Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Routan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com, Will Schroeder. Well, look, as founders, we are no strangers to pressure, right? But so much of that pressure doesn't come from like what we actually want. It comes from the expectations that we on from investors, peers, the startup community, and to some degree ourselves. And we end up like chasing these goals that aren't even ours, comparing ourselves to other people, believing success will fix all the problems that it can't. So let's unpack that. But like, let's start with like, where does this come from? Why the hell are we doing this?
Wil Schroter: It's interesting because it comes from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, like, right. I, I've spent so many years, you know, personally, unpacking, where do my expectations come from? And a lot of people, you know, when they talk about how their lives have gone, and a lot of people at different junctures in life, kind of have that reflective moment, and I, I'm always fascinated when they say like, it's almost always I'm not as far ahead as I should be, and I always think to myself, are you sure? Right? Like, based on what exactly? Yeah. And I rarely get a good answer, and I think for founders, this is a big issue.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, man, I, I feel like the worst expectations we can possibly have, regardless, like if if I don't know anything else about him, if you didn't question them. Right, yeah, because it, it starts to push you into like chasing some version of success that that maybe isn't even yours, right? Like we just got these things by proxy, inherited them from some posts we read on the internet without even really internalizing or whatever, and next thing you know, we're making decisions based on this, we're listening to advice based on this that take action and do stuff, yep, without having question like, do I even want to have these expectations for myself for my
Wil Schroter: startup. It's unbelievable because I, I think in In terms of like how much time and energy and devotion we're going to put into fulfilling these expectations. And then I think about how little time we put in determining how they got here. That's why we had them to begin with, right?
Ryan Rutan: It's like you're just randomly completing instructions from an instruction booklet and then you're like, where did this come from? Like what who who gave me this booklet? Like, do I even want to build this thing that they're that they're suggesting? And it just, it happens so often. It's funny that like, I feel like part of it in my case, was like, sometimes I was so confused about what I need to go and do. And I didn't recognize that that was OK. It was like it was OK to not know what the answer was, that any answer was gonna be better than that. And so somebody was like, well, why I think you should go do this and be like, OK, that's a good expectation, like without really thinking about whether it had anything deals like it was an expectation, so I could go execute against it without thinking about whether that actually fed. Into anything that I was trying to accomplish.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, no, that's the thing. We're not only spend all this time that I just mentioned a moment ago, but we're gonna risk a lot of stuff, everything from financial to emotional to our health, to our relationships. And imagine risking all of that on the assumption that you had certain expectations, only to find out later that they were bull. Which, by the way, is usually the case. That's usually the outcome. So what I thought would be cool is, why don't we take and dissect all the different buckets that these expectations come from for founders and talk about how, how they got here, why we're responding to them in that way. And then if we're lucky, figure out how to how to ignore all of them. Let me, uh, let me ask you this, which one comes to mind first? When you think of something that drives, you know, obviously to to founders, what would you say? Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: I mean like it pretty clearly in our case, like all the founders we talked to, a lot of them are seeking funds, not all of them, but a lot of them are seeking funds or considering whether they should and so. Expectations from the investor base, right? This is a huge driver of people thinking they need to go do something because an investor has this expectation, investor has that expectation, or I think an investor expects this, whether I've actually heard that from them or not, and oh by the way, have they invested in your company? No. Yeah, why are you running their playbook exactly? Well, I think that's what is expected of me. Shit,
Wil Schroter: here
Ryan Rutan: we go.
Wil Schroter: I want to share a story of where I missed investor expectations at every possible level, but even to an extent that the investors were like, what are you doing? So, so I, I'll give you an example. Years ago I'd gotten some venture funding for Affordit.com, which doesn't exist anymore. It's basically what a. is now. It was an amazing group of investors like first round Capital was in there. Dave McClure, when he had just before he started 500 startups, uh, was in there. Mark Sister was in there. Bessemer was in there. I mean, there's there's a lot of folks in there. Mike Jones from uh what's now science to Dollar Shave Club, stuff like that, awesome investors. I was so excited, right? I was so excited and, and so humbled to take that back. I was not humbled.
Ryan Rutan: I remember this part of the story, Will.
Wil Schroter: I made up the humility part. That's not true. Uh, that's probably what got me into trouble. anyway, I remember thinking like these guys have put in, you know, a whole ton of money, some of them personally, right? Like, like Mark Suter, who's who now runs upfront Ventures, I don't think he was part of it yet, and he just put in personal money, might have been one of the first investments he made. So I felt pretty like tethered. Yeah. To this expectation, which is where it started coming off the rails, because I was the only person that felt tethered. Now, when people put in money, they they have expectations, and literally that that's the deal, right? Have you seen any case where people put in money like, yeah, I'm
Ryan Rutan: good. Maybe in the case of like, Family investments,
Wil Schroter: good point,
Ryan Rutan: yeah, but that's, that's it, and I would even hazard a guess that even if they're saying like, yeah, don't worry about it, doesn't matter, like that's not what they're thinking it might be what they're saying, but yeah, now pretty much in every other case there's gonna be expectations and why? Would there be, but there are expectations there but the thing we got to remind ourselves is that those expectations aren't ours. They're they're not even really about us. They're about the investor, right? It's about their returns, it's about their timelines, it's about their portfolio. And what needs to come out of that for them, right? Now, sure, some of that stuff aligns with what you want. It's not like they're thinking like, OK, we're just gonna liquidate all his assets in his car and then we're gonna sell it, and that'll be how we get our money back, yay, ha ha, right? It's not like that, but very frequently, the drivers of the decisions, right, if if they were to drive the decision, they may pick something very, very different. We talked about this last week. We're talking about investors wanting to push us off a cliff. It's not that they want to push us off a cliff, they just need us to move in specific ways that might be counter to what we want. 100% what they want, right? So this is where that alignment with the expectations can become problematic.
Wil Schroter: But here's, I think, the part where we consistently and folks listening to this now, I, I want you to lean a little closer on this one because this is one of the things I see missed most consistently. They believe that the investor wants this thing to succeed, regardless of the expense of the founder. Now, now, I'm sure there's investors that are perfectly fine with that, right? But generally, That has not been my understanding, right, or my experience. Let me fast forward through my story. So we, we were out of money. This we were running right into the financial crisis and no one was writing checks, sounds familiar. And so we're running around long past the point where we're out of money and we've been written off. I think at that point I'd maybe pitched, I'd done 80 investor pitches, which is a, I mean, that's not 80 emails, those are actual meetings. Yeah, back when you had to meet. but there was no Zoom yet. I get to the point where I'm so drawn out. I mean, it sucked the life out of me. It was, it was miserable. This is like a year and a half doing this nonstop. And at some point, I finally bring it to the, the investors, and I'm like, look guys, honestly, this isn't gonna happen. Like, you know, I've, I've done everything I possibly could. I have no idea what else to do. I've been killing myself because I feel so strongly about my commitment to you. And they looked at me and they're like, yeah, we wrote it off like a year and a half ago, like we have I haven't even thought about it, but,
Ryan Rutan: but don't you expect me to, didn't, weren't your expectations to, hey, wait, but I've been doing all this shit because I thought you wanted me to, yeah, this is the big danger, man, and letting anybody else's expectations drive your life because you might not have been clear on that, like, well, you said this thing to me one time, like, well, yeah, in passing, but I didn't mean that you need to go like live your life according to that. It wasn't a mantra, it was just like an observation, right.
Wil Schroter: God, yeah, no, and, and so we get to this place where we build a narrative. We and this happens over and over and over and all, you know, all the buckets we talk about, I'm sure there will be a consistent thread there, but we build this narrative. In that narrative, we're always the, the, the bad guy, not not the villain per se, but the person doing something wrong, right? And we look at it as the investors, whatever their expectation. Who it's from and what it is, is legitimate. And it always blew my mind, right? We may not get to things like parents, etc. but I mean that that's a huge one. But like people say this is what parents expected of me, and I think to myself, who are they? And now I know that's heretical. How can you dare say, who are my parents? They're just other adults and maybe not adults that make, they could make really bad decisions and you're based your whole life on that. It's bananas. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: that's the thing, right? Like I, you gotta go back. And say like, what one, like, to your point, like what right do they have to have an expectation? And look, most of them, mostly in the case of parents, like, let's assume most of them were were well intentioned, at least, right? They they had an expectation so that you could achieve something in life so that probably you could just get off their couch, right? And, and so that's fine. But even though you have to question, right? Like we know the whole thing about best best intentions, right? Like pave the road to hell. Same thing here, like, even if they're well intend. It does not mean that it's your path, right? The minute you are not defining your path, the minute someone else's expectations are defining your path, you're probably on the wrong path. So just constantly ask yourself, right? Am I doing this because I believe this is necessary, because I believe this is what gets me to where we want to be, because I believe this is the right thing to do right now and that I have reasonable expectations for what it will yield, or is it Some version of somebody else's idea or something that I've amalgamated Mark Twain's style where I'm pulling from like 10 or 15 different characters, and now I've rolled them into one, and this is the set of expectations that I have to live by. God, don't do this to yourself.
Wil Schroter: Let's take that. Let's let's expand upon that and project it again onto the investor pool. It's easy to overlook this because most of us, this is the only investment we'll ever do. 90% of investments will fail, just statistically. And when we look at that from Our standpoint, from from the the founder's standpoint, this is our only investment, so to speak, right? This is our only deal. So we don't have a portfolio theory here where we can say, oh, I guess I'm just one of the ones that failed, no big deal, right? So we put it on ourselves that this one has to be the one. And and by the way, no investor is gonna pull you aside and say, you're good, don't worry about it. I got some other good deals. Do what you do, don't do what you do. I don't care. You'll never I guess
Ryan Rutan: you'll be one of the 18 out of 2. not the 2 out of 20. And so
Wil Schroter: because we get so wrapped up in this idea that the expectation is that we are going to be the 1 in 20, and don't get me wrong, I mean, you shouldn't play this game if you don't expect to try to be the one in 20. Correct. But in the absence of understanding how this thing actually works, that is a place to drive you to insanity. Absolutely. I know this now, and I would never make the same bet again. I, I would never have that mentality, even though I'd want to win. I would look at it going, we'll try to win, and I'll do everything I possibly can, but I know now that the expectation of the investor is that we'll probably lose. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: I think that's that's the real problem. You start imposing your own expectations. And again, those expectations are healthy for you to have. You have to assume you're going to win, otherwise, why would you have gone and done this? Why would you spend your time doing this? Why would you ask other people for their money? So yes, you have to expect that you're going to succeed, but don't expect that everyone else expects the same thing. The minute you start imposing your expectations on them. For you, and then you start to act accordingly, right? We're like, well, I assume that they want me to behave this way, so therefore I will. It's a really, really dangerous trap and it's just an unnecessary one, right? They again, to your point, they don't have that same expectation of you, so there's no need for you to foist that upon them, and then pretend that you're doing it for their benefit or their good. They don't care and not think of it the same way you are.
Wil Schroter: venture fund, I'll just use venture funded as an example, but what venture funded founder doesn't feel like their their neck is in a noose because of the investor expectations. I, I hardly meet any. I, I don't meet any laissez-faire founders that are like, yeah, you know, I took the money, it worked, didn't work. And to be fair, if that's the way you feel, you sort of shouldn't be in this game.
Ryan Rutan: And then yeah, I don't have another one was that a that's it's the only I can think of.
Wil Schroter: So my thought is, you know, the, the resolution, if you will, when you're thinking about where your expectations come as they relate to the investors, we've got to give it perspective. We've got to say, yes, the investors would love to get an outcome, but the expectation is that there's a 10% chance that that could happen. It's like basically, I'm a lottery ticket to them that might pay off. The expectation isn't that I, I guarantee I'm a certificate of deposit CD that's gonna yield in 5 years exactly this rate, right? That's not what the expectation is. And frankly, if it is, the issue isn't. You, the founder, the investor that doesn't understand how investments work.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I mean, to the extent possible, right? Not always entirely possible to suss all this out and can't maybe it doesn't isn't represented clearly on the term sheet or anything like that, but like, before you take on the money, ask yourself like what expectations am I actually agreeing to? And are they stated or not? And if they're not, then you're not agreeing to them, OK? Make that clear. And how this line with my goals. Right? Because again, like investor expectations are their priorities, not yours. Build towards your goals. Let the outcomes be aligned, but the methodology doesn't have to be, right? The way you go and do things and the expectations that get you there can be completely separated from the outcomes. At the end of the day, the outcome is what everybody should be aligned on and it should be a kind of a common goal, a common ground that we're we're working towards, right?
Wil Schroter: Yeah, agreed. And, and so here's the way I think about it, like when we have, you know, we do our founder groups, where we bring a bunch of founders together and and everybody kind of weighs in. Whenever I do a founder group that's a group of all funded founders, here's what I see immediately. I see all of them when they give their updates basically projecting their investor's voice. This is what, but here's the second thing. Which leads us to another bucket. Ryan,
Ryan Rutan: are you just reading us replies to your latest investor update? Maybe.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, right, probably kind of. But what I'd consider to be a second bucket, using this as context, is that we'll go around the room and everybody will give their startup updates and by way of that, in this case investor updates. And immediately every single founder there will start benchmarking off the other founder. Yep. Oh, you couldn't raise another round? Oh, OK, well shit, I couldn't raise another round either. Oh, like you're having a Trouble hitting your metrics? Well, I'm having trouble hitting my metrics
Ryan Rutan: as if you're comparing 40 yard dash times, as if they have anything to do with each other whatsoever, right?
Wil Schroter: Exactly. What I see as one of the biggest buckets, particularly in the startup community, is when we compare ourselves to other founders, and it's not just founders, right, but it's comparing ourselves to our peers, and I find this to be the most consistently useless exercise that never ends. Well, you know what I mean?
Ryan Rutan: Anytime we spend scrolling, and we could have been building, like we're all we're doing is just trying to gather evidence that we're not doing everything that we could be. Guess what? You're making it true by virtue of doing that, right? Put, put down, put down the Facebook, put down the Instagram version of whoever it is that you're you're trying to benchmark again against and and just get back to building, right? I somebody said it, right? There's a quote out there somewhere, I don't remember who, but the only comparison that matters is Who you were yesterday, right? Like, are you better off today? Did you accomplish something today? Did you get something done? Uh, the minute we start comparing ourselves to others, and look, you said something about like people comparing themselves to their peers, at least if they're comparing themselves to their peers, maybe there's some overlap or some value. The one that kills me is when they align themselves with someone who has nothing to do with them. They're like, well, look, you know, Microsoft is doing this like, do you have any concept, free revenue. Startup fits in comparison to Microsoft? Not at all, right? You can't even afford their operating system at this point. We don't need to worry about how you compare to them as a business, OK? It's all right, you'll be fine. 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. I find this a lot because I spend a lot of time with a lot of founders at all stages of their career and all stages of success. But what I find consistent across the entire spectrum is the comparison. Now here's why that's fascinating, because let's say that that we've got a scale, and I'll make up this scale, say it goes it starts from 1 and goes to 10. 1 is I'm a broke college student, I'm destitute, and 10 is I'm a billionaire. As as far as, you know, I'm just gonna use money for a second as the success metric just cause numeric. The folks at the one side and the folks at the 10 side equally spending as much time comparing. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: oh,
Wil Schroter: it's, it's, it's here's where that's messed up. It's
Ryan Rutan: a great habit. Once you start, it really stops.
Wil Schroter: Well, here's what's messed up. The thought was when you were at the one level, that once you got to 2, the one issues would go away, like you'd stop doing that. And certainly once you got to 10, they'd all go away. And and what I found was interesting was, in every case, whenever people change their peer group, uh, in other words, they level up from 1 to a 2. They just bring the expectations with them. They just have a new set of expectations, and I find it fascinating, and I want to share kind of just like a a little bit of personal journey because as I've watched it in myself, right, in my life, like, I grew up dirt poor and so my benchmark, I was a 1. I actually I think I was a -5, right? I didn't have food, so I'm like borrowing
Ryan Rutan: the one at that point.
Wil Schroter: That's pretty far back. I look at that and I think to myself, at that time, in the earliest part of like my childhood and certainly in the formative stages of my career, all I cared about was safety, right? Like, I just wanted to get to one, like one was like amazing. And so when I got there, I was thankful, don't get me wrong, but immediately I was thinking about 2. And once I got to 2 immediately I was thinking about 30, yeah. And I found this behavior where no matter how many times I leveled up, I felt exactly like I did before, only the the the the stats had changed, and for those of you that are video game nerds, uh, you can appreciate this. I played a ton of video games. It's like when you level up, but the people that that you're you're fighting just level up with you, right? It's every Assassin's Creed game ever. And so, yes, you have the plus 10 sword, but it doesn't matter cause now everybody has plus 10. Swords. But when all you had was the, the, the wooden dagger, you thought to yourself, if I could just get one day the plus 10 sword, yeah, everything will be solved. It never is. You can't win the pure comparison game because there's always new peers. You, you
Ryan Rutan: cannot. No, it's, it's comparison in general. It's just, it's a waste of time and the only way to win that game is not. Play it and just build the startup that matters to you, right? Just do the things that matter to you. Look, it is so easy to get lost in this, right? Like I, again, going back to my own history, I remember doing it multiple times simply because I didn't have an answer for something. I didn't have an expectation for how something should go. So the minute I heard one, I just adopted it as my own. Like, I'll take care of you forever and you'll take care of me too, right? Turns out no.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, it was interesting because, uh, you know, everybody talks about doom scrolling through social media and stuff like that, and I, I think it's, I think social media is dangerous, and I'm not trying to make a point about social media, but I'm saying, um, I, I'll give you like a personal, I don't spend a ton of time on social media for a bunch of reasons, which is ironic cause I'm a super social guy. Part of it is because I don't want to spend time finding out what other people are doing, like. If I have time, I want to go be doing something, but that but that's not really the issue. The issue is when I scroll through social media, it depresses me. I like, and by the way, I know I'm not the only one. So when I'm saying this, like I'm saying this is like like one of the most books written about this. Oh yeah, it's a whole set, right? And so there's whole commissions being formed and have formed around this targeted out somebody named Zuckerberg. But my point is, as I'm scrolling through and I'm like, oh, this person. person's doing better at something, or this person's doing better at something, or this person is doing better at something, I actually have to stop myself and take inventory of my life. Let me give you an example of of what that inventory looks like and how hard it is to benchmark against, right? So, I have to stop and say, well, you know what, like, I've had a good life. I've been able to do everything I've ever wanted to do, right? I became a millionaire when I was 22. Right? Not a lot of people get to do that. So I've been, you know, fortunate my entire life, my adult life. I, I have an amazing wife. I have amazing kids. I have a dream job where I get to, to, to work with you and, and, and people that I really care about. I get to help people all day. But here's my point. This isn't me trying to like brag about my life. This is me saying everything is going as well as it possibly could in 1000 decks better than I ever expected, and I still have to go through that. when I spend time on social media. And I'm like, OK, so everything's gone as well as it could possibly go. How's everybody else feeling about this? Look,
Ryan Rutan: any activity I find myself doing where I realize I have to hit pause and do some self therapy to unwind it, it's like, I probably shouldn't be doing this, right? I need to, I need to back off this. Yeah, it's the same boat, man. Like, I have not turned the corner on social in the way that a lot of people have, and I think to my benefit, not to my detriment. Yeah, there were times where I was like I need to be more active there and I was like, every time I get more active there, I, I remember why I'm not, and again it goes back to the comparison game and even if I'm not playing it, I'm watching a bunch of other people do it, and it's just like it, it just, it doesn't yield anything of value for me.
Wil Schroter: It it's a bunch of things too. For me, again, this goes back to the, you know, comparing the peers and things like that. Because we work with founders, the stratification of how my peers are doing, it goes from 1 to 10, 100X either way, right? So everything from this person just lost everything, uh, in that conversation, hang up the phone, pick up the phone, and this person just bought a yacht, right? Like they just want it all both ends of the spectrum, right? I think for me that that helps me. Because I realized that it kind of doesn't matter where I am personally, there's always gonna be another side of that. And so my resolution you you kind of came to this before is I just can't play the game. The only way to win is to not play, only way to win, and nobody's nobody's ever won otherwise.
Ryan Rutan: But I like, I think this brings us to this brings us to a great, a great third point here, right? We can, we can talk about the the next bucket around. How we tile this to our self-worth, right? You talk about like this comparison that we're doing, and you want to find a way to, to really call whatever you've actually accomplished into question. Go look what other people are doing, right? And again, like there you you're you're comparing based on a few tiny glimpses into what this other person's done, but what really ends up happening here is we just dial up our insecurities, um, as if as if we don't have enough challenge with that as founders, that that comparison is part of where this the kind of the third bucket generates for me. Right, it's, it's rarely rarely comes from anywhere other than comparison, right? And so that the insecurity around what I'm doing, is it good enough? Is it enough, is it big enough? Is it fast enough, comes from some absolutely baseless comparison to somebody else who did the thing that I think I should be doing, right? Which drives so much insecurity.
Wil Schroter: We all fall into the bucket that our success equals our self-worth. Yeah, we get to the point where we think, if I could just be more successful, it's going to satisfy these other issues or really insecurities, always maps back to insecurities. I've seen almost no one ever pull this off, right? My myself included. Whatever insecurities I had 30 years ago are to the letter, exactly what they are today. Oh yeah, I mean, which is bizarre to me. Like I've lived a 100 lifetimes. So the amount of experience that I've been able to to gather, I, I, I know wisdom is the right word, but that's all, yeah, like just, you know, where you're looking at things like, OK, now I get it now. While I understand my. Security is better. They haven't changed whatsoever. Oh,
Ryan Rutan: they, they level up just like anything else does, right? You talk about the, the, you know, get, you got the level 10 sword now. Now you get the level 10 insecurities to go home. That's
Wil Schroter: really it, right? It reminds me of of like the, the guy that rolls up to his yacht or with his yacht into like the marina, and he's got, I'm just making this up, the 50 ft yacht. And in his marina, he's by far the Biggest yacht. And then he pulls up to this other marina, and he's a dinghy.
Ryan Rutan: Welcome to Monaco, sir. Yeah, exactly, right.
Wil Schroter: And, and whenever I see like those aerial shots of Monaco, and of course that, you know, they're always showing that the yachts and stuff, I think to myself, that is a bay of insecurities. It is every, every single one of those captains, so to speak, you know, those owners are a giant bucket of insecurities that is personified. Single body of water.
Ryan Rutan: Uh, you can, you can actually read a lot about this just from reading the uh the names of the boats, right? You walk up and down and read, you'll understand exactly, exactly what they were trying to overcome with those purchases. But it's funny. I actually had that that that experience, a guy I know in uh uh in the Mediterranean, uh, self-made shipping magnate, like I didn't know you could still do that, uh, but, uh, this guy's done this in the last 15 years. Same kind of thing, like bought this gorgeous boat and was telling me about it and showing me pictures, wow, it's amazing, it's this is that that. He goes, yeah, he's like, but he was only like 5 million and pretty much all the other boats in the marine are like 15+ and whatever, and I'm like, God. Like you poor bastard. You just spent 5 million to feel worse about yourself, like it's so sad, so sad.
Wil Schroter: Where I saw that in spades. is in San Francisco. I have never seen more high achieving, wildly insecure people in my life, like the concentration of those two things, and again, this is partially a compliment. I've never seen a higher concentration of the smartest, most productive people on the planet, OK, so this is me saying like these are friends of mine, so I'm not, I'm not disparaging San Francisco. I'm saying. I've never seen so many people make so much money and have so much talent, and be so insanely insecure about it.
Ryan Rutan: Well, I think that's, it goes back to something, man, like I, I think that in, in those cases what you tend to see, right? And and I've I've been guilty of it myself. It's that you said it before, right? You gotta separate your your your startup success from your own self-worth. And like you and I talked about this a lot, like being able to celebrate wins and making sure that you celebrate even the little wins because they're all really important. Yes, celebrate the wins, but don't let them define you, right? Because in in almost every one of those cases, these high achieving people are just really unhappy or really insecure, you can kind of gauge the distance that they are right now from their last win. Right, and in some cases it doesn't have to be far. They're like, well, yeah, I haven't had a marketing success since yesterday. Success isn't gonna fix that, right? It's not gonna fix that level of insecurity cause you're just gonna keep carrying them forward. You're gonna keep, you're gonna keep leveling up the insecurity and, and keep raising money for. I mean like a startup founders and whatever that rung that was out of reach. Yesterday, the minute we get it in hand and can press up like we put that thing under our foot as quickly as we can, and that becomes the thing we're pushing off from, right? We don't, we don't take time to celebrate it, we don't, we don't allow it to kind of like sink in and say like, yeah, I did that thing, right? Even if we do celebrate it, we quickly relegate it to, OK, that's already done that. What's next? What's higher? Where's the where's the next run.
Wil Schroter: I kind of hit this moment, you and I have talked about this over the past year, when I hit 50, and I said to myself, I'm tired of having goals. Now, for someone, people like us or other founders that are built around goals, saying I'm tired of having goals is the polar opposite of our DNA. But, but let me explain. Every time I achieved a goal, my life didn't change at all. Now, now financially something changed or maybe I had a nicer something, yeah, but I was exactly the same person with just different shit. And and I remember years ago, Sarah and I decided uh to move to Beverly Hills. It wasn't our first choice, we just, as you remember, we just happened to find a house there. But I remember when when we got it, I was like, you know what, what the hell? Like, let's, let's see how the other half lives, right? Or, or, or more specifically, let's test this. Let's find out if living like that, we're like living at the top of a mountain, right, with celebrities. We're so out of place, but my point is, I was like, if this is as good as it's supposed to be, as everybody says it is in the brochure, then we'll make it work, I guess, maybe not. But if it's not, I don't want to spend one more minute thinking about the grass is always greener, cause I already know it's not. So here's what ends up happening. So we end up moving out there, our kids start school there, we're You know, get involved in the community, and we had already lived in LA before, so we had a ton of friends there. My wife and I were at dinner, and I'm like, you know, this is really no different than when we've been at dinner anywhere else. I mean, yes, it's theoretically a nicer restaurant, but we have to spend like $150 to Uber our babysitter to our house. Yeah, so she can watch our kids. I was like, there's no way we're getting out of this dinner for less than. Like $400 and otherwise we're gonna sit at home and just watch Netflix, and it's gonna be the most expensive Netflix vis a vis like the cost of housing and everything else that we'll ever watch in our lives. I was like, I, I keep waiting for what's better, and I can't seem to find it. And so we left, right? And we were just like, we didn't hate it. We thought that success or that that milestone or that thing. Yeah. Would unlock all this other stuff, right? This is this other private level of life and happiness and success, and it offered none of it. If anything, it was more stressful.
Ryan Rutan: I was gonna say I'm, I can, I can imagine collecting some insecurities while there, that wouldn't have been hard to do. God, yeah, right, talking about, like about being right up front against the benchmark that you're unlikely to achieve because you don't want to either, right? Like it's, it's because. It's so crazy, but so let's not talk about that, right? So where this narrative comes from, right? Like this whole thing, like, so you shortcut the process, right, cause you could have said like, OK, I'm gonna spend the next 20 years of my life building the required resources to gather the money, to gather the the influence, whatever I need to be able to go there and do this thing. You shortcut the process and so like let's go try it and see if we want it. You got there and you realize you didn't. Unfortunately, there's a narrative in the startup community. That's counter to that, which is that like you gotta grow fast, get massive, make billions, right? Got, got it. If you're no they're hiding a unicorn, it's a donkey, right? Maybe, um, like why, why, why does it even matter, right? Who decided that that's the only definition of success? And, and again like because if you haven't been there, if you haven't tasted or you don't find a way to test it, you won't know if it's even worth achieving and what a waste of time, energy, resources, emotions. To to do that, because if it doesn't actually align with what you want, then we're just really latching onto somebody else's vision and then trying to achieve it. That sounds really dumb, when you say it that way, and yet we see so many people do exactly that. So how do we, how do we recalibrate? I mean, I, your, your story was perfect. As a startup, what do we do
Wil Schroter: there? The startup community, unfortunately, you know, we have a lot of broken narratives, but one of them without question is you have to be big, you have to be giant, you have to, you know, scale fast, etc. And I always thought to myself, and we've done a whole podcast about this, do you? Yeah. For whom? Because we get to see a million businesses built a million ways, and only a tiny percentage of them require any of that. When I was living in San Francisco, when I was living in Los Angeles, I would have a lot of conversations with founders, where they would be talking about how you have to be the biggest, you have to be, you know, crazy growth, whatever. I kept raising my hand and I said, listen, I know I'm the. Weird counter narrative guy, and I'm not trying to be counter narrative guy. I'm really trying to understand how you got here. I said, but like, I've built businesses that are just as successful in other ways that had nothing to do with anything you just said. And I've met a million founders who have done the same. We're just like, I'm just gonna start a business, it's gonna make money every year, and over a number of years, I'm gonna have a lot of money. OK, that makes total sense. Yeah, right, you weirdo. I think in terms of how easily we get seduced by this startup narrative, you know, we get seduced by this idea that, oh, I guess I have to get 10x bigger in a year, and I'm like, for whom? Right. Well, if I get that much bigger, then there'll be a bigger outcome and I'll have all these things and I'm like, oh, there it goes. Now you're just taking all the buckets we just talked to. How your self-worth will change, how, how you'll compare to your peers and how the investors' expectations are set, all of which are bullshit.
Ryan Rutan: All of them are predicated on the biggest word in that whole sentence, will, which was if, right? If I do those, right, you're gonna
Wil Schroter: go even win, but they
Ryan Rutan: still like it's a long shot, right? Like, so even if you are successful, we're questioning what comes at the end of that. The vast likelihood is you won't succeed with that, right? You don't have to grow like crazy. You know, if you're building something that matters to you, does it really matter how long it takes to get there? Does it matter if you make a billion or 500 million or 5 million or 500,000 next year? Probably not that much, right? Yeah, you know, I just, I, I really wish we saw more founders stay drunk on the. The idea of building what matters to them and not what other people expect. And again, like, not even really what other people expect. Collectively there's this idea of of of an expectation because there is a collective narrative. But like, yeah, I don't, nobody really expects you to go do it. In fact, they hope you won't so that they can in most cases, right? Like they don't expect to do it. Like, I hope he doesn't, he'll take my market share.
Wil Schroter: I think though, the concept of, you know, like you said, I, I, I've got to get big startup community. I'm a start up now we get whatever. It's just a really unchecked expectation as all the ones that we're talking about are. It's bizarre to me that you would say I have to grow, blah blah blah, without any indication as to why. So in other words, and we've done whole podcasts and this, in fact, it was one of the first podcasts we ever did, talking about how $250,000. All the money in the world, right? I remember we got such a strong reaction from that. And it actually, you know, it's funny, I remember sitting across from, I remember Sam Parr was my first, yeah. So this was when Sam was still doing the hustle and Sam and I were at dinner so a long time ago. Sam was saying he had just listened to the podcast. And he said, hey, man, and I just listened to that episode and I loved it. And, and I was like, what do you love about it? He's like, well, you know, at this point, I haven't made any money. And he was saying. And so yeah, 250K is all the money in the world to me. It was so different for someone to come out and say it. And again, it was, it was cool because I was watching Sam kind of process the bullshit because he had just moved to San Francisco as well. The bullshit of what that narrative is compared to his own reality, which is like, I'd be good with that.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, exactly. When you start to actually layer that over your reality and compare that to what would that actually. Look like if there was 250K in the bank tomorrow that wasn't there today, how much does that change things, right? And again, like we, we did an entire episode on this too, optimize for the likelihood of the outcome, not just the size, because if you go like, what would it be better if it was a billion? Oh, I guess, yeah, that's more than 250,000. So theoretically, yeah, that'd be better. But like, what are the odds of that, right? And and why does that become the the low water mark, right? Why do we set these incredibly in Incredibly unrealistic expectations, and again, without measuring them against our reality to say like, would it matter that much. At some point, there is a clear and diminishing return on the additional time, the additional risk, the additional money, the additional energy, the lost life, the lost happiness, the deferred all of, all of that stuff, relationships, that just isn't worth, right, without very clearly identifying whether or not that's a a good expectation to have in the first place.
Wil Schroter: I think for every founder, if we're gonna go down this road, we're gonna have this journey, and we're gonna say I'm putting everything I have into it. The first thing we have to do is audit our expectations. We have to stop and say, you know what, everything that was an expectation I have up till now of me, by me, whatever is bullshit. And I'm hitting the reset button and I'm not gonna lift a finger until I've actually figured out what expectations actually do matter to me. Where They come from, why they matter to me, and I'm gonna calibrate exactly how much effort I need to meet the absolute minimum expectations that I need to get to. And if I need some more expectations later on, I'll get there. But for the time being, I'm going to focus all of my effort, all of my time, all of my energy on meeting the least amount of expectations I need in order to build an amazing startup that works for the only person that matters, and that's me.
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.