Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan from startups dot com joined as ever by Wil Schroder, my friend, the founder and Ceo of startups dot com. Well today we're going to talk about something that a lot of founders get a little bit twisted I think, you know, we, we, we, we always talk about celebrating the little victories, right? Um, and, and making sure that, you know, the little things don't go, don't go missed and that, you know, you need those things to kind of keep the energy and the morale of the team up and speaking specifically of team. That's exactly what we're gonna talk about today. And we also have to be pretty careful about like what we actually consider a victory, right? A lot of people use staff count and the inflation and growth of staff count is like some measure for success and to some degree, that's true. If you've got a basketball team, you've got one player Hiring four more people be a great idea, right? It's sort of necessary to play the game. However, in the case of the startup, I think that this gets confused a lot and we start to focus on headcount as opposed to some other really, really important factors. What's your take?

Wil Schroter: Uh, look, as far as I'm concerned, the only thing that should ever truly be celebrated in an organization is revenue now again, but we talked about celebrating the small winds right? And so hiring somebody is exciting. Um, feels like a victory. Um, getting a new office space back when people used to get office space, you know, feels like a victory and we've all celebrated those things right there. They're fun. Um they feel like building blocks in a greater journey and I think that's wonderful. What we're really talking about and we'll dig into today is how that celebration gets confused with success. Right. Right. Anyone can spend money. That that's not the hard part is getting the revenue behind it, but, but I think it would be worth digging into today is to talk about why we should be maybe a little bit more hesitant in gun shy when we're thinking about celebrating staffing and some of the kind of challenges and pitfalls that come with it. I think if we've never done it before, I mean we've raised around the money and now we're like, Hey, we're hiring all these people and there's an article about us that we're adding 50 people or 100 people or whatever it is, that sounds like this company must be doing well. Right. Right. Right. But it's not, that does not mean you're doing just added a whole

Ryan Rutan: bunch of overhead is what actually happened, payroll tax, a whole bunch of additional headaches within culture and strain on the management team and all sorts of other uh really not fun things are happening as a result of that.

Wil Schroter: Alright, so before we get into this next topic, I just want to let you know what we talk about here is like 1% of the conversation, you know, really, this conversation is going on all day long online at groups dot startups dot com. Where Ryan and I pretty much talk endlessly with founders about every one of these topics. So if by the end of this discussion, you like the topic and you want to dig into it a little bit more with Ryan and I just had two groups dot startups dot com and we'll pick it up from there, right? And, and, and I kind of stole this from, from some, some other use case, but I always say that celebrating staffing is like celebrating the cost of a wedding, right? That's not what you should be celebrating, You should be celebrating the outcome, which is revenue, Right? So, so it's very different. And so I guess to kick it off, um, I'd like to talk a little bit about how we look at staffing Ryan, right? So when you and I sit down and we're adding more folks now, um we've got a founder group product, that group, that product is growing very fast and we need lots of people to add to that. But walk me through, when you see us, you know, open up all these different hires, what goes through your mind, you know, kind of how do you calibrate, you know, are you looking at that as we made it? Are you looking at that as oh ship now we have all these people we have to deal with? Walk me through it?

Ryan Rutan: You know, it's a bit of both, of course, in a product

Wil Schroter: where

Ryan Rutan: humans are required and and are kind of keystone to scaling, right? So like there's no version of us running founders group with 1000 groups and and one moderator, one coordinator, one onboarding person. Right? So it is an indicator that we're growing. And so of course, I'm always happy to see that growth, but the way it works in reality, it's kind of like a manufacturing right? You manufacture and you've got, you've got a machine that's capable of putting out 100 widgets and now you've got an order for 100 and five widgets and now you need a whole another machine, but you only need five more widgets. So it always comes back to like what is the what's the what's the break even time on this going to be right. Even even when it's really clear and sometimes it's not right, depending on the higher sometimes it can be really nebulous as to exactly what the R. O. I. On the individual is. In this case, we know it's really we're solving a capacity issue. And so there is a very specific R. O. I. On that. Um so then it becomes a matter of time. So my mind first jumps to the P. And L. And right. How much of a deficit that particular group is going to be operating at for how long of a time, what do we need to do on the marketing side to try to make up for that, Right? So then it, it turns from a simple like, hey, we added somebody into the calculus of when is that somebody no longer just a cost burden. And when are they participating in a way that actually benefits the company? Um, in this case specifically financially monetarily

Wil Schroter: when, when a founder says to me, we're about to staff up my, my first reaction, even though I don't express this is, I'm sorry for your loss. When I say that, what I'm saying is I'm sorry for your loss of efficiency. I'm sorry for your loss of capital. I'm sorry for your loss of culture. I'm sorry all these things that are a massive groundswell of liability that most, especially first time founders aren't aware of now. It's also the cost of doing business. Right? But that's, that's not the end of it. I think where we get held up as founders and the whole team really is that we see this as progress,

Ryan Rutan: but we only

Wil Schroter: see it as progress right the way over the years, we saw building giant industrial complexes in building cars as, as progress. We didn't understand there's some, some residual damage to all that product progress, right. It wasn't good for everybody all the time. And so I get anxious when we look at staffing and growth through staffing in this one dimensional lens. Um and so let's talk a little bit about all the strains it puts on the organization and while adding those strains aren't always recoverable, right? You know? So what are the things that that come to mind first for you?

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. So like the financial strain is often recoverable, right? So we can kind of jump over that one. I mean, in theory it should be at least right at some point there there should be R. O. I. On on the individual, right? So like there's there's some way that they're impacting revenue. So we kind of jump over that one. Um management strain, right? Doesn't go away, right? As you continue to add people, it's not like, well, okay, there's more of a burden up front, which is true, but there will be permanent additional management strain. There's one more person to more people, Three more people for more people, whatever it ends up being did that manager that leader has to lead and manage and that doesn't go away and it doesn't get reduced until you hire another manager, right? So we're right back into that, we're kind of chasing our tails on this one. So I think that's a that's a big part of it. Um company culture definitely changes with, with hiring,

Wil Schroter: right? And

Ryan Rutan: you know, we've definitely had cases where where there were hires, where they were bad cultural fits and we've done an entire episode on like our stance around this, our ethos is a company. Um And where we stand on this, we've done a full episode on that. So if you really want to understand, you know, how we feel about culture and hiring, um skip back to that episode, it's a really good one. However, um what I will say is we've also made hires where they were absolutely cultural gems, right? And there are people who do augment the organization. So this one isn't always a cost specifically to culture. But what I will say is that as a general rule, the bigger the company gets, the more amorphous the culture gets right, the more the more clicky it can get right. You can you end up with like fractionalized culture, you end up with, you know, team based cultures and not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but from a leadership perspective, it's a big burden, right? Because you're still responsible for overall culture and now you're managing what might be 567 distinct cultures within an organization and trying to somehow make that into a cohesive blend that actually works better together. So that's those two are the kind of the top two for me in terms of what the cost of hiring is and that's the the the increased management burden. Um and the change in culture, which of course feeds back to that management burden because ultimately it's it's reliant on the managers too to make sure that lands as well as it can

Wil Schroter: Sure What kills me is efficiency, right? For sure. We had 10 people in a room in the important part in a room at any given time at that moment, let's say before we took on venture capital, if we want to make a hard right turn right now, everybody turns their chairs faces inward, we give a little pep

Ryan Rutan: talk speech

Wil Schroter: and make the hard right turn. That's it. That's the change. And and now we've raised a bunch of money now we plan on having 100 people, right and like, but it's gonna be a little bit harder to do actually, a lot harder to do because by the way, not everyone agrees with what we're doing that everyone cares about what we're doing right now. Everybody wants to work harder based on this new, you know, genius idea we had nine seconds ago and so whereas before we were tight, we're efficient. Now all of a sudden every person we add decreases our efficiency, right, decreases our ability to communicate and get everybody on board with with what we want to do. We don't see it though at the time we raise a big round let's say. And we add all these people and in our mind now we can get more done. And theoretically that's true and again, we're not anti staffing, what we're saying is you have to realize what the true costs of adding more people are. And it's and and again adding more people isn't the success metric

Ryan Rutan: will you said something that I want to circle back to and that was it was it was part and parcel with the efficiency. Um but engagement is is a big piece of this. And you were saying that like you know maybe you don't care as much And that's the point I want to pin on if your employee for the chances are you're bought into the mission because that's probably all that's being sold at that point right? Like it's the vision and the mission right? The company has no cash. It has no staff. It has nothing right? So you're really bought into why this business is doing what it's doing and you want to be part of that right? By the time your employee 200 500 not to say that engaged employees and that the rock stars don't come along at employees 205 100 they do. However the likelihood of that becomes less and less and less right? The further you are away from kind of like mission critical stuff. You know if if you're the seventh dev on the on the fourth product team you're buying level is probably not the same as the person who coded the M. V. P. Of this thing and he's now the cto right? Like by nature by definition the engagement level the buy in there is very very different. And so I think that that speaks to a couple of things. One just the engagement overall, but to your point around efficiency, there's kind of a declining curve there, right? Like as there's a diminishing return on all these additional hires, the likelihood that we're getting that same level of buy in, that same level of efficiency out of an individual reduces. And then there's the organizational efficiency, which is, I think what you were speaking to now, we've got multiple people that are supposed to be doing the same kind of things. Are they doing them at the same pace. Is there a rate limiting factor? Is somebody holding up an entire team, all sorts of stuff starts to happen and again it's managerial burden, right? It just falls back on the leadership team and the management team to say, how do we make the most out of all these parts? We have particularly, we keep adding parts as we're rolling down the road and it's really tough.

Wil Schroter: Well you said something um that I think is interesting. Think of the delusion that comes like this is the commonly held thing is that a higher A's and B's B's, higher CCs, higher DS etcetera. So by definition, as we grow, we get a delusion of quality. Now some people say no, you know, we got more money now we're gonna higher quality across the board, You're going to higher quality across the board. Right? But employee 58 has no idea what quality means compared to you or like you said, buying and all these things start to tie together. And so as more and more people get added to the roster, the quality, the consistent quality starts to inherently dilute Because if Ryan, if you hire me and you're 100 and I'm a 90 and I hire an 80, it doesn't take very long because at first everybody seems pretty good, right? But it doesn't take very long to get down to 10. And what happens is as as we grow this thing, we lose sight of that. We lose sight of how powerful delusion is in an organization. And you rarely hear someone at any level say, let's audit Where we are down the line and see if the last high we made is as good as the 10th higher we made, right? And compare that you should. But nobody really, that would

Ryan Rutan: be interesting. But yeah, nobody does that. I mean, certainly anecdotally we make comparisons, right? It happens all the time. Like, you know, jeez, you know, it'd be amazing if they, if they hustled as much as so and so, or, oh gosh, you know, I'm really glad we hired this person and, and they're, you know, they're to explain what the person who was in that seat before them did happens, right? And we talked about it in that sense, but in terms of like a really objective breakdown and analysis, we've never done anything like that

Wil Schroter: in all of these are collectively the costs that we're talking about because I think everybody, when they hear costs, they just think dollars and the dollars matter. You know, we're definitely not overlooking that aspect of it, but the dollars are just one piece of it. We know instinctively and we'll see this if we haven't seen it yet, that as each new person comes in, they are a burden. They are cost right there. Probably wonderful to right there. Probably fun at parties, right? I'm not saying they're bad people. I'm just saying as, as founders in the managing team, as we look down the line, all of these things that right now we're celebrating, we've got to really understand what the hell we're celebrating, Hey, oh my God, you know, we're growing so fast, so we're adding more, so many people. Okay, what's, what is that about to cost us? And if we just keep thinking that every person we bring on, you know, that next person in Headcount is a net positive. We're totally overlooking what happens when you staff up, you will find out about it

Ryan Rutan: later, but we're overlooking it. Now.

Wil Schroter: You know, by the way, I just want to mention if what we're talking about today sounds like the kind of discussion you wish you were having more often you actually can, you know, we're online all day everyday working through exactly these types of topics with founders just like you, so any question you would have or maybe some problem you just want to work through. We're here and we love this stuff and we're easy to find, you know, head over to groups dot startups dot com and let's just start talking,

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, you know, let's talk for a minute about why why this occurs, right, why we're willing to take on these costs. I think this is always important, This is startup therapy. So we got to get into the fields here a little bit. Let's talk for a minute about like why we associate hiring people with growth with great outcomes. And, and, and and it really is a lot of it is an emotional decision. It's an emotional feeling, right? And it's some of it, I remember early on, like some of it just felt like Adding troops to the front line. Like I felt like I was insulating myself a little bit, right? It went from being a team of three to being a team of 15. It felt like some some defense and insulation there, right? Like I now have a front line, right? I'm not in this by myself. So just by by virtue of just adding bodies, um, I felt safer in some

Wil Schroter: ways. Yeah,

Ryan Rutan: and and, and and that was that was a good feeling right now, watching these people perform poorly or or, or well obviously changes how I feel about it after the fact, but you know, in the moment just adding that person um felt good. Also we tend to be happy about the hires we make, right, we go through this process. There's vetting, there's multiple candidates ideally. Um there's multiple great choices and then you get to pick somebody at the end and that feels great, right? There's a, there's a real like euphoric high around making that decision. In most cases now sometimes, you know, you got desperation hires and things like that were just like we've just got to fill seats, we need people answer phones, we need people to code whatever it is, right? But in the vast majority of cases it does feel kind of like welcoming a new member to the family, write new baby arrived or somebody married into the family and you like them. Like it feels good. And so I think this is part of where we start to fool ourselves a little bit and obscure the cost and and willingly kind of push aside what the real impact of this is going to be for the business because it feels good, right? And I'm not sure you may have some other thoughts on that as well, but I didn't want to move on beyond the cost without talking about like why and how we're willing to do this to ourselves.

Wil Schroter: It's validation that we're doing something positive in the reinforcement of that validation comes from everywhere, right? The media writes about it, even the government gets in our local governments to talk about how many jobs we created. You know,

Ryan Rutan: it's all they focus on. It's their key stat. There only stat,

Wil Schroter: right? Yeah, pays taxes. Um, but, but everyone around us, you know, high fives us for this. Imagine for a moment for a second, right? We actually just changed what we were taking the liability on and we were saying, we just took on more debt, Right? And we're just and we're running around looking for that high five and nobody's given to us, right? You know, just got another credit card just to get another loan. Just gonna it's all gonna go towards growth and everyone's like, you know, you have to pay that back, right? Right. That's a huge liability, right? No, it's a sign of growth. People, people said yes, they're giving me money. And it's like, you kind of gotta pay all that

Ryan Rutan: back.

Wil Schroter: And so I think what happens is you're sitting in that interview where you're sitting across from one of your peers, you're talking to the media and and they're telling you how great it is that, you know, that you're validated by the fact that you're adding more staff and and it feels good, like you said, right? So, so you get behind it and more people are joining your cause. And of course that feels good, right? You probably just got funded and you totally overlooked that liability. And they said yes. The investor said yes and they gave you the money and you must be good. Again, totally overlooked the liability that that comes with it. And that's part of the job by the way. But I think where we get led astray is we start thinking about creating liabilities as wins. And the truth is, while they are necessary evils their deaths, revenue is a win. Everything else is a debt. Everything else is a necessary evil in debt to get to revenue if we have to. But we haven't won shit until we get the revenue.

Ryan Rutan: Exactly, yeah. So this, this brings us to to another point. So like in terms of talking about like you brought up to like a higher bees, bees higher seas, you know, sees higher DS. Um, and that's the kind of anybody's capable of hiring a human, right? It doesn't take any particular skill. I'm, I'm reminded of the first time I decided to let somebody in my first company make a hiring decision. Um, and boy was that scary. I don't know if you remember that will, but holy hell was I nervous about the decision they were about to make. And all I asked was that they come to me with their final three candidates and and talk me through them and I was still going to let them decide. I decided to give full responsibility here. It felt like an important step in the company. Um, I just wanted to hear about them and understand why out of the top three which one they were finally going to choose. Which secretly was going to decide whether I ever let this person hire anyone else again, didn't tell them that. Um but I remember he came to me with the three candidates and and he was like, you know, he's so excited to work for us. He loves the mission. You know, he's he's he knows, you know, every client that we've worked with. He's he's made some suggestions already. Like he's really, really into what we're doing. He loves the space and kept going on and on about how much this person loved us and at some point I just, I couldn't help myself. I told me I was just gonna be quiet and kind of listening at some point. I was like, okay, what do we like them? Do we want to hire him? Like are we as excited about him as he is about us? And it was just like deer in the headlights, look around like you know, I had kind of forgotten about that part. Let me uh let me go back and get you a new top three captain there. Um but which just points out right? Like and again, nothing nothing against against the war the candidate because we we did ultimately end up hiring this person. They were, they were a great fit. Um but that was not apparent from the information that was being passed, nor had enough diligence been done on that side. It was just like

Wil Schroter: we were excited about

Ryan Rutan: them because they were excited about us and like we're gonna need a little more than that before, before we, before we say yes. Um, and I think we can easily forget that, right, that there isn't anything particularly difficult about hiring people. It's, it's particularly difficult to hire the right people. Almost as difficult. It is for me to say difficult today for some reason. Um, but it's just not that hard to hire people.

Wil Schroter: Right? Well, actually hold on, let me modify that because uh, you know, I've hired a lot of people, it's challenging. There's a tremendous amount of friction to it. What we're saying is hiring them saying yes and putting them on payroll is the easy part hanging for payroll.

Ryan Rutan: Oh, yeah.

Wil Schroter: And so I think, uh, you know, let's say again, we raise a bunch of money. I'm using this as an example, not because for against raising money just more because it's a single event that tends to charge this decision, It's kind of at one time. And so we get this big check and we said, we got 20 open hires, everybody's high fiving about, you know what's about to happen and we start to think, oh my gosh, it's so hard to find people. And we're looking at all these sources and trying to find the right people and it's, and it's so competitive, etcetera. So this must mean we're accomplishing something and we are, of course, this is all part of how we grow a business. What we lose sight of is Okay. I finally found four engineers awesome. Uh, that was the easy part getting the productivity out of those four engineers right? Getting the the R. O. Y. Getting our product to market so we can sell what those engineers are supposed to do to get all that money back so that we can pay for them. That's that's what we should be celebrating. That's where our focus should be. Do

Ryan Rutan: we have a plan for that? We could we could at least celebrate the plan. Well,

Wil Schroter: think of how many startups wind up having a tremendous amount of time and friction invested in building these staffs raising money, et cetera, but never get to the point where they make any money, right? What I think, you know, we're suggesting here is we're not discounting how challenging all these things are. What we're saying is, let's keep our head about us. Let's look at, um, when, when we have the friction of hiring people and saying, look, anybody can spend money, like we just got a bunch for an investor. It's not hard to spend their money, right? Um, let's just, let's look at every choice we're about to make as a massive liability, not just a massive step forward and look at that and say, not that we're not going to do it, but are we sure that for, for all the liability that we're about to take on that we can back it up. Right. I think it's just a change in mindset.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah man. I mean, what we're really saying here is that staffing isn't the victory, right? It's not the, it's not the validation like revenue is the validation, right? We have to have some plan for how all of this stuff gets us there. Um, or it doesn't really matter, be kind of like celebrating having an office. Um, but not having a product or a team or anything to fill it and being like we got the office in a logo were there. Yeah, definitely has. Um, it's, it's not really the victory you want to celebrate, right?

Wil Schroter: Well, and look, uh, in my mind again, when a friend comes to me and says, Hey, just be raised some money or we're just about to hire, you know, 50 people, I always try to say, okay, cool, that's the easy part. And again, here's what's weird. Nobody thinks about it as the easy part at the time because they don't have it, right? And I just went through maybe a fundraiser. That was hard. It is hard and now they're going, they're going through staffing, which, which is super complex. Uh, but I said, look, eyes on the prize guys, we go through this ourselves at startups dot com, we hire a lot of people. And when, when we look at it, we pour over every single decision, right? We may have a couple 100 people and figure we have turnovers were replacing people, etcetera. But I gotta tell you not a single decision we make is made lightly and we think about every single cost that it implies in what I think we're kind of known for doing. Certainly, internally is saying, how do we add as few people as possible? Because here's what we're saying, we're saying we want to make revenue, we like that part of the business, but we don't necessarily want to add a ton of staff to get it. So what can we do to keep revenue going? But be more efficient with our staff. Right? And I think what that does, it's made us a really healthy business. It and I've, you know, I've looked at other businesses in the past that have kind of had that mantra craigslist comes to mind, you know, craig Newmark, He told me years ago he said, we look at every single hire as a massive liability to be avoided. And by way of that, I mean they put like a $200 million 50 people, right? Um and and to me that's amazing because the focus isn't on size, it's on efficiency.

Ryan Rutan: That's right. It's it's about being a better company, not even bigger company,

Wil Schroter: right, Right? And then we look at it and say, we don't want to be the biggest company by virtue of headcount. Right? Actually that brings me no pleasure when, when I say we have 200 people, we have 200 people and they're all great. And if you're listening, we love, you don't want to take this wrong, but like we have 200 miles to feed, that's a lot of liability. And I think about it every single night and no part of me is like, I wish we could be 400 people actually 10 times as much liability to really think about it. But um, I look at at at, at all this, this growth and I say, I want growth. I don't want to pay for it and head count, right? I want to pay for an efficiency. I want to be able to say if we can do it with two developers, let's do it to developers. I don't want a team of 20 people in hopes that maybe that will somehow magically turn into R O Y. Uh, and if we're funding a company, if we're growing a company right. I want you and I to be super diligent about saying every single higher we're about to make, do we have to, and then you try to come with the reason, you know why or why not?

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. And then this is one of the things that I beat up all the time when people come to me saying like, hey, I need to go raise funding. I'm like, why we've got to build a team, okay, Why? Well we need to build stuff. Okay, Why have you, have you done any of that? Right? And you just keep playing this game? They get pretty annoyed, but by the end of it they're going okay, okay. I see where you're going with us and so often right? They, they're, they're missing, right? And this is a, this is a really easy example because you're talking about raising funds to spend somebody else's money, which you have to pay back in one way shape or another, right? That's money that's now no longer yours, right? You're spending it, but it's not your money and you have a debt, you now have given up equity, you've given up something in order to take that on in order to build the staffing line. Now, please explain to me cleanly and clearly exactly how that pays back and the answer is usually aren't there, Right? And that's because what they're hoping to do is add people and accelerate things and I don't argue that that will happen, Things will start to happen faster. But the likelihood that there are good things or bad things is kind of a coin flip at that point. It depends on how well the rest of the plans laid out, right. And typically when I'm talking to people,

Wil Schroter: the plan's not laid out all that well. So what we're

Ryan Rutan: talking about is just accelerating towards the potential curve that we're not going to be able to make. Um, and so, you know, we see this all the time, particularly around fundraising. Um, guys, there's a reason they call it a burn rate, right? It's painful, right? And it's, and most of the time it's tied up in staffing, I mean, we do occasionally see, you know, people take on money to do things outside of staffing,

Wil Schroter: but I would say,

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, but 70, of it goods towards that team, right towards building the product, which is usually team contracting something along those lines. Um, and so, you know, we, we see this repeat itself over and over and over again with the same subpar outcomes. And it goes back to what we've said from the very beginning of this episode, is that people aren't considering that hiring is actually a cost and reliability. It is not a measure of forward progress in and of itself, right? If it achieves the desired outcomes, if it gets you closer to your North Star, which by the way, we will be talking about in our next episode, then you're on the right track, right?

Wil Schroter: But so

Ryan Rutan: often, so frequently that North Star isn't there at the time, were making these hires and we're just like, we need to get things moving faster, right? Product iteration isn't happening fast enough. Um, marketing iteration isn't happening fast enough, throw more people at it, throw more people at it, throw more money at it. Um, and it just comes with this exponentially increasing cost of all the types that we talked about, right cash cost, culture, cost, management burden and the rest of it. So this is an area where we have to be super diligent and as you said, you know, we, we, we probably, we might even take it too far, I don't know. Um, but we certainly scrutinize the hell out of each and every one of these decisions. Um, and you know, I can't think back. I'm trying now, I'm trying to think if there's a time where I regretted it, whereas like, you know, we spent too much time thinking about that, um, we, we, we didn't make the higher, and I'm sure that had we done that things would have worked out better. I don't really know that there's a way to do that. I don't have a crystal ball. Um, but I can't really put myself back in a situation where it's like, man, you know, if only right, that the one that got away, I can't pull one out of my hat and it's a fairly large hat

Wil Schroter: and you don't know, but, but here's what you do know, and you and I know, and because we have the experience of working with so many founders and working with so many startups, when the startup doesn't end up working out all those staffing decisions are what you're going to regret, right? All that overhead and all those people who you made commitments to when we're hiring people. We think about the upside right. We rarely think about the other side of it. If you've done this enough times, you actually will because you had to sit across from a huge number of people and let them all go, right. You won't forget that one after, you know, having a couple of battle bruises from that experience, you'll think twice in a heartbeat of, let's add people, you know, on spec and see where this goes. So I think Ryan, all we're saying here is staffing is an important part of every business. Our staff is very important to us. But I think like with every decision we make, particularly with staffing, we've got to look at this is a massive cost, a massive debt that may not be paid off, that we may not be in a position to, to make whole and we have to say before we make any of these decisions, what else can we do? Alright, so that was fun. Well let's actually keep this conversation going. You've heard what we think about this, but you know, Ryan and I would really like to hear what you think and we're online, like all day long, pretty much talking about every startup topic you could think of from fundraising the customer acquisition to just really had to get all of this crazy startup stuff out of your head and there's tons of other founders just like you, they're weighing in on these topics so you'll get a chance to just hang out and meet some really smart founders were also super, super easy to find. You head over to groups dot startups dot com and let Ryan and I hear what's on your mind. Let's get to know each other a little bit and let's just start having more of these conversations.