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 dot com, will start ups tend to start small, right? And then we have these aspirations and dreams of growing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And uh one of the, the core metrics that we use, we tend to use around that is, is head count and you know, you've run big teams, small teams, which one works better, which would do you like more, right? Should we really have all these aspirations for just pull up our head

Wil Schroter: count? You know what's funny is, I was definitely in the big team camp, no doubt as I think most people are, which is why we're gonna talk about this today. But I was in the big team camp, like I was all excited about growing big company, big staff, all these things. And then we did, we had like 6, 700 people. We have massive staff. This is the first, you know, for start up I did and I hated it. I hated it the whole time that we were growing and adding all these people, like we were high fiving each other because it sounds like you see people getting added, it must have been success, growth, whatever, right? And it does sometimes, right? We're an ad agency. So there's no way to grow without adding more people that could build time. So they were the product. So you did need them to grow, but a lot gets lost as you start to grow. And I don't think it's necessarily necessary the way it used to be again. If you're building humans for time. Yes, you're gonna have to add people, right? But even then you don't necessarily have to add them infinitely in order to build a great business. I think what we talk about today is how so much has changed certainly with the advent of A I on the horizon, et cetera that you could now build a huge business without having to add the burden of all of those people. And I think that part's interesting. Yeah,

Ryan Rutan: it certainly is. I mean, you, you said it right. Which is that, you know, we dream of doing this and then as it grows, the, the blush comes off that rose just a little bit, right? Like it's not as much fun as it sounded like. And it doesn't take a lot either. And I'm, I'm sure that it changes over time if I, I go back to my own experiences through kind of growing through those various phases. I don't remember with start ups. We did this, it was kind of, we hit that 50 mark. All of a sudden, culture just starts to be very different. All sorts of things have changed. But, you know, as, as I've grown up as a founder over the years, that first one I remember just even going from 5 to 10, all of a sudden felt like. And part of that was, it was now two different teams, right? So it wasn't a team, we had essentially like a sales team on the front end and a development and design team on the back end. And boy that was like, I don't know, cats and fire, I don't know, two things that don't get along and that just made things a lot less fun. Right. It wasn't just about the size, it was about the dynamics that were then possible to be created between those two camps that

Wil Schroter: formed. Right. Right. And I gotta tell you, it took a while. It took me like, I'd probably say like eight or nine years in my career for me to actually see an instance of where a small company by virtue of head count had just this outsized kind of um impact. The first time I saw it again, it was kind of by accident. This is circa 2001, 2002, probably 2002 because it was definitely post crash. So

Ryan Rutan: uh some of the listeners will need to ask their parents about those dates. Go ahead, we'll

Wil Schroter: wait, you're not wrong. And I get a call from a guy named Botha who is now the managing director of Sequoia Capital. But fun story prior to that was working with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as the 27 year old CFO of paypal, he leaves paypal, which was funded by S Square. Goes to Sequoia as essentially an associate. And one of the first deals he does was with two weirdos starting some company called youtube. I mean, dude, especially back then if you're gonna get something right? Like that early in your career, like year one from cold calling. Not

Ryan Rutan: a bad hit.

Wil Schroter: First one in youtube is, is the worst way to do it. So he did anyway. But at the time he was still hustling on the phone, right? You know, trying to turn over deals, et cetera. And I was running this small company called swap a lease dot com, doesn't matter what it is. And uh he calls and he said, hey, I think that model is really interesting. Would he be willing to talk to us? Are you looking to raise money? And I was like, well, we weren't until Sequoia called, I guess now we are,

Ryan Rutan: I am now

Wil Schroter: nobody gets these calls. II I to this ever since then I have never got a call from, right? And I know them now, I should probably say them. But anyway, so rule has me out and I'm there to pitch, uh, Mike MRI who's like the big, big DC at the time, no idea why he was in the meeting. But anyway, I'm sitting in the, uh, in the lobby. Right. I'm sitting in the lobby and in their lobby at the time. This is in, in San Hill Road, they had the tombstones of all the companies that they had funded and taken public. And, and for those that don't know, a tombstone is basically like a commemorative plaque to say like, you know, we took something public if that doesn't

Ryan Rutan: tell you ever everything you need to know about the VC funding round. The fact that success is a tombstone. Come

Wil Schroter: on. So telling, what are we doing? So, but anyway, like it was especially for, for their era, it was like the who's who of Silicon Valley companies, right at the time, like Yahoo was a big deal and Yahoo was on there and Cisco was a big deal and Cisco was on there and I remember Electronic Arts was there. My memory could be wrong on this. So if I am I am um I swear Apple was on there, right? I swear like just like these behemoth companies,

Ryan Rutan: right? Massive massive companies.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. So two things stuck to me. So I thought it was really interesting. The first was like this company, this venture capital company has had massive success, like uncanny in the size and scope. And since then it's been 10 X that. Right. And the second was, I'm looking around and I'm like, this is as big as a dental office. Right. Like, this is a big, like, major corporation.

Ryan Rutan: Nine people here. Yeah,

Wil Schroter: exactly. Like, there's almost nobody here now. I don't know how many people worked there at the time. A lot of those venture firms, like the, like, injuries and stuff has staffed up a lot since then. But I swear there couldn't have been 2030 people in the building pops. Right. The building, I mean, it wasn't even that

Ryan Rutan: much room. Yeah, I mean, they'd say the, the venture models changed so much in terms of the, the type of support they try to provide their portfolio companies and then just by virtue of being around a long time, they have much bigger portfolio. So there's just a lot more to manage. So you just need more head count. But, yeah, back then, what would you, what would you guess if you had to guess how many, how many people they have on staff when

Wil Schroter: I did the partner meeting, which is folks, listen, after you do your first pitch. If they like you, they usually have you in on Mondays and they do the full partner pitch and I don't remember how many partners who were there at the time enough to fit a room, maybe 15 at most. But I thought it was interesting that such a small number of people were controlling so much outcome and that just always stuck with me. And when we had just sold the agency the year before, and like I said, we had like 6, 700 people. And I thought, man, that was a ton of work to try to like manage all those people. But back in the day, right, when the agency was really small, like 15 to 20 people also just fun footnote and no one was over 30/30 was, it was like a senior

Ryan Rutan: citizen. We had a head count of 20 our aggregate age was less than 200. How was that possible?

Wil Schroter: So anyway, everyone would always talk about back in the day. Right. Oh, it was so much better back in the day when we could all go out, you know, and, and have lunch together and, you know, whatever and they weren't wrong. I gotta be honest. Right? And so I guess at that moment I started to look at it and said, you know what the dream is, the dream is to have that small tight knit team, but to be doing something massive, right? In other words, not having to take on that liability. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Ryan Rutan: And, and just again to your point, like it was so much more fun at certain sta ages because of the size, like at the point at which you don't know everybody's name anymore. It's not as much fun, right? When you show up at your own company and you're like, you feel like a bit of a stranger because I don't know those three people, I'm about to walk past. Like it's a weird feeling. But beyond that, I think that, you know, as we scale these things and as the head count starts to grow, a lot of different dynamics start to appear. But the core point here is like, that's not how we should be measuring the growth of our company, right? Un unless you are like people dot com. What do you have? We have people, you need lots of people. That's cool. But for everybody else, you should be trying to scale that outcome, right? You should be trying to scale the impact that you're having and figuring out, you know, what's the most efficient we can be with the staff that we have and create the biggest outcomes possible because guess what else is really fun doing incredible shit with very few people that everybody can take a big piece and have a hand in. That's fun as shit, right?

Wil Schroter: Where it gets interesting to me especially now because we're in the tail end of a venture cycle, right? So you have a lot of heavily funded companies that are pairing back. It's sucks. You know, it's part of the process. A lot of my friends are going through this process as leadership in these companies. It's brutal. I feel for them, but they'll tell you the same thing like, dude, OK, I've done this now. I will never do that again. Right? Because they got enamored at this idea of scale and size and size equals value, right? And sometimes it does don't get me wrong. Other times you step back and say, was that really necessary? Did we grow? Because we thought we were supposed to grow? And I'm talking about head count or did we grow? Because the product absolutely required it and there was no other option.

Ryan Rutan: No. Yeah, very rarely. Is it the latter? Right? Unless it's a services based business. And even then we talked about this before in the podcast, you gotta figure out like, where's that point at which there's a diminishing return for just continuing to grow, right? As opposed to just being more efficient, you know, better profitability as opposed to just higher top line. But back to the, you know, the VC side, the venture cycle we've just come out of and watching what happened there. You know, it was, it was cool to watch companies post Pande get fun again. Like it was great to see. It was kind of cool to watch the head counts go up and watch people hire lots of people. You know, what wasn't as cool when the massive layoffs started coming? This wasn't just a start up problem right. There were big companies doing the same thing, right. Amazon adds 10,000 head count. Six months later, Amazon cuts 10,000 people. Right? Sucks.

Wil Schroter: It sucks. I guess when you look at it like, again, we keep aspiring to growth in this head count. And I think, you know what we cover here is, it's not quite what you think it is. And I would, I would argue in other cases, it's an easy way to be lazy by just adding head count. Like I'll give you an example. So years ago, it's like mid two thousands. I was talking to Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, right? Craigslist has historically been this wild sleeping giant. Everybody thinks about this corny business from the nineties that like does these weird things online and they do like that actually, that is appropriate, right? It's part of it. What, what they don't know or the story that never really got told is that behind the scenes, Craig Newmark and Jim and some of the other people that were working there with like 37 people. This was like, I'm kind of getting my dates wrong a little bit like 2007 ish. When I was talking about this, they had 37 people there and he said something to me that just blew my mind. He said will size creates dysfunction. Every person you add, creates more dysfunction. Now, when he said that he didn't have to tell me this part because I'd already done my homework. They were doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as a 37 person

Ryan Rutan: company, seven person company. Yep.

Wil Schroter: All the pressure in the world, right from the ebays at the time, the ebays of the world, what would later become Facebooks and everything else like that? Trying to basically just burn them out of existence. Right. On a model that everyone thought they could replicate and even with hundreds of millions per year, by the way, per year of revenue and profit, right? Did he add thousands of people to combat these existential threats? No, he added like one gal, how was it? There? It

Ryan Rutan: is. We got it, we got 38 done

Wil Schroter: because he said my job becomes harder when I had lots of people. The business becomes harder when I and he wasn't wrong. But think of how he was able to do that, right? So imagine your ebay, for example, which was trying like crazy to get into his business. It was a fun back story where they actually bought out one his old shareholders and became an equity partner in Craigslist in order to like backdoor their way into the business. A huge lawsuit. But anyway, imagine your ebay, your Meg Whitman at the time, who's, you know, running ebay at the time? And you've got tens of thousands of people trying to displace this tiny dinky company, 37 people, right? It's mind

Ryan Rutan: blowing power of an insurgent. You're

Wil Schroter: looking at your own people. Like, what the fuck are you guys doing?

Ryan Rutan: Have you beat them yet? Uh You just told us to do that too. Hours ago. There's 10,000 of you, there's 38 of them. Get it done, right? Like what is taking so long? Exactly.

Wil Schroter: Make it happen. But let's talk about the size, creates dysfunction, kind of what that actually means. Ryan. You and I are starting a mythical new business and there's just the two of us. If I'm not doing something, sounds great. I know you're doing it. If you're not doing something, you know, I'm doing it. There is nowhere to place blame, there is nowhere to place like to hand the ball to, you can only pass to one person. So you always know who, who was gonna catch the ball, right? The moment we had a third person, I don't know which of you is getting it done. Right. And once we had 1/4 person and 1/5 person as that gets bigger, no one is directly responsible for what other people aren't responsible for. It's kind of shared in this amorphous way right there in lies the beginning of your dysfunction, right? When it's nobody's ball. Right? No one knows,

Ryan Rutan: nobody knows.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Right. And as the thing gets bigger and for folks of you that have staffed up, you mean this right, Ryan, you and I have seen it as, as we've added more and more people you got a manager of a manager, you know, is it, is it the manager's job is the manager of a manager? No, you have clear roles and responsibilities and everything's. Yeah, bullshit. None of that actually works. No, it sounds great. It doesn't actually work that way. But as you get bigger, everyone has a portion of the responsibility. Right? Like you and I, you're running marketing, I'm running like a strategy on whatever the fuck else I do, right? We know our roles. If marketing doesn't get done, it's on you. If our strategy stuff, we're not doing acquisition or doing whatever that's on me. We had 40 of us to the mix. Who the hell knows, right. Who the hell knows? 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 dot 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. There's

Ryan Rutan: a whole lot of stuff happening, not sure any of it's valuable or in the direction we want to go but a whole lot of stuff will happen. Yeah, I, I think that's one of the other interesting things that happens as growth occurs. Not only does this, like the clear lines of demarcation and responsibility start to blur big time. So does the point at which decisions get made? Right? Like, right now, if there's a big decision to be made in myth co it's the two of us or based on our responsibilities, it's one or the other of us. And then you end up with these weird like follow on decisions or these things that just happened by proxy. Whereas it used to be, hey, we've set new sales targets, we need a new sales person. And then that was the end of the discussion. At some point, you get to a certain scale where it's like, hey, I heard sales is hiring a new person. We're gonna need to add somebody else to the social media team to make sure that. And then there's all of these like knock on domino effect decisions. And this to me is, is probably the the most fertile breeding ground for that type of size dysfunction that starts to occur because decentralized decision making sounds fantastic. But when it starts to fall off of the strategic path, and now just becomes reactionary to a decision that someone else made that may not have anything to do with the strategic path. But now you're following it because well, they did that. So therefore we need to do this and then some of the department's gonna have to add and it just starts to spiral out of control really quick. And it's not like we have any time to go back and audit and say, like, did we really need to add the three other people in addition to that salesperson never happens? Right. You don't have time to go back and look at it. I like

Wil Schroter: a concentration of accountability, right? For sure. Like at start ups dot com, we have a very flat or chart, right? Very flat. And it stayed that way for 11 years. And even though, you know, we still have a lot of people, the word charts very flat. Why is it very flat? Because you me Elliott and everybody else, we believe that every general should carry a gun and go into battle, right? Like we, we don't believe there should be managers, we believe everybody should be in the mix like doing shit like, you know, you and I, before we had this, uh we started recording, I was telling you how I was creating content yesterday. I spent the whole day, you know, creating content, right? We don't have half of people to do that. We could hire them, but this is where I would correct. Do we have to, right? If

Ryan Rutan: we want to invite dysfunction, we could or

Wil Schroter: you get what I consider to be the 70% employee. And what I mean by that is we don't need a FTE, we don't need a full time 100% person. But there's enough work that we need 70% of someone's time to be able to take on that work. Now. That's cool. But then you hire the next person at 70% the next person at 70% the next person at 70%. And all of a sudden nobody's 100% necessary, but nobody's ever used to working 100% either. So we keep hiring 70%

Ryan Rutan: resources, right? And somehow that math never balances itself out. Like you don't get to the fourth person. You're like, well, we've created 100 and 20%. So we just got a free human. It never Rebalances because as you know, like once you set that watermark for this is what your job looks like. If you've been operating at 70 percent for a year, you're gonna continue, right? You're not gonna always be like, oh, well, I guess I can do 100% now and we won't have to hire that new person. Said no one ever.

Wil Schroter: It's a funny little story that, that you'll remember when we bought virtual, our virtual assistant business and we bought it from the previous owners. I was talking to some of the, the V CS that had funded it and I'd gone through all of their numbers. And I said, guys, do you realize that you've got like 75% utilization. Like, yeah, 75% is pretty good. I was like, no, it's terrible. I'd come from the agency world. I was like, here's how I need you to think about 75% utilization. You have 400 people that are W-2 full time people billing at 75%. Which means you have the equivalent of 100 people billing at 0%. You're literally paying 100 people to do nothing. That's how bad 75% is. And somehow you're losing money. Jeez, I

Ryan Rutan: wonder, I think I figured it out.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Yeah. Right. I know so. But think about that, that 70% principle or in this case, the 75% principle, you get to a point where if you're not hiring people that are fully effective, you're adding this amount of blow and it compounds virtual. Wasn't that big of a company when we bought it in the grand scheme of companies, but they had 100 people getting paid to do nothing, not directly. These are all good people and you know, I'm not questioning their salary but numerically

Ryan Rutan: and again, it went back to like that was one of the metrics that they were using was showing that was part of how they pitched that funding round was head count growth. Look at how fast we're adding assistance because we need to add them way faster than we need to. But, you know, pull that aside. For now, that became a very important statistic. Very shortly after that

Wil Schroter: by the time we acquired that business, you know, I was enamored with this idea of size and efficiency and I watched more and more companies and founders start to kind of embrace this and I started to watch these outsized hits a few years back when I was living in L A David Heer Hansen had just moved to this insane house in Malibu, right? And which is a good example of what I'm about to get into base camp. You know, he and Jason Fried started base camp and just printed money. That thing did so incredibly well, tens of millions of dollars of revenue and they had enough revenue to staff hundreds and hundreds of people. They had 50 so Dave and I are having lunch and we're just talking about his staff and his growth and everything else like that. And I said, how big is your open head count right now? I'm just curious because I know you've been historically a small business. He said it's zero. I said, yeah, but you know, you talk about the business is growing pretty well. He's like exactly. He said, our goal is to not hire any more people. And what's interesting about David, I mean, he's, he's a super smart guy, right? You know, he, he created Ruby on rails, you know, back in the day like he's just, he's just a brilliant guy. But he's just, he's a philosopher in my mind. Like he has these deep seated philosophies in one of his philosophies that was we should be scaling the function of our staff, not the staff. Which, how prescient is that in the age of A I right now, think of how many things, right. Just got taken off the

Ryan Rutan: table. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and imagine, like in, in that model then imagine how excited they are about that because this opens up an entirely new gateway is presumably there are some theoretical limits. It's like we want to keep growing, but we wanna ever add another person, right? You're gonna be continuously squeezing efficiencies, looking for ways to do that and then something like A I comes along that gives them an absolute like new lever to pull and, and create a whole bunch of potential scale on the outcome side and the revenue side without having to scale a single human, which is really interesting, right? So it's companies like that, that I'm watching really closely right now, like how are they implementing A I? What are they doing with it? Because they've set themselves up for exactly this

Wil Schroter: moment. I find a couple like places where the I have to add more people think breaks, right? I'll give you some examples. I mean, you and I deal with this all the time. First thing is somebody comes to us, let's say within our own org here at start ups dot com and they say, hey, I'm tapped, I've got so much going on. I need help this brands, more staff. Ok. Cool. Question one. This is bananas. Do you have to be doing all the things you've been doing? Right. As if that's sacred as if everything I've been doing, by the way. Exactly. The way I was doing, it has to be done.

Ryan Rutan: We've only made correct decisions until now and we've only built exactly the right process with exactly the right people until this day. So, yeah, we're good. Right. It's just not

Wil Schroter: possible. So, one of the things, right. And I think we've done particularly well and we've gotten better at it over the years is we audit process when somebody says I'm buried. Our first question is an, oh, I guess it needs more human. We looked at it and say, well, why are you doing all the things that you're doing now? You know, here's some things that you wouldn't think of often the person that's coming to us saying, hey, you know, I'm buried and they are right, justifiably, they're still doing shit. You, they stopped doing years ago or there's doing stuff that, that you forgot to tell them to stop doing right.

Ryan Rutan: Or that you never told them to do that. They decided they wanted to try and somehow it just became part of their process, but it doesn't add any value. Yeah. Right. Now, when you go digging, man, it's, it's so rare that I don't find even in my own workload that I don't find 15 to 25% of stuff. It's like, you know what, I could probably stop doing that and probably nothing will happen. And that's usually my approach, I'll just stop doing it. And now, let's see. Right. Because I've got some other stuff I want to go do. If I don't do this, I can go do that. Instead. This

Wil Schroter: is a good analog from, from back in the day, particularly when it used to all be in office. A big one was, well, I'm stuck in meetings all day. Stop going to meetings. I dude.

Ryan Rutan: Yes. Yes. Wait, what? I, I stopped responding to all emails. It's like if somebody emails me and they need something from me, I'll wait until the second time to make sure they really needed it. And guess what happened? About 80% of the time? There was no follow on request, right? Meaning that I didn't need to do the work, right? Whatever it was that they thought they needed, they didn't need. And so that would have just been time poured straight down a drain.

Wil Schroter: The first question becomes what work can you stop doing? I mean, it sounds heretical like what? Stop doing work. What do you mean? But when you give people the agency to say is some of the work you're doing bullshit. They're like, yeah, man, I'm doing this one. Repetitive task or you know, I'm doing this whatever and you're like, OK, let's just stop doing that or do it differently or et cetera, right? Very few people audit the work first. As soon as somebody says, I need more head count like, oh, I guess you need more head counts. Like, what are you actually doing? Right. The next thing is, do we need a full time person? Just because you have 10% more work to do? This is the fallacy, right? If we're 90% utilized, we feel like we're 100 and 20% utilized, right? But if we're 100 and 20 or 100 and 10% utilized, we feel like like we will never get past this. Right. In other words, 90% makes you feel pretty overworked, but 100 and 10% feels like 100%

Ryan Rutan: more. It's non sustainable.

Wil Schroter: Right. Exactly. Right. But so a lot of times what we're trying to do or actually trying to do is cut back 20% right. Reduce some workload. But the way we solve for that, throw people at it, right. More people, more people right now, all of a sudden we're not improving anything we're just trying to solve for 20% of workload, which again, there are countless examples of this, but the same thing comes back to, we should not take organization is growing and adding people as gospel because it's

Ryan Rutan: not, it's not, it's not. And

Wil Schroter: very smart people have figured this out. I don't

Ryan Rutan: know, I like using that as that vanity metric for growth is kind of like saying I can afford to keep 200 light bulbs on at my house all the time. Right.

Wil Schroter: Right. Do

Ryan Rutan: you need that many lights on? No, but I can afford to do that. Right. I can afford this many people. I can afford to pay these number of salaries that makes me feel good about myself. Right. This tends to be where this comes from. Right. I generally see, like when you start to, like, show off headcount and I've done it right. I've done it 100 times. Like, yeah. Yeah, we're up to 500 people now. That feels good for some reason because it's some measure success, right? I

Wil Schroter: think it feels quantified. It is, it's

Ryan Rutan: quantified, but something that other people will understand, right. Which there are so few other things in a start up founder Journey that other people really understand that. I think it's one of those things that we glom onto and we're like, ok, I can tell my buddy who works at nationwide that we've got 500 people now that's bigger than his department. So at least he'll have some idea what the hell I'm talking about. And they're like, oh, wow, that's a lot of people. I thought you guys were a little start up company right in your garage. Still. Right. Yeah. No, not anymore. But so we need these things, but it is not a good metric, great for parties, bad for running your business. That's OK

Wil Schroter: to put it. And so I look at it and I say, OK, what's the most we can do with the smallest amount of staff? I start looking at current state of the state. Now, I'll give you some examples that because I don't want to say it just happened. It's been happening when whatsapp sold to Facebook for $19 billion. Dude, they had 55 people. This goes back to my example about Craigslist and ebay. What the fuck was Facebook doing all day? I know right? 55 people could do your job, right?

Ryan Rutan: It also makes you wonder on transactions like that. It just, I can never help but look at that and go. Are they doing that math too? Are they like if we had put the right 28 people towards this, we could have saved ourselves $19 billion. Like do they ever think of it that way? It just seems so hysterical to me that they pay for these and good. Look, it was, it was an outcome. They got tons of users. They got, it was, it was a lot of daily actives like all those things were great. But my God, what a premium over what it costs the company they bought it from because up to that point, like what had they invested in that Right. What had they put in? Not nearly as much as Facebook did we know that?

Wil Schroter: It's unbelievable around that same time I remember Knox sold Minecraft. Right. Which was this little tiny company in Europe. And they had like, what, like, 40 people or whatever, he sold it for like, $2.5 billion. That's freaking Minecraft. My kids play mine, every kid I know plays Minecraft. Most adults at this point. right? Like it's unbelievable what able to do with such a small step. I think there's a bit of an ethos within a company to say we're here to build a great product. You know, it's outwardly, right? We wanna have massive impact, Ryan you and I wanna have a massive impact, right? With millions and millions of founders, right? Super important to us. You know, here's the way I would say that the more founders, we can help by just making their lives easier and helping them see around corners the better. Now that said whether we help one or 10 million, so long as we're helping founders, we're doing our job, right. You know, we're contributing. But if it winds up taking the same amount of effort from us, the same amount of staff, whatever and helping even more benefit. Exactly.

Ryan Rutan: Wins all around, right? If I can help two people at the same time or 10 people at the same time or 100 people at the same time without diluting that help too much then give me the 100 like that's what you

Wil Schroter: want, right? And that's the goal. So I think, you know what we've set ourselves up as, and I'm starting to see this with lots of other start-ups. I think we're all finally getting to the point where the glitz and glamour and kind of the distraction of just building and adding staff is starting to wither and for the first time and again, with the help of all kinds of new tools and opportunities, we can focus more on how big of an opportunity we build without having to build scores and scores of people just to work there. It ain't factory living anymore anymore. It's about how much impact you have, not how many people you hire. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on start ups dot 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 dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.