Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Ruch joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Well, sometimes startups can be a real shit storm. When, if ever, are startups not a real shit storm? Man,
Wil Schroter: I don't think it ever stops becoming a shit storm, and that's the funny thing like for startups that are doing this for the first time, you know, founders, they don't realize it, they all think that their version. Is the shit storm. It's kind of like when people are in marriages and they're like, oh, I guess we have challenges in our marriage. No, it's just marriage, right?
Ryan Rutan: Everybody else is doing this perfectly. Yeah, it just goes so well for everybody else just
Wil Schroter: not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and I think what happens is for all of us, we get into a spot where like things get pretty bad, right? I mean, they're always challenging because we're always so resource constrained and we've got, you know, time's running out all this good stuff, but there's some times where it gets like really, really bad. And I think in the Moments, many of which people call us, you know, other founders call us specifically, that's how we help people and say, hey, I am in an epic shit storm right now. How do I get out of it? What I thought we could do today is just kind of talk about all the advice that we give when we get into these situations, we get into a lot of them, what advice do we give and what
Ryan Rutan: works? Yeah, I think we can keep today's episode focused on like practical ways to keep moving forward, even when everything is falling apart, which is often all the time. I mean,
Wil Schroter: it's hard though because when things are falling apart in our minds, like we've done everything wrong and we fucked up and like, you know, and that's it, right? A lot of what we don't realize is this is just a moment in time which you know we'll talk about, but also what we don't realize is it's not just our job to keep our own headspace going, it's our job to keep the whole company's headspace. Our headspace is a reflection of that. So we have to get ourselves right in order to get the team right.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I think that's. Important point. And, and I think it's like, you know, every day it feels like there's a new fire to put out, right? Every single day, but staying positive isn't just a luxury, like it's a survival skill. To your point, it doesn't just impact us, right? We have a bad day, a couple bad days, a bad week, next thing you know, that's spread to the entire organization and these can really, really get drugged down. So this, this is a super practical episode, super important because without this survival skill, you may not make it.
Wil Schroter: I think the first thing that founders need to consider when they when they run in really hard times, you know, when something really hit the wall, is you've got to regain perspective. You've got to get your perspective back because that's the first thing that's lost. You're running around and all of your anxiety is just pumping, and you're making generally bad decisions, you know what I mean? Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: I think when stuff's going wrong, right, which again, oftentimes it is. Our first instinct is to treat every single one of those. Moments like it's life or death, but man, for me, and I, I've done this 1000 times, it's the recipe is the same, right? Well, the recipe is different, but the, the, the cake I bake at the end is the same, and it's burnout, right? So when, when I forget to like zoom out and ask myself, is this gonna matter tomorrow sometimes? Is this gonna matter next month? Is this gonna matter next year? Zooming out always gives me that that clarity to stop overreacting and to start making better decisions.
Wil Schroter: And and I. I think when we think about our lives in the course of a longer timeline, it gives us perspective. And depending on where we are in our lives, kind of how much maturity we have by virtue of age, not just maturity, we can start to understand this. Let me give you an example. When I was in high school, and most high schoolers, that's just specific to me, when something would go wrong, when I'd ask a girl to the dance and she wouldn't say yes, my life was over. over. That was it. There was no other moment in time. I watch it with my son who's 8 and If he doesn't get like a food that he wants for dinner, his entire life imploded. There is no moment before or after that moment. He's
Ryan Rutan: constantly drinking out of the grill, man. Every supper is the last supper, right? You gotta, you gotta, gotta get what you want now. There's no tomorrow.
Wil Schroter: It's crazy for as much as we all get it, intellectually we get it, for as much as we all get it, actually stopping, zooming out and saying this too shall pass, this is a moment in time is really. Really hard to do, especially when things are going epically wrong. Like I've got 6 weeks to live with my P&L.
Ryan Rutan: It's so important for us to remember all the time that like every single chapter in our startup company is temporary, right? And we cannot let today's setbacks define tomorrow's success or today's success tell us that there won't be setbacks tomorrow, right? I think that's the other thing we, we, we can't permanentize anything, right? Nothing stays the same. And so here's. Here's one for you, Walt, because I think that you and I have the luxury of being able to zoom out and look at long periods of time because we have long experience. And we've been doing this a long time and so, you know, you bring this up a lot. We've been through multiple recessions. We've been through multiple financial collapse. We've been through multiple up cycles, down cycles, funding bliss, funding nuclear winters for people who are just getting started, right? A lot of, lot of our audiences is really early in their startup journey. For them, when you can't. Zoom out and look at your own history and say, OK, I've been through this before. How do you reconcile that, right? Can you go back in time to like the 1st, 2nd, 3rd time you were running into this stuff?
Wil Schroter: That's exactly what I was thinking. I'll give you one of the first times, right? So I'm 22 years old, I've been running my company at the time for about 3 years, one of the first interactive agencies. Things were going so bad that I basically had to let everybody go and move my, my office, if you will, back into my apartment, which like. That was kind of how it was gonna end, right? Like I, I could not see a path back because at which point you can't pay anybody and you don't have your office anymore, especially back then. You're kind of done. Now, I want to crystallize that moment and kind of what my thinking was at the time. What my thinking was at the time is, I'm $100,000 in debt, which at the time when the prevailing wage was $5 an hour, that was like a billion dollars. There's no way I was gonna pay that off, right? I had no college degree, I had no work skills. Whatsoever. So there was no version where I was like, oh, I'll just go work for consulting and make $100,000 nothing. In fact, at the time or prior to that, I should say, the last job that I applied for was uh at Best Buy to be the Bowe's sales representative in that department. I wanted that job so bad.
Ryan Rutan: That's a dream job for you, dude. Audio you are like that's, yeah, that's that's that was top of the food chain right there. But,
Wil Schroter: but that was my fallback was working at Best Buy, right? Like and and and and I didn't get the job, by the way. I wanted to start a company. Nobody
Ryan Rutan: would look weird in a polo. Well, it wouldn't, yeah,
Wil Schroter: yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so anyway, oh, you know, funny side note, I never put two and two together. Best Buy would wind up becoming one of our bigger, biggest clients, and I always credit them for having paid for my house. I
Ryan Rutan: never even been there one way or the other, you went to work for Best Buy, you got, yeah,
Wil Schroter: yeah, yeah, yeah, one way or another they're gonna help us out. Anyway, in that moment, in that, in that very moment where I'm like, this is the end. It had all the pieces of the end. It's what the end looks like, you stop paying people, you move out of your office, like clients stop paying you, like it's kind of how it ends. What I wouldn't know at that time was that I had an entire career ahead of me, and good things happen over time as well. Within a year, we had merged the agency with another agency which wound up being a great deal for everybody, and we won a quarter billion dollar piece of business per year in the same year, fuck, I could have never seen that coming. And I guess when I think about it, what I didn't have at all was the benefit of of experience and perspective to be able to say, oh wait, future has time where things can happen too. They can be bad, but they can also be good, right? I just didn't have that.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, unfortunately, like, I think we've as as young startup founders, we all take that whole live in the present, right? Live in the moment thing a little too literally, and we, again, we tend to permanize things. It's funny, I had similar similar time, similar experience. It was one of those cases where we had just won our biggest client, right? And so all of a sudden we have more cash than we've ever had. I go on a hiring spree, I, I bring in, you know, like, not double the team but like half again as many people to get this. Contract done halfway through the contract, they lose their biggest contract and guess what? It's on pause indefinitely. And so I remember thinking again, like it's end of days, like this is, this is how it ends. It will never end. Did I have the, the ability at that age and that time to zoom back and go, wait a minute, 2 months ago we didn't have this client anyways, right? We had never seen this much money before, even as much as we got with the half check just to get started. It was like more than we'd ever seen before and it wasn't really. Days, but you just can't see it then. So I guess just as early stage startup founders, if you're this is your first go at this, or if you're just early in life in general, if you're just young and haven't been through this in your other career or relationships, anything else in life, just try to zoom back out and remind yourself, whatever is happening today is gonna be some different version of what's happening tomorrow and the day after and the day after, right? Nothing is gonna just a chapter, not the chapter, it's not the book for damn sure.
Wil Schroter: I think part of what concerns me though, Ryan, is, is when we get to a point where we lose perspective, we make really bad decisions, 100%, and they manifest in all kinds of different ways. First off, as managers, for many of us, we get shitty. Yeah yeah. That's a cooler way to say that, right? Like we're angsty, we're on edge, we're getting in fights with our co-workers, maybe clients, maybe we're bursting out on social media, whatever. We're the worst version out of ourselves at a time when we need to be the best version of ourselves, and that is so dangerous. Now, let me pick this up because we'll carry this thread throughout this, and then we make other people like that. When we're shitty to our co-workers, right, especially if, if we're a leader. position, they become shitty and they become shitty to people in their lives. Like it's bad.
Ryan Rutan: Enthusiasm is infectious. So is apathy. So is anxiety, so is
Wil Schroter: anger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I find that enthusiasm tapers off, antipathy or anger spins up cycles up, as we just saw like like with our past election in the United States,
Ryan Rutan: right sides. When I plant anxiety in my garden, it is, uh, it is self. Propagating it grows and grows and grows. It does a great job, takes over immediately.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the the concern I have is that when we lose that perspective in our attitude starts to manifest because we don't have the perspective as the nucleus of this business, it has a geometric effect across all of our other people, which incidentally, are the very people we need to figure this problem out. And so, rewind back to, you know, I'm I'm 22 and I just had to let everybody go. I was cool about it. I mean, as cool as you could be about it, right? And it turned out I hired all those folks back like within a year, and they got the highest paying jobs they've ever had in their lives, right? Awesome outcome, didn't see that coming, got to be honest, right? We chapter,
Ryan Rutan: right, but not the only chapter. You know,
Wil Schroter: one of the things you and I talked about and I just want to reiterate, a lot of people don't know this because it's like I said, not in the brochure. Startups go out of business many times before they become successful, right? No one tells you that. Everyone's like, oh, I guess you just find product market footage. You just scale the business. No, you talk to any, any real founder, meaning they've been in it for a while,
Ryan Rutan: like I just had somebody in my getting customers workshop on Monday who had shut the business down just pre-pandemic, just pre-pandemic. They just came back, just reinvigorated things, relaunched the website, uh, rebuilt the offer, and is now working on getting marketing back on its feet 4 and something years later. Happens. We took care of life for a couple of years and never lost passion for the project, didn't want to kill the startup, but needed to go handle some things in life before the startup could become a reality again.
Wil Schroter: I've done 9 startups over 30 years and in that time, some of them did well, but a lot of them also did not do well. And I gotta tell you, like, it didn't feel good. I like, I'm trying to give the the the argument for perspective. When things weren't going well, I wasn't like, ah, you know, I got perspective, so it doesn't matter. It still sucks.
Ryan Rutan: Oh, it does.
Wil Schroter: Still sucks. It still hurts, right? It still creates a tremendous amount of anxiety, but it's how you deal with that anxiety.
Ryan Rutan: For me, it's knowing that there's possibility on the other side of pain, right? It's not that like, oh, I have perspective, ergo pain goes away and I can just operate happily knowing that it'll change tomorrow. No, but I can operate, right? I don't operate happily, necessarily. I'm not feeling great about it, but I can get something done. I can keep moving.
Wil Schroter: When we Look at our own business, Ryan, you and I were talking about this earlier this week in the business of helping startups, right? And again, our own business at startups.com. So we're kind of looking internally as of this moment. It's a slow period for startups. I mean, it's no surprise we are now in Q4 of 2024 and there has been a funding and by way of that startup freeze for like 3 years almost, right? Now we are in the business of helping startups. So by virtue of that, our business slows down. How could it not? We start looking. At other companies in our space or other organizations in our space, tech stars, right? A phenomenal organization starts pulling out of major markets like Seattle and Austin, etc. That sucks. I mean, they're not really a competitor of ours, but they're in our space. They're in space,
Ryan Rutan: right? It's, it's a sign of the ecosystem, right? It's, it's not a positive sign that we want to see.
Wil Schroter: So how do we deal with that? So the first thing we say is, I think, you know, I talk about this stuff with the team, you know, we all do openly and say, and it's not. say shitting on TechStars, it's a great organization, right? But we also saw Venture for America go out of business, right? And an organization we love, we've hired tons of people from venture.
Ryan Rutan: It was a major feed source for us for a long time.
Wil Schroter: They're awesome, but you know, their whole, whole business model was putting fresh grads into startups. Well, it works when startups are actually hiring, and startups have not been hiring for a long time. The point is, we know we're in a trough in a valley in our business. We have two different ways. We can approach it. One way we just freak out, right? And oh my God, everything's wrong. Other way, which, which I'm actually very proud for how we've processed this, is, hey, we're in a valley, right? And there's some period of time that we have to navigate out of this valley, we got to cut costs, we got to stay lean, you know, all this stuff. But it's a valley, right? It's going to happen. It's happened to us before. That said, Ryan, if I had never been in this before, my perspective would be so much different. I would be, what did we do wrong? What did I do wrong? What, you know, like. I would have looked at this whole period completely differently. I know because I was in this position, and I did look at it differently, but because I've got perspective now, and I can say, oh, this is a moment in time, I can navigate, we can navigate way differently, differently, right, with confidence, if that's if that's hard for people to believe with confidence in a trough because we know it's a moment in time, we're looking for opportunities within that moment in time, and we'll build a better business because.
Ryan Rutan: And it's been a wonderful comfort to be able to do that for ourselves. It's also been an amazing gift to be able to hand that to other start-up companies, simply by saying similar to what you've just said, like, look, I have actually seen this before. We've been through this, this is what it looks like, here's where it's probably gonna end. Here's what we do to get through it, and they go, oh God, there is something like this, yeah, yeah, there likely is, you know, it, it reminds me of like there's moments when like my parents shared advice about parenting to me when I'd be like, oh my God. All this stuff's happening and then they're like, kids do that and you go, oh, kids do that. Like just like that's the thing, kids do that. Oh, OK, cool. I can, I can calm down now a little bit, just knowing, right? It's just that that commiseration goes so far sometimes just to know that again, like you're not the only one going through this. You said at the beginning of the episode, which is like, you know, my startup is a shit show. No, every startup is a shit show. That is the name of the show.
Wil Schroter: My, my kid is difficult to manage. It's called having a kid, right? Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about the number one advice we give to founders when they call us with an amazing amount of anxiety, like their their heads are ready to explode. The first thing we tell them, you need to take that energy, that nervous, anxious energy and convert it to action, because I gotta tell you, that nervous energy is powerful stuff if you channel it right, or destructive stuff if you don't.
Ryan Rutan: If you don't, yeah, man, action is the antidote to angie. for me and and one of the other things I think is really important to note there is like, we can talk about this more later, but like even really little steps, right? Just little actions chip away at at really, really big problems, and I think it's, it's easy to lose sight of that. But yeah, as we start to think about, because I think this is one of the challenges, right? So practical challenge, you're faced with a big problem, maybe, let's say a truly big problem, and anxiety starts to take over, right? The kind of gut wrenching, all consuming. I just want to crawl under a rock and never. Come back out again. I know I've shared on the podcast before. There was a period in time where I was having so much anxiety around a couple of projects that we're doing. When my phone would ring, I would immediately become tired. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, wow, right? Talk about anxiety like through the roof. My phone rings and I'm like, I'm sleepy cause I really don't want to have this conversation, right, right, right, response. The way out of it was action. I'll use a more recent example. So we had, uh, you may or may not remember this, probably 4 or 5 years ago now. Major HubSpot issues, right? We had, we had a couple little issues, Snowball out of control, some really big stuff started to happen within our HubSpot account, and I was looking at that just going, oh my God, I was having so much anxiety and our emails going out, is stuff happening? Are we properly, you know, are we, are we handling leads, all this stuff going on. And like there was just this mountain of anxiety because it was this mountain of work, and I finally got to the point, probably with your help where you were just like, just pick something little, just like chip away at it. And so I did and that felt great and then what I did was like I just said like, look. I, when I look at this thing as a mountain, I'm never gonna get over it, and my anxiety is gonna go through the roof. Yep, so I just said like, I'm just going to take an hour a day, and that that'll be the, that'll that'll cap it. That way I can limit my anxiety, I can limit my pain and we'll get through it. It took me 3 or 4 weeks and we got we got through it, but it went from that point of just like pure anxiety, running around like a chick with my head cut off, to just taking some action and and turning it into a little bit of progress.
Wil Schroter: So, so along those lines, anxiety. Is energy. Anxiety is momentum, right?
Ryan Rutan: It's frenetic energy.
Wil Schroter: Correct, right? But how we choose to use it, usually a huge waste of time. We usually use it by worrying, as if worrying is an action. So whenever I'm in this spot, and I get in this spot all the time, just an anxious dude, and I've been running startups for 30 years, like I don't, I don't know how else to operate, right? But when I get into this spot where where my anxiety starts to to to really crank, my first instinct now is where can I put this energy now. Yeah, yeah. When I say that, the key is somewhere simple, usually a dumb task. When I was 22 and I had, you know, crazy anxiety, we're shutting the business down. I remember the first time I started to have this thought process, and it was so effective. I said to myself, OK, I can spend the next 10 minutes or an hour really doing anything, right? I can spend it worrying, I can spend it, you know, blah blah blah, or I can just spend it writing code. And I was like, what if just every time I get anxious, I wrote code. Well, guess what? I a boat because I had an outlet and so now whenever I have that anxiety, my first instinct is find somewhere to put the energy cause lo and behold, it's that energy that gets you out of the anxious situation. And I think within that, those small actions, they start to cure like a bigger problem, you know what I mean? Like, in part of it is not making it worse. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: letting it spiral out of control, right? Gaining positive momentum instead of negative it's, it's to me, anxiety is always about the momentum shift, right? Yep, clearly at the point where I'm starting to get anxious, momentum is working against me, something is going the wrong direction. So it's just about changing inertia, right? Getting moving the direction that I wanted to move. You know,
Wil Schroter: 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. And I think like we keep thinking, here's a great example. Every startup that's ever raised money has a period where they don't. I think they're gonna raise money. It's kind of like the nature for money, right? And so the anxiety is at full tilt. So their thought is, oh, well, I guess I need to work on something with this anxious energy to reach out to more investors or to update my pitch check. and yes, that's, I mean, that's not a a bad place to put it, but I want to be clear, part of this exercise isn't necessarily doing the thing that's going to dispel the anxiety. And the reason I say that is because sometimes there are anxious things that don't have an Action that's gonna get done anytime soon, right? It's like, oh, our sales are down by 30%. Are there microactions I can take to, to help that there are, obviously, right? There are. But I also think that there there's some aspect of saying, hey, I'm just gonna do our accounting, or hey, I'm just gonna like I'm gonna work on this, this boring task. I'll give you an example of that for me, I have a long list of tasks, like what I call side tasks that I reserve specifically for when I'm feeling this way. Or or frankly, what I'm just like kind of in a position where I'm like, uh, I'm creatively like shot, right? And I've built this habit where when I see one of these tasks, I'm like, oh, that'll be good anxiety task, right? And I just kind of throw it into that bucket, right? And when I have anxiety, I go to that well and I just motor through those tasks and I feel great about it.
Ryan Rutan: I
Wil Schroter: feel
Ryan Rutan: good about it. Yeah, I think one of the challenges is that it feels like in those moments where you're really anxious and there's some big thing, let's say it's like a an existential crisis for the company type thing, yeah, of course. Feel like because our energy matches that problem, right? The anxious energy is there, anxiety is there, worries there, all that stuff is there, that our actions somehow have to match that. And I think that's the biggest misconception, and I think that was the biggest thing that I finally got over was that it's actually far better to start with those tiny steps. If I don't have to save the company to fix my anxiety or to gain momentum, we can take the smallest possible steps and that actually starts to get us moving towards where where we're going.
Wil Schroter: I think within that, a big part of what we tend to focus startups on, founders specifically, when they hit these really rough patches, you would say, look, first thing you do, reset all of your goals, all of your every single thing that you're working on reset every single one of those goals, and it takes them a minute to figure out what that means, but what we're really saying is take all the big things you were trying to do and turn it into a micro goal, the smallest possible thing, which has so Many benefits, you know what I mean?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I mean, the there's such a, it's, it feels like such a cheat code to learn how to shrink scope, right? Stop worrying about next quarter, even next week, like, what am I gonna get done today, right? And we talked about this on the podcast before. We plan in weekly sprints, right? For this reason, and a weekly sprint breaks down into what? Days, Days break down into what, hours, hours break down to what tasks, right? Like it, it matters so much because it's a horizon that you can actually do something about. And I think that's a big part of where anxiety comes from is. You feel powerless. You feel like you can't get something done. And if you keep thinking that way and you keep trying to act too big, that is exactly what will happen, right? You will be right for all the wrong reasons. So when we can shrink scope and just bring things down to ultra manageable, ultra achievable, all of a sudden that momentum shift becomes really, really easy, right? Instead of trying to move the entire mountain, the shovelful, right? We all get this, we all get this metaphorically, but I think that for a lot found is it's really hard to actually take that action and say, well, but that doesn't feel meaningful enough. I'd rather, I'd rather, you know, die on my shields, right, than or or whatever that is, right? Like the that that whole thing where it's like I need it needs to be big, like if this is gonna be the end of me, I want to go out doing something big, not focus on a bunch of little stuff. And look, I, I think we do have to be careful here too about saying like ignore the big stuff. It's not worth saying. We're not saying ignore the big things and just, just go do some little stuff and everything will take care of itself. No, I didn't say go bury your head in the sand and. Focus on admin tasks either.
Wil Schroter: Let's not look at it in terms of these are irrelevant tasks. Let's look at it in terms of these are critical tasks, but we're making them smaller, right? So for example, if, if our big issue was we're trying to raise money, right? we keep coming back to that, but we're trying to raise money. The macro task, if we want to call it that, is raise our bridge round, raise our our next round, what whatever we're trying to do. The micro task is find one more investor to reach out to. Yeah, right? And so part of what gets us so paralyzed is that we take the macro task as being the work, and it's never the work. It is typically the culmination of all those micro events, right? It's kind of like like when when you look at your room and it's dirty or messy, right? And you know my kids are like this, right, you know, room will be
Ryan Rutan: mess. You give me anxiety just thinking about a messy room now. Well, thanks a lot.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, right. Well, so first thing I always say is, here's what I want you to do. I want you to pick up that football. That's it. Put it away. That seems super easy. And I'm like, OK, now go pick up that, right? And, and like, once they understand it in the, in the case of achievable micro tasks, all of a sudden you can get stuff done. You and I were talking about this, uh, you know, you came and visit me to work on my house, right? You know, build a new house. I remember telling you I was like, this whole house in this entire process is all done by like one dude, which is, which is crazy not literally one person, but kind of sort of every single. Part of the project from the excavation to the foundation build to the framing is just a couple of people, right? In some cases, literally one person, like one person with an excavator did all of my excavation, right? So like, it seemed like this Herculean task, but one person just chipped away at it. I personally built every cabinet, every vanity, every closet, every single part of my house by myself in my free time, which I don't have a ton of. But what I did was instead of looking at it and saying, oh my God, I have. To build all this stuff. I said, no, all I have to do today is spend one hour this morning standing this one thing. That's it. That is my only task. Nothing else matters. And lo and behold, now I have an entire house worth of stuff.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's the, the HubSpot example that I gave earlier, right? It was like fixed HubSpot became the the outcome I was trying to chase, and it's like there were so many little things going wrong when I broke it down to send tomorrow's newsletter, make sure that everybody that should get it gets it, make sure that the rights are get right just. Fix that one thing, get there, that is a piece of fix HubSpot, right? So you just tackle these little, and again, they're not unimportant, right? Every single one of those things is important, right? Every cabinet in your house is important. Every newsletter that goes out from sharps.com is important, and so it's not like, oh well, yeah, the newsletter, well, but what about HubSpot? Well, right, this is part of how we get there. Well, OK,
Wil Schroter: so uh this lesson actually was taught to me, and I told you this story once before, was taught to me by a British SAS officer. Oh yeah, yeah, right, so of all things, I'm at a Forbes summit. This is, oh my god, it's like so long like.
Ryan Rutan: Can I just say I'm really glad that neither of us can illustrate anything quite like this, like, like I'm I'm glad that I don't have a personal anecdote that hits quite like this,
Wil Schroter: so, so story goes, I'm on this summit with a whole bunch of other speakers and they're all founders and we're talking about something, and we're kind of in the green room, so to speak, like ready to go on stage and I'm talking to this this guy, he's a founder, and what he's developed was um a practice munition. A bullet essentially for for uh soldiers to learn how to get shot and keep on going, right, which is maybe the most badass thing a founder has ever told me, right? And so I asked him, I was like, well, you know, how did you get into this like, I love backstory. And he said, uh, he's like, well, you know, I, I'm actually a former SAS officer, and I've been shot 6 times. Wait, what? Like, you got shot 6 times and you still live. He's like, no, no, no, I've been shot on 6 separate occasions, separate occasions, yeah. I'm like, wait, what? What? I'm like, OK, first off, maybe you're the most unlucky man. It reminds me of that first stormtrooper that I was just through and get like blasted immediately. Anyway, so I, I'm talking to him about it and I said like how how do you deal with this? He's like, actually, part of what we do, the munition is just is a bit of a red herring. The issue isn't that you've been shot because most wounds actually aren't fatal at all. He said that most soldiers die because they bleed out, because they they they. In shock. What we really teach people the munition again is just is just a way to like get hit with the force of a of a bullet, uh, without actually penetrating it. He said the training is what to do the second that happens. Now, I kind of can't think of a higher anxiety moment than I've just been shot and I'll probably get shot again, right? So here's what he said, and this is what stuck with me, and this is what I always think about like in in my toughest moments. He said, when, when that happens the first The thing we train the soldier to do is to focus on nothing but getting the cover. Nothing else matters in the world, not whether your heart's beating, not whether who's around you. It's getting the cover so you can protect yourself and, you know, and and and uh stop the wound, etc. And he said, so what we do is we teach focus in our most anxiety ridden moment, how to be the most focused, and he said, and he's like, you know what, and that's why I'm still alive, because when that would happen to me, I'd get shot. My first reaction, you know, the first time it happened a little bit different. My first reaction wouldn't be, oh my God, I'm going to die. It's, I need to get to cover, and nothing else matters until I do that. Whenever I think about being in like in a high anxiety situation, I look for what is my cover? What is the next place I need to go? Total blinders on right right, total blinders to anything else, and it is so effective.
Ryan Rutan: How do we achieve safety in this moment?
Wil Schroter: There's a couple of things here. One is making the goal small, but it's also focus, right? We talked about turning anxiety into action, but part of this too, again, it's not just us. We got to look at our team and say, if we're stressed, they're stressed. So how do we take their work and make it smaller? How do we take their work and give them the opportunity for those tiny wins? Because what we're also talking about here isn't just making the work more achievable, which is important, it's also creating a different momentum. How the momentum starts to build more milestones. It's hard to build momentum when you're missing all of your milestones, but now all of a sudden when you get all your milestones, you just achieved 28 things today, you feel like a champion, even if they're small.
Ryan Rutan: Absolutely, and man, like, momentum is so important here and breaking those things down is so important. I think I've shared this anecdote in the past too, but in in my one foray off into the corporate world where where I realized how well things don't work, I was tasked with handling things for 14 different country market level operations. And politically, the request was that we make progress even if small, on all of them at the same time, right? I couldn't prioritize one over the other. We needed to show each and every one of the markets that we cared about what was going on, and we're trying to, trying to show progress. And my God, when you're trying to make progress on 14 things at once, there is no momentum. You couldn't see it, you couldn't feel it. 2 years later, there was marginal progress on anything and and like people were kind of happy that they gotten some attention, but nothing had actually changed. And so we were able to shift that I in my like insistence kind of at that point it was like, look, I just need to spend the next two months doing nothing but this project for this country market. And all of a sudden, by breaking that down and making that smaller, we started to pick up momentum, right? Lots of little wins do build big, big momentum which allows you to take on bigger and bigger stuff too. So I think that's it's important too. This doesn't always mean like, oh we only you can only ever have small tasks. No, there can be big projects, big things get done. Of course, yep, we can argue you always break those down anyways, right? Like when you do start to pick up that momentum, all of a sudden it changes what you can get done. And again, not just for you, but across the team, right? So when everybody's just had a little win, now we've got some, we got some steam, right? We can actually move forward, we can do something else, we can move on, do bigger things, which feels great to tie this back to kind of like the the the shit show uh that our startups, it's like, I think we have to remember that when when chaos hits that Aiming for greatness is not the idea. It's aiming for progress and survival small little wins build big momentum, right? When you get shot, you're not thinking, how do I win the battle? You're thinking, how do I get behind that log so I can avoid getting shot again. Yep, I can put on a bandage, staunch the bleeding, and maybe we'll return fire. It's about, like, again, it's about right sizing what you're trying to do for the thing it's gonna, it's if you optimize for momentum instead of optimizing for. size of outcome, you're you're gonna be far better off.
Wil Schroter: I think one of the things that's been a great hack for me, and I always talk to other founders about this, when they're in super high stress situations when the anxiety is just, uh, you know, just boiling over, focus on something else. Now I know that sounds batty, right, what do you mean focus on something else? Like how could I, I'm about to lose my house. How could I possibly focus on anything else? OK. Here's what's interesting about that. We all need something that is as far from our work as possible. That we can obsess over. I don't just mean like, oh, go play some video games or something. I mean something you can obsess over. That's not work. Now, at different points in my life I've had like that different hobby or something that I could obsess over. For a long time it was video game, right? Like I, I have more hours in the civilization franchise than I think the people who made it.
Ryan Rutan: I would say I think you, you've you've you've outstripped their development team at this point. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: it's unbelievable, right? If anybody is a fan, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But through all of my years in 30 years, I've played almost like every one of the franchise. I've got ungodly amounts of hours into it. Why? Because I needed it. I needed something to channel my like my anxiety into. That was an obsession, something that I could get so gripped by that it would pull me away from that other thing. And over the years it's changed. What is it for you,
Ryan Rutan: Ryan? Oh man, for me at this point, it's, it's a couple different things. I mean, I tend to do kind of like you do where I'll go kind of project to project for a while. It was, it was uh Hands, which I really mean it was learning all about bacterial digestion and and like all of these other crazy things. It, it kind of depends too. I think there are times where I have more physical energy due to anxiety. Sometimes I have more mental energy due to anxiety. One of the best for me, uh, soccer's always been there, right? Soccer is always there. And, and one of the things I love about it, it has a start, it has a middle, it has a finish, there's a process. of progress to it and I can obsess about my performance and I can obsess about the team's performance. I can do all kinds of stuff to just really, really get my mind off things. The other one was jujitsu, and the, the beauty of jujitsu is that it forces you to obsess and stay in that moment. When someone has their arm around your neck and they're trying to deny blood and oxygen to your brain, you don't think about much else until you stop thinking all together and then you wake up and you go, I'll think differently about that next time. I think this is such a great. Man, the about getting obsessive about something else. And here's the great news for founders, like, probably everybody, but specifically founders, our brains are wired to obsess.
Wil Schroter: I know, right?
Ryan Rutan: Just want to build things in the first place because we can't just look at it and go, oh, that doesn't work like it should, or that could be better. Oh well, we've never said that. We're like, that could be better. I'll make it better. I'll fix that. I'll go work on that. So we're already wired for this. So startup stress starts to take over. That Obsession turns into an endless loop of what if? How do I fix this? That's that moment where I know I'm like, I, I need a healthy house, something where I can redirect that energy. And again, like for me it's soccer for you, you know, right now it's, it's woodworking and, and, and home building, and I don't really think that it matters a ton what it is, as long as like you said, it, it can be, it allows for obsession, right? It has to be something that's deep enough and nuanced enough that it actually allows you to dig in and obsess, right? It can't be like somebody like, well, I go. For a walk. I don't know what happens on your walks, Will. Walks are never quite enough for me, right? Like maybe you're like, I go walk, what do you do? I walk across the one during uh rush hour traffic. Oh, OK, shit, yeah, that maybe that would do it. But it has to have that like erase everything else, force you to put the blinders on, and become truly engrossed in it. For me, that's where the therapeutic nature kicks in, right? It basically has to block everything else out for a period of time. It just be something fancy, man, right? Like.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, agree.
Ryan Rutan: people clean their houses. Some people garden if if that's what it is, and that can get you to that place, if that gets you to that all-consuming, fully physically absorbed, fully mentally absorbed, fully emotionally absorbed, awesome. It's all it needs to do.
Wil Schroter: Agreed, and I also think that something that, like you mentioned cleaning, something that doesn't have consequence is equally important
Ryan Rutan: because it has a positive consequence, of course,
Wil Schroter: right, if we obsess about something that actually creates more anxiety, yeah.
Ryan Rutan: Like that's oh my God. I had a friend who would his diversion from startup companies was day trading. Oh yeah, there it is.
Wil Schroter: That's exactly
Ryan Rutan: you want to know how old he was when he had his first heart attack? Are you kidding? 44, right? Like it's like wrong secondary obsession. Can I right
Wil Schroter: and and gambling is another one, you know, it's kind of the same thing, but like, um, the keys to this though, I think the first key to to be able to to embrace this is allowing yourself to embrace it, is allowing yourself to say, to be a Better founder. I need to go obsessed for this thing. I need to use this as my mental emotional punching bag to get stuff out of my system. Now, a lot of times we'll we'll we'll look at it and we'll say, well, I can't be, you know, doing woodworking now or doing gardening right now. I have to go build a startup. No, you actually kind of do need to do it. That's kind of the point, right? You, you need to get into that so you can get this stuff out of your system. If you're like, oh well, I shouldn't be you know, cleaning my apartment right now. I should be working on my startup. Yeah, at some point that's absolutely. True, but that therapeutic nature of obsessing about cleaning isn't incidental, right? When people go to clean for therapy, it's because mentally they're trying to put things back. They're trying to restore order. They're trying to get to a completion point. For me with woodworking, it was more about being able to say, I'm done. And when we build startups, one of the things we often can't say is that we're ever done. Nothing's ever done. In fact, it's always horribly incomplete. We never have enough people. That we've hired, we've never had enough revenue, we've never had enough funding. It's always not enough. The level of completion is rare in what I always say, when we are complete with something, it's often amorphous. We just launched the website. You want to have a more boring completion, launch a website. I've done a million of them. Never once was it exciting for more than 5 seconds.
Ryan Rutan: There it is, yeah, like there's some, there's a release and relief, but yeah, it's not really excitement. I mean, it's excitement about now it's done, but like, yeah, now a whole bunch of new work begins called. Marketing and, and, and, and bug fixing and everything else
Wil Schroter: doesn't have the same thing, even though it's important,
Ryan Rutan: right? Yeah, yeah. And that's again, like to your point, that one has a consequence, right? So that isn't that, I mean, like, I know you weren't talking about building a website as a right, but you know, to tie that back together, it can't be a distraction, right? And it can't have a negative consequence. It has to be a bit of a reset. And so I want your feedback on this one because I've I've realized that a lot of the things that I've done have had a fairly finite start and stop, but the one that you named like. Civilization, like you can kind of endlessly play that. So how do you balance that? How do you keep it from becoming escapism when there isn't a consumption limit to to your secondary obsession?
Wil Schroter: In that case, it it didn't matter that there there wasn't an end. It had milestones of progression, right? I beat this nation or I, I launched this technology, right? Like it had a a very definitive stop and start, even even if it reset to another one. The problem, like I said, in Our business and what we do as as startups is there often isn't a very clear goal. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: there's no, there's no feeling of momentum or progress, right, right, right. I'll be getting anywhere. I don't know.
Wil Schroter: When I was a kid, I would go out on the job site with my dad and I used carpenter and and we build stuff, right? When we were done with it, I'm like, Dad, this is amazing. Like, like, how great is this that like we're able to build this thing. Now my dad did not give a shit, right? It's like, he's like, So, I'm 40 years old, my back is shot, my knees are shit. Not do anything but this, right, which is ironic because literally the first thing I did. But, but my point is, I loved the fact that there was something visible a few months back, uh, when you and I were in my workshop and we were building drawers of all things, right? You drawers for a cabinet. We sat there, we marveled at how well they came out, right? We were excited about the the the slot that we put in it. We were excited about the how tight the seams got
Ryan Rutan: obsessing over those little details, man. But
Wil Schroter: it was awesome because at the end of the day we got to see something in a very short period of time, literally at the end of the day. We got to see something that was the the outcome of our work and we were reminded therapeutically that our work has value, that our work has outcome, that our work has a milestone, and there's a pride to it. Much of what we do in startups actually doesn't have that, and it is wildly frustrating. It adds up. Yeah, I,
Ryan Rutan: but I think that's a, it's a great point. I think that that's one of those places where you can lean back and say like, how do I redesign it so that it does, right? How can I redesign this process? And this is one of the reasons is when I'm talking to people who want to go build a Product, and let's just say they haven't worked in that industry before, they, they haven't built a product like that before. It's gonna be something very new for them. Very frequently I'm pushing them to do something in a service or consulting basis that's related to that, partially for that exact reason, because we actually do get to an outcome much sooner. Something that we can actually say like, oh, I talked to this person, I solved their problem, they're off and running, I feel good, right? That type of momentum is, is, is so important. But to, to put a bow on the, the secondary obsession, uh, uh, segment. Here, like, I think it is really, really important that every startup founder, and even people within the organization, like if you're the founder, you should be pushing people in your organization to also have this outlet. Startup stress, any kind of stress needs an outlet, but startup stress in particular because of the fact, like you said, there isn't always this defined end to where this goes, meaning we don't know when the stress is gonna end, and the reality is it doesn't really end, it changes, right? It just changes clothes, it changes shape, changes form where there's gonna be more stress. So it needs that outlet and to make sure that to the extent that you. And you're obsessing over something restorative, something that fills you back up, not something destructive that also just wears you out, but in a different way.
Wil Schroter: So, I actually don't think that any of this has to do with specifically times are bad and we're acting like this. I think everything we just talked about is how you manage startups, is how you start process. Yes, right. And so when we're talking about having perspective, it's not just useful for when times are going bad. It's just as useful for when when times are good, right? When we're talking about. Converting our anxiety into action. When will there ever not be anxiety, right? Always be anxiety. So that skill, not just for us, but for our team is incredibly important. When we're talking about taking big goals and turning them into small goals, right? That is valuable to every aspect of everything that we build. One of the oldest adages in software development is you can tell the success of a project or the probability of success by the length of the timeline. Longer the timeline, lower the probability, right? That's the nature of small goals. And when we're talking about getting obsessive about something, about finding some place where we can unload all of this anxiety on a regular basis and ideally a healthy way, all of the things we just talked about need to become fundamentally how we're built as founders, right? And how we, we build our startups around this for all the people that are part of this. If we can't figure out how to channel and manage our anxiety in a productive way, our chances for building a big startup for being around and healthy long enough to do it, are pretty much zero.
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.