welcome back to another episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined as ever by Wil Schroder startups dot com CEO and founder will Today we're gonna talk about something that I think plagues a lot of founders. You and I have certainly not been immune to this. And that's this notion of, ah, pacing and not sprinting right that we don't necessarily have to just run full speed all the time, every day of our lives. I mean, if we do, we just end up with a lot shorter lives. But there's a lot of other downsides

to it too, right? It reminds me I always have this. This kind of like a metaphor in my head, I guess, or parable, you and I are standing at a campfire in the bear shows up, and it's about to attack. And you're like, Well, in order to get out of this, I don't want you to sprint. I want you to run in a leisurely pace because we just have to Ah, wear this bear down. Are you kidding me? It's like I'm out of here. We're gonna sprints as fast as possible.

It's kind of run the bear actually, just have to run me,

right? Yeah, exactly. I love the It's kind of hard to tell Founders to not sprint any of us. I mean, Ryan United inclusive, right to not sprint at the same time. Where were terrified. We're running from things like debt and everything else in toward things like every dream we've ever had, right? So it sounds absurd when we're delivering this information. Yet at the same time, it's probably the best information we can tell most founders, by the way, including ourselves. So I think this topic, you know,

we're talking about the idea of pacing yourself for the long run. I think we need to talk about how long these things actually take. I think we need to talk about what pacing yourself looks like. It doesn't mean slowing down per se. It means finding a pace you can maintain. And really, what happens when you don't? I think all of those things. What do you

think? No, I think so, Yeah, and it's super critical, right? I mean, we see this often times, you know, the earlier stage founders suffer from this even more, but it's not limited early stage founders either. We still see this a lot across the board, but the reason I find it so striking at the early stages because there's an easy justification for it, I think it's a dangerous trap to fall into the easy justification is, well, there's a lot to be done right now. It's the early stage I have to share.

I and I have to use extra energy and that's absolutely true. Here's the other thing that's true that they forget about. You have no idea what the hell you're doing at that early stage, right. So spending energy that you have no idea what the return on it is s. So it ends up being this. Throw spaghetti at the wall type approach and I would say I would love to see more early stage founders spend a little more time thinking about what they're going to dio, then just kind of running around like chickens with their heads cut off now, easier said than done easier. There is a real balance. It has to be struck there between just spending energy and kicking up a bunch of dust because if it's the end of the day, the dust settles. Nothing has changed for the positive. What did you spend that energy on in the first place?

Here's the best way to think about it. Like take year one. When you're up all night, you're killing yourself. You're just stressed about everything. Because to be fair, everything's broken. You're one of a startup. Doesn't involve us. Just come into the office filling up our coffee, hanging out, just kind of seeing how things were going. Like that's what you do at a regular job when some other poor bastard has already had to figure all this stuff out decades ago. And you have the benefit of working at their company. Ah, were things, you know,

Things have been figured out. We're going to start up. Obviously, you show up. Everything's total chaos. It's nothing but fires. And you're constantly in a high stress mode. Okay, Yeah. So if that's the baseline, the problem is especially if this is your first time out. I know this. Is this the way for me and probably for you, Ryan, it is your first time out. Your instinct is gonna be to run as hard as you can after every single problem your gonna exert all of her energy,

and I go, No, no, this this deal fell through. You know, we have to go four alarm fire to, you know, be able to attack this thing. Whatever. And there's an appropriate measure of that. The point is, how long can you keep doing that? How long can you stay at maximum alert mode? The problem for first time founders this is mostly first time founders but not exclusive to them is that you haven't been doing this long enough to know that you can't keep this pace up. That startups takes 7 to 10 years to mature. Now there's a couple points of that scale.

Right now, I'll point out Point number one is 7 to 10 years average life span. It takes it for, like a venture funded company to make it to a public market. Your Google's Facebooks and the fastest growing companies in history seven and 10 years is also another metric for an average company just to not fail, right, just to get to a point where it's got enough revenue coming in, that it that it's not failing either way, it's not three years, yes, companies have done it. But that's generally not the way it goes, right? You know, there's people who make it into the NFL after a year or two of college, That generally not how it works, Right? If you makes me a little

yeah. So interestingly enough. Well, I I delivered some of this advice last night, but in a very different context, I took my brother in law with me to ju jitsu practice for the first time. He had never done. And as we're driving over there, I'm telling him. Look, I'm gonna give you this advice. You're probably not gonna follow it, But when we get to the end of the end of the evening, there'll be an opportunity to roll, which is what we call the sparring that we do in ju jitsu. And I told him that like when we get to the rolling portion, you're going to expend a ton of energy and I want you to not do that.

I want you to stay calm. I want you to know because you don't know what you're doing. You're gonna have no techniques. So literally. Everything you do is probably gonna be mostly a waste of energy just try to survive and invariably everybody is the same thing, right? They get out, they're going up against somebody who has significantly more knowledge and they do, which is to say any at all. And in 30 seconds he had rised around and strained and stressed himself out to the point where he had zero energy left and then becomes very, very easy to just give up right And it's exactly the same thing that happens in a start up right. We expend all that energy and then we assume that all this is impossible and it's only impossible because of the pace at which we tried to approach it right. If he had just held on and just calm himself down a little bit, not just tried to exert a bunch of energy and use power and use strength and just held on and just survived, he would have lasted a lot longer. Right And the same thing is true in the start of context that in that early stage,

when we don't really know where we're going to get the best returns on our energy, simply just pouring all of your energy into it without any outcomes will have any real riel destination in mind. Doesn't end any better, right? You end up burning out prematurely and had you just taken a more slow approach to it. You know, you you may not have. You know, gotten as many learnings is fast, but you might still be in the game to play alright. If you gas yourself out early, you don't get the benefit of the second half. You don't get a second wind, you're just gone.

We'll stick with that rain. You need a second wind. I think that's the part. Do folks just don't realize, Because again, they haven't done it before. It would be the equivalent of you're running this marathon. And then about halfway into the marathon, when you think you're about to hit the finish line, people are like, great, you're at lap one of four barely crawling against this. But I got three more laps to go of all what I just did. And so the first thing that challenges folks Yes, your ones chaotic. Yes. Year one,

you're probably gonna burn, you know, a lot more cycles that normally would throw at any other point in this journey However, by the end of year one. Let's just use that as a mile marker by the end of year one. If you don't try to find your pace air, go dial it down a little bit. That could be in hours. It could be lost. Sleep. It could be your health. It could be, I mean, a boy. The list goes on right? There's a lot of places,

really. Unversity get winded. If you don't dial things down or find a healthier track to catch pace, you're not gonna be around long enough to see this through. And Ryan, that's the part that people miss. You have to be in it for the long, long, long haul way longer than you think. It it is in order to make all the effort you're putting in right now. Ever pay off again to stick with my little marathon analogy? Ryan. If your goal is to win the race, but you're passed out unconscious by the end of the first lap, what was the point?

Frank, what I think to your point. A lot of founders don't know that that's the type of race that they're in. They didn't realize that running a marathon and so I think that in order to win a game of any sort, you have to understand the rules of the game. You have to understand all of the constraints in the game and I think a lot of them missed that. And we've talked about this before in a different context in terms of gold setting. Certainly we've covered off on that. But even just in celebrating the little winds, I think that one of the things that can allow you to more appropriately pace yourself is if you look for victories that aren't at the end of the marathon, right, if it's just start running now and stop running 7 to 10 years from now, it's not very motivational. It's so like if the first time you ever go jogging, you know you're starting a marathon from that day forward. It's pretty de motivational, right?

So I would say that being able to appropriately pick points in the future appropriately pick goals, targets that are reachable in a short period of time and we've definitely talked about this before. The fact that we planned weeklong sprints that you know our horizons were never more than 1/4 out in terms of what we're really thinking about accomplishing. Better break that down into the weekly and daily activities that allows you to understand how to pace yourself. There are periods in this race that are like the 100 meter dash, but you've gotta know when those are you can't run the 100 meter dash for the duration of a marathon. There are periods of time where a specific goal that you need to hit might require picking up the pace. But you have to understand that, and you have to be aware that that, too, has a cost and that once you're done with that, you got to slow down a little bit right, and I think those things work together in a couple of ways. One. It makes easier understand how to expend the energy. And two,

if you're appropriately setting short term goals, you feel good about hitting him right? You get that energy boost right? That's where that second wind can come from. If you just still not accomplishing anything, I think one you lose motivation and to you feel like you have to keep running

right. You also have this broken mechanism in your head that believe that if you solve this problem, there won't be a next one just a big

around the corner. It's imagine I'm just picturing I'm picturing 100 meter hurdle where you can only see one hurdle at a time, and they just keep popping up right in front of you yet that's how it works.

You know, in the early days when I was doing you know, my first start ups I would come home and and my wife tell her about, You know, what I was working on in the early days, every day I came home was the largest crisis that had ever happened. It was clear the decks. Sorry, you won't see me for a while. I'm gonna be holed up in my office, you know, at home, whatever. This is the biggest fire of all time. And in my mind it was because in my mind, that person that just left or that deal that we just lost or that product that just didn't ship was the most important thing that could possibly happen. If I could go so far as to solved that one problem,

I'd finally be on the other side of things, so that was early years. But when I said the benefit of kind of seeing this, this whole thing play out in the more recent years like we did start ups dot com, I would bring home the same problems, sometimes bigger. And I would like, Yup, this happened and she's like, Well, you know, you don't seem that broken up But it could have been a big, pretty big problems like No, it's an enormous problem. It's an apocalyptic problem. She's like,

Can you don't seem that upset about it? I said, because it doesn't matter like I'll solve it. I've solved a 1,000,000 these problems before, It'll be totally annoying, you know, lose some sleep over, I guess. But, well, next week, the week after the month after the quarter, after next year there will just be another version of it. The problem is always the same. It just gets a different name. There's no version where I stopped problems from happening, and I think there's quite a whole podcast on that, too. Yeah,

it's absolutely true, right? They're always gonna be there and so and going back to the pacing. If you do allow yourself to get worked up. If you do start to run after every single problem, regardless of how fast you saw them, they're still gonna come. And you're just gonna run images to solve them at all. Right? I think that, uh, and we could turn the boxing here ju jitsu or any sport you really want to. The pacing is so important, because if you punch yourself out, you run yourself ragged. At some point, those who are pacing themselves are gonna run right past.

You are the other guy's gonna start throwing punches and landing them because you can no longer keep your hands up right. You've got to keep yourself in a position in a condition to deal with the unknown. I think this is where pacing is maybe a little less obvious. But if you constantly sprint after the things that you do see and the things you know you need to accomplish, it leaves, you know, extra gas in the tank for the things that you don't see coming. And I think you would agree that it's more often the ones that we weren't anticipating that end up taking Maur effort, more energy more time on this stuff we knew we had to solve right. Those tend to be more obvious, and they tend to be things that other people have dealt with. And there's proxy, and there's lots of ways to lean on somebody else to solve those things. The ones were you really having to sprint and run hard are the ones you didn't see coming in the first place,

right? And I think you touched on something. We keep making reference to the physical sports analogies. And I think we say that because we know that everyone can understand being winded. Yeah, the problem that we run into ah in the workplace is it's not quite the same type of winded, right? We're losing sleep. We're losing health. We're losing, you know, so emotional wellness, et cetera. But it doesn't show up like I can't breathe anymore, by the way, later it does. I was gonna say there were points where I I remember.

Yeah, but here's the challenge. If we do a hard sprint, right, and I'd say, you know, we do the 100 hour a week and we venture. That's another episode when we bought a company called virtual. It was, Ah, it was a four alarm fire type situation and and we basically stayed up for a month, which is exactly what needed to be done. There was no other answer to that problem. I'm convinced of that, right. However,

at the end of that sprint, we know we've got to reset. If what we d'oh and I can say this because I've done it for decades, it was terrible idea if what we do at the end of that, Sprint says, Guess what we can fix That sprint with is another sprint and another in another in another. There's no version where in the end that pays off. Now there's a ton of people that will save. Not true. They'll say that's exactly how started companies get built. It's just endless sprints until you finally get it there, and I would agree that that's how you can get him there for a while. I agree that that's how you can win the race for a while, but long, long, long term.

And I'm only talking like 57 10 years stops in the grand scheme of life that's out that long. You can't keep it up that long without paying for in some horrible way. And I'm talking about mental health, physical health, etcetera. And as you get even a little bit older, those things really start to matter.

Oh, it does. I found a super cool way to recharge after the whole virtual thing, and after not sleeping for that month, we had a newborn. That was a cool way. Thio put a bow on that and almost kill me. There's some other things that I would So there's two other things I want to talk about in terms of pacing, and you talked about in terms of being winded and being fatigued. I think there's two other dangers. Improper pacing, and the 1st 1 is when you're moving really fast, imagine walking down the high street versus driving down the high street right? The things that you notice are entirely different. The amount of context, the amount of information, the amount of experience that you get when you're moving at a walking pace versus speeding totally different.

You miss out on things because you lack the context. You might miss an angle. You might miss an opportunity because you're so focused and kind of heads down and running. The 2nd 1 is related to that. And it's when you lack that perspective, you not to end up just running the wrong direction so that speed can actually lead you to miss your turn, right? And so it's not just about being winded, you might have the energy to do it. But for example, yesterday, in addition to Ju jitsu, I decided to torture myself in play squash for the first time ever, against somebody who really knew what they were doing. And he had me running all over the court and one of things has happened. Music I was over committing.

I was trying to anticipate and be where I thought I needed to be. What? Turns out he was way better understanding what I was thinking, that I thought he knew what he was thinking about. My anticipation was terrible, and so I kept running myself out of position, and he kept trying to tell me, Stay in the middle of the court, stay in the middle of the court, and yet I kept going to where I thought he was gonna play the ball and trying to be, you know, Johnny Hero and just use energy and effort to get somewhere I needed to be. And I just kept ending up in the wrong place. And so wasn't it was out of energy. I just ran so fast in the wrong direction that I ended up out of position when it was time to make the play. And the same thing can happen in a start up company.

Yeah, I think. What happens? Vannes for startups. Let's say we're doing a sprint and we're heading toward the one of our product launch, right? You know where to spend the next 3 to 4 months just going heads down, working insane hours, et cetera. Totally fine. Okay. And just just so we're seeing something, it's probably appropriate. It's probably the best use of time. We're not talking about anti sprint. We specifically say it startups dot com. We operate in sprints like really rough it in five days sprints.

The big difference is we don't try to sprint marathons, and I think that's what founders don't understand. I don't think founders understand that you can't keep that pace up forever, So if we're gonna do ah three or a four month sprint, we know going into it that we're gonna need a little bit of downtime to cycle down in tear point, learn, watch what happened right before we jump into kind of the next move. Of course, the roof is burning while we're trying to build the house right. We know where we're running out of money or we're trying to get funding or whatever that's happening that's trying. You prevent us from moving forward. We're trying to short circuit that, and I get that. But we're not gonna be able to keep that pace unless we say OK at the end of this product launch, let's focus on a few things where we can dial down just a little bit, right,

catch our breath, get some sleep, gets whatever, man, just dialing that into our program. And our planning changes everything because they were fit enough to go sprint again. And I think that's so important

to the point about the roof being on fire. One of things I want to point out there is that often times what seems like a roof fire in the moment ends up just not being that critical. We talked about this once before and I don't remember something. The podcast is just you and I shooting the shit at some point, but we talked about the fact that sometimes what looks like a big problem at the moment, if you just don't have time to deal with it right then goes away on its own. And of course, not all problems go away on their own. And certainly products don't build themselves. But there's often the case that we end up running and chasing after something that we think is really critical are important. Whether it's a problem or it's an objective. I'm going back to the notion that sometimes paste can mislead you, right? If you're moving too fast to really understand what's going on, you end up chasing the wrong, probably end up making more out of a problem than it really is, and you end up spending energy that you really didn't need to, or at least the amount of energy at that time that you didn't need to. And I think that's something that take some time to get

over him. I don't know that people understand that you only have a fixed amount of energy. I think it's why we keep going back to these physical versions where people are winded. I think, especially in the early days, especially for Young, we get the sense that we have so much energy and we can just keep sprinting forever. It always catches up with you, and the whole point of this particular episode is to say, You just can't keep doing it as much as it feels great in the beginning, you can't keep doing it. And this reminds me of like I'm going to torture one more marathon analogy. Probably when I did my first triathlon and it was like a real traffic was a sprint triathlon. I'm not good of shape. I remember as soon as the gun went off, it started with a run. I could literally sprinting out.

Right. And there's 1200 people there and I'm like, probably in the top 20 people coming out of that and I'm like men. I must be much better than these guys. That old geezer that was standing next to me, huh? Blowing his doors and, you know, pumped up on adrenaline and do not even 1/3 of the way into it. I'm slowing down, right? An old geezer just comes sliding right by me and I'm calling on The Giza is probably the same age I am now. But, you know, the funny thing is, I didn't understand how to set pace.

So you know, I didn't end up doing that. Well, old guy knew exactly had a set pace, and that's why he's sailed right by me. What I'd love to see more founders understand is how are you setting your pace? I'd love to see more founders say, Hey, man, I'm running at a good pace and I'd say, How's your health? Has your sleep? You know, how's your, Ah, your stress?

And they're like, Well, you know, start up. So it exists. But here's what I'm doing to kind of correct for that counterbalance and to be able to set a pace so I could be around for 10 years. Which, by the way, is how long this takes. If it's successful instantly, failure happens a lot faster. So the good news is that it will be in that race

for very right. Yeah, they won't take him too many laps for it to run past them. Well, the good news is here you know, I have actually developed an entire training program around being able to understand that a you do have a limit and exactly where your limit of energy is. It's a fairly well adopted program at this point is called Parenthood s O. If you do think you have limitless energy and can go all day and all night and still you say you just have a child and you realize you let

a trader in the world Absolutely. You don't write that. There's another side of this that I think is really interesting. We keep talking about the founders pacing themselves, right? You talk about our own stories, but incidentally, that's actually not the biggest problem here. The biggest problem is setting the pace for the rest of the organization's right, because we may be forgetting that you were just an army of one. We have all these team members, and we're expecting them to maintain a pace in a productive output for a long period of time. But if we don't set the pace, if we keep running them through the ground and we're still expecting them to be around for 57 10 years in order to see this thing through. We're actually shooting the whole organization in the foot. So I think we should talk a little bit about what we can do to kind of define pace, show others that pacing does matter and maybe get people a little bit. Prep for ah, how long this thing's gonna take. What do you think?

Yeah, No, I think I think the I think the preparation for how long it's gonna take is an important one. I think having that conversation with people is important because it's not just a matter of I don't think it's just a matter of setting the right pace for the founder and then saying, OK, that will also be the right pace for everybody else. The very individual thing, right? Depends on the type of role that they're in is a grind work. Is it heavily creative writer? There is it ebbs and flows. Is there seasonality to it? That means that everybody's roles with same and not every energy is the same

or commitment. You know, not over these commitments the same very during commitment level than everybody

else. That's exactly it. And so I think there's a danger in. Even if the founders sets the pace, that's reasonable for them. That may not be reasonable for everybody else, and I think that's something we have to consider. There's a little bit of good news here. Generally speaking, I think it's far easier to recognize when your team and when the people around you are over their toes on pace like I think it's easier to lean back and say like, that guy's running too fast out of the gate and I can see that every real surroundings not running this fast he's gonna gas himself out right that I think we can use that to our advantage in terms of right. If we're observing enough and we're paying enough attention to to our team, we can say, you know and again it's not. I don't think it's well, look at that, too. It's interesting. I had never really thought about it in terms of like a team pace. I tend to think of pace is an individual thing.

That's why I was bringing up Yeah, but as leaders we set the pace.

We set the pace right because people downstream can't necessarily do that right now. They may not know they can do that. We talk about permission a lot on the show, right? And I think this is another one of those areas where they have to have permission to run at a speed that's healthy for them. And I think that that does take some work. But again, I think that it is easier to see that in others than Busan yourself. I think it's easier to run past your own pace because you don't have that perspective, right? If you can't look back and see Gosh, I'm running twice as fast as everybody else. I wonder why that is. But when you're looking at a group of individuals, you can typically tell when one of them is kind of over their toes on that.

Well, okay, so we'll play that out. I'm gonna put this on the Dev team because it's always the death scene that gets teams get crumbs in the most. We go to the dead team. We say we've got to get this ship. You know, we're gonna work crazy hours, nights and weekends. All this stuff because often the ship date is kind of when the major milestone of us be ableto sell anything even happens. And so we d'oh! So Deb team goes crazy, you know, other product teams are all connected in everybody's doing sleepless nights. It has leadership. We don't take stock of the fact that we just created a huge debt to the organization debt in the form of we took all this energy away from this team, right to get this done with no plan to pay it back there so many ways to pay it back,

right? I'm not just talking about, like you giving somebody a bonus or something like that, giving somebody some time off some recognition, some indication that at the end of this we're going to switch pace so that you can catch your breath for a while. Even just making that clear that that's even on the table is so powerful. Leaving it on set is the problem. And I think that's usually where it lands.

Damn! And I think yeah, leaving unsaid is is really dangerous. I think that even stating it and I think it does take some level of almost forcing or enforcing. We've done this before, right? We've told people to take some time off. I was talking to a company yesterday and they just came through with their peak season. They and they are very seasonal company. And they're actually now forcing about 30% of their staff to take days off here and there. And then they're not saying we're not gonna count as vacation time. They're just saying like, Okay, on Tuesday, 1/3 the staff's gonna be off on Wednesday, another third and none right on Thursday there. And just to get some down time just to let these people breathe a little bit.

And I think it's really important, I think was a very good move on their part because, you know, if you just say, like, you leave it in the hands of folks, there's all sorts of reasons that that could be problematic. Nobody wants to be the 1st 1 right? Like to admit it? Oh, yeah. It was really a tell. Gotta force. Gosh, take me out, Coach. Right. Nobody wants to be that playwright. And so I think that being very aware of this at the leadership level and ensuring that you're doing what you can up into the point of forcing people to take some down

time is critical. Yeah, I grew, and I think part of what we're saying here and for Founder's listening to this for leaders listening to this what I want you to at least hopefully consider is the fact that understanding howto pace the organization which comes from us, which comes from leadership is is valuable is understanding how to drive the organization right. So as leaders were able to say, I'm liable to run my team to 100 hours a week. Okay, maybe that's good or bad, but if you're also able to say I know how to refresh my team, I know how to make sure that my team is rested, that their their heads air back in it and we're ready to go full sprint again. That's the mark of a seasoned founder. To me, that's the mark of a founder that understands the long game here, and this happens. Ryan.

This happens with our team. Noah and I are creative director were very closely together on all the products You Exxon, you know, some campaigns and different things, right. But we're also very cognizant that between the two of us there's some level at which our creative juice just runs out. And we've gotten to the point now when I could just tell our back and forth isn't quite working. I'll just say Heymann were at that point and no one, literally. The next day, we'll just take two weeks off, right? You just go do anything else. Anything else? I've said the same to you like, a couple times a year old.

I'll just stop. Dude, I'm fried. I'm gonna take a week off. I'm just gonna go build stuff in my workshop. Was gonna do something has nothing to do with what we're doing because I want to be able to perform at my peak. I want to be able to sprint, but I also need to be able to pace that or I'm not gonna be able to do anything. And we've got a whole bunch of podcast that that's exactly what happens when you try to stay in full sprint mode forever. It ends horribly.

Yeah, You can't always be playing the Super Bowl, right? There is a build up to that and there's a recovery from that right here. There has to be some give and take in this entire thing Otherwise, it does just, ah, fall apart, right? And I was thinking that the marathon analogy is a nice one. You said something about They have to know how fast to drive. And I started thinking about in terms of Formula One Grand Prix type racing. We're not just going in a circle, so it's not just about finding that optimal speed that you sort of maintain. There's cornering, there's all these other things and that there's an appropriate pace. And then there's the pace at which it's it's reckless or dangerous,

like too slow, too fast. And so to your comment about the experience founder, I think that's really where that shows that it's not just knowing where to go, when to turn its knowing the velocity, which to do these things. I think that is the hallmark of a really good founders, not just understand the path, but understanding the pace that's appropriate for the point in the path. All right, get also when you get a sprint.

Sometimes I guess there is also a check in right? Yeah, a couple of years ago, I remember having done this with a lot of the folks in the organization essentially a sit down check in, which was like, Hey, guys, it's just a couple years ago were passing like the five year mark. You've been here the whole time. Are you good for another five years? Yeah, that's a big question, but it's a question people just generally don't get asked, right? Meaning, Hey, we're five laps and we got,

you know, five laps to go, maybe 20. Are you good? I mean, it's more like, Hey, I'm just gonna keep running into the abyss in hopes that at some point this is the end of the race. I think when you check in with folks number one, it's just the right thing to do. You're just basically saying, Hey, I care enough about you to find out where your head is. That, by the way, pretty good time to find out.

The answer is no. Okay, man. Right. I was in this for five years. I thought we'd sell by now. I feel you know, there's some broken promises here, and my head's elsewhere. Boy, that's useful information to pull out of the out of the discussion, like kind right now. OK,

freeze your half metal marathon. Go home

Or have I just like not everybody understands how long this races and not every willing to suit up for that long, and that's fair again. It's it's It's not for everyone. We're

some people with a job, right? Even here, because people were there from the beginning, I don't think indicates they need to be there until the end. And we've had this discussion in a number of different ways. But oftentimes that founding team isn't appropriate for the second half of the race there, either out skilled at that point or their skill sets really do lend themselves well towards really early stage stuff where things were a bit more flexible and fast paced. Maybe that's just how they like to play. And so, yes, I don't think it's the case that we need to assume that everybody's gonna be there for the intact race, and that's okay, too.

You touched on something that I really liked. Our jobs change over time, and I'll even speak to the founder. Yeah, when I was doing my first company, my job for the 1st 5 years was really awesome because it was creating everything from scratch. Everything was a problem, but I like it because it was a challenge. My job for the rest of the years was just being a manager of a big company. I hate it. So if someone were to say to beings fun, totally right if someone were saying me Hey, man, Ah, Year five, You're now a manager. We have hundreds of people and all you do is going to meetings about meetings.

Are you down with this for another five years? Like hell? No, Dan says CEO. That's all part of the pacing, though. That's all part of the saying. Guess what? There's a point where this transition's you know. There's a point where where Mark Zuckerberg isn't the startup kid anymore, he's the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. Are you down for that? Maybe he is. Maybe he's not. But I think all of that is part of not only the pacing but the evolution that comes with that pacing. You know,

not every case is firmware updates replacement buddies. It's a fair question to have, I think, a smart season founder or one that's, you know, listening to do a show like this and trying to kind of get ahead of all this. Yeah understands that there's a pace that that both they and their team need to meet in maintain in order to see this thing through to the end. In the end, to me, could be multiple things could be the sale of our I p O. That's just one end. It could be profitability. It could be the point where the product we're working on is our dream job, right? Whatever that Shangrila end is, it takes a long time to get there. You've got to make sure he's on board.

That's a wrap for this episode of the start of therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan on behalf of my partner, Wil Schroder, and all the startups dot com family thanking you for joining us, and we hope you'll continue to join us. Be sure to subscribe rate and comment on iTunes or wherever you love to listen. To start up there, you can find all of our episodes at startups dot com slash podcast. If you're looking for Maura, amazing resource is tow launch or grow your startup. Be sure it ahead to start ups dot com and check out Startups Unlimited It's everything we have to offer from our online university to our amazing community of experts and founders and even all the tools we've built. Like his plan fungible in Launch rock. It's everything of founder needs. Visit startups dot com slash begin that startups dot com slash b e g i n. You'll thank me later.