Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan from startups dot com. Joined as ever by Will Schroeder, my friend and the founder and CEO of startups dot com. Will funding is inextricably linked to the startup space and there's a lot of narrative about it. A lot of things that are taken as truisms. But what do you think about beating some of those up today and talking about how true these truisms are and how much of this is just mythology spread by the very people who benefit most from said

Wil Schroter: mythology. A lot of it is mythology. And what's interesting is we wrote this article, you know, a lot of these podcasts are, are based on articles that we write. And the article's title was the bullshit case for Raising Capital. The funny thing is we're actually writing the opposite article. We are trying to write the bullish case for raising capital because on this show, I think more often than not, we talk about how, you know, we can avoid raising capital. And people might, if they was up this show, they might even think that we are anti capital anti V C anti investor, which is hilarious. Given that we run a fundraising platform, we have a fundraising agency. We spend most of our time teaching people how to fundraise. So us being anti investor seems, seems a little antithetical. But what I was trying to do in this article trying to put together this conversation, this mock conversation that we were, we were having with a V C where the V C is talking about how there are these truisms. And we're gonna support those truisms in the article, but I couldn't do it as that V C. This, this, this mythical V C was talking, I kept saying to myself that's actually not true as much as I want to write something that supports what this V C is, is saying. I can't. And so I thought it'd be make a more interesting show to talk about why these truisms that I actually wrote down as the truisms are actually false. You know what I mean? Sure.

Ryan Rutan: No, I think, I think it's, I think it's worth it because we talked to so many founders and so many of them have already heard the narrative and before they've really considered whether they really need or have a strong case for funding or will even be able to get it. They've got it in their minds that this is the only path forward, right? That there's no way around this. And in a lot of cases, we see it turn founders back because they eventually realize, like, you know, I, maybe I can't raise funds, maybe I don't want to raise funds, whatever. But it's the only way. Right. The best companies all have funding, the biggest companies have funding everybody that ever IP O had funding all of the founders. I know the names of got funded, er, go in order to be successful with this, I would have needed funding but I'm not sure that I can do it or I've tried and I'm not, and so I'm just gonna pack it up and I'm gonna go home and so I think that breaking down these walls, made of myth is gonna be really helpful for a ton of founders listening.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. So I think there's a few of them, let's start off with, with maybe my favorite, which is all the best companies raise capital and here's kind of how it goes, I'll set it up a little bit and you bring it back to me and kind of how you see it. The theory goes that if you look on the public markets, you look on NASDAQ, you look at nice anything and you look at all the companies that have gone public, they've all raised capital by way of that, the best companies all raise capital, of course, they've raised capital. What do you think about that? Do you think that the best companies all raise capital not using IP A is the only vector but would you say that? That's true.

Ryan Rutan: Well, look, there's a reason that that's true. Right. That would be like saying everybody who gets on the cover of Vogue ends up being really attractive,

Wil Schroter: right? I love that.

Ryan Rutan: There's a correlation there right there, there might even be a causation there. But it's not because I got on the cover of Vogue that I'm attractive or had some sort of visual appeal. It's the opposite. I got on the cover of Vogue because I had visual appeal, really good companies get funding because they're really good companies, right? I said differently. If that wasn't the case, then there'd be a lot more investing going on and we'd be turning lots of really shitty companies into amazing funded companies if that's all it took, right? So of course, the best companies get funded. I've heard you explain this in a different way will, which is using universities as an

Wil Schroter: example, right. Stanford. Yeah, exactly. Stanford graduates the best students. No, they don't they accept the best student, right? If you're gonna accept the top 1% or less of all students that ever apply, how could you go wrong? Exactly. Try accepting the bottom 1% and see how well Stanford does. Now, that would be impressive if Stanford can turn those into founders of public companies that would make Stanford impressive. But if you already accepted the smartest kids, what other outcome were you gonna have? What,

Ryan Rutan: what were you? What were you hoping for? Right. We're gonna dumb them down just a little bit just to normalize things at touch. Right. That's not their mission.

Wil Schroter: If you're, if you're an investor, you're a V C and you're only funding the best companies, then yes, by way of that, the best companies will have taken funding. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they were bad companies before you funded them. Correct?

Ryan Rutan: Or that they wouldn't have succeeded,

Wil Schroter: right? That would imply that if you funded your 19 other companies out of 20 that were gonna be successful, that they were all gonna be successful as well. What happened to those? Because as many of, you know, one in 20 of V C investments are successful. So if V C makes companies successful, if all the best companies take on V C, why did 19 of them not return? That's the big question.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Well, that's where this goes from truism to myth really fast, right? I mean, there's, there's sort of nowhere around the numeric on this, right? We can't, we can't avoid the math and look, you can say that sure they get the best companies as the ones that get funded and you could still probably try to make a fairly cogent case where if they hadn't gotten that funding, they would have been great companies that went nowhere. Right? They just stalled out. Yeah, they were a great idea, great team, great early execution. But without that money, they wouldn't have gone anywhere or they wouldn't have gone as fast or as far or whatever. Sure you can, you can make that argument. How the hell you prove that? I don't know, I'll

Wil Schroter: give you this. If I look at the nine companies that I've started over 30 years, my top two were bootstrapped, no investor capital whatsoever. My bottom three were all venture funded. Now, if that venture funding is such a guarantee of success and the bootstrapping is such a guarantee of failure. What the hell man? Because it's not like I had one shot on goal here. A lot of reps on this equation and I just don't see the correlation at all. It's ridiculous.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Right. And so look, I, I think that it's important to acknowledge the fact that yes, capital is a tool. Yes, it does get used. Yes. Some of the biggest companies that, you know, and the famous founders that you've heard of have been through the funding path, but that doesn't mean that it's the only route to victory or that it's even the best route to victory. Right. And we've covered a lot of the anti funding cases around, you know, hiring your own boss and how it changes your ability to, to derive direct benefit from the company or at least delays that or changes the conditions under which that's true. So, yeah, you know, you have this, there are a lot of great companies that have been funded again, we're not anti funding, but we want to take it off the table that it's a foregone conclusion that that is what made these companies successful or that without it, they otherwise wouldn't have done what they did.

Wil Schroter: Look, there are certain cases where you actually need a ton of capital to scale in a certain way and to be clear, there are certain cases where you kind of can't be that company without some level of scale. Now, that could be anything from an expensive R and D operation that actually just requires money. You can't bootstrap it, it's not two guys in a room just working really hard

Ryan Rutan: every pharmaceutical ever, right? Because of the the regulatory process that you have to go through is so expensive that without raising funding, there's just no way to do it. You can't bootstrap FDA approval funding

Wil Schroter: 100%. There's other cases where you need to have a substantial amount of, let's say inventory like a clothing company, right, where you actually have to have a lot of inventory. There's yet other cases where the products will only make sense if it hits a critical mass kind of all. At the same time, I would argue Uber couldn't have been bootstrapped, not because it, it, you know, it was an app or whatever, it just you needed to be in enough cities with enough critical mass at the same time to have built up enough of the user to make that business work. And again, those things are very real, but here's the weird thing and I wanted to get your take on this, most of what we're talking about is scaling quickly. Where do you think scaling quickly comes from?

Ryan Rutan: Well, let's see who benefits from scaling quickly. Let's think about what it takes to scale quickly. It takes, it takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of energy, it's fraught with risk because we're very uncertain as because it's not like just having money means we can go and scale, right? We still have to find product market fit, we still have to do all the damn things that are hard now, we can just do them faster. So, you know, it, it really does benefit the founder if they like less sleep, uh no free time. Um If they don't appreciate being able to see their family on a regular basis, that kind of thing. Uh It's, it's great for that otherwise it's really great for the V CS, right? Founders don't need any of this to happen fast, right? A lot of times I think they want it to, but I think that they misunderstand the connection between the two and they assume that funding will help them to grow faster, er, go get to the outcome they wanted, but they forget to factor in all of those other down sides. Like the fact that if the thing is just doing a nice job, cash flowing a couple $100,000 to a million bucks a year. That, that'd be an awesome business. If you owned it out. Right. If you don't and you be holding to investors, you don't get to stop there. That exit is closed for you, sir, or ma'am, you must proceed to IP O so that they can get paid back because they do have a time frame. Right. Maximum time frame, 10 years, right. They've got a show return on the fund in 10 years and they probably want to go raise another one. If the first one's not returning at all, guess what? They can't go raise more and get their carry. Right. And I'm not pointing out the greed of V CS. Plenty of other people have already done that. I don't need to. But it's the case that that's who drives that condition, right? It's the investment money you took on in the first place. That makes it true that we need to scale fast. Otherwise you absolutely don't. You probably can't and you might not even want to. Right. So that's my subtle take on it.

Wil Schroter: There are a hilarious number of instances where I hear founders say I need capital because I need to scale faster because everyone else is going to scale in this market. Oh. Right.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I, I forgot the competitive one.

Wil Schroter: Right. Right. Because we all want to believe with good reason. That's why it's where conviction comes from that our startup, our idea is so good that it's gonna be so market changing, that you're gonna need so much capital in order to capitalize on it before anybody else can. And at a faster rate. And so what I hear from founders is that if I don't raise this money, if I don't go down this path, I'm gonna get gobbled up by all the people who do. now that does happen. Sometimes it's hilarious because we see a version of it that nobody else sees. Which is why we're saying this on this podcast. It's hilarious. How often that does not happen? Correct.

Ryan Rutan: Right. It's, it's the, it's the vast outlier, the vast outlier we're talking like magnitudes of difference between the people that never happens to and the very few cases we can point to and go, they got beat out because they had a very similar idea. Somebody else raised more money and got more market share faster and now their top dog and the other one's gone. But let's

Wil Schroter: play this out. How many companies tried to compete against fund with funding. Remember, we had like 30 funded competitors within the first year.

Ryan Rutan: I couldn't even get auction insights because there were too many people like I could only get the top 10. It was unbelievable. But yeah, we couldn't, we couldn't understand the competitive landscape because there were so many of them coming in and out right at rapid pace and eventually there were very few left. Right. So

Wil Schroter: out of that 30 people that we competed with, maybe there's three or four left, maybe they've all raised just to be clear. Didn't raise a penny. We didn't raise a penny and outlasted all of them. Right. Not because we're doing anything special, but because this notion that this market is gonna get so big and you're gonna have to have the most amount of capital. It's the only way to do it is shit. It's actually what bankrupted. That very same mentality is what bankrupted all of our competitors because they raised a bunch of money. The market didn't get as big as they thought it would be and then they had to bankrupt the thing. Meanwhile, we're still making money, you know, good for us. I've personally had so many businesses over the years that were constantly challenged. What, by what was supposed to be these massive venture funded incumbents and they were gonna take everybody out time and time and time again, they flame out. Here's why in the first month, year, two years, they sound like geniuses because they got so much money, they don't have a chance to do anything wrong yet. Then they realize they come to the same conclusions that we're already at, which is, this actually does take a little bit of time to grow this business. It's not just about throwing bodies and capital out of it, right. Product market fit, still evolving while we're still kind of getting there slowly. Right. But diligently, the rest of them are burning out and I'm not saying it happens every time, but firsthand, we've watched this across so many companies that this idea that if you just raise a bunch of money, you're gonna be the successful one consistently does not pan out. It's almost laughable.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. I mean, they, they all tried to scale at a rate that was unsustainable and all at the same time. That's the other thing that's really funny about. I mean, there's, there's an interesting paradox there where you have a market that looks hot and everybody starts raising funds to build something in that space. It creates a bunch of artificial competition before anybody really knows how much market there is. And so, you know, we don't have product market fit yet. We're not even sure really. You know, like, well, there's, you know, 1.2 billion tam. Right. Ok. Sure. Maybe like we all guessed and it's probably somewhere around there. Uh, but how reachable is it? Right? How addressable is it

Wil Schroter: actually? How cost effectively addressable? Is it cost

Ryan Rutan: effective? And that's the thing, once they're funded, they stop worrying about things like how cost effectively all that matters, that we stack up the users as fast as we can, we'll figure out how to make money later, right? And now you've got a burn rate and now all of a sudden you've grown to a size that's unwieldy. Right. You can no longer react or change to the market. You've now made commitments that are gonna be really hard to undo at a time where things are changing really fast and you're learning and now you're trapped into this path. Right. And we, we saw it time and time again. It was basically, they were around as long as they could keep raising a subsequent round. And the minute the funding dried up, they started dropping like flies, you know,

Wil Schroter: something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's ok. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups dot startups 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. I mean, how many more examples of this do we need? This is 2022. When we're recording this, we are at the tail end of probably the worst IP O run in history. And what that means is you've got just nearly 100 companies in the tech sector alone that have gone public in the last 18 months that as entire cohort have failed at such an astronomic level. Now, you have, you have to ask yourself why, how could so many companies in so many different industries all hit the market incidentally? What in the US was one of the most boom times in the market. How did they all perform so poorly? We've got ones that I can cite that have been 99% down. You can't get more, there aren't, there are more points to go. Right. And so the reason is those companies had should have never grown as fast as they did to begin with. You can create artificial growth, you can create artificial revenue, you can get to market. But when the market starts to see what this House of Cards actually is, it goes nowhere. And I don't know how many more examples we need to show that this bullshit scale bullshit House of Cards system doesn't work. Now years ago, I can also show you instances where it did work where companies got out to market, they got out with story, you know, investors made their money, et cetera. And then the thing imploded. You remember Groupon? Of course, you don't vaguely,

Ryan Rutan: I remember buying several and using none.

Wil Schroter: No. Right. Right. Right. Right. Which is uh you know, and, and I actually love the Groupon model so I'm not knocking it. But what I'm saying is like once the thing kind of falls out of fashion. It's not like what people thought it was gonna be and the hype wears off, you get these bullshit companies if we dial that back to be less IP O I and we just talk about specifically specifically the near term growth of a company investor comes to us and says, take my money. I need you to be 100 x bigger in five years. You know what a prudent response would be. I don't need to be 100 x bigger in five years. Cover

Ryan Rutan: your ears, Children. That

Wil Schroter: works too. I know I'm like, I, I don't, I I actually just want to build a profitable company like you need to be 100 x bigger Mr Investor. Not me, you

Ryan Rutan: sort of said this is a second, which is that yes, you can acquire customers, you can, you know, show not fake revenue but basically revenue that costs you far more than the revenue that you earn when you're on a burn rate, right? Instead of just building from a point of value. If you scale based on the value of your product in the actual market, this is how great companies are built, right? If you scale simply by adding cash instead of adding value, it's going to end poorly most of the time,

Wil Schroter: right? My problem with, with the startup world having been in it for a minute is we have such limited memories. Like right now we're going through this whole contraction period where startups aren't raising their next rounds, et cetera. And everybody's, oh my God. I can't believe this is happening, dude. It happens every six years, six years, not six years. This is World War Two we're talking about, it's the el

Ryan Rutan: Nino of funding. It comes around on a very regular basis.

Wil Schroter: And every six years we pretend like it's never happened before. It happened again. In 2008, 2007, it happened before that. In 2001, it always happens. We always wind up back in the same place. It

Ryan Rutan: always happens since, since the beginning of this type of capitalization it has occurred over and oh my God and over

Wil Schroter: again, I don't know how many more times we have to learn this lesson. It's unbelievable. And yet these myths still sustain and yet these myths still sustain. I'll give you one more the next one which it's so hard to refute, but we're gonna refute. It is. It's better to bet someone else's money. Oh, I love this one. Yeah, that now, that sounds true. Of course, I would rather lose because what we, that's what we're really talking about. We never say it's better to bet and win. We're saying it's better to bett and lose, right? Because

Ryan Rutan: just play it out the other way. I'd rather bet someone else's money so that when I win, I have to give them a pro rata share of it. Right. Because that's what you're saying because unless you're literally setting out to lose it, which if you are, let's not raise the funds, let's not start the business. Right. I have a better idea. Here's an easier plan. Let's not lose any of that money. So, if you are setting out to win, using someone else's money is actually the last thing you would want to do from a logical financial standpoint. Right. This one is so hysterically flawed just from a logic standpoint. No, again, there are those cases is where, like, you have to pay to play at some level. Right. If you're entering into manufacturing or pharmaceuticals or whatever else where there's a giant barrel of cash that has to get dumped out just to get

Wil Schroter: started. Yeah. If you have to do it, you have to do it. Right.

Ryan Rutan: But that applies to what 1% of the businesses that we talk to maybe less. Yeah. And so it's just, it's one of those things where, like, I have such a hard time with this one because it gets bandied about all the time and it just, it's a great sound bite. Right. Well, I'd rather be somebody else's money. Right. Ok. Right. Go to Vegas and try that and see how much fun that is. Hey, I finally hit. How much of that do you have to give back? Well, it was actually all this other person's money. So I have to give it all to them. But man, did I limit my downside? Didn't put a penny at risk. And what did you take home at the end also? Nothing.

Wil Schroter: So I want to provide two flavors of this, of this kind of rebuttal. The one is the obvious one. If you were actually able to not burn through all of your own cash and things go poorly, which isn't a great outcome then yes, you didn't lose your own cash. Ok. Fair. That, that's true. I I'm gonna refute that in a second and say that actually never comes to pass like that. But let's call that true for a second. The other side of it is you're saying, well, if things go really well, I didn't burn my money, the company made a ton of money, et cetera, dude, if things go well, it doesn't matter what you did exactly. Like you raised money, didn't raise money. If things went well, you're fine. We're talking about downside scenarios. So I'm gonna play out out of the 20 portfolio investments that A V C makes and every V C is different, but I'm just gonna average a little bit here, you know, better V C is gonna say, wow, my, my returns are better or worse and of course, gonna say it's worse. But let's use these numbers, let's say that out of 20 investments. One is a ballpark hit, right? It just goes nuts. Right. And then there's like five on the other end that are just never even got, got off the launch pad. Right. Just did horribly bad. Let's take those guys off the table for a second. I'm gonna, I'm gonna argue that the one that went great, whether you use somebody else's money or not, didn't really matter. It's kind of irrelevant for the five that went horribly by the time you go so horribly you've probably burnt all of your own cash anyway. Because the part that people don't think about is you don't just stop operating the moment you think you're gonna run into cash. It's not how it works. You cut your own salary first. Now you're digging into your personal savings. Maybe you give the business a little bit of a loan. Now you're digging your personal savings or you probably burned all your savings before you raised any money. So, either way you've probably burned through all of your stuff.

Ryan Rutan: There it goes the argument for downside protection.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Exactly. Right. Let's talk about the folks in the middle, the folks that didn't take off, but they didn't altogether fail either. This is actually

Ryan Rutan: the most painful for me. This is, this is the most painful.

Wil Schroter: It's a walking dead of the funded and it's a part that people generally don't talk about. You know, we talk about this stuff on the show that people generally don't talk about for exactly that reason. Here's what that looks like you've raised enough money. You've generated enough cash where you're still around, but you're not doing well enough that you can actually take the kind of money you deserve or you'd be otherwise earning in the market. So you're stuck in the middle. I want you to understand this. You're stuck making 100 and $20,000. Now, some people are gonna go, that's more money than I've ever made. That sounds like the most amazing outcome And other people are gonna be like, dude, if that's as much money as I could make for, like, for the next, like, 10 years, that would be a problem.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. If, if you're a talented human, right? And the, the kind who would have a chance of success as a founder. If you went to market and got a job and stuck after a career for 10 years, the chance is you'd be topped out at 100 and $20,000 relatively small,

Wil Schroter: correct? You might say, ah, well, well, you're using way low of a number within a venture funded company now. Maybe, maybe it's 100 and 50 K, it's not 200 K and you're just sitting on it forever or said differently. If things aren't moving forward, that salary is gonna get dropped. First thing, you're gonna be a total target for a little bit of reduction in expenses to try to get to profitability. My point is if things are just going ok, you're now stuck with this thing. I don't think people understand that. Like a lot of people in the company can leave, right? If you've got somebody in the company that their employee 20 and it's not going well, they can leave. You're the founding team and you guys are all connected to this thing. Where are you gonna go? You're stuck with this thing emotionally and every other reason doesn't mean you could leave, you're not indentured, but you tend, tend not to. I

Ryan Rutan: was gonna say like, regardless of whether you can or you can't, the vast majority of people that we see in this situation, stay in this situation till the bitter end, right. Which is that it eventually does just grind them out or eventually fail completely and then they're gone. Right. So there's, and I think people don't really understand the difference there too. It's like saying, well, couldn't that happen to a non funded company? Yes, a non funded company could hit a plateau. They very frequently do. Every company is gonna hit a plateau at some point, right. They all do. And yet when you hit that midline plateau as a non funded company and you're only making 78, 900,000 year, a million dollars a year.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Yeah, you'll get by

Ryan Rutan: compare that to the 1 20 right. All of a sudden the line for success, right. The high water mark is shifted so significantly that it just makes it an untenable situation for a funded company and it makes it a fantastic outcome for a non funded company. That's, that's the irony of these things. It's the paradox of taking on funding to grow faster when it works. Like you said, it doesn't matter. Right. It wouldn't have mattered when you hit, you know, a couple billion dollar IP O bootstrapped or otherwise you're probably good. Right. Maybe you can only get the 120 ft yacht, not the 150 ft yacht. You know, you can dream about the other 30 ft. You'll be fine. If you have the same outcome with an unfunded company, you can just keep doing it right. And these are a lot of the wealthiest people. You and I know run companies that just consistently spit out between 500,000 and a million five in cash a year, right? Not massive outcomes. We know some people who have done that as well, right? But the vast majority of the people we know who are wealthy did it in a different way.

Wil Schroter: You bet. And so what we tend not to hear about are these walking debt of funded companies? The idea that, hey, I bet somebody else's money, I gotta tell you time and time and time again. And I know a lot of founders in this situation. I, I mean, probably, well, statistically, most of the founders that I know that are funded are in this situation. They're not big enough that they can grow anymore. They don't have any growth story left so they're stuck where they can't raise more capital, which means the prospect of them being able to increase their own salary or outcome is pretty much nil, but they're not small enough or debt enough to wind it down either. So they wind up churning year after year after year after year in the same company. And because they've raised money, they have this indentured servitude that gets built in. Right again. It's implied. It's not real, it's implied, but they stay for a very long time and unwinding those things is so hard to do. It's weird, but they're all over the place. V CS have long since written them off by that point. Right. You're in year eight of your company, you're not on a track where you're gonna raise any more money or you're not growing at a rate. You have no more growth story left. They've had to write you off. There's probably not gonna be an outcome there, but you are not writing you off. This is your company but now you're stuck with this, something that someone else owns. Yeah,

Ryan Rutan: they write it off and you write it out. Right. Yep. That's exactly an awful, awful scenario to be stuck in. And like you said, statistically, it is the majority by a long shot of the companies. And I mean, and, and remind yourself that like when we say, you know, the majority it's the majority. Remember, there's also the other five that just completely outright failed, they're not super happy either, but they also got to move on. Right. So you can, you can make an argument that maybe they're better off because at least it forced a change. It forced an outcome as opposed to these who are just sort of stuck in this purgatory, the walking dead as you put it. And it's just, it's an awful thing to bear witness to and we get to do it far, far, far too often.

Wil Schroter: Yeah, the thing is we see the difference, you know, unlike say an investor who has a very jaded view of how startups should work. We see both sides. We ever see everything from the bootstrap side to the funded side. Now, I wouldn't argue that one of them is necessarily better than the other. There are different ways to get to your outcome. I would argue that there's actually more risk in raising money because your aperture of success gets very narrow when you are successful. It sounds great, but your aperture is very small, having been through it numerous times. I get that on the bootstrap side. Obviously, you have all kinds of risks. Like not a day goes by where we don't look at some other way, Ryan and I could have been spending capital on startups dot com that we don't have, right. It's part of our lifestyle. It's kind of what we get used to. But on the other hand, we trade that for the amount of optionality that gives us right, because we're basically working off of our own plan and both of them have some advantages. You know, your mileage may vary, I think between Ryan and I, our only concern here is that we take these different tenets of what it means to raise capital like these truisms if you will, that all the best companies raise capital that you can't possibly scale without capital, or it's better to raise somebody else's money. And what I would say is while there's some truth to that, most of it's bullshit. And I think that's a big concern for a lot of startups that are getting into this for the first time, founders that are getting in this for the first time and they're believing all of these myths verbatim. I think it's an opportunity to step back and say, you know, most of that stuff isn't exactly true or it's total bullshit and we need to make a decision based on exactly what path makes the most amount of sense for us, not the investors. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on startups 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 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 fund for attracting investment capital. When you log into the startups dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.