Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the start up therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of start ups.com. Will. There is a changing in the tides right now. There is a new scent on the wind. The, the narrative is shifting. It's gone from raise, raise, raise, raise as much as you can. You can't catch me. I'm the fund man to, you know what I think I just want to build a business that makes money. The

Wil Schroter: fundraising man. Yeah, imagine that was

Ryan Rutan: completely dynamic by the way for everybody listening, we don't rehearse this at all. You know, this, any of you have joined the live show. It didn't injure my brain until I said the third raise. And I was like, I know where this is going now. Now I see it sometimes it works.

Wil Schroter: That's the episode right there. I love it. So next

Ryan Rutan: time folks,

Wil Schroter: so look, everything has changed. OK? And, and what I mean by that is, you know, over the past two years and, and when we're recording this and I always point this out because we've got hundreds of episodes at this point. So who knows where people are by the time they listen to this, this is Q one, the start of 2024 and it's probably the tail end of nuclear winner. Right? I, I never want to say those things during the time because of who the hell knows. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna

Ryan Rutan: say, let's not tempt the universe. Well, it's, it's early in the week

Wil Schroter: we're at a point where the Pixie Dust of fundraising, which was at its apex in 2021 is gone.

Ryan Rutan: Gone. Gone. Gone.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. So, now you have two sets of people, you have the people that they're still running their start ups, right. They can't raise money anymore, which is very challenging. Right. And we feel for them and they're like, ok, this sucks. Right. And then you have the people who either didn't make it or were about to get started and are like, ok, yeah, I don't want to go down that, that, that path. Right. In other words, it's not so sexy and that'll change.

Ryan Rutan: Right. We saw a lot of outcomes where people did exactly what they were supposed to do. Raise money, raise money, raise more money grew. IP O Ed and are now trading at pennies on the dollar. Right. So when you see Shangri La is kind of like a third world slum, you might not want to move there. Right.

Wil Schroter: Absolutely. And last week one of my friends was hosting a founder dinner, a bunch of folks that are in that group, listen to the podcast. So, yes, we're talking about you guys, but we'll keep it all anonymous. And there's about eight founders, founders I've known for a very long time, probably 20 years on average or longer. It was pretty cool actually. And we're all kind of at a life stage, uh, forties and some in their fifties where we're thinking about the next gig, but pretty much everyone at that table had raised venture and I'd say five of the eight of them were thinking about what they were going to do next. And every single one of them unprompted was like, and I will never raise venture again. Now, think about that for a moment because if you rewound back 5, 10 years even, right? Not that long ago, every single person would have been talking about how much I'm raising at what terms, et cetera. And if you raised your hand back then and you're like, yeah, and I'll never do that again. You would look a heretic

Ryan Rutan: heresy. Yeah. Literally, I dare. You ridden out of town on a rail. Yeah, it's, it's amazing. But I mean, this is so many things fed into this, in my opinion. So many things fed into this. You know, all of the, the, the Instagram version of start ups is a big part of, we talk about this a lot, which is where you know, you get to see that one person who's going on and on about all the good things that happened, they ignore all the bad and all that. So I think there was just so much false narrative or just misleading narrative or just even incomplete narrative where you were just seeing tiny bits and pieces that led so many people to do that and because start ups are so damn hard and because it takes so long to get to actual success, we started allowing people to define success based around things like fundraising guys. That's not success, right? That's like going to the grocery store and being like, yep, I bought a bunch of groceries. I won, I've got stuff I can make things out of now. What are you gonna make with it? No idea. Will it taste good? No idea. Will anybody buy it? Zero clue. Right. But I won because I, I went to the grocery store and I got the stuff, right? It's not the same thing. But I think that that was a huge part of why that was bandied about so much and why people were so excited to talk about those things. And of course, it is an important milestone sometimes. Let me

Wil Schroter: build on that though. So as we're talking about in this episode, you know, what about a start up? That just makes money. That's where the conversation went with this group, right? Where they were like, dude, I just wanna make money, right. Like I'm so tired of the dance, right where it's all about, you know, showing vanity metrics and month, over month growth, that isn't actually revenue growth. But more importantly, at the end of the day, it didn't put money in my bank account or maybe it did. And in retrospect, I could have built something much more efficient that just makes money. They would just keep making money. You know, one of the challenges obviously when we're doing venture funded or, or anything else is we got to have the exit to get to liquidity, which is, you know, very rare. So for a lot of the folks, they were just saying, and this isn't just this group, but just across the board, they were like, yeah, that all sounds well and good, but I've got to make a 7 to 10 year bet and it's easily 7 to 10 years for those folks that are listening, you know, that maybe this is your first time and you're like, how long does it take to make a start up successful? 7 to 10 years if everything goes right? If it doesn't either way longer or not that long at all, because you won't be doing it, just fail fast. But even with that, the fact that in our world, we've gotten start ups to the point where we can create success in less than a decade, that's amazing. Used to people take people a lifetime. Right. So, our compression has been incredible. But what I think is more interesting is after you've been through this cycle at least once and most of these folks, you know, at that table have been through it many times. The Pixie does just wears off. Right. We're like, yeah, I know everybody validating me with checks sounded awesome. Right. Getting the press sounded awesome. Hiring a whole bunch of people that we would essentially never be able to sustain. Sounded awesome. But now that I've done it, never again. Never again. Yeah, I don't know, a single venture funded founder that in private company hasn't said to me and I wish I never took funding and I could have just owned this thing. Now, obviously, that's revisionist history. You know, you wouldn't have gotten the same place without the funding most likely. But what if? Right, if at start ups.com, 12 years ago we took venture funding, we'd probably be at somewhere in the same outcome. Maybe better, maybe worse, who knows? But we didn't. Right. So we can justifiably say we built something without venture funding and it worked out great. Not a lot of people can say that.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. And our options are still myriad, right and wide open, which I think is, is one of those important points we've talked about an entirely different podcast. I won't, I won't belabor the point. But the minute you go that venture, right. And you said it earlier, you basically have two outcomes at that point. You gotta, you gotta sell or go public, right? Those are the two ways where it works out for all the people who you've now involved and it needs to work out for everybody or it can't work out for anyone. Right? You can't just say like I'm just gonna sit back and collect money from my ATM. The investor can stuff like, hm. It's not your ATM all that money needs to go back into business to grow it bigger so we can sell it. So we get our ATM moment. You don't get that until

Wil Schroter: we do. I think we've also just minted an entire generation of not just founders but all the people that work for them that had a chance to see how this thing actually works. And again, it's not that it didn't work for anybody, you know, it, it does work for some people, but just on a percentage basis, it doesn't work for so many people and those people are collectively starting to say, ok, this is bullshit, right? Particularly founders and they're saying they're looking out like this, they're saying if I'm gonna invest 7 to 10 years in something I'd prefer to have some that has multiple outcomes, right? In other words, maybe it doesn't grow as fast or as big. But I would like to know that if in five years, I just want to take out a distribution or in five years. You know, we want to hire somebody to replace me. I, you know, I go do something else that I can't. I cant. Right. Exactly. I think we've got a whole generation of folks that saw that optionality taken off the table and they're like, yeah, not again. Yeah. It's

Ryan Rutan: fascinating to me. It's fascinating and it's, it's so, it's so funny and so ironic in so many ways when we have these conversations with people, because what's one of the number one things that we hear people say when they're deciding to start their business, they want the freedom and flexibility, right? They want freedom. They don't wanna have to answer to their boss. They don't want to have to answer to a system. They want to define things they want to build, they want to do it their way and then they chase a path that takes away 98% of the options they otherwise would have had. And now they're constrained just in an entirely different way. Right? So it is, it's painful to watch most of the time, right. And again, like you said, it does work out. There are people who've been very successful with it. Uh You know, who it always works out well for the V CS because even if their funds don't work, they got their money all the way along the way. Right? And again, not taking shots at VC kind of am. But like it always works for them, right. They get to play with house money and they get their percentage either way. So kudos to them for freaking a great business model for them. And it does help the ecosystem at times. So I'm not entirely mad at them, but we're not exactly friends

Wil Schroter: either. Last week we did an episode where we talked about what does it mean over some period of time to be able to consistently make money, you know, to be able to kind of like create an an additive structure if you will. Right. And so I think part of what people are starting to re realize is that if I just, ok, let's say year one, this business makes $50,000 but it actually made $50,000. You know, last week we talked about, should I get a paycheck or, or should I go the start up route? And part of what that impasse was a guaranteed money versus not guaranteed money. Now, there's nothing to say bootstrapping is guaranteed money. It is not right by any means. However, I think, you know what these founders again, having all come around, the block started to realize was, yeah, that year one, year two, year three isn't that great, right? You know, you're talking about small amounts, but it adds up, it really adds up, right? And even if you know, you and I start a business, year one probably don't make any profit. But let's say we make $50,000 of profit. Not all the money in the world. Right. But, but we actually made it and then year two goes by and let's say we get it to 100 and 25,000. Again, we're still not getting super rich on this thing. Right. But over time that starts to, you know, those little pebbles start to create mountains. Yeah.

Ryan Rutan: If it keeps compounding in that same way and you still own all of it and your overheads don't scale in the way that they always do when you take on VC and have to try to get really big. Right? And that's the thing that people miss out on is that it dictates certain types of activities that wouldn't otherwise exist in your business. Right? You might say you wanna grow, but show me any bootstrap business that grows in the same way that a venture capital funded businesses, it just doesn't work that way. You don't have the same resources, you don't need them. You also don't have to grow to the same size to get the same kind of outcomes. And I think that's the part that just gets lost in the, the really messy calculus of raising

Wil Schroter: funds. I agree. And I think when times are good in the fundraising world and look, they're fun when times are good. Right? I prefer we were back at that. But when times were good, you could say dumb shit as an investor like, oh, that's just a lifestyle business. Right. It was turned into this term, like this derogatory term to say, I guess that's just a business that makes you money and, and I'm, like, scratching my head. I'm like, isn't that the point? It's not exactly what I'm trying to

Ryan Rutan: do. Here comes the bus, I'm gonna throw somebody under it. Um, it's me, in this case, I'm gonna throw myself under the bus. I have definitely been guilty of looking down my nose at those main street businesses, right? Entrepreneurs. They, they call themselves a start. It's not really a start up, right? You're building this business. That's just gonna do something that a lot of other businesses do. It's not imaginative, it's not novel, it's not new, it's not a start up, right? And look, I respect those. I do. I don't know that's always comes through in my narrative and they are there been times where I've said like that's not really a start up company and I probably said it with a bit of a sneer, but there are probably plenty of entrepreneurs and mainstream businesses out there looking at the start up space now going weird like, you know, they've done all this shit. These guys raised more money than my business will ever make in a lifetime. And yet I have 10 x more wealth or I have some wealth and they have none, right? Explain to me why that was the way I should have gone. Like why that was the, the valiant thing to do. So, there's, there's a whole whole host of people out there now listening to this going, yeah, that just making a business that makes money does kind of make

Wil Schroter: sense. I'll give you a great time stamp. In, uh, in 1999 I was invited to join something called YPO Young Presidents Organization. Typically, I think you had to be 40 year older. Not a problem anymore, but across that one. But back then they'd done this new offshoot of YPO. I think it was called Yeo or something like that. Basically, people are 40 younger and, and I joined the group and, and I was probably like in my late twenties and I was an internet guy. All the other people that joined my group were all obviously 40 or younger. They might as well have been 90 to me the way I look at them but whatever, and they all ran traditional businesses. They, they all ran like the threshold of time. You had to be like x number of million dollars of revenue or whatever. But I'll never forget, you know, we meet every week. It was like founder groups. Basically, we meet every month rather for like six hours at a time and we go deep on everything. It was, it was really fascinating for me. I learned so much about so many things. But one of the things that was the constant narrative was I showed up and I was internet guy and I was, like, fundraising scale all these things and they were just looking at me like, I have, like, I was a circus attraction and I looked at them and I'm like, don't you guys get it right? And they're like, no, no, we, we actually don't get it. We, we do not get businesses that don't make profit. Right. That just makes no sense. And I'm like, ah, you guys don't get it and, you know, they actually did, they did,

Ryan Rutan: they got at least part of

Wil Schroter: it. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, kind of like the crypto thing, right? I was the person and, and you might have been too sitting on the outside of crypto going, yeah, it's total bullshit. Right. And when I say that I just wanna be clear, crypto is a very broad term. But when people are telling me that they're gonna sell cereal, everything was

Ryan Rutan: crypto. Yeah.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. I'm like, no.

Ryan Rutan: And it was somehow going to be better. Except then when you asked how it would be better, there wasn't an answer. That was always the problem. It was like, every time I was like, ok, I will turn this rock over with you 100 times. There was never anything under the rock. Like, I just never found it. I never saw it. There were like four use cases that I encountered in the entire millions of people that presented me their Blockchain related ideas that actually made any sense to me and they were the obvious ones.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, it was a solution looking for a problem. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it. but that's ok. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups dot start ups.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. So all that said that was the same skepticism I took, which is, hey, I don't really understand it or maybe I do understand it and that's why I know it's wrong. But you know what? Right. We're, we're coming full circle to just the fundamentals, the physics. If you will of business, the physics being, I have to sell something for more than I pay for it. Right. It sounds crazy. Right. That was not Uber for almost a decade, right? And I have to make actual profit sooner than later in order to be self sustaining versus being able to support the whole thing with funding. And while that shouldn't be surprising to us, I saw somebody on Twitter the other day and they were like, oh, you know, it's so great to see that companies are more focused on profit again. And I thought to myself as opposed to what, what

Ryan Rutan: were, what were they doing? What were they doing? Right. Purposefulness, impact scale. Like,

Wil Schroter: you know, my favorite was about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit longer. Now that I think about it, there was a new role in Ved in the start up world called Chief Revenue Officer. The term of the title has been morphed a bit since then. But there was this constant idea that we would build something like a social network or something like that and we bring someone else in to understand how to turn it into a business,

Ryan Rutan: how to make it into money. Yeah.

Wil Schroter: Wait, isn't that the point of starting a business? Right? Is

Ryan Rutan: amazing. It was once upon a time and it is now again, but there was a period in time where it was, you know, we're just looking for user acquisition, we're just looking for growth. We're just looking at ma us, we're just looking at all these things like cool. And do you have any plan for when it should make money? And oftentimes they were like, look, our advisors told us not to focus on that. And I'm like, can I meet these people? They are giving this?

Wil Schroter: It's not that I don't get that if you super fuel something, sometimes that works, sometimes you're able to kind of like, you know, um break out of orbit and all this. I get it, I get it and it does work sometimes and when it does work, sometimes it works really well and creates a ton of wealth and it creates a ton of outcomes. So I get it, I get it. The argument is well, tread for a very long time. What we're saying is cool except 99% of the time. It doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Ryan Rutan: That's the thing. Like have a plan B right? For every rocket ship that made their moon shot, there were a whole lot of fireworks that just blew up right in front of us and then slowly drifted back to earth and ashes. Like why was that? The plan and

Wil Schroter: look, you know, the way Ryan it works for you. And I, if we started a, a venture firm, it's, the chips are stacked in our favor. It's 100%. Yes. Here's the deal. We're gonna raise a ton of money. We're gonna guarantee that we make millions of dollars no matter what the outcome, we're gonna make a bunch of bets and ideally one out of the 20 bets works. But again, we're gonna get paid very handsomely either way. And if one of them works and it goes astronomical, we'll get paid even more. Hey, what about the other 19 companies that you invested in. Uh, not my problem right now. Now I've never met an investor who actually talks like that. Right. You know, even behind closed doors. Right. They, they genuinely care about their investments and I'm not trying to vilify them. What I'm saying is they have a backup plan. No one else does nobody. And, and I think that got old. Right. I think enough founders are like, yeah, you know, I think I wanna build something that actually is, is gonna be around even if it's not as big. Yeah, I

Ryan Rutan: mean, sadly it took, it took building a really big start up graveyard to do it, I think. But there, there are now enough people who are going, you know, had we done this right. There were all those people who thought had I raised funds, this would have worked out very differently well, maybe. But there are plenty of people who can go back and do the calculus and say, look, you know, just based on pure mathematics and like the decisions that we made based on the resources we had, had we done this differently. Had we not tried to scale to this point, we could have actually built this $20 million a year business, which would have been perfectly fine. It doesn't work based on the amount of capital we took on. Right. We, we took on $80 million. So a $20 million a year business doesn't work in that model. We have to go well beyond that. So we can sell for well beyond that. So we can make everybody happy. And so I think there were just so many people who realized that they had slammed doors shut along the way, based on taking on funding, there would have been great outcomes for them. And I think now there's more of that side of the narrative permeating the zeitgeist and kind of the, it's, it's out there now, people can see it, people feel it. And to your point now we've got a whole lot of founders who are coming around for their 2nd, 3rd, 4th rodeo who are going not gonna run that bull again. Right? I will do this differently. Something

Wil Schroter: I was thinking about from a personal standpoint, a lot of the folks in that room and I'm using them as room as not them specifically, but like my age bracket, if you will, right, who had had 2 to 3 decades in the start up world, they've kind of bifurcated into two camps, ok? Those that over that period of time, 20 to 30 years found enough ways to keep making money that their average over 20 to 30 years is actually pretty high, right? Their average how much they were able to take up. And then the other camp is those that just kept taking moonshots and kind of have nothing to show for. Right.

Ryan Rutan: And then a very few who took moonshots and and hit them. But like we're talking a infinitesimal percentage at that point, it's not even worth including in the calculation,

Wil Schroter: you bet. So I'll give you an example in my career. I'm in my 31st year of my career, I've had nine start ups, but I've also had a bunch of exits. Right. So my income is wildly lumpy. Right. But over a 30 year period, I've had a high average, like a high average income. Right. And my point is, it adds up. Right. And so I think where we get a little confused and I really would like people to understand this point. We keep thinking that the way to make money, particularly in start ups is in one huge exit, one huge event. And I'm here to tell you and by the way, most like 99% of business owners here to tell you, you can also get there one pebble at a time.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, 100% just keep stacking profits year after year

Wil Schroter: after year. Right. And that's where I don't think people get that, like, personally again in my career, I've had this weird thing where on the one hand I've always thought about like those big moonshots or those big outcomes. But I think what served me well now that I kind of like zoom out and kind of look at it is I also stayed very focused on making sure every year was a victory. Not always a big victory. Right. Some years were better than others. Right. But I was always putting up a w, every year if you

Ryan Rutan: find a way to make every season, a winning season, regardless of whether you were the champion or not. As long as you were on the right side of that percentage. Yeah, you're going to end up in a good place.

Wil Schroter: So, if I'm 24 year old founder and I'm like, hey, I wanna start something.

Ryan Rutan: You're twice as good as that. I will.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Uh, part of the advice, you know, I, I would likely give would be, is there something you can do that is, uh, the most clear path to be able to generate revenue. Like, yeah, I've got this one thing but, you know, I only see it as like a million dollar business throwing off a little bit of, you know, 100 grand in cash or something like that. And again, when people say that they vastly overlooked the probability that, that even that will happen, they're like, oh, this is only a million dollar idea. Yeah. It doesn't mean you're gonna make it happen. Yeah, just a

Ryan Rutan: million dollar. It's a million dollar certainty. No, it's not one. But it's a hell of a lot more likely than the $100 million thing you're pitching with nothing more than a pitch deck behind

Wil Schroter: it. Yeah, I was like, you know what, I've done an awful lot of these and I'm here to tell you it ain't that easy, right? And I know what I'm doing, I think with that said what I would say to, you know, uh perspective 24 old founder, hey, look, if you can get something to 500,000 in revenue making 50,000 per year in profit, which again sounds like like peanuts in the grand scheme of things we talk about. I was like, that's not the goal. The goal is just to get on base with that number and start growing that. And I gotta tell you 1st 3 to 5 years is not gonna seem like a big deal. But what's going to happen is if you stay on that path and you just stay hyper focused on, we gotta put up wins every single year. Those wins add up. Now it's not as sexy as big exit, right? But the difference is you're more likely to actually get there.

Ryan Rutan: Well, here, here's some depressing math. Just do 10% compounding on that profit per year, right? But on profit now do 10% compounding on zero profit, right? Every year, it's still the same number. It's still zero, right? You gotta get out of that trap at some point. You got to escape the gravity and the severity of the number zero before anything is gonna start to happen. And like I think you and I would both argue the sooner the better, right? Year one is a great time to do that. One of the

Wil Schroter: things I've learned in this, there's probably a whole episode on, on this separately is as a founder, you do need to play some actual defense, right? You need to be actually concerned that if I run 3 to 5 years or sometimes longer on zero, that has a massive opportunity cost, massive

Ryan Rutan: opportunity cost, it can also, could become a really bad and permanent habit.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's easy to replicate. It's that, it's that gambler at the table that lost. And it's like, well, if I just double down, you know, I'll make more and, and that's always the biggest sucker's bet. It's

Ryan Rutan: hard to replicate in some ways. But it's actually really hard to replicate in others because at some point it's really hard to keep a, a business, doesn't make any money in business right there. At some point, the lifelines run out. You and I were talking about this before, before the episode. That kind of this year is gonna be a really interesting year in the tech space because as you and I are seeing it, those lifelines are, are running out. There's not gonna be that bridge. Save me funding. Hey, remember how cool we were in 2021 when everything was going, you know, super, super nice. Yeah, it's long gone. So, yeah, point taken,

Wil Schroter: I think with that collectively, we've got a generation of founders and I'm going to name those generations. I would argue the Gen Xers have long since figured this one out. In other words, like they're like, ok, uh we get it. But I think we're now at the point where the millennials, right? Who the oldest would be about like 43 ish,

Ryan Rutan: right? Something like that. I'm close to the line. Yeah, they just, they arrived right after me

Wil Schroter: but have now witnessed a full cycle and are kind of like damn. Right. That has real consequence. The reason I think that's interesting because you have a massive generation of folks who know better. But 10 years ago, let's say 15 years ago actually didn't. And now you have a whole generation in the workforce founders, et cetera that are like, hey, Pixie dust is worn off and I'm kind of tired of the game. The narrative is balanced. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That founder meeting we had last week was just a tiny microcosm of what I've seen on a much larger scale in the past year. And I think a lot of that has to do with again, a generation that hadn't witnessed how this whole game is played. But now has it is like, you know, not dying to sign up for it again, which is a big deal, which is a big

Ryan Rutan: deal. Yeah, it'll be, it'll be a good shift as it continues to play out. And I think we see more and more companies that we will grow to respect and, and know by name that have grown through bootstrapping, it will add some Pixie dust, necessitous. So and deservedly so to that side of the equation,

Wil Schroter: which is powerful and I don't think there's any downside to us being in a situation where founders focus more on profit. Because to me, profit means longevity, right? To me, profit means not just making money or the corporate greed or anything, the way people sometimes pervert that buy yourself

Ryan Rutan: time to figure it out, man. Yeah. Yeah.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Yeah. And give yourself an opportunity to not only grow personally versus being bankrupted. In other words, if I go raise $200 million and I burn through it all. There are consequences. I'm not knocking that for a second, but it's a little bit different, then I just burn through my entire bank account. Right? That feels personal, that feels consequential at a different level. Like there are life changes that I cannot, you know, can no longer afford because I just rent a little money and, you know, bootstrapped profitable, hopefully be profitable. Founders have to deal with something a little bit more closer to home. And I think that's important. I think that's helpful. We do it right. You know, our, our money is our money, right? Go

Ryan Rutan: back to your defense concepts, right? If you're still sitting at zero, there's nothing to defend there other than maybe, you know, that runway and how much time we got, right? You got a gas tank where the, the needle is quickly approaching e and that light's about to come on, but that's not really defense, that's just more motivation. We had to get some kind of offense going. But to your point, like when we do cross that line and you do have something to defend, I think it does change decision making and it, it will make you a better founder because you also now really understand what you're losing at that point. And you understand the value in having it, you understand the value in growing it further, but again, with profitability in mind, not just OK, let's just scale the hell out of this thing. And then someday magically, we'll figure out how to make the colors invert from

Wil Schroter: red to black. I agree. And you know, I'm excited about this time. This feels like, you know, when the forest burns down, it grows back better. I genuinely feel like that. That's what's just happened here. I think so. I think

Ryan Rutan: so because again, we're seeing so much positive come out of this narrative, right? OK. Go back to the microcosm of the, of the dinner last week. Again, it's a microcosm and it's a very specific group of people, but it's still pretty indicative of, of the whole, which is to say that now you've had this generate people who have gone through and seen how this works with venture funding, how it's how it looks with bootstrapping and they're saying I am going to do this again, but I'm gonna do it differently. And so I think that your, your analog here is a good one. I think the forest has been burned down and I think we're gonna see some great growth coming out of it whether or not the funding landscape recovers or becomes bigger or goes sideways or whatever. I think we're now in a period where again, the other thing that I think it has to be considered and I mean, there's, there's a lot of, you know, this happens a lot in the technology curve, but it's also getting less expensive to get to some of the same places or like go back and think about what it would have cost you or I to build even a basic web application in the late nineties or the mid two thousands compared to what I can do now in 12 hours on

Wil Schroter: bubble or a I, you know. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's

Ryan Rutan: incredible. So the, the speed to getting to the point where you can even start to figure the important things out. Like does anybody care about this? Will it work? Does anybody want? It is so shortcut that I think it's also going to take away some of the need for that venture funding to just get us over that initial hurdle level. We gotta have something to show people, we gotta get that prototype out the store we got and it costs money to do that. Well, not so much anymore. So some of this is just an addiction to that model which is like get an idea, go raise money, hire a bunch of developers, build some shit, actual shit in a lot of cases. I mean, and see if anybody wants it right. So I think there's a whole number of things coming together right now that make this a pretty damn awesome time to be a

Wil Schroter: founder also. I like the narrative that it's ok but to make profit, like, I, I was like, personally offended when people are like, oh, that's just a profitable company. I'm like, that's literally what a business is designed to do. Yeah,

Ryan Rutan: I heard somebody call someone a profiteer once and I was like, yeah, like, what did you want him to do? Make a decision counter to the financial health of his business? Like, what do you, what are you actually mad about? You're mad that your company doesn't do that. That's it. That's all I

Wil Schroter: hear. I mean, look, I associate again profit with sustainability right now. There's a whole other part where, where people again vilified profit and they're like, wow, these who are profiting at this person's expense. Totally different discussion. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely not what we're talking about. But I think we have a new landscape and I think this landscape while painful, right? The forest burning down and rebuilding we've seen this movie before again, Ryan, you and I have lived through it, we lived through it in the.com Bubble. We lived through it in the, um, I love

Ryan Rutan: the smell of wood smoke. I don't know what you're talking about.

Wil Schroter: I don't disagree with that. So I think we're in a good spot, although it's painful right now. I'm very excited that we've just minted yet another generation of founders that can see, I'm gonna use the analogy of the forest for the trees, but can also start to say, hey, you know what building a business that, that quote just makes money. And I hate even saying that makes sense. And I think if we can focus, if we can focus as a founder community and say, hey, it's not just all about raising money, it's not all about scale, it's about building a profitable business that actually pays us, pays all the people that, that work for us, et cetera. I think as a community, we're gonna be a lot better off. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on start ups.com that includes all of our education tracks which will be funding customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. They're so so much stuff in there. All of our software including Biz plan for putting together detailed business plans and financials launch rock for attracting early customers and of course, fundable for attracting investment capital. When you log into the start ups.com site, you'll find all of these resources available.