How much do you actually need and what are you going to do with retirement? And is it actually what you want after you've got it, you know, we use the examples of Things like your move to LA, right, which you thought was going to be like the pinnacle of life, and this is what I want to do and then you get there and it's and it's not, right? Yep, good to find that out now, not later. Me moving to Florida, we talked about it, like, you know, my version of retirement was being able to go kayak fishing twice a week, which doesn't require retirement. It just requires a kayak and a nearby body of water and a couple of hours. And so I think that it is so important for us to quantify these things so that we can start to do the math on like. You know, before we just start to do the endless sacrifice, cause believe me, like we, we both know that that part's there, that part comes regardless whether you figure the shit out or not, what you actually want, the sacrifice will be there. It will let you sacrifice whether you're clear on what you're trying to build towards, and I, I'm sure I said it on that podcast. One of the things I've realized over over time is that there is no interest earned on life and happiness deferred. Now, it can compound certain things, yeah, right? But, but you don't get those moments back, we. Know this, and so I think that we need to be very, very careful in calculating what is the reward that we hope to get from this? When must we expect it by, and what do we do to actually get to there by that point and and achieve that thing. And again, just make sure we're actually gonna want it once we get there. I bet both of us have a ton of examples of people who have done all the things, gotten to the thing that they wanted, and then we're like, well, now I've got it and it's not quite as cool as I thought it was gonna be.
Wil Schroter: In almost every case, by the way, like just to be clear, in almost every case, let's start with the first part of this, which is the sacrifice. Like, like, you know, what, what does that look like? What's the psychology behind it, you know, what, what were our expectations going in? How was it so easy, so to speak, to make those sacrifices without any guarantee of return, or more specifically, even when we got the return, if someone were to say you're gonna have to do X Y Z and you'll get a million dollars. And then you're like, OK, I want. a million dollars, but you didn't exactly know what a million dollars was going to do for you. And so it just looked better, so you said, OK, I'll sacrifice for something better, but when you got it, you're like, wait a minute, I can't do anything differently than I could have done before, like, what the hell did you sacrifice all that stuff for? Right? I don't quantify my sacrifice and compare it to someone else's. Everybody's pain is their own, right? So again, when we're gonna talk about your sacrifice, my sacrifice, whatever. Or anyone sacrifice, not for a second do I think, oh, I sacrifice more than you and therefore I deserve something, or I sacrifice more than you, and therefore I'm better at sacr. I don't even know what that that would mean, right? Like
Ryan Rutan: the sacrifice is relative to what you would have done had you not sacrificed. There's nothing to do with what anybody else is gonna get. It's all relative to, because I sacrifice, my life is different, some things are are less than they would have been. Hopefully theoretically some things are more than they would have been. And then it's the the calculus of that change over time and saying like, is that what I actually wanted, right? Did that give me the thing that was actually was that beneficial for me to make those sacrifices?
Wil Schroter: I was at dinner last week with a friend of mine who's in his mid-50s now. I was on his board for many, many years, uh, alongside the founder of uh CompuServe, if you remember CompuServe, 4:30
Ryan Rutan: reservation, more or less for the two of you, old timers.
Wil Schroter: And so, uh, anyway, the founder that I was at dinner with brought along his nephew who was like 26, 27 years old, which also means I'm old enough. That that people's nephews or
Ryan Rutan: nephews are, yeah, it's all full functioning
Wil Schroter: adults, uh, nephew's a great guy, uh, fantastic guy, super smart, and an entrepreneur himself. Well, well Dave, the guy I was talking to, uh, well, he and I were were were discussing just like kind of building our companies and scaling things and you know, he had a phenomenal exit a few years back. His nephew was sitting there very intently like like listening to everything we're saying, we're talking about the sacrifices we made and you know, kind of how long those slogs were, and you could tell the look on his face was like, what the fuck you, right, like. I mean,
Ryan Rutan: well, again, by the way, nephew, this wasn't in the handbook, like we didn't know exactly how long or how much we're gonna have to sacrifice, nor that there would even be anything at the end, right? And like, I think that's also problematic. Like this is something that we should, we should talk about is that the sacrifice doesn't come with a guarantee, right? Like, neither you nor Dave knew that there was actually going to be a pot of gold at the end of that sacrifice rainbow, which is just one color, dark.
Wil Schroter: The only guarantee is the cost.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, the cost is the sacrifice is the guarantee, right? And so I think that there is a bit of a danger and then like even sitting there and listening attentively. Now imagine, imagine this is somebody sitting there listening to two people who are on the right side of this equation. Correct, right, and going like, wow, you had to do all that to get this? Yeah, and by the way, at the time we didn't even know we would get this. That's the real rub with all of this.
Wil Schroter: So there was a couple of things that I'm as much watching his expression. His reactions and his interactions than anything else in this conversation, because a couple of things were interesting to me about kind of just how the situation came about. He is also an entrepreneur. He's been running his own business for a couple of years now. He's running essentially a general contracting business, right, something very near and dear to my heart. So he's a hardworking guy. I mean he's literally, you know, getting covered in sawdust, you know, sweating it out, right, for, for Bucks, which, which I respect. But also he's 27. He's at an age where Life's different, you know, they, they don't do this kind of stuff as frequently as they did back in my day, right? And so what was interesting for him to to witness was how Dave and I were talking about our sacrifice, and we're bragging about it, we're just being very matter of fact about it. And and he was like, I'm not sure all that makes a lot of sense, and he wasn't wrong, like, like he's not, we're like can't argue that. Yeah, what we did to our health and everything else like I can't can't argue that. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: look, I think the other side of it like that we we certainly can't just make this about like being a founder or being an entrepreneur is all sacrifice up until some seminal moment where then later finally arrives, the reward arrives, and then we're either happy or we're not with it. Like I think get your take on it, but I imagine you'll agree. A big part of this is like, what are you doing on the way, right? Like if, if I was at this point in my career, if I was hating something I was doing on a daily basis, there wouldn't be a sacrifice that that wouldn't be a sacrifice I'd be willing to make to get any type of reward, right? Again, like as you get closer to later being now, which I think we're both basically there, yeah, we're we're now living in the later we're we're we're in the upside down. And so because of that, like I think you do start to think about sacrifice. A little bit differently, but I don't want to paint an overly, overly pessimistic picture of it either. Like, I think the things that we sacrifice with an expectation of these larger returns at the end, also have to be married up against what happened along the way, right? Like how many wins did you have along the way? This could be personal wins, this could be outcomes you created for clients, people you work for, you know, certainly you and I get tons and tons of energy every time we jump onto a one on one call with some. within the accelerator and help them solve a massive problem, help them figure out their own sacrifice and reward calculus, help them get to an exit, help them just, you know, hire that first person, whatever it is. There's a lot of reward along the way. So I do want to be careful about stripping this down to just this very binary thing of all sacrifice input, hopefully big exit outcome, something at the at the end of the day. So it's it's not kind of a straight amortization in that way for me at least.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, I mean, again, it also comes down to what specifically you sacrificed, OK? So if I go back and I have and I do my calculus to say, you know, um, you know, what, what did I sacrifice specifically? Let me give you a couple examples of things where I can look back and say, shit, I'm I'm never getting that back, and that's a big part of it, right? Sacrificee number one, from when I was 19 to 26, I basically didn't take a day off. Like it didn't even occur to me. That like Saturday or Sunday was a day off. Like I just worked through every day all the time. We
Ryan Rutan: were playing in our rookie seasons. You had to. That's a sacrifice, but yeah, there were real costs to that too,
Wil Schroter: right, which is why I, I give it that time frame, right? OK, so from 19 to 26, arguably the most formative important pivotal years of my career, right? You know, kind of set things in motion, and things went really horribly and then really well. Right, so again, having seen both sides of the equation. That said, I went to college, but I was never at college, OK? Like, I don't have a single college memory, right? Other than working, like other than working, I'll give you I'll paint a quick picture. My first day at Ohio State in the dorms, I was my sophomore year, everybody else's freshman year, um, I had transferred from uh University of Connecticut. My first day in the dorms, I'll never forget my roommate, Jimmy Bell walks through. Jimmy Bell was a lineman for Ohio State. He's like 6'6 320. It is, it's crazy to think that was an 18 year old kid back then. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: right? But he must be like 22 ft tall by now.
Wil Schroter: I know, right? And I remember him basically like kind of like ducking to get into the doorway and being as wide as he was tall, right? Niceest guy in the world, we became great friends, right? I remember like the look on his face when he Was in, he walks into my shitty dorm room and he's like, what is going on? I've got a credenza, a fax machine, a phone, I've got a filing cabinet, I've got my PC which was, you know, in 9192 was pretty unusual or 93,
Ryan Rutan: I
Wil Schroter: guess.
Ryan Rutan: Which hall are we in? Because I wanna, I wanna get, yeah, yeah, OK, so this, this room is, is all of 8 by 9.
Wil Schroter: It's tiny. And he's like, what is going on here, right? Cause I basically turned my dorm room into to my office. I was like, bro, I gotta make money. It's like, I was selling mainframe computers over the phone back then. Uh, that was my full time job, and so I was like, you know, and, smiling and dialing, make 100 phone calls a day. But my point is, while all my friends were doing cool things, all the things you go to college to do, I did not. In fact, I never even had a sip of alcohol until I left college, I probably made up for that, but like, hey, will.
Ryan Rutan: want to come play beer pong? What's beer pong? It's a combination of drinking beer and playing ping pong. What are beer and ping pong?
Wil Schroter: Yeah, I have no idea. I like the whole thing was lost on me. And and I made some great friends, friends I still have to this day, but if they were here to like testify, I'll I'll give you a good example, you know, Dave Ronaldo, right, yes. Dave listens to the show. He's a friend of ours, uh, found her himself. My first year at Ohio State, when we were leaving the dorms, it didn't occur to me that when like holidays happen, that you have to leave and go home. Well, I had no home to go to, and Dave was like, well, what are you gonna do? And I'm like, I don't know. He's like, do you wanna come home with us for Christmas, right? Like, like taking the orphan boy. Yeah, so, so anyway, so Christmas Day,
Ryan Rutan: do you have a a reasonable broadband and uh in a room where I can make phone calls from Dave? Even dial up,
Wil Schroter: right? Anyways, so, uh, Dave's so kind, he brings me back to his house in Cleveland, and his parents are great, and I'll never forget Christmas morning, his mom summons him into the guest room where I'm sitting there. I'm sitting on the floor with my laptop writing HTML code, and he just puts his head and he's like bro, do you know it's Christmas? Yeah like I had no idea, right? I was totally. lost at work. This the day we played the beer pong? Yeah, yeah, I will never get that time back. Those are really important years that that I missed with my brother, my mother, my father, like, yeah, everyone. I, I didn't see anyone ever, and I won't get those back. Now, it'd be hard in any context to be able to say, oh, that was worth it was worth not seeing my family kind of asshole would say that, right? Like, like you, you can't say that if it was true, you can't say it, right? But anyway, the point is, I, I never. I had a moment in the quad where some amazing thing happened. I never had one crazy night with my college buddies, right? None of that happened, erased from history. Can't get it back, right? Now you look at that and you say, yeah, you kind of had some cool stuff happen too. So you do balance
Ryan Rutan: that. Yeah, you have to balance it out, right? Like it it is there's a lot of sacrifice. It's not pure sacrifice and inside, well look, in some cases it is, right? Because for everybody that did those things and got an outcome, we know. Physically speaking, there were a whole bunch of people who did all those things, made the same sacrifices, and walked away with almost nothing, right? That's just the nature of being a startup founder.
Wil Schroter: And look, you start to multiply that over a long period of time. And I think for, you know, for what I'm going to call our younger listeners, younger at this point could be 20s, 30s, whatever, um,
Ryan Rutan: most
Wil Schroter: of
Ryan Rutan: the population will, I don't think you have to say that anymore. Cool, let's just move for those of you listening, because anybody older than us probably can't
Wil Schroter: hear us. That's probably true. For those folks that are saying like, oh, you know, I'll make it back up later. This is where that argument starts to get dangerous,
Ryan Rutan: right?
Wil Schroter: And again, I could go on and on about all the types of sacrifices along the way, but they were many, OK? And for folks that are in their twenties. The problem with being in your 20s and making sacrifices is you have your whole life ahead of you, which gives you a built-in excuse to make those sacrifices and kick the can. So that's what I did. In my 20s, I kicked the can. In my 30s, kicked the can again. In my 40s, kind of kicking a lot of. Yeah, they can't do, right? Being like, I'm OK doing this, working this, whatever, because there will be this bigger thing later that's worth it, which brings us to our next chapter, which is what happens when you are called to the carpet to find out whether all your bullshit excuses were worth it.
Ryan Rutan: The moment of truth. day, yeah, well, depends a lot on exactly what you sacrifice and exactly what you gained, and I think to some degree how clear and eyes wide open you were about the costs and about what you were actually trying to accomplish and how close those two things are to to kind of balancing out. I think there's a lot of cases where, you know, if you see a really outsized outcome. Uh, you might say like, well, all the sacrifice that you made was was worth it, until you ask the person who actually went through it, and it's funny, man, cause we know some people with some like really, really big outcome, the dream outcomes, and even then, in so many of those cases, like the the the reality of it, the tale of the tape, they go back and be like, yeah, I probably would not do that again, right? It, it wasn't worth it, right? So it's for what it's worth. Be careful about being clear about what you want at the end, cause I think that was the common thread amongst all those tales were like, I didn't really know what I wanted, right? I just, it was like, I was aiming for growth, but I wanted to be bigger, I wanted more, but I wasn't specific about how much more, nor what that more represented to me as the individual. You bet. It just became the the pure metrics chasing of bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: it does, and it creates a debt. That's what I want to talk about for a second. It creates a debt in life to yourself that most people never pay back. So at some point in life, you look around you and say, OK, like enough is enough. Like at some point, like sacrificing more, either I have nothing left to sacrifice, like I'm, you know, I'm broke or I'm, you know, whatever, or you just stop and you have a very realistic question which is, now what? like like. OK, like I've I've sacrificed like crazy. I've done all the things that everybody said I was supposed to do, or I thought I was supposed to do. Like, when do I cash in these chips? I'll tell you a quick story about when this actually happened to me. I had a very like deliberate specific moment, like when it was, now it's time to cash in the chips. Was it worth it? Ryan, you're familiar with the story, but uh but for the folks to listen, I'll, I'll take you back real quick. So Ryan, you remember like in my somewhere mid-40s, I don't remember when Sarah and I decided to move back to LA. We ended up looking for a house forever, finally found a place in in Beverly Hills. It wasn't our first choice, if I'm being honest, everybody says, oh you went to Beverly Hills, it was like a 3rd 4th choice. It just not a lot of houses in LA. It's what we found. But it's a nice enough house, not very big as LA tends to be, and we moved there. Now here's where this got interesting. Part of it was in. This was, you know, as, as Sarah and I were discussing this, I was like, you know what, living in Beverly Hills, even though again that that wasn't our number one choice, we actually wanted to go back to Santa Monica. Living in Beverly Hills was never our our goal, but it's kind of an interesting life goal. It's like an interesting bucket list thing that we didn't really know we had, but like, here's what I said, and I thought this was really interesting because it paid huge dividends in the end. I said, bucket, let's just go. Let's basically push what I call all the sliders to the right, you know, when we we talked about like our life stats or whatever else like that, and it's like ain't nowhere to go after this, right? Like if after we've gone to Beverly Hills, we're like it doesn't work for us, then it won't matter anymore. There's nowhere else to go, right? It's kind of a top of the food chain kind of moment, right? So we looked at it as like a grand experiment, right? Let's go out there, let's experiment with it. And let's see if it's worth it. So we do, we get out there, you know, my daughter summer starts school there. We already had a ton of friends in LA from when we lived there before, so it was great, you know, it was great. But about a year or so into it, we get to this point where my son Will, I start to get a little bit bigger, it's started to get a little bit tight in our our 3 bedroom house. The
Ryan Rutan: toddler boy energy is tough to contain in the house of any size,
Wil Schroter: brother, and you know, my wife, my wife's an angel, but Jesus. So we start shopping around and for folks that aren't super familiar with that market, there are no new houses, right? The only new houses there are. Old house that got bought, demoed and and rebuilt. There are no new subdivisions in Los Angeles. So we looked for over a year, can't find anything. We keep getting beaten down and trying to find, you know, price point, whatever. We finally find the place. Now, when I tell the story, I want to remind people that like how modest the size of this house is. It's a 4 bedroom house on a postage stamp of land. The entire front yard slash driveway is the length of a car.
Ryan Rutan: I remember it was hilarious in a specific car, like there's some cars you couldn't have. Your bumper would hang up.
Wil Schroter: The back of the yard is maybe 30 to 40 ft deep. It included a pool, but the best part about it was there was like a 40 ft vertical mountain at the end of that 40 ft. Like this thing was something that like blasted a mountain and like shoved the house up next to it, right? You had a view with like a giant wall in the back, right? And in your distance to either neighbor on either side, you could spit to. Unfortunately, this house is in Bel Air. So take all of those, all of the things I told you, and now you have an eight-figure house. We had been so beaten down and we lived there just in Beverly Hills everything long enough to forget what houses cost.
Ryan Rutan: Right. What what a house everywhere else in the world costs like, yeah, the fact this is a $580,000 house in Columbus, Ohio.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, exactly, exactly, right? And, and we were like, you know what, we're so lucky to have found this place, right? Finally, this is, this is where our family can can lock down,
Ryan Rutan: isn't it funny, man.
Wil Schroter: And I always say if you want to feel the poorest you possibly can, just punch 902-0 into Zillow. Yeah, there you go. I know what your money buys you home 22. Yeah, oh my God, it's, it's bananas. Anyway, so point though is we decided that this is it. This is home, this is gonna be our, our family's future and, and what have you. And around that time as we're kind of looking to clothes and all this good stuff, Sarah and I sit down and I'll never forget we're on like a little weekend trip that we took. And Sarah, who as you know, is the smarter of us, it just is like, you know, This is cool and all, but like, for real, this is dumb. She's like, you know, well, what are we doing? Like seriously, what are we doing? Like, she's like, we have a perfectly good house in Columbus, we saw our house in Ohio. She's like, let's just go back there,
Ryan Rutan: right?
Wil Schroter: That costs of zeros of
Ryan Rutan: 8
Wil Schroter: figures. 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. This is the reason I'm telling that story, because this was my moment. This was specifically my cash in the chips. I did all this stuff.
Ryan Rutan: I did all these things. It has to add up to more than just going back to the house that I already have in Columbus,
Wil Schroter: right? I was like, look, this was the point, the whole reason for the past almost 30 years at the time that I've been sacrificing and giving up everything and risking everything, and working with 5 companies at the same time, and do all this crazy shit, right, was so at this moment, I could cash in my chips, right? Cash in my life chips, not just dollars, but like life. This was the reward, the trophy, if you will, for my. sacrifice. And I said, more specifically, if not now, when, because we ain't getting any younger, right? And number 2, if this wasn't the point, what have I been doing for the last 20 some odd years, right? And my wife, who has an amazing ability that she doesn't even realized to boil things down into the simplest terms possible, said these words to me. She said, now that you know that you can, you're good. Now that you know you can, you're good.
Ryan Rutan: You did it, but you don't have to go any further than knowing that you can.
Wil Schroter: The point was that you could, not that you should, and I was like, it doesn't sound nearly as exciting. Like it's something much cooler in mind. It got really interesting because like my world came crashing down in a weird way, right? Like in a way where I'm like, how could I have been this unprepared or said differently? Why did I sacrifice for all that stuff if if the time came, like when the moment of truth came. I had nothing to show for it, and fun facts, we moved back to Columbus a week later, we've been there ever since, yeah, right? Like, cause my thing was like, well hell, if we're not going all in, might as well go all out, you know, we packed our stuff and moved. It was really interesting to me because it was the first time in a very deliberate way, all of my sacrifices were called into question by me, right? By me, to be able to say, I thought that was the point that I could do this extraordinary thing and and make that sacrifice pay. Off. And I gotta say, I felt like, and if I don't, I just kind of cheated myself. I could have bought a house in Columbus with a hell of a lot of sacrifice.
Ryan Rutan: That's that's what's a bit crazy about the whole thing is that sacrifice is done on a safe note basis, right? It's, it's a future priced round, right? Because at the time we're doing it, we have no idea what the value of that sacrifice is actually gonna end up being, and then we get to that point where the settlement comes and, and we see what that looks like, all of a sudden. For me, a lot of cases like the the size of the sacrifices felt like they got bigger, right? It was like, oh, you know, and that is as I go back and revisit these things like why did I do that? Why did I forgo friendships now that I've seen what the actual value this is is, and because like then the the the return on it started to get smaller and smaller and therefore it magnified the actual cost of some of those sacrifices and it it can be a really, really tough moment. I think that, you know, I'm curious to see. What else, what other catharsis you went through at that point? Like, did you get to a point where, like, that led you to some comfort, or did it just sort of recast the past in was rose colored glasses on the way forward? Is it all just kind of a sepia tone old timey photo now, all the sacrifice all things you gave up along the way?
Wil Schroter: Yeah, what was interesting about it was it really fucked me up, because like in theory, like here's what should have happened. Here's what should have happened by by all rights and and I get this, right? Like I'm pretty self aware. Here. I should have been like, oh I'm so thankful, I'm so grateful, like, you know, blah blah blah, and you know, drive off into the sunset. That is not what happened. What actually happened was I was like, my whole world came crashing down. I'm like, all the things I was built to do to achieve to get to get to goal got taken away, right? Because I'm like, wait, OK, now the finish line doesn't matter. The equivalent of you won the Super Bowl and you realize you hated winning Super Bowls. Well, I'm not gonna go back to football practice tomorrow and and not win a Super Bowl, like what's that's the point, right? And And so it really blew up the entire kind of fundamentals in the in the infrastructure that I had built mentally around my ambition. What I also learned, I learned a lot of things, but one of the things that I learned was that not having stuff is a great way to blind yourself to working more. It's so easy to say, I don't have car, house, life, whatever, vacation, whatever it is that that you say you don't have, you can instantly justify sacrificing or doing something to get it. What we don't understand, or we. We can't comprehend is, once you have it, did it solve what you thought it was going to solve? The answer 99% of times for every single person is no, and what sucks is you only get to learn that, having already sacrificed to get it. Like that's the founder's paradox.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, you find, you find out at the wrong time. It's funny too, because like, we, we sort of see this like as parents, we certainly see this like we actually learned this as kids sort of maybe we what we experienced as kids, we learned as parents, which is that like, the value in the thing is is not having it, right? It's it's way more valuable like the the toy the kid wants, the candy, the whatever the thing is, the minute they get it, it's valueless and they're just on the chase the next thing. And so I think that's why there's there's, and we've said this already, but there's so much danger in all of this deferred living, all of this deferred happiness, if that is what in fact what you were doing as we've said, there's lots of different kinds of sacrifice that happened along the way. Those are some pretty common ones, at least in my case. And so it comes down to, you know, this, this kind of balancing of the accounts at the end, but like being really clear. clear as you can be coming into it, this is actually what you want, knowing now that just the the accumulation of stuff isn't going to make you a happier person. It's not going to to move the needle meaningfully in life. And I think that that was the catharsis for me was this realization that like I should instead of trying to optimize for for later, optimize for now, right? It's not to say you don't plan for later, but like, make sure that you're living in a way that you want to be living now, and not for some maybe future that once you have, you might not even be satisfied with, right? So that you don't have to. Go through all of those, oh fuck moments like I did all this, I sacrifice all this shit. I did everything I was supposed to do. I got the thing I wanted, and it's no longer what I want, right? Because I was unaware, right? I that's why the play test you guys did in in Beverly Hills was so valuable because flipped that on its head and let's say you're still sitting in Columbus, and that judgment comes due and it's like, should we do this? Should we try this? If you hadn't had that year experience out there, you guys may have made a very different decision, which is like, if not, Now when, right? And you wouldn't have had the this isn't worth it. This isn't like this isn't what we want. We already have this other thing, because it was still at that point, a just pure imagination and so much of what we do is driven on pure imagination, right? We get used to that as founders, our whole business is the beginning, right? So everything is something to be for
Wil Schroter: sure. It's a double edged sword. So on the one hand, that hope and optimism and kind of like blind, like, you know, futurism helps drive us. It helps us run through walls that at the time we. Need to run through, right? So it it creates a superpower. On the other hand, of all the things that we spend so much time trying to quantify as founders and entrepreneurs, our happiness tends to be the thing we suck at the most, right? Like our, our ability to be able to say what actually makes me happy, into the penny, what does that cost? So if I were to take that exercise, something I've done for a very long time, but I'll give you a moment in time where I first started to understand this, although when I explain it to you, you're gonna be like, OK, what have you been doing with it. No, I'm like, I think I'm like 27 years old, right? At the time we had an offer this is when I was running Blue Diesel, the agency, we had an offer to buy the agency and for a meaningful summit, I think it was like $50 million at the time or, or, you know, around that, and this is like maybe $99. I'm getting my dates right. And uh I remember I'm on a plane to yet another client that was back when I was like on a plane 250 days out of the year. I remember I I got my laptop open I'm in Excel and I'm like, OK, what am I gonna do with all this money, you know, once we make this, what I do with all this money? And and I remember. This is awesome. I make a spreadsheet of every single thing I'm gonna buy, right, all the obvious stuff, boom, Lamborghini, and all this stuff, right? Everything down to a DVD player, and I love saying that because you gotta remember back then, like a DVD player, like a high-end DVD player was like a big deal. And anyway, anyway, I add it all up, but then I, I had this interesting thought. I was like, OK, that's just stuff to buy. Like once you buy it, you have it, like there's, what are you gonna do once you. Have it. So then I create like another tab, which is like, how am I gonna spend my time? And I list out all the stuff that I'm gonna do every day. Uh, I'm gonna work out, I'm gonna play hockey, I'm gonna read, I'm gonna do this, this, and with my friends, whatever, and I'm like, wait a minute, this stuff doesn't cost anything. Yeah, that's free. It's like I'm like, wait, so all this how I'm actually going to spend my time costs zeros of dollars, but buying all this stuff to drive myself to to where I'm gonna spend. Time cost millions of dollars, right? Or or the house where I'm gonna sleep in to wait to get up to do stuff that costs nothing, costs millions of dollars, right? It was this weird kind of like, huh, now by way of that, you'd have thought I would have had this great cathartic moment that would have made me go, oh, life is free and I don't have to worry about it, right? I did none of that. Here's what I did. I was like, well shit, if life is free I might as well roll the dice. Yeah, try to make more money.
Ryan Rutan: I mean there there's something to that, right? There's something to that, and I think, look, you're also built for this, right? Like you, you do enjoy the, you do enjoy the process. If this had been, you know, yes, there was a lot of sacrifice, but it's not like this has been 30 years of misery either, right? just this one hour a week you spend with me.
Wil Schroter: Yeah. A pain incarnate. Yes, it, you know, it wasn't all misery, etc. but I think part of it, Ryan, that people don't quite understand from the outside. They look at it and they see, well, you're able to buy a nice car or a nice house or something like that, and so therefore all your problems must be gone. What they're thinking about in most cases is I don't have that thing, so once I have that thing, problems must go. with it, not the way it works. You got to understand, for most folks, I always think about this in terms of professional athletes, of which I'm clearly not one. I'm like, people from the outside like, oh, it must be great to be like such a gifted athlete to be able to perform at that level. I'm like, you know how much torture that person has to put themselves through in order to perform at that level, right? I couldn't spend a week in their mind state, right? When we're living in Beverly Hills, right, and somebody's like, oh, you know, must be nice. I'm like, listen, I'm grateful for all of it, don't get me wrong, this is, this isn't a lack of gratitude at all. I don't wake up in the morning and just get like carried to my office through butterflies, right. I am stressed 24/7. My anxiety meter is at 11 all the time, right? Like, all I'm thinking about is what can go wrong, right? Because now that I have more stuff, I have more to lose. And so I'm even more stressed about it. And look, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it's not the Shangri-La people think. It is on the outside. There's a tremendous amount of anxiety and stress that goes with it, and it kind of doesn't go away. Here's what I'm gonna say. If you were the person that was built to get to that level, you have all the baggage that comes with being built to get to that level.
Ryan Rutan: For sure, yeah, and I think that's part it's so hard to see from the outside and like we talk about this, like you can't just take The Instagram version of this thing and say like, well, I want, I want this, I want the results, but I won't put any of the work, right? It's like everybody watching he's like, yes, abs, no to working out, right? And so like you have to drive past Channing Tatum's abs on like a weekly basis when you were up in the hills, didn't you?
Wil Schroter: That was pretty funny, actually. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah,
Wil Schroter: our neighbors were Calvin Harris and Channing Tatum. Uh, I was like, the chances of me staying married to my wife are 0 at this. All she needs to do is go jump the fence. No, but like from my standpoint, I looked at that moment in time being like, I guess this is as good as it gets. Here's what's really interesting for folk, and I love being honest about this stuff cause I wish more people were just honest about like, like how it went. Sarah and I would sit on a Friday night and we'd sit in our living room in Beverly Hills and watch Netflix, and I'd be like, dude, this is the most expensive. of Netflix we're ever gonna watch, right?
Ryan Rutan: How much brighter are the colors? How much clearer is the sound when you watch it close to the source? Is it, is it better?
Wil Schroter: I'm not knocking it. I'm saying like, there is a point where you're just gonna go back to doing the same stuff you're doing anyway. I'll I'll give you another example because I remember at the same time, the guy, he goes by uh Notch, who is the founder of Minecraft at the time, same rough era, he had sold Minecraft for a billion dollars to Microsoft, and he moved from like Sweden or wherever he was from to LA and not just LA. He buys at the time like the most expensive house in LA, which or the most expensive on the market house that has like $75 million and he outbid Jay-Z and Beyonce to get it, right? And it was bananas, like it was bananas, bananas, right? Anyway, he moves in kind of this this frumpy 35 year old, you know, dorky kid, right, into a place that he has no business being in, right? Jay-Z made sense there, right? Anyway, they do an article uh interview with him like a year later, and he's depressed, he's miserable. Right? He's like, look, all I did was sit home and code the whole time, right? The same thing I did back in my apartment 10 years ago or whatever he was doing, right? He's like, nothing changed for me. Obviously I made a lot of new friends that all of a sudden liked me a whole bunch. He's like, but short of that, I just went back to doing the same stuff I was doing to begin with.
Ryan Rutan: You're gonna revert to what makes sense in your life. Yeah, I think that's the thing is that people assume that because certain circumstances change, that all of a sudden we change. Like, well, I will be a different person, I will become a renaissance man. Who does nothing but paint and ride the horses and hunt fox, right, or whatever, right? Yep, yep, it just, we don't change that much, right? All of a sudden your circumstances changed, it turns out like you're still kind of the same, same person. Yeah, and I mean you may grow after that, you may have more time to explore and do those things, but like, yeah, the the the the delta between life before and after tends to not be that much, not because it can't, but because we're human and we just kind of want to do the things that we've always done and that we know and that's what we like in life.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, I think generally speaking, there's, you know, there's nothing wrong with sacrificing to get more. It's the nature. Of being a founder, I mean, like there's, it's inherent in what we do, and I actually don't believe, just so we're saying the same thing, I don't believe that you can get to extraordinary ends with no sacrifice. I've never seen it happen, right? And so, so this, uh, this idea that I'm just gonna have perfect work-life balance, which just means work less, and I'm going to get to extraordinary ends does not happen. I mean, we are in that business and have been for a very long time. It does not happen, right? So you have to sacrifice, you know, in order to get Those big returns. What we're talking about though is what are those big returns specifically? How much more does that buy you? Because I'm telling you like, I'm doing the same stuff now as I was doing 30 years ago when I was dead broke, getting the same amount of enjoyment on them. I just do them in a nicer house. Like I mean short of that, like, nothing about my life has changed. I sit around, I do woodworking, I play video games, I play sports, etc. none of which costs any money whatsoever, and it's all stuff I could have done all along again. I do with some some nicer tools or I go on a nicer trip, but short of that, my life is identical
Ryan Rutan: festivals what it was that festival set
Wil Schroter: is nice. Here's what I would say for all of us that are going through the sacrifice, and we're all going through the sacrifice, sacrifice is fine so long as we know exactly what we expect to get out of it. And the return on that, that the value of that is commensurate with what we're willing to sacrifice. And if we're like, hey, look man, I'm only willing to sacrifice 50%, you know, whatever that amounts to, because that's all I'm willing to give up to get more, that's fine, that's actually fine. You will get what you invest in it, and you'll get no more, but that's also OK. I'm not worried about that person. I'm worried about the person that sacrifices 110%, and in the end gets 10% back, cause you don't get that time back. You get one shot at this life to put everything you have into it, but you also get one shot to get everything back.
Ryan Rutan: Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone, you don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes. Connect with 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. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.