Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joined as ever by my partner Wil Schroder startups dot com, Ceo and founder, Well there's this narrative in startup land that we've talked about before, which is growth growth growth growth growth growth growth growth growth right? And it's just always, always up into the right and that's the only narrative that seems to matter in a lot of cases, but we've had this debate a number of times and talked about sometimes getting smaller can actually be the right move. Um and you've got a really interesting story um that kind of encapsulates both growth and shrinkage all in one year. I think it's really cool to kind of kick off with them.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, I mean look, I think, I think it's just what you said that this narrative around, it's always got to grow. Um I'm not sure where that came from, I mean we start at zero, so growth is guys kind of like right, it's important to begin with for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's easy to grow when you started zero, but I think the bigger point is we also have this mindset that if we have five people then we can only have six and I think what we should explore today and I think what's what's worth digging into and I'll certainly, you know share a story where I learned this firsthand is that we really need to be thinking about the startup, especially in these times as the right size for the right moment and sometimes that's bigger. Sometimes that's smaller, we all seem to understand bigger. And I hate to say it, but I think we just take that as an assumption. Like if we're adding people then we must be doing something right. And I think that in and of itself is a broken narrative, but the other side of it is, Yeah, yeah. If we're, if we're reducing headcount or reducing the size of the scope or closing an office or whatever it is that we're doing, uh that that's somehow tantamount to failure. And I just don't think that's, that's true. And so what I want to talk about to start is an experience that I had at the very beginning of one of my first startups company called Blue Diesel, which was a web design agency and we had a bizarre turn of events. Um, here's, here's what it looked like And in roughly the beginning of January in 2, 2007, Geez, I'm going even further, 1997 90 still exist in 1997 time machine. Um, mm hmm. Things are going okay, but not great. I'm about $100,000 in personal debt, which may not sound like a lot, but I was maybe 21 at the time. Um, and, and at the time we were doing everything right. We just weren't making any money right. And that that happens. And so we're in a professional services business. So in good times, you don't make that much money. So when you lose it, you really can't get it back on top of that. We're a start up on top of that, we have zero capital beyond uh you know, whatever is on my Visa card as far as the unspent balance. And so uh we're sitting in our offices and I have this conversation with the team and I said, look guys, um we're not going to be able to continue to operate the way we've been operating with the overhead that we've got for much longer. You know, we're kind of at esteem, I said, but it sucks because we're building a really good book of business. We just landed some great clients. We had chases a client. We were, we had intel as a client, we showed these awesome clients, but we're not making any money. And I said we need to trade growth for longevity right now. And at the time I don't think any of us really knew what that meant because we've been in business for like two years, but I really wanted to be in business for a third year. And uh we're excited though. And so I said, look let's let's get rid of this office. Uh we're going to cut back salaries. We basically have to make a ton of cutbacks, lean this thing up and move back into my campus apartment. Um and and at the time again, nobody had families or anything else like that, most of us were still in college at the time. So it wasn't that dramatic of a change, but relative to the dollars that we didn't have, it was all the money in the world to us.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's the difference between being around and not.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, exactly. And so so we packed everything together and the office was such a big a big deal for us, you know, I mean it was our first office, we bought our desks, we put them together together like it was a it was a big unifying moment and it felt like all of that had kind of been stripped and so it didn't feel great. However, we end up going back to my apartment working out of my apartment wasn't that awesome either and it didn't feel like we were growing something. But then something really interesting happened. One of the clients we were working with was a traditional agency um an agency called Gsw based out of columbus Ohio. Um they've been around for about 20 years, had a relatively small staff, maybe 40 or so people, but a great agency. And uh we started having advanced talks about what if we took the traditional side of the business and the digital side of the business and brought them together, which at the time was still a fairly novel concept and we ended up merging agencies. And then something really weird happened, we had an opportunity to pitch eli lilly, the pharmaceutical company and had one of the most lopsided wins in agency history about a quarter billion dollars worth of business that would come our way all in the same year

Ryan Rutan: to put that into context. If you had had that in cash, there wouldn't have been enough room

Wil Schroter: in your college

Ryan Rutan: apartment to store it

Wil Schroter: all. But but it it was such an incredible lesson where instinctively right? And I think I knew that I wanted to trade uh you know longevity versus failure right? You know I'd rather be a smaller version of who we are but be around long enough to see this through. Um and I loved what we were doing and I cared about what we're building and if I'm being honest I didn't really have anywhere else to go would have been working at blockbuster or something if not for that. And so um but but it was this really interesting thing where I would sit awake at night saying what did I do, You know like like is this broken? But then I kept coming back to this feeling that it's smaller but it's not gone. And I started to think to myself after a while what if this is just a blip and not a trend, what if this is you know just a smaller version of who we're supposed to be and now that we know we know we can build up properly and it turned out that may have been one of the most valuable lessons. I think that I ever kind of experienced first hand now, I had a wonderful ending, right? But that wasn't really the point. The wonderful ending was the reason to stick around. But I think the real point to all of this is growth isn't something that's always like you set up into the right growth is something that has lots of different dynamics, has lots of different form factors and I think we need to keep adjusting them until we get to where we're supposed to be. You know what I mean?

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Well, I think it's really important, man. I like this concept of, of trading growth for longevity. I mean, and of course you can do both sometimes, but you know, trading one wholesale for the other trading growth for longevity. Um, you know, if you just decide like let's burn it all. Um, if that bet doesn't pay off, you're in dire straits, you're done right. If the, if the bet says, hey, let's let's back off a little bit, let's slow things down a little bit knowing that there's an essentially perpetual runway. If you, if you get things right sized, that is a sustainable, untenable situation. I mean, in your case, of course hindsight's a lot easier to look at now, but with, with blue Diesel when you, when you shrunk that back down. Had you not done that? You may not have gotten to the point where you landed that huge client right? You guys may have had to shutter things before you got there and then that story ends very, very differently. So I think this notion that we need to make sure that we're putting ourselves into a position to be around right next year, the year after the year after. Um and of course growth is a part of that, but I think that to your point, if we get myopically focused on growth, we we can miss the opportunities or just not be around long enough to seize them. Um and and of course this isn't just a, you know, a a new founder kind of thing, you know, we're still going through these even with startups dot com and this is nobody's first rodeo. Um and yet we've gone through periods of growth and and decline. Um and we've done that with very specific intent, which was to make sure that this business is bulletproof and iron clad and that we're going to be around for as long as we need to be to achieve the type of growth that we want, which isn't just to say user account or money, but the value that we bring to the market, you know, the team that we've built around, us, all of those things and some of them far less tangible than top line numeric growth are still super, super important and some of those you only achieve with time and so buying yourself that time, I think super, super important.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Look I think that it's critical to constantly look at the business and say um you know where can we add but also where can we subtract? You know um We look at you know I'm our CFO and as you know we look at our P. And L. And income statement every single month And we look at every single line item down to a $5 item and we say

Ryan Rutan: you said

Wil Schroter: month day,

Ryan Rutan: right?

Wil Schroter: Um But it's such a healthy exercise because I think for startups if we're not constantly questioning every expense, every bit of our size, every endeavor, you know we look across our product suite and say what do we still want to support? Just because we have it it doesn't mean we need it and I think a lot of people have a tough time with that. They say we hired ted in marketing and now that we have ted and marketing we always need Ted and marketing do we? I just checked I don't

Ryan Rutan: see it Ted in marketing man, I I I should know.

Wil Schroter: Yeah I'm not trying to put good old ted out of a job but what I'm trying to say is look um if if we're not constantly you know right sizing the business then it gets away from us and you know sometimes we have a cataclysmic event we just had Covid happened and you're watching you know huge companies like Airbnb and Uber lay off massive amounts of people Okay, now there's some interesting thought processes there. Right? And this and again, and if you look at companies as hyper successful as them and you say it still applies to them, it's kind of hard not to say it applies to you as well. For example, Uber just laid off, I don't know what it's like 6, 10,000 people, you know, whatever the number is sort of doesn't matter if Uber just laid off that many people if Uber were and they had to obviously the whole world shut down. But is Uber going to hire back all of those people specifically in all of those roles with all of those initiatives. Of course not. Right. You know, even assuming the world corrects a bit, if that's the case, then wouldn't it be safe to say that Uber should have been making those decisions months and years ago. And wouldn't it be safe to say that maybe a better version of Uber is 10% smaller, Right, is 10% leaner. One of the things that, that Ryan, you know, I've been interested in your thoughts, uh we've done multiple rounds where we've had to let folks go, we've had to um, not really in a mass layoff situation, fortunately or not on what? We haven't had that, but um, where we said, hey, you know, this, this team doesn't make sense for this business unit doesn't make sense? What have you? Uh, but we've always said the same thing, would we end up hiring those folks back also, by the way, not a knock on. Those folks were just talking about whether it fits for this business and the answer is almost always no. And if the answer is no, doesn't that kind of tell you, you know, like, like, like what you should be doing.

Ryan Rutan: We just talked about this in the, in the previous podcast, which was around looking for opportunities in recession. Right? And, and we were saying that, you know, in some cases the recession can just be that alarm bell that goes off. That reminds you, hey, it's probably time to do some cleanup. It's probably time to look around the house and see what we can, what we can put out beside the curb. Um, in terms of initiatives in terms of, of product. Um, it's also a great time to, if not, you know, clean up the staffing line at least make sure that everybody is tasked as appropriate as they can be. You know, one of the things that we've gone through and done over time is let's just make sure like hey is what they're working on. Like they've been working on this for two years, like they've just been doing the same thing because that's what we told them to go and do, is that still the best use of the time, right? And more important in a time of recession or a time of crisis because the context in the work in which they do may have changed. And so at that point really really really important to make sure that you that you kind of revisit what they're doing. Um But yeah, absolutely. You know, there's there's not really a wrong time to do this. And as you said, you know, we go through the P. And L in detail at least monthly, um if not two or three times a month, as as things happen and through that process, you know, we stay really close to what we're working on, what it's costing us and and it forces you to to kind of recalibrate those decisions on a constant basis, which I think is has been a huge part of the health of the business.

Wil Schroter: And so let's stick with the health of the business component, I think as for for the founders, for the executive team, the longevity of the business should be the the the the focal point. I think again too often, growth is the focal point and and and nothing wrong with growth. I mean, you know, growth has tons of positive aspects has some negative aspects to, but um generally growth is good. Um but uh growth left unchecked is a cancer, right? Uh can breed the wrong culture, can breed um bad financial practices. I mean the list goes on. So I don't want to say that that if numbers are going up into the right everything fixes itself. That's not true. Conversely, nobody likes shrinking shrinking involves letting go of people shrinking involves canceling contracts with people you shook hands with, you know, canceling office space leases, losing things, you know, So so I'm not trying to suggest that obviously that that shrinkage is is a good thing necessarily. But what I would like to focus on is whether you're growing or shrinking that we're actually a little bit more focused on whether or not this is improving the longevity of the business because what I'll argue is businesses win when they make it to the finish line. Right? So we should be focused on being around long enough in whatever size or form we need to be in order to get to a finish line because that's kind of what this thing is really all about.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. And it's interesting, you talked about the, you know, the multifaceted aspect that is growth and that sometimes it's it can be, you know, have a cancer within the company. It can be a detriment to the company. And I think that one of the places we see this manifest most often is in the life of the founder, right? And often all of the teams. But growth can really really just suck the life out of you because you're constantly then hitting new plateaus and trying to exceed them. You're having to add staff, which adds complexity. You need to add product contractors expenses. Um there's a lot that comes with growth that, that can, can lead to burnout or, or other actual fiscal disasters, but the burnout components are important when we talk about it a lot, but I think that growth is one of those places where we don't attribute enough emphasis in terms of its, its role in generating that level of burnout and part of the longevity of the business is simply the founder continuing to want to do it right. We forget about that. But like there are points where you get so burnt out, you're just like, you know what this thing is still growing, I don't want to, I just don't want to do this anymore, I'm worn out, I'm tired um and it's sad because in so many cases that growth was fairly arbitrary and it could have been thrown back and it just isn't. Um, and, and again, like that can lead to the premature death or closure of the business or having to do a harder reset and maybe cutting back more than you otherwise would have had you course corrected and made sure that you were kind of at the right configuration for that right time.

Wil Schroter: I think it's important. Ryan to that the, the team understands that there are different forms for different times. I think, you know, if you were to say to the dev team, you say, Hey, you know, you had 14 developers now, you have eight. Oh my God, you know, we can't do anything with it. We had to have 14. It's like, did you, I mean to be fair because you were building stuff when you had to, why does it have to be 14 now? I think it's, it's important that we help condition folks that what was, isn't what always has to be right, You know, like, like, uh we had a giant office before, it doesn't mean we always have to have a giant office. We had one back then because we're closing huge enterprise sales deals now we're not. So that's not what I think emotionally, it's of course hardest for for the founding team, right? Because we believe, I'm projecting, I believe that if we let go of people that I've, I've created some failure to the team, right? And let go of people could be even contracts that we cancel or anything else like that. And it's really hard for me to, to break out of that and say, you know what we're doing it because things are constantly changing and we need to adjust to those changes or it's going to sink us. Um but, but but it's hard to deliver that message and it's hard to um get the rest of the team to see it as evolution versus just some negativity, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think going back to your, your

Ryan Rutan: example around the deV team, I think that it's really important in these phases where you're you're looking at needing to scale things back, that you talk about how the work will scale back as the people scale back or as the budget scale back, because I think that the first thing everybody reacts to is we're getting smaller, we're cutting something that feels bad um and they just assume that they're gonna have to continue to do exactly the same amount of work, the same type of things and it's it's almost never possible, but if you go from 14 debs to eight debs or seven debs, um you're at least looking at extending your timelines right, if not cutting your projects entirely. And so I think that, you know, as you have to go through this being clear and communicating, you know, that everything's going to scale back together, right? Like it may not just be as simple as, oh, well we just, you know, get 50% as much done now, um but it's sort of that simple, right? You just have to scale the the efforts to to kind of meet the new situation. Um and and again, like we're in the middle of covid right now and we're dealing with a lot of folks cutting back, right, you know, we've we've made our own adjustments, um we have clients making adjustments, we have contractors making adjustments and um you know, everybody's trying to figure out what that new configuration is and it's not all in your hands, that's what's been interesting. You know, as some of our contractors have had to change their level of input um and and or cost based on on their situations we've had to adjust to. So it's it's not always in your control and of what, when and how things scale back, but always important to consider the new context and figure out, you know, what's the configuration now that we need to be in um and be clear with the team and make sure that you get by in, as you said around. You know, here's the new context, here's what we're gonna have to get done here are the new restrictions around doing that. But here's the good news. We're also dialing back our expectations a bit and then, you know, I think we've done a good job communicating that you certainly have done a fantastic job in this current crisis, um, communicating that to the team and sort of letting everybody know like, look, we all need to pitch in and do what we can. Um here's some of the changes in terms of our budgets in terms of, you know, what we're, what we're hoping to accomplish. Um And I think as long as you communicate those two things hand in hand, it's it's far easier for the team to absorb and to get on board with.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, thanks for that. By the way, I I think the the benefit once again that we have is having been through this before, we kind of understand that you can have a spike and a trough back to back, right. If this is the first time you've ever built a startup, you probably don't realize that, right? You probably don't realize all you think of is, hey, I'm in your four. Everything has been going up into the right and now all of a sudden things have hit a wall. I guess this is the end and it's like, man, if you haven't done this for long enough, you don't understand, that's not really the way this works. Um, you're going to hit peaks and valleys all along and this just happens to be a valley. And do you know how long it's going to last? Of course you don't, but you didn't know how long the peak was going to last either. The thing with the peak is, we tend to not pay attention when we're in a peak because things are good, right? You know, you don't scratch that you don't have, but when we're in a valley, it's all we can think about is how long is this going to last, Right? Because there's only so much time that you can last. Uh, you know, in that capacity, I always make the analogy that someone that goes to the blackjack table can win forever, but they can only lose once, right. Um, you know, the good times can flow forever, but the bad times do have a bit of a stoppage boy. And so, uh, I think being able to see a bit of a long view, um, on behalf of the founders is tough to do because you haven't done it before. This is your first rodeo. So you're getting your three, maybe four years in, which is a long time by startup standards and now all of a sudden things hit a wall and you're thinking yourself shit, you know, what do I do from here? And the answer is you, you lean up, you circle the wagons and you get ready for the next phase, right? And that's, that might take a year or two years doesn't matter. That's just how this goes. It's not always up into the right.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, that's right. And I mean the, the wrong move there when you see the wall appear, is to continue to drive headlong into it. Right? And I think you've said this somewhere, which is that failure is the wrong configuration. And I think that's, that's perfectly put. Um, if you see yourself heading towards that, you know, it's incumbent upon you to, to make some changes, right? And if that means scaling back, that means changing direction. You got to do those things and of course that's easier said than done, right? It's easier to say like nothing appears like a wall and start up, but it's not like, oh, there's the wall, let me just go around it never quite that simple, right? But I think that the, you know, because we're talking about this notion of longevity versus growth and the right configuration for the right times. Um, and then hitting these points of failure, it's important to remember that that scaling back isn't failure because I think sometimes people look at that as two sides of the same coin, it's like, okay, we can either push ahead to what looks like imminent danger or we could scale back. But that's failure to and they treat those two things like they're the same and they absolutely aren't. There is no shame. None whatsoever in rightsizing a company to make sure that it can be around, right. Uh there there is something wrong with hubris that leads you to just drive straight into that wall, right? And say like, look if we're given these two choices, which is to scale back and to undo all this growth and feed into the sun cost fallacy that, you know, we've done that and now it's ours and we earned it and we're gonna keep it um and drive ourselves off the cliff. That's just just dumb, right? You wouldn't do that if you could lean back and see that, that's what you're doing. Um that's often the case, right? People get stuck in that decision matrix where they think scaling back his failure, I'd rather fail while moving forward. I've actually heard somebody say that I'd rather fail forward uh, than than scale back. I'm like, are you actually kidding right now? Because that doesn't sound like something that the rational person that I know you are, that build this great business would say. Um, and yet you hear stuff like that, right? And, and again, it comes from, comes from bit of pride, comes from this sense that, you know, growth and up into the right is the only thing when you do, it's

Wil Schroter: an experience thing too man, for

Ryan Rutan: sure, for sure. But I wouldn't say that it's limited to that either man.

Wil Schroter: No, no, no, I agree with that. Uh, like that, that, that short story, that kind of vignette I used at the beginning of this where I said, hey, I had the experience of kind of pulling back and seeing what that could do. Well, you only need to get that experience once to understand that that is a viable option, right? Um, and I think aside from like cataclysmic events, like what we saw with, with Covid, I also think there's just a lot of moments in time where the business feels like it's hit a massive failure point. Often things like a huge new competitor just jumped into your space, right? Google is offering what you offer for free, um, or uh, a huge enterprise client just pulled right and you're gonna lose a third of your revenue, you name the issue, right? Um, and I think at that moment was like ship, you know, we hit this point, there's no going back etcetera. And what I would argue is a smart founder in a smart executive team, we'll stop and say, look, this is going to suck. So there's no, there's no sugarcoating it, right? You know, like when you hit these points, they do suck. It's one of the hard parts about being a founder. It's the hard part about being a leader in an organization, but it's part of the job. And I think that the, the smart and focused folks will stop and they'll say, okay, yes, this is going to suck, but it's got to happen. It's gotta happen fast and we have to try to advance past the um, layoffs or reductions or whatever we have to do and get the team back focused on um, on growing and surviving. Um What, that's not how it goes though. What happens is instead folks start focusing on, how do we delay this for as long as possible, right? Because it's painful. You know, and, and, and of course we want to avoid it. And so we end up taking this tact where we say, hey, let's, you know, let's avoid it, let's let's hold things off, let's burn through cash reserves that we probably don't even have, lets you know, rack up debt, etcetera and it burns us every single time. Ah but if you haven't been through this, this, this process before, it's kind of hard. It's kinda hard to know that, right? You just, you look at it as things were going great now. It's failure time.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons this podcast is so important is that we, we've been through so many of these things before and there are so many of these things that until you face it firsthand, you would have no no understanding of this and I know that some of its hard to absorb by proxy, but I hope some of this does come through. Um but yeah, you're absolutely right. I think that um I think that having not been through it before, it can be a huge, huge negative in terms of your ability to understand that. Yeah, it's okay, we will be here next year if we do this now and if we do it fast um on the other side, just to just to play the side of the coin. Um I have definitely seen, you know, multi time founders, experienced folks um give their gut more attention than it deserved um and give their own like past experiences, more experience or more more more benefit of doubt that they deserved and plow forward thinking, you know what, I've been through this before, I've got this and even that can lead to a little bit of pride and hubris and drive right off the cliff right? Like, you know, I got this, this little, this little thing can't stop me. So, always, always really important to just step back and, and, and re measure? There's no harm in recalibrating the business. There's no harm in taking time to measure. And what's the current situation and how well are we matched to deliver our value promise in that context? And I think that's where most people get it wrong and that's why they have a hard time doing what you said, which is, you know, like to do it fast. You know, sometimes it really sucks to have to pull the band aid off, but we all know the faster rip that damn thing off, The less it's going to hurt. Um, and it's important to be around into the future. I just went through a process with a couple of founders here locally who are in the travel industry, which is not an awesome place to be right now. Yeah, I mean, they're, they're just like, it's business went to zero. I mean actually 20, it's very rare that business goes from, you know, you know, healthy and thriving to full zero. There's usually some kind of a decline, but in this case because the situation, these guys went to zero. Um, luckily they've been running a great business for years and they managed to build some cash reserves. Um, and so they were talking about how to spend those and, and the, the discussion started with, well, how long can we just continue before we run out of money? And I was like, well, hang on a second guys, why do we want to run out of money? Like what can we start cutting right now? And they're like, well we don't want to make any rash decisions. I'm like, your income is zero, like you've been handed a rash situation time for rash decisions. Um and we eventually kind of got around to it, but you know, it was it was for all the right reasons, right? They were concerned about about staff, and we said, okay, let's let's make a plan for that, let's do whatever we can to make sure that you take care of your people in every way that you can, let's cut every possible expense that you can, let's look at everything you can do to right size this, it's a super weird situations, so for a period of time you're gonna be running a really weird business and that's okay, as long as you're there, when it comes back, travel is not going away, it's just gone for now. Um and so it's super important that they're poised to come back and that means reserving that cash and being ready to re employ people and do all those things when the time is right, but not before right. And not to simply say like, okay, let's divide our available cash across our burn rate and say, well let's hope this lasts for less than nine months because that's how much cash we've got ar 15 months or whatever it is. Um. Wrong answer guys. Wrong, wrong answer. So yeah,

Wil Schroter: I think that for the founding team founder, what have you? The key here is not only to know internally, you know in your mind, you're kinda emotionally that we have to to make this thing smaller change the form factor like we've been talking etcetera. I think the other key is to also communicate that to the rest of the team. You see, we know we've seen the numbers right Ryan like you know, we know why the business should be smaller, chances are the rest of the team does not. In other words, they know something's wrong, right? They they saw externalized events happen. They saw we lost a client, et cetera, But they're missing two really important pieces of information. The first piece of information is how bad is bad we we lost that big client. But what does that really mean? I think in the absence of information, people make up really weird ship and I think if you let that fester, it never ends well. Right. I've never seen somebody make an accurate guess about how the business was doing when you didn't share any information with them. So the more information the better

Ryan Rutan: nor have they ever given you a more favorable potential outcome than than the actual never.

Wil Schroter: No, no, absolutely not. No. Um People tend to believe that the business has tons of money in the bank and I guess we'll just start spending that and that's never the case. Um,

Ryan Rutan: yeah, obviously we just saw one of the yachts and we covered, we cover salaries. That's the way it

Wil Schroter: works. The second component. Um, is that we have to say, here's Plan B here, here's where we're taking the business going forward. Here are the milestones that we need to hit as a company and here is the way forward. Here's how we get back onto the good times. Again, you know, whatever good times looks like for us. But again, I want to emphasize whenever we make a change, good or bad, it only works if we take the time and the diligence to figure out exactly how to point the entire team, Not just the management team, the whole company in that new direction.

Ryan Rutan: That's a wrap for this episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan on behalf of my partner Wil Schroder and all the startups dot com family thanking you for joining us and we hope you'll continue to join us. Be sure to subscribe rate and comment on itunes or wherever you love to listen to startup therapy, you can find all of our episodes at startups dot com slash podcast. If you're looking for more amazing resources to launch or grow your startup, be sure to head to startups dot com and check out startups unlimited. It's everything we have to offer from our online university to our amazing community of experts and founders and even all the tools we've built like biz plan, fungible and launch rock. It's everything a founder needs visit startups dot com slash begin that startups dot com slash b e g i N. You'll thank me later.