Learning From Failure: 3 $100M+ Operators & Their Darkest Moments

24:37Everybody does it. Everybody, you have to tell when your employees have to fire somebody below you, you have to say, stop worrying about it for weeks. Just go do it. It's not going to be as bad as you think. Like after three days, she'll never think about it again or rarely. Like just it takes three days to get over the emotion. So, yeah, everyone does.

24:54Matt Bertulli:Yeah, you know, Curtis, it's I think we do this with just problems. Like what we're talking about today is like there are problems in business. You're just going to have those every day. And then there are like problems like capital P like, oh, this could actually nuke us. So this is exciting for me because I am someone who started this company in a garage. So when you hire in a garage, you're hiring people who will go and work in a garage, right? These are people off of Craigslist saying, give me$10 an hour cash and I'll be fine, right? Then when you move up, you're hiring off of Craigslist at$12 and$14 an hour, right?

25:32These are people who just moved to the city trying to pay their rent. They don't have a call. Like these are people struggling, right? and you're on the whole time you're saying as the optimist, don't worry, trust me, we are going to make it work. We are going to grow this. And when they say, uh-oh, be careful, we don't want to do that, I'm like, don't worry, I got you. If you do this with me, we'll all get, and next year you're more successful and you're like, see, I told you so, trust me. The next year you build and you're like, see, I told you so, trust me. See, I told you so. we just had a problem that could kill the company.

26:09And I've got six years of telling you, don't worry. Just trust me. I'm the big thinker. I gotcha. And now they're all like, we could lose the company. But Curtis, you have built this completely on, I got it. I got it. Don't worry. We can overcome this. Can we overcome this? And you say to them, of course we can. And then you go home and you start getting the emails and the calls and the bankers and the finance and the this and the notices and everyone just sticks you. And you're like, oh, did my hubris, my pride, my self-identity of the person who can get it done has now just been challenged. What in the heck am I going to do?

26:54Matt Bertulli:Curtis, have you adjusted your approach to building over time to have yourself as less the rainmaker and less like the guy in the company? I think this is a trap that we all fall into. No. No, I should. I really should. We all do this, right? It's like, wait, I know I should learn this lesson, but I haven't. What I do is I've been able to set more structure. like here's marketing, here's this, here's this, and here's this. And then they're like, we need to set a process. We need to set this. I'm like, great, great, great, great. But then I go through and I'm like, wait a second. We can maximize that by this.

27:35And let's look at that problem. If we do this and we hook that up with this and you see it in a different way than they can and you have the ability to act on that. So no, the biggest fear I have with this deal is that someday one year, two years, five years, I won't be there. and all of these structures do not feel as sound as I want them to be because I think there's money dripping out that if I catch it, I can save. Now, we're still going to make our goals. That doesn't matter. I want to make our goals plus every single time. We're talking about bad moments, and I told you, I built this up.

28:10I said, everyone, get on my back. I got this. I got it. I would come in every day. I would be optimistic. I would come in every day when there's a problem. I'm like, we got that. When we have to fire somebody, we say, that is for the right thing. We will find somebody better. I did all of these things, and most of the times it worked out. And I love to celebrate small victories, right? Like really small. Every day I am jumping and dancing and running around saying, good job. Every day I celebrate that. I also have the ability to forget the bad and only celebrate the good ones. That's how I look at life.

28:44Matt Bertulli:Every entrepreneur is. it's like the woman who has a baby. There's like a chemical thing or something. Like their memory of the actual pain of the pregnancy goes away. So that's why they're able to have multiple. Because like if they knew just how bad it was, they wouldn't do it again. There's some like, I've read, there's some science on this. But what you're saying, Curtis, is like entrepreneurs all have this ability to like delete the trauma. Well, as people, you should be able to say, I don't want to remember the bad. I want to remember the good things. I do that with high school friends who say stupid on Facebook.

29:19I don't watch them or read what they say because I want to remember that I liked them before they became it. I let them go. I let them go. I was not going to interrupt, but I will redirect. Right back in. If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. After Sell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns. after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise-grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's, and Target now driving results for brands like True Classic, Hexclad, Ridge, and Jones Road.

30:03I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. Aftersell has already generated over$1 billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands, revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher CAC. So check out Aftersell and tell them that the operator sent you. So Curtis, I think you did a great job voicing what a lot of us do, which is we're casting vision for the future. The future is awesome. We're optimistic. We're going to get there. We're going to beat the odds, all of this stuff. And we kind of try and project this reality distortion field around us where we're capable of anything.

30:43you have to be kind of borderline naive, optimistic to the point of naivete in order to like actually do this thing that's entrepreneurship and startups. But you're not always right, you know, it turns out. And so sometimes you have these moments where you realize that you've been projecting a future that maybe isn't going to happen. I want to hear your moment, your moment where you really bottomed out and felt like, wow, the vision I've sold and the future I've sold maybe isn't going to happen at all. Yeah, there's three things that go into that. And it did come about. Number one of them is when you're growing and you're doubling every year, I didn't pay enough attention to the finances.

31:23I'm a salesman, right? I'm like, don't worry. We need it. I'll make us more money. Oh, we're having trouble. I'll bring in more money. That's not working. Rather than understanding the finance and making all the, I did not pay enough. That's number one. You got to get somebody good. They got to pay attention. You got to read that. I know that now. I didn't know it. That was number one. Number two was way back in the 2020 era like that when they're like, hey, you're getting big enough. You need to pay sales tax. And so we're like, okay, we'll do it on January 1st. Don't worry. We got all the software.

31:56And on January 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, sales tanked. And I'm like, that's because of that stupid sales tax thing. Screw that. Take it down. Let's see what happens. And sales jumped up. Now, it wasn't the case. it was something else. It had nothing to do with adding sales tax. But I grew up in Montana, no sales tax. I lived in Oregon, no sales tax. So I'm like, you want to add extra when I get to checkout? That's going to kill us. So I said, let's not worry about that for a couple of years. So, uh-oh, I'm not paying attention to finances. Uh-oh, I got the sales tax liability. Number three, I decide that we're going to go into footwear and we need footwear to work.

32:37And that That is a lot of POs that I don't make. I put a lot of money to a lot of people out there, and then I'm hoping to get the product and sell it on a new company that's not going to be efficient yet. Don't worry. I can always make us more money. All three of those things are hitting when the bank, Wells Fargo, comes in and says, hey, we just had Silicon Valley Bank go out of business. We promised you$20 million. We're not going to give it to you. In fact, the$2 million that we loan you, we want that back right now. And they started taking money out. And so I have$12 million in POs partially paid out there on a footwear company, and we have no money.

33:15I have to tell everybody that always trusted me. I go to someone, I say, you want to know something about Portland Leather Goods? We pay our bills. You want to know? We're growing. You want to know? We're skyrocketing. Oh, you want your money? We can't give it to you this week. We can't give it to you next week. We can't do that. And all of a sudden, we have our finance people doing nothing but saying, we can't pay our bills. And that is emotionally, as a leader, I have failed. I should have saw the finance coming. I shouldn't have made that decision on sales tax. I shouldn't have made that one.

33:50I shouldn't have made that one. And then I didn't have to do that. I had people answering those phones, fighting people off. But I felt their worry and my worry. and it was heartbreaking. It really was. And what I'd made a decision for that one, Mike, was this. I will never let someone else have control on a decision. Wells Fargo could say, I don't want to give you the money and we're screwed. I need to bring this in. So I got to go to our finance people and I'm like, I have never been a finance hawk. I am now going to be a finance hawk. Where are we? Where's that dollar? No, no, cut that, do that, do that, do that.

34:28And when this company came back to buy us and to give us an equity deal, they said, that was the moment. The fact that you said, I went from zero to 30 million in shoes, and then you cut the whole division. No one would have done that. You got lean. You got profitable. You built. If that never happened, Matt, I would be the same guy. I'm winning everything. Don't worry. There's more money where it's coming from. Then I had to say, no, no, no. where's the finance? Where's the payroll? How long did, where's our working capital? How much do we have in inventory? Where's our age's inventory? How much are we paying our 3PL?

35:08How much are we paying this person? Do we need this new hire? All those decisions that you think of as individual decisions, they're all part of the ecosystem and you have to focus down on it. I told people, I didn't know, I didn't believe it, but I told them, I said, this moment, we will look back on in two years and say, this saved the company. This was the best thing that ever could have happened to him. And I don't know if I was lying or not. I remember saying it to everybody. I don't know if I thought it was true or not.

35:37Matt Bertulli:Do you both, Mike, I'd be curious to get your take on this. Do you both tell yourselves that lie or truth in the moment? Is that something, my business partner Impila, he's like one of the most wise people I know. and he's constantly, you know, it's not happening to you. It's happening for you. That's his mentality on things. He can somehow get there really quickly. And in the moment, I just feel like, no, this sucks. I don't like this. You know? But some people can just do it. They're like, nope, this is going to make me better. Mike, where do you fall there? Curtis, where do you fall there? But it's not binary.

36:15Like, because you have 24 hours in a day, right? Yeah. So 16 hours of the day, you can say, I believe that. And the hour before you go to bed and the two hours when you're laying in bed, not sleeping, you don't believe it. So it's not like I believe it or I don't. It's like, do I sincerely in my heart hold that 24 hours a day? No, there's still that doubt. And you have to be able to get up and say, what am I going to do today? Next step, next step, next step. Other people will break. other people will break when this happens that's how they go out of business we will not break

36:51Matt Bertulli:mike what's your view here like how do you deal with the the moment that you get the bad news i think that curtis does a good job of uh summarizing that like you're always of multiple minds on any issue when something hard happens something unexpected happens like you've got a lot of different immediate reactions and emotions going through you i think that the thing that i've observed about myself and I've observed about other people that I would consider to be really successful at life is that as they mature, there's just shorter and shorter time windows between when it happens and taking the constructive mindset.

37:29And so like I've seen people have a really hard thing happen and they were stuck for a year or for multiple years, you know, in that. And then I've known other people where they'll give it, you know, a minute to be frustrated. And then they're like, okay, I'm just choosing to take the constructive mindset here. And so I actually think it's a skill. It's really, it's a self-disciplined skill. It feels good to be self-indulgent, I think. Ironically, like, it's kind of counterintuitive that, like, thinking about how bad things are would feel good. but there is some kind of a weird chemical thing where sometimes like kind of wallowing feels more enjoyable than like having a constructive mindset.

38:17But I think we can I think we can train ourselves. And one of the ways we train ourselves is just by being around other people who who do this. Like certainly if you go through something really hard and you have a spouse or you have a best friend or you have a community that's like, let's talk about how sad your life is like you're more likely to be that way. And if you choose to surround yourself with high agency people that are like, hey, let's figure it out. Like, it'll be OK. We're going to we're going to find a solution that can help pull you out. We've already mentioned the role that community has.

38:47And I think clearly when you go through the really difficult times, it's when you need community the most. So the advice I would give based on my own personal experience is how do you reduce the amount of time it takes you to get to the constructive mindset as you get more mature and as you grow as a leader?

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39:45Matt Bertulli:I call that a no-brainer offer. The pricing is also kind of wild, about 20 cents per conversation instead of most other vendors being like$1 to$3, which is a little nuts. If you are interested, go to richpanel.com slash demo, not for some generic demo, but to actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team. Either of you write stuff down every day. Like I'm a big, I got to get out of my head. Like my process for getting very quickly past things is just export it. So like, hence the daily writing practice I have, which I've talked about before, is like a lot of the time that's just like brain barf, you know, like it's like what's in my mind right now.

40:24Matt Bertulli:It's like, I got to get it out because if I get it out, it's sort of like clearing the pipes and I can just keep moving on and I can be more stoic about how I react to things. Do either of you guys have a, like Curtis, do you have a process or a way that you do We're like, you go quickly from ba-da-da. I do it. I do it quickly. And I do it not by writing it. I do it because I surround myself with so many people. Like, I am around people all day, every day. And so, I don't drive to work. I have somebody pick me up. And that's that poor Mariana that if you know me, you know Mariana, right? And you know that we'll get in the car and she says, How are you doing?

41:02What are you thinking about? I'm like, You know what I'm thinking about? And I'll unload for 20 minutes and we'll pull up to work and I'll hop out. I'm like, I feel better. Like I just went there. I was able to get it out and say, well, that wasn't that productive. And walk in and sit down in a meeting and more calmly, not calmly, more calmly do that meeting because I've been able to say it and move that out of the system. When we drive home, I say, hey, she says, what did we learn today? What did we do? And I go through the good or the bad. But before we get home, I turn it into a good. And she says, what are we doing tomorrow?

41:37I say something positive. I get out of the car. I'm like, guess what? I've just cleared this out. So it's not writing. It's actually somebody talking. And if I asked her, what the hell did I just say? She'd say, dude, I'm not actually listening to you. This is your freaking therapy. I'm here for you to get it out so you can be a better person. Ironically, question asking is one of the best ways to help people process through things. and it's one of the best ways to lead people for this reason. Because often what they need is not actually the piece of information. They need to come to the own individual realization of that course of action.

42:15And so like there's a great line in the matrix that someday you're going to learn the difference between knowing the path and walking the path. It really is just so true that often we don't need to be told the right answer, but we need to get to a place where emotionally we're ready to embrace the right answer. And Curtis, that was your story. Your story was you needed to hug the cactus and learn the numbers of your business. It wasn't sexy. It wasn't what you wanted to do. But you came to the point where it was obvious that it's what you had to do. And by doing that, like you took this really difficult event and it sounds like it probably is a big part of the reason why today you're sitting there as somebody who's had a partial exit.

42:57Because it forced you to grow as a leader and grow your capabilities in a way where your company could become a much bigger, much better version of itself.

43:08Matt Bertulli:I want to hear from Mike. I want Mike's like, uh-oh, I don't know if we get through this. I want to hear that moment because Curtis and I are telling ours. I will give you one that has nothing to do with, oh, we're growing really fast. You know, cash flow problems. I'm going to give you just a total fail moment. Love it. You know how it's like, it's always, you know, it's always darkest right before dawn. Sometimes it's always darkest right before it goes pitch black. um so uh to give some of my backstory i was in full-time ministry even though i'd had a business degree and i had always kind of thought i would go over to the business world eventually and then i got to 30 and it looked like well maybe that's just never going to happen but my brother had been kind of a solopreneur and he was in the very first wave of affiliate marketers um on the internet i would say and had done really well he had an idea for a company asked me if i would help him on it on the side i said yes that company turned into a company called quibbons um which the way i would describe quibbons is kind of like whatnot before uh you know social selling um was a thing and like i really think whatnot's kind of like almost like the spiritual successor to like what we did in some ways and we did that business for a few years um and at one point my brother was like you should come work with us full time i was still doing ministry even though i was working on the business.

44:33And I wasn't particularly motivated to come over and work on that business full time, even though I'd done a lot on it. But we had another idea for a business that I was very excited about. I wanted to build something from the ground with him. And the idea of this company was a combination of gamification and e-commerce where you shop, you buy your stuff, and then there's some kind of a gamification play game element. At the end of the checkout process, You get some kind of a discount on your order. And so we thought this is like, seems to be where things are going. And we were like 70, 80 % right.

45:12So I moved full time from the ministry world to the business world, which was a pretty disruptive change. And we started building this company. My younger brother is my boss. So there's challenges to that for sure. But we're building this company and we are making so much money on the quibbit side that we're just funding millions of dollars for this thing. And I would say we did many things wrong in retrospect in the way that we built the company. We didn't do a lot of validation. We invested way too much before we determined exactly what customers wanted. We made some really unfortunate architectural decisions to give like a picture of this time period.

45:55the app store is pretty new. Like it's like we built a bunch of stuff in HTML5, which like, because we thought, you know, the web was the future and we really built around desktop still. I mean, this is where things were in 2011, 2012. It just wasn't clear where everything was going to shake out. Interestingly, one of the companies we were looking at at the time was King who had Candy Crush. And so like we were kind of 90%, 70%, some kind of large percent of the way there towards where things would get. But we weren't at 100. So we build all of this stuff. We get real excited after two years. We launch this.

46:39We launch on like a Thursday night or something. We go to a steakhouse right after we hit launch. I ate two 20-ounce steaks. This is like my way of celebrating. I ate two 20-ounce steaks. and then uh you know we go home and over the the coming like i would say three four five weeks we're running marketing we're testing and and it looked kind of promising at first and then it looks less promising and less promising and less promising and you know one of the things i'll tell people is like people were so confused by the concept that they were they were hitting our landing page like it was a trampling it was just like the the bounce the the rapidness of the bouncing off of that page was amazing.

47:22And so there's this moment in time when you go from thinking this isn't trending in a good direction to like, this isn't going to work. Like this is just straight up. There is not a pivot. Like this is the end. And I think it was a Wednesday and I'm looking at numbers all day. I'm playing with some different things and it's just kind of like almost like a fog that's rolling in. It's kind of like this realization is kind of like surrounding me that this thing that you left one career track to do business and you put like two years and millions of dollars into this thing, this is going to fail. and which is an incredibly depressing feeling and you know we were out of pivots we were out of ideas it was just not going to work and so I go home and I'm very down uh and my wife can tell that I'm very down I'm not really wanting to talk about it I ate dinner and I'm like you know what I'm just gonna go upstairs I'm just gonna watch an episode of the show I've been watching I just need some space.

48:42And she's like, okay. So I go upstairs, and I had been watching Game of Thrones. And... Such an upbeat, uplifting show. As fortune would have it, the episode, if you've ever watched Game of Thrones, there's an episode that they refer to as The Red Wedding, which is, like, one of the most shocking, disturbing things you'll ever watch in your life. And it turns out that without me knowing it, that was the episode that I was queued up on that night. And so I'm watching this episode and it's just like, again, horrifying, shocking, very sad. And so I get done with the episode, it's like 1130 and I'm like, I think I just want to go sit in the garage with the car running for a while is kind of how I feel right now.

49:31You know, like, and I tried to go to bed and, you know, there's like several hours of just not being able to sleep and I'm wrestling with it. And it was, it was probably like, I think you said this, Matt, but it was probably the first time in my life that I really had to grapple with failure. that, like, certainly we all face setbacks, but my wife's opinion is that I've had very little adversity, that I've had a great family, that generally, like, things have gone the way that I wanted them to go. And I think this was probably the first time that I came really face-to-face with something that just really was going to go badly, and there was no, like, there was really nowhere to point the finger but at myself.

50:23And I think it was a transformative moment in my entire career. I think it was simultaneously the worst day I ever had in business and probably the best day I ever had in business. I don't think Simple Modern happens. I don't think the person that I've become, I really, there's so many things that probably never happen if that day doesn't happen. Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D2C and e-commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing,

50:54Matt Bertulli:warehousing, financials, all in one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one, that has more direct 3PL integrations than Fulfill. They integrate with over 400 3PL locations globally, and most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3PL relationship or you're about to. And the second your 3PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other in real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true lander costs. You don't know your real margin. You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11 p.m. trying to figure out where$40 ,000 went.

51:23I know because I am on Fulfill. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement. It's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up for D2C, and it's not some vive-coded piece of crap. Believe me, those exist. Fulfill isn't one of them. Go check out Fulfill. Tell them Sean sent you. So my big takeaway from this experience was my entire life i've if you kind of uh took persistence as a as a character quality i would kind of max out on that character quality i've always been described as extremely persistent which as we know like in entrepreneurship we get told over and over again the grit persistence like this is the quality um and what that experience taught me was for the very first time, I realized that there was a dark side to my persistence that I had never seen before.

52:21I had always thought that persistence is always the right course of action. But if you just think about it from like a first principles perspective, you realize that that's a silly idea. There are so many things, like you're in a bad relationship, persistence is the worst perspective. If you're in an addiction, if you're doing destructive things, if you're headed down the wrong path, like one of my favorite quotes is that if you find yourself on the wrong train, the quickest way to get where you want to go is to get off at the next stop and get on the right train, right? And, but persistence is kind of like the opposite of that.

52:57Persistence is like, you know, the evidence be damned, I'm going to keep going. And nobody is going to stop me from doing this thing. And so what I realized is there is kind of this, like, destructive persistence and kind of more of a redemptive or positive persistence. And it's all about how are you choosing the things that you persist in? And up until that point in my life, the answer had always been, whatever I'm focused on, I'm gonna keep doing this until I win. And it was the first time I realized that like, hey, you know what? Successful people are actually allow themselves to quit at things.

53:33They allow themselves to pivot. They allow themselves to say, this isn't working. And I don't know, maybe I didn't have the character or the self-confidence or I was insecure enough that I had not seen that before and that it was okay for me to quit on things. It was okay for me to say, hey, this didn't work. And it probably set up the rest of my career, but really low point. I mean, as low as it gets, because it made me question if I was any good at business. It made It made me question if I should have even switched careers in the business. It made me question what was going to happen next. But it was a gift.

54:18And I think I started to see that pretty quickly after it. But I really clearly see it now that it was the worst day in business and the best day in business I ever had. That was a great one! I want to tell all of those people who happen to be in a business right now and it ends up failing, I had a bunch of those. I don't even go back to all the businesses. I started this business at 50, for God's sakes. All these young kids are like, I don't know. I created a business. I'm 28. What is my next move? I'm like, hey, go fail a couple more times. I have a bunch of failures before this in entrepreneurship that I don't even go into because everyone wants to know about this.

54:59When I made this one work, my best friend and cousin Dan said, hey, you made this work because remember all the failures? You learned a bunch, dude. And I'm like, oh, I forgot I learned that I've had these lessons that I got better. So if you made it this far, if you're using Fulfill, if you're using Northbeam and you've made it this far and your business is failing, congratulations. That is part of life. I am a recovering alcoholic. I should have died. and you hear in your first year of sobriety, it is a blessing that you went down so low that now you get to reconstruct yourself and be the person you can.

55:41It is a blessing. And you're like, a blessing to be an alcoholic? Screw you, dude. It is a blessing to have your business go out when you're young. It is a blessing for what you learn so that that next one can be 100 times bigger, not 0.2 % bigger, not double. You can create things, Mike, not just one or two or three, you can create people, networks, companies, entire structures that that taught you about.

56:07Matt Bertulli:So this is the, this is the important point, Curtis. I actually think that one of the great places to get to as an entrepreneur is realizing that as long as you're still in the game, you've never actually failed, right? The point of the game is to keep it going for as long as you can, you know, that, that, that's how I look at things now. So like now I'm just willing to i'm willing to fail very publicly because to me it's like that's not failure it's i'm still in the game i'm like the what is the the chamon thing like the man in the arena when he went off on that like hey yeah roosevelt i actually yeah roosevelt like i actually i really do believe that i think that as long as you are making moves and you never get fully knocked out of the game for me i'm in it for the love of the game so how could i possibly fail i'm just taking in swings, I'm going up at a bat.

56:56Matt Bertulli:I mean, like no baseball player strikes out and says, well, I guess that's it. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming. Are you ready? Not in the normal marketing calendar offers prep sense. I'm talking measurement and attribution. Are you even going to know what winning and losing looks like when the big Q4 season hits? Reality is the businesses that win set up their measurement solution when the times are slow, not the night before the big weekend. There's a reason for this. You see, with Northbeam, you're getting a totally independent, completely new set of ad performance numbers with infinite look back windows.

57:29Matt Bertulli:That means that the longer that the data grows, the more valuable it becomes. So when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from while your competitors are guessing. This is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with North Beam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out. Mike, that was a great story, but did you want to hit another one real quick? I mean, I can, but I think what we're saying, I think, is really good to emphasize that, like, in the kind of Twitter sphere, sometimes, like, the, hey, I'm going to be authentic and share things looks like I'm going to humble brag, you know?

58:12It's like, we're growing so fast. Cash is such a problem. What am I going to do? And I'm not saying that those things aren't difficult also. I just think there's a lot of people that don't feel seen because it's like, that's not actually my situation. My situation is I'm actually bleeding out because, you know, I bought some inventory and nobody's buying it. And that I think it is kind of emotionally calloused when all the stories we tell about struggle are, you know, this thing happened, but then happy ending, you know, but then, you know 10x growth because sometimes they're just not and so the way that i would think about it what you were saying about failure matt is that you know we define what failure is and that i i don't think that uh i think the relationship you have with how you think about failure is really important and there are some chapters that just end with defeat or end with frustration and that's okay.

59:11You just don't want the book to end that way. And that's kind of like my story, is that I have certain chapters I'm really proud of, and I have certain chapters that they were hard, but they set up the next chapter. And that's probably the most redemptive view that we can have towards our careers and towards entrepreneurship, because there just are going to be highs and lows. Like, you probably will get fired once in your career if you work for other people. You probably will have at least one startup that just outright fails. And like, that's the way that this stuff works. So anyway, thanks for listening.

59:49I mean, I really enjoy sharing this stuff because I feel like it transformed me. And if anybody else can learn from it, I want them to be able to benefit from it.

59:57Matt Bertulli:Something I told my co-founder and Pila, Brad, early on, because Brad is like definitely, you know, 10 years ahead of me. I love that all of his failures are my best lessons. Like, that's the great thing with this. It's like, if you're smart about this, it's like, learn from everybody else's. That's also a way to go about it. You don't need to go get near bankrupt. If you, like, don't seek that out just for the lesson. Take mics. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, it's actually a good point that wisdom is being able to learn from other people experiences that I can learn that the stove is hot because Matt told me the stove is hot.

1:00:42And I can see his hand is melted. But, you know, as entrepreneurs, often we have to find it out for ourselves. And so I think that that's the point of the pod is being able to share our experiences so that hopefully everybody listening like that, that this is helpful for you and that you can avoid maybe sidestep some of the challenges that that we faced. But we know that these are really common, like everybody listening to this. I know that you personally have a story of this and we would love to hear it. We love the feedback from the community and it's really helped, I think, shape build and it's helping shape how we're doing episodes and how we're creating content.

1:01:20So we are really grateful for the entire community. Thanks for listening all this way to the pod. We want to thank all the sponsors. We get to do this many times a week at this point. and as a result of all these great companies that are backing operators. And so hit subscribe, drop in the comments, wherever you listen to this, your example, hit us on Twitter, whatever else. We'd love to hear some of your stories of adversity that you've gone through. And then like, hey, what was the good that came out of it? How did that transform you as a business person? We would love to hear those stories.

1:01:55I wanna end it by saying this. Curtis, sometimes as entrepreneurs, we do not do a good enough job of celebrating the wins. Your life is different today, not because there's more zeros in your bank account, but because you built something of real value that's transformed a lot of people's lives. You went from a point of total adversity in your life where, like you said, alcoholism could have killed you, but it didn't. You changed your mindset. And literally there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people's lives, millions probably if you include all your customers whose lives are different because of the choices you made as an individual.

1:02:34We always like blow past these things. It's always on to the next one. It's always like, what's the next hill? Like be proud, be honored of everything you built. I'm going to end it here. And when we did our deal and we signed and everyone's like, congratulations and everything, the next three hours, I was depressed. I was really depressed. And because I surround myself with the right people, I got a box and it was a present. And I opened up this box and it was a letter from 60 of our employees saying, thank you. You, like some of them, five, 10 pages long. Thank you. You believed in me. I remember when you interviewed me, I didn't believe how my life would change.

1:03:14This has completely changed my life. And Mariana had letters from so many people that she had put together. and I sat there at my table and said, look at this. Okay, now go to work, smile and be happy because these people are amazing. Yeah, proud of you, man. All right, that's the pod. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next time.