Where early-stage founders MUST focus to success | E2244

25:40Yeah, so for us, trust was, you know, can you trust that this product is going to serve you prospects or dating candidates, should you say, that you want, that fit your preferences. And for us, I actually vetted every single applicant manually. So, you know, eventually we did transition to using algorithms and machine learning and all that fancy stuff. But at the beginning, it was literally me, Amanda, looking at everyone who applied and saying, and you're accepted and you're rejected. And people downloaded the league and joined the league because of that, you know, reliability or trust that the people are going to be high quality vetted.

26:12They're going to have six photos. They're not going to do gym selfies. They're not going to be wearing sunglasses in their pictures or they would be rejected. And so for us - And those were specific things you did? No gym clothes, no - Oh, yeah. We had a whole rules of, you know, eventually I trained people to do this. I wasn't always the one accepting all the candidates. But eventually, you know, we found we had almost a 50 % acceptance rate as far as when people get a prospect, we call them prospects, in their batch, 50 % of the time they liked them, which if you've been on any dating app today, usually it's probably like one out of 20 that you're going to be swiping right on.

26:45And so getting a 50 % acceptance rate was sort of unheard of and is still unheard of today. And so that was because we spent, we did a lot of things that didn't scale. That was what I was doing didn't scale. And then we also did customer support. So I had a human, that was me at the beginning too, the concierge. We had a concierge that would answer every question from a user, regardless of if they paid us or not, help them with their profile. We said, hey, your third photo is actually better than your first. I went ahead and swapped it for you. And I would actually go, I remember before we launched, guys in particular are very bad at curating their photos.

27:15So I would go and find the best photo of the six they put and put it first. And then I turned everybody's photo black and white because everyone looks better in black and white. So we did a lot of these things that just made people trust the product and want to come back. In the case of Airbnb, they said the photos were critical. And there's this famous story that the founders always tell of, you know, talking to Paul Graham at YC about... Getting the professional photo shoots, right? Getting the professional photos. And he says, well, and he said, hey, and the most demands in New York is this.

27:44So why aren't you in New York with cameras taking pictures of the best places and hiring photographers? And they were like, oh, because we're startup founders and we want to focus on anything that's not the most essential thing. And that's what great mentors, great investors, or great programs like YC or hopefully ours can help you do, which is get to that essential, important thing. And those photos build trust. If you're going to stay somewhere and the photos look like a serial killer's apartment, you're not going to book it. But if it looks like the Amman Hotel or it looks like the Ritz-Carlton, okay, yeah, maybe I will stay there.

28:21which is why, William, when you look, they almost have a playbook of what the kitchen should look like, and they have a neon sign, and then they have the pods. I mean, they've literally figured it out. When you hear Amanda talk about it, it seems obvious, but each of those nuances builds trust. What I hear when Amanda tells that story is somebody that is obsessed about making the core value proposition reliable. She's obsessively vetting everybody. She's committed to five matches a day or like five offerings a day. And she's hand-holding kind of what she's serving up. And she's saying no to all these other features.

29:01And I think that level of obsession and not using tech necessarily and doing something that doesn't scale is a way to do that. Okay, we've gone through four really important things that founders should focus on in year zero. We've got three to go. First up, hey, let's get focused on that product. Don't worry about fundraising. Number two, customer obsession. Number three, feature death march. Feature creep. Just staying really focused on making the thing the thing. And, of course, fourth, working on that reliability and trust in your product. These are really important things to think about right now in year zero.

29:36And if you're listening to this and you're thinking about starting a company, you can go to founder.university, apply for the U.S., Riyadh, or coming to Tokyo, and everybody can apply to all three. It's competitive to get in. Let's talk about constraint. There's this expression that great art is driven by constraint. Yeah. Innovation is a constraining variable. Yeah. And they asked Bob Dylan, one of my favorite artists of all time, and my favorite album happens to be Blood on the Tracks. And they said in this Rolling Stone interview, my gosh, this is my favorite album, and it starts talking about all these incredible songs.

30:10And what was the inspiration for this album? And Bob Dylan said, well, you know, I owed Columbia Records a picture I owed them an album and they've been waiting a long time and they said if I don't get it to them by this date they would sue me to get the advance back and I didn't have any money I'd just been through a divorce and this poor interviewer was crushed that this album that meant so much to them when I read it I was crushed that the inspiration of the album was the divorce and not getting sued because he was broke. That was the inspiration. There was a limiting factor. When you're making a movie, you have a certain number of days to shoot.

30:53With a startup, you have... You can drag it out if you want, but you have the gun against your head of your burn rate. Yeah. Like how much money you have left. Right. And I think cash flow management is the most important thing when it comes to managing a startup. Like running out of money means the game's over. One thing I've seen time and time again, I get hundreds of investor updates is you have some founders that I think get attracted to company building. They want to play company building rather than finding a product that works and then testing and improving that they can scale it in an economically rational way, where the unique economics makes sense.

31:34I think David Sachs came up with this term of burn multiple. For every dollar that you spend, what's the incremental revenue that you generate? There's a constraint. Yeah, there's a constraint, right? And I think for, you know, defer to David on this one, but I think for a lot of, you know, SaaS metrics, you know, under two is, you know, a good signal and over three is a bad thing. So you spend$2 million, you make$1 million, totally fine. Yep. You spend$3 million to make$1 million. Okay, that's not super efficient. What's going on here? Yeah. And are you going to catch up next year? Yeah, exactly.

32:05And so, you know, there's a certain group of founders where you get the investor updates, and they're being very kind of disciplined about how they start to increase spend. And again, it's sequencing. It's like, do they feel like they're really starting to solve a customer problem? Have they then been able to prove that they can start scaling that through sales or SEM? And only then do they start to increase the spend relative to how much money they have in the bank. Signs or thoughts about constraint? You tipped us off to a little bit of it. Constraint, five at five. Five at five. I mean, we also only launched in San Francisco.

32:38We were only in San Francisco for the first two years, so we made sure we really understood that market and had a good product in that market prior to expanding. I think the other piece for me was time. I don't know. A lot of founders are wired like me where perfection is the enemy of done, I always say, and it's easy to just sit and spin and want to keep perfecting things. So by setting a launch date and saying we are going to launch on this date and telling your customers that that we that forced us to actually get the product out or else I could have tried to make it perfect forever. So I always say to founders, give yourself a deadline, however you want to do that, whether it's telling your customers when you're going to launch.

33:13But I know that's what got my butt into gear. So you have geographic. You have financial and timelines. You have the ratio of spend to revenue. Yeah, you also have maybe a wait list. Yep. And limited availability. You then have a social contract. Social contract. We were talking about a really interesting, beautifully designed app about helping people find friends and get out in the real world. And you and I were brainstorming about it. And I said, you know, I wonder if, you know, there is a possibility of having two day parts, you know, the brunch, lunch period and nighttime. So that means seven days.

33:51There's 14. It's a lot of liquidity to manage. To fill. Yeah. 14 events occurring. I wonder if you took the peak loneliness, which probably occurs for people on Friday and Saturday nights. Not Amanda. Incredibly popular. But for you and I, we're sitting home Friday and Saturday night like we're losers. We taxed each other and go get a drink or should we go get some sushi? We're losers no more. But I wonder if they just focused on Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday brunch. And that would be 3 of 14. And just nailing that, selling it out, and creating pent-up demand. That would work so much better than this open platform where everything can occur at any time and then nothing occurs.

34:33I think what you're saying is you're touching on several points we've talked about, which is what you're doing is you're niching down. And so now your marketing communication, how you pitch it to people can be more narrow. So it's easier for them to understand because it's constrained. And then your ability to serve that product is easier because you've got a more narrow scope. So you're going to spend less money and make it easier for you to deliver on the promise. When you put all that together, you don't need as much money. Your ability to execute, because you've narrowed the constraint, you don't have to spend as much time, so you can get customer feedback quicker.

35:08Yep. And you can nail the product more easily. Correct. Because I don't think you can just do a good job. You have to absolutely nail it and over-deliver. Right. If you want to drive word of mouth. So those five people, Amanda, have to be really high quality in your example. in this example, just that came up in two different conversations, just, hey, what if there was only four events on the weekend with only eight spots each? Now you've only got to fill 32. And you're going to crush them. And just make each of them so wonderful and great. And it also prevents, like for us, you know, as a consumer marketplace, you're going to have the cold start problem.

35:43So I knew from the get-go, I was like, I'm not going to have nearly the liquidity that someone like Tinder does. And so by limiting that, by only showing you five, people don't have to know that maybe there's only 15 people total. You buy yourself a couple days to give them your full set of inventory so they don't have to know how small the pool is at the beginning. I've been thinking about that myself, reflecting on Founder University. In the United States, it was getting popular and popular. I said, hey, listen, there's no cost to accepting more people. We should be just able to scale this. We did 350 people the last time.

36:12And then what we found out was because we had 10 pods, there was 35 people in each pod. the great founders would skip the pod because the pod was being filled up with questions that were so rudimentary from the people who were just very early or neophytes or maybe not even cut out let's be candid to be founders and i said huh did we know that coming in and we're like we kind of knew that some of them weren't ready maybe we're just being a version of the gym selfie dudes yeah exactly like maybe just too many people and are trying to do more so i asked the team hey can We do less. Yeah. And your team is now spending less time with the best people, right?

36:50Because they're more distracted. Because they're more distracted with the squeaky wheels who get the most grease. And so in Saudi, we did 60. Here, we did about 30 in founding university. And then that makes the pod smaller. So then we had a really interesting, what's the optimal number of founders to be in a pod every Thursday night talking about their startups? And we came to, well, two or three is probably too small. 30 is way too big. So between those two numbers, we think the right number is. It might be 15, it might be 10, it could wind up at 20, but it's enough that everybody gets to participate and there's no cameras off.

37:25So the number is probably eight, nine, or 10 is my guess. But we don't know. We'll figure that out. But we are enforcing constraint, which I think is pretty interesting. Next up, we want to talk about distribution. We're cooking with oil right now. First up, we talked about product first. Let's put the fundraising down the road and we're going to keep that burn rate low in order to do that. Customer obsession and meeting with customers and understanding them, that costs you zero dollars. Most founders are too scared to do it. If you're too scared to do it, you can't be a founder. You should quit now.

37:55Number three, feature creep, death march, doing too much. And why are you doing too much? Well, maybe you don't want to focus on your customers or build the product. Trust is just so critical, reliability. And then constraints, our fifth item. Now we're at distribution. How did you handle distribution, Amanda. And how do you think about distribution today? When's the right time to be thinking about distribution? And I'll include virality there. I'll include paid. I'll include social. I'll include everything. Just distribution as a concept. Some people might refer to it as go-to market. Some people might call it growth hacking.

38:29But just getting distribution for your product. Distribution is everything. So that is your main primary job as founder and CEO is to figure out if there are distribution hacks for your product and you've got to go find them so if you're not the one doing marketing you should be at the very early stages for us you know we found a combination of doing events inviting press to events and then pitching press were actually our biggest levers and they were all somewhat free because the events didn't end up costing that much money we were able to get bars and restaurants to sponsor or to say hey you can do this for free if you bring x number of people to our bar on a monday night when they don't have anyone so we were able to kind of find hacks to get that initial couple thousand people in the database.

39:11And then we found a playbook. So what we found is that as we went to cities we would get local press. So Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle. You get these local publications to write. For us the tagline was Tinder for the elites is coming to your city. And so we would run that play over and over again for each city we went to. And press was our best friend. And it was controversial. Oh, 100%. Don't be afraid to push against You actually agitated it. You knew it was coming. And you said, hey, this event is only for people who can get into the league. And it's elite. And they were like, oh, my God, we're going to count the demographics.

39:45And we're going to write these things. We were the first ones to reject people from a dating app. So it was a controversial concept at the time. Which makes it worth writing about. So you figured out how to hack local PR and national PR. Journalists were our best friends in today's era. That would probably be influencers. You know, if you can find people with distribution on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, if they're going to be talking about your product for free, that's amazing. You can get people to just try it. So inviting those people to events, those kind of things. Zillow. Business Insider was our best friend.

40:17Yeah. They were doing link baiting and all of that just got people to know the domain name. Zillow did something similar. They created a very controversial device, not, you know, applied to become part of this dating site. It was the Zestimate. this is our estimate of the cost of your house people got really upset you're estimating the cost of my house it's wrong my house is worth more everybody thinks their house is worth more you want to see what your house is valued at plays into vanity plays into vanity plays yeah and and if something's wrong people want to fix it the same thing the wikipedia had which was sometimes the china page originally when i first started using wikipedia was one paragraph and people were so upset that like they're like this is the largest country in the world and it's one paragraph if this is an embarrassment.

40:59And they said, okay, hit the edit button. And they were like, okay, the population of China is. And then the next person was like, okay, you don't have anything about X, Y, and Z. Let's add that. And Zillow then made local reports about the Zestimates of the local and the national. And then to this day, they send out reports. Every week, a different city or geo gets sent out so that their team can rotate from Arizona, to Texas, to New York. Really amazing way to get distribution. Give2get worked pretty well for Uber. Perhaps too well, yeah? Yeah, definitely. At times there were groups of people that were hacking it.

41:43They would create landing pages and then drive SEM traffic against it to sell them. They would buy ads to go to a landing page. In fact, my friend who I introduced to Uber 2, he bought, my friend Nick, bought ads on Google that said Uber is now in Los Angeles. Click here to get a free ride to get$25. Oh, I remember this guy. And it was$1 or$2 per click. Yep. He converted like every other click, so it was$4. And every time he got$25 credit in his account, he got to like 300 or 400 rides. And he's like, it got turned off. I lost all the things, but I spent all this money. Can you get Travis to undo it?

42:21And I was like, yeah, let me bother Travis with you hacking the system against the terms of service. Yeah, no. But give to get, that was of the moment. It was definitely of the moment. I mean, and I think the specific example which you can turn into generalized advice is that your existing power users or people who love the product are the people that are most likely to be able to talk to and find other people that can love the product. They're advocates. Yeah, you can turn them into advocates. If you have a customer that loves your product and is using it a lot, it's worth spending time with them and incentivizing them to find other people in their life that are like them.

42:57I think there was a moment of time where people were building tools to take their eBay listings or their Airbnb listing and get it onto Craigslist. And they built tools to just have that happen automatically and have it happen in different cities. And then it was like a little cat and mouse Craigslist trying to do it. But building these little tools that help people move inventory from one place to the other was enough to just make this work. And the people who had Airbnbs, well, they would set up their own landing page and send people to Airbnb. I mean, I think it's a pattern that I'm guessing all three of us have seen is, you know, 10, 15 years ago, building the technology was equally, if not the hardest part.

43:40That took six months. Yeah, it took six months. And I think the term that all VCs like to throw around is Javon's paradox. You know, that's something gets cheap. Javon's paradox is things get cheaper, people use them more. And I think that's definitely true with AI and vibe coding. And so the product piece is getting easier. I mean, obviously, truly brilliant products are still hard, but it is easier to build product now. And so I think there is more and more value being created in distribution. and so that can either be the obvious example is influencers, people with podcasts or Dropbox is a great example where you're sharing with a friend and then they have to create an account DocuSign DocuSign is the best one if you do DocuSign it's like this is saved in your locker if you ever want to look it up again and then you're like yeah I've got to get that document, is it still in my locker yeah don't worry it's in your locker but distribution can mean different things right so the obvious one is you know an influencer somebody with a big audience but distribution at an early stage can mean other things like access to customers uh you know an industry insider somebody that's worked inside an industry someone with a rolodex yeah hiring somebody with a rolodex an advisor an early angel that has got deep relationships in an industry that you want to go and sell into so they can help you go and find customers to go and do customer discovery with is another good example and the other one is a design partner a design partner is kind of an anchor customer that's going to allow you access to their workflows, their data.

45:16They're essentially saying, hey, you're building a product. I will let you use my data. I will kind of commit to giving you feedback and having access to... In return for testimonial, right? Yeah, exactly. So they're different forms of distribution. And that product council is what it used to be called, the enterprise software. Yeah, customer council. Yeah, customer council, product council. So it's like people would, I remember when I was inside Sony for 18 months, one of the few jobs I was able to hold. It was 14 months now that I think about it. Anyway, I got asked to be on like the Cisco one or this one.

45:49And all it was was a local sales rep just trying to figure out how to take us out to more lunches and bond with us so they could sell us more stuff. But we got to say that and put it on our resume. So my resume, I had, oh, I was part of this council, that council. and they're, oh, tell me about that when I go to my next job. It's like, oh, well, they bust so highly of me. I got to see their new products first. This is really amazing. And they want the relationship, right? And so if they're trying to find, with Sony you were working at. Yeah. So if they're trying to sell into Sony somewhere, they're going to ask you for an introduction.

46:22Of course. If they find a route into a decision maker, they're going to ask you to forward an email. They literally asked me for the corporate directory. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I don't think I can give that to you. They're like, yeah, no, we've got it many times. But we've bought your sushi. Yeah, exactly. I was like, okay, yeah, I guess maybe I could. What are you looking for? They're like, well, we need somebody in Jersey, you know, who does this thing. My God, we're having a great time in Tokyo. This is our second time as a group here. William, I took you last time. It was your first time coming here.

46:48Great French toast. And karaoke. And pizza. Continue. Go ahead. And sushi, of course. And wild boar and bear. Yeah, smash burger. The smash burger was exceptional. Wagyu mafia. Wagyu mafia was great. Tonkatsu, pretty great pretty much all the food Wagyu Mafia was quite expensive I gave you that bill we thought it was in yen but it was dollars yeah it was pretty deserving it was the one I decided to pay for Amanda's like, J.Gow you're paying for everything I'll pay for Wagyu Mafia I was like okay it's just a Wagyu Sando and they charged her$350 for a sandwich with gold leaf and caviar on it times three so she got hit with a thousand dollar Wagyu bill it was very yummy It was very yummy.

47:30But I always love introducing people to the culture here because, gosh, the commitment to excellence. It's wonderful. It's just wonderful to see people take the donut as seriously as the car, as seriously as the consumer electronic device, as serious as the hotel, as serious as when we lost our bags, Amanda. And we were frustrated. And then we had this moment of like, okay, let's put our entitlement aside. if we were in America and we had lost our bags, we would be in a 12-person line with a woman behind the counter who was extremely upset at us for having... For being there. For existing. A lady with my son's name, she had my name on a sign.

48:12She went to find you knowing your bag didn't make it. Yes. And they asked you to describe your bag. What color is it? In detail, in a lot of detail. What size? Does it have a zipper? Does it have a lock? Does it have the code? What material is it? What material is it? very meticulous. And then William and I started joking what were the next five questions you could ask us I was like are you happy with the bag? Have you considered other bag options? When did you first meet the bag? And we were just like wow this woman cares so much about getting Amanda her bag and to her J.C.L. didn't get a sign.

48:49I didn't get a sign. I don't know Japan that well I'm not going to pretend to know the culture that well. But your second trip you're good. My second trip so I'm now an expert. It does seem that unlike in the United States, in the United States, there is social status associated with the job itself. Like what job you're doing has social status. My limited observation here is that there seems to be social status not about the job, but how well you do the job. Correct. And that is... Your competency. Yeah. Yeah, your competency and the detail and your enthusiasm for pursuing excellence. And in order to do that, leads us to our seventh point, which is the team and team building.

49:25What did you learn, Amanda, in your years of team building? And tell us the mistakes. So many mistakes. I think it's a different podcast probably. But team is everything. Yeah, okay. Great. Everything is everything. Products, everything. Distribution is everything. We always say everything is everything. Well, I was just saying. But team is up there. For me, it was the hardest thing to learn. And it's easy to ignore. And at the beginning, you're so focused on the marketing and the product. And those are kind of the glamorous things front of the house. and then actually building and retaining and hiring and firing if people aren't working and being able to fire fast when it doesn't work.

50:00Those are actually what really should be taking almost 30 % of your time in this zero-to-one stage, and it's easy to ignore it and spend maybe 10 % of your time on that. Where did you find great people, and how did you assess their greatness and potential? Well, my favorite story is my first employee, Meredith, had to email me, I think, five times because I'm not great at responding to emails all the time. And so she learned quickly that she needed to follow up with me. And she was one of the few candidates that followed up enough to get the job. So there's founder candidates. Persistence, grit, not being offended because someone didn't write you back.

50:34I've had people like that. No, understand that the founder's busy and they're going to go the extra mile and step up to get the job done. And so I think people that are willing to raise their hand and go the extra mile. What have you learned over the years in terms of talent and finding great talent, inspiring great talent, and maybe cutting talent that isn't going to do their best work at your company? I mean, I think hiring for, depending on if you're talking about hiring an early stage company or. We're talking about early stage. Early stage. So let's just say first two years. Yeah, then I would focus heavily on generalists that have incredible attitudes and like high slope.

51:13Yeah, that was my first hire. Yeah, yeah. Let's define and unpack high slope. High slope is somebody that you think has kind of the, they're open-minded, they're highly conscientious, they're low on neuroticism, and it's the type of person that you can throw at multiple problems and they're just going to go and figure it out. They're not necessarily going to be a domain expert and become a VP of engineering, but for the years where you're early and you're trying to find out solutions to random problems and there's pivots and there's chaos and you're working late and there's psychological drama.

51:46No, there's fear. The company can go out of business. It's not working. Most really good founders are pretty obsessed and they can have quite sharp elbows and you need people around that founder. They can handle that. They can handle that. And that's why low neuroticism is helpful because they're not going to get derailed by those things and they're pretty steady and they're highly conscientious and they can grow into solving different problems. You know, I know this. They can juggle. And they can juggle. And they're high energy. They're people that are like intrinsically high energy and they're like learning machines.

52:21And they're not going to get frazzled when you say, hey, we're going to Tokyo. Yeah. And we need to find an AV crew to record the episodes and we need to get really unique food and I want to do some schwag. And they're like, they don't say, I don't do that. Yeah, they're like, oh, okay. Well, let me ask ChatGPT and Google and Gemini, and how would I do this? If this is going to be true, what would need to be true? Yeah, I think there's a fearlessness to certain individuals who, if they're built for a startup culture, we call them Jack of all trades or Janes of all trades in the United States, but it's somebody who will understand, hey, we're a five-person company.

53:00There's eventually going to be 20 people here doing 20 different jobs, but right now there's five people doing four jobs each. and maybe at best we each know two of those jobs, but we're going to on the fly figure out paid marketing. On the fly we're going to figure out how to find the restaurant and how to do PR because I assume when you did all this great stuff on PR, you didn't have a PR firm advising you. No, I figured it all out and then I gave it to Meredith once I figured it out and she would go and – And Meredith was an assistant to you? She was everything from an executive assistant to doing customer support to doing marketing to sending emails to our customers to doing Facebook ads, to talking to, you know, restaurants and bars to get an event done.

53:38She did everything that I gave to her. So that's not always true, but I have seen time and time again someone very young, somebody very young. Couple years out of school. Yeah, they have come from a flyover state, and they have made their way to L.A., New York, or San Francisco. Interesting archetype. They didn't necessarily go to Niverley School. Their parents definitely didn't go to Niverley School. So they're hungry. They probably had jobs in high school, certainly worked in college. Working class, blue collar. And they played sports in college. So discipline with the sports. Yeah, and they're very competitive.

54:13And you were one of those people. They hired you as, you were from the flyover state of London. Yes, exactly. The backwater. It is now. It's now London has kind of devolved into a flyover. It's like, we're going to Paris or Germany. We're going to Dubai. I don't know if you want to go to Paris or Germany. No, we're just going right to. Right to UAE. Yeah. We're not sending our students to London. It's too radicalized. Yes. It's the greatest headline ever. Amazing. My parents, yes, I sent that to my parents. It took me three times to read that to understand what I was reading. Yeah. The world's changed.

54:46It looked like an onion headline. Well, I mean, and in all honesty, those kind of people are just so valuable to the company, especially early on. Later on, they get called special projects. Yes, because as the company gets bigger. Or fixers. Yeah, as the company gets bigger, for better or worse, you get specialization. And you have to take things away. And you have to have people that are okay with giving away some of their power and not taking that personally or wanting to keep their power base. Go ahead and tell me how you would say that to Meredith. Hey, we're taking PR away from you. You did it.

55:18You had this great success. Well, she was great at that. So I put her in that, but I took her away. So you specialized her to that? Yes, that's where she ended up staying. But at the beginning, she was customer support. She was doing our mail because I hated checking the mail. She would actually send the mail to my mom. So when you did that, obviously the mail she probably wasn't bummed out about, but she might have loved customer support. How do you say, hey, we're taking this away from you. You didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. Well, there's this actually great first-round capital article called Giving Away Your Legos, and so I had everyone on the team read that, and it's just about as you scale, you are going to have to give away parts of your job, and that's a good thing.

55:49That's not a bad thing. In fact, a great founder is literally trying to get to the state where there is nothing. they come to the office on Monday, there's nothing left that they have to do. That's when you actually know you're successful, I think, as a founder, is that when you take a week off, the company does as well or better than if you were there. What I've seen work well in terms of taking projects or scope away from people is, first of all, understanding what their kind of career goals are. Do they want to stay a generalist and stay early stage? And if they do, then it's time to get off the train and I'll help you find something.

56:23We have a four-year vest for a reason. Yeah, and if you do want to specialize, which is, I would say, 75 % to 80 % of the time they want to specialize, okay, which area do you want to specialize in? Okay, so this. Okay, well, my job is to go and find an expert with much more experience than you. They're going to come in over you, and their job is going to be to mentor you and help you achieve their career path. And I'm not going to be able to do that because I'm not a 15-year marketing expert. But my job is to find someone that you find inspiring. and if I don't hire that person, you've got every right to turn around and tell me I'm an idiot and I'll help you find another job somewhere else.

56:58Yeah. And the good ones will stay and the bad ones, that'll make them leave because some people don't want to get hired over and those are not the people you want on your early stage. Because they're delusional. Like if you think, you know, you're four years out of college and, you know, you're going to become a CMO of a serious become. Happened to me on a board. I was on a board and they said, we want you to be on the audit committee. And I looked at the founder and I was like, I've never done anything like that. He's like, yeah, I just think it's an opportunity for you to learn. And then, you know, whatever, you know, fast forward two years, I learned how the audit works.

57:28I learned how to interface with the accountants. And I was like, got me. Pretty exciting stuff. I see that as your superpower. It was the worst two years. When I think of you, I think auditing. It was the worst thing I had to go through. But I was like, you know what? If this is what the founder of that company in New Hampshire, Dine, wants me to do, I'm going to be loyal to him and suck it up and do it. This is 20 years ago. But I said, okay, you gave me a board seat. I'm doing it. I'm going to make this work. And that's not one of the points here, but just learning to delegate as a founder. I know I struggled with that.

57:55I kind of liked owning things and I wanted to do it. And you have to really learn to give work away and be okay with the fact that maybe it won't get done exactly as you would have done it, but 80 % of the way is actually good enough in the startup world. And so you have to learn how to delegate. One of the great things about delegating professional development that I've learned is it will lower the anxiety in the organization of if this person leaves the company's hit by the train issue. This is all coming off the rails. So what we do is I will say, well, okay, you're running Founder University until this date.

58:29Six months later, you're going to work on the syndicate. Six months later, you're going to work on the fund. Six months later, you're going to go work on first calls with founders and running that department. So there's your 24-month experience. GE used to do this. And I rotate, and we do professional development. And when the person hands it off to the next person, I say, do a Zoom call. record it put it into our notion database and make a document with all the instructions use ai to summarize it now when we've done the first handoff of hey you're handing founder university off and you're going to work on the accelerate now you're leaving the accelerator you're going to go work on the syndicate each time you hand that off now we've done it two times or three times now there's two or three calls zoom calls on that page now yeah the first time was handed up the second time the So the next person who gets hand-offed, who can watch all three of those.

59:19It forces documentation. Yeah, exactly. Which is right first culture, is how we say it, how Amazon says it. That was one of our values. Write it down. Whoever writes it down gets credit for the idea. It is a court tenant. I will steal that. It is true. All right, listen. This has been over an hour. What an amazing episode. We will take two questions. So there are a lot of folks in this room who will make money, some who won't. all three of you have gone the process of making money yeah uh i'm curious how has the meaning of money changed in your life as you've accrued more money i mean you're gonna yeah you're both gonna laugh at me first uh money has a non-linear value each incremental dollar you get it becomes worth less than the one you had before and there's probably some step function depending on your lifestyle needs money solves money problems and it just allows you to have more time to worry about other things or focus on things that i think are more valuable i think having money is a bit like debt it creates massive leverage and so it amplifies the type of person you are.

1:00:19If you know you're the type of person that wants to spend lots of time with your family you make a bunch of money and then you're like oh I'm gonna spend a bunch of time with my family now. If you like lots of external validation from social from playing social status games you are now going to do that more. So it's an amplifier I think people need money obviously but once you hit a certain threshold acquiring more money is not about the utility it provides it's about kind of the psychology of it? A lot to unpack. I guess I would say it allows you to think bigger. I think at least for me with the league, you know, that was sort of like all my net worth was tied up in this company.

1:00:54And so if the company, I don't know, all of a sudden had a class action lawsuit and we were sued out of oblivion, or all of a sudden, I don't know, a new competitor comes out and wipes us out. I was nervous that like all my work would go to zero. And so I think, you know, by selling it and by earning enough to sort of have the nest egg, I now feel like I could swing and I could probably take more risks. So, you know, J. Cal's just waiting for me to pick a big idea to do that with. She guaranteed I'd be the first investor and William would be the second. I have not said that. To William. She hasn't said it to William.

1:01:29She said it to me this morning. But, yeah, I think it kind of allows you to get to whatever, you know, that ability to then sort of think bigger and think, what would I do if money was no issue, right, and think about solving those kind of problems versus like how do I make X amount of money in my life? Definitely when you hear that term, F-you money. Some people I find they get the money and it makes them more guarded, more anxious, it becomes a distraction for them. And then some people, a smaller group of people, it does actually give them the ability to say, I'm going to do things and pursue them the way I want to with my vision without compromise.

1:02:09That's what it did for me. It just gave me the freedom to say, I'm going to use my own chip stack. I'm going to do it the way I want to do it. If anybody doesn't want to do it that way, I totally understand, but I'm doing it my way. And, you know, this purity of vision, I think, is very freeing. When you have a bunch of investors, when you have a board, you know, you have to build consensus. And that's good when you're young because you're going to learn a lot. And then there's a certain point where you're like, I think I know the playbook and I know what works for me. This has now given me the freedom that I don't have to compromise the vision.

1:02:46And so that can send you up the rails. Francis Ford Coppola just did a film, Megalopolis, that nobody has seen. And he stole his watches and his vineyard and he made this perfect vision for him at the age of 80 or whatever. There's a documentary about it. And it's been a complete flop or whatever, but he wanted to make it. It made him happy. He's not going to be here for much longer. Okay, more power to him. But there are other people who also, you know, they started to get a taste of that money, and all of a sudden 20 years of their life went to a Marvel franchise or a Star Wars franchise, and George Lucas said he always wanted to make small, intimate films, and then he just, Star Wars.

1:03:25Like addicted to the money train? And it just became bigger than him, right? And he never, who knows, who can tell me a George Lucas film that is not Star Wars? American Graffiti. After Star Wars. Sorry. Tell me a film he made after Star Wars. He had a really hard time doing that, so it became a burden. So sometimes the success can then be a burden. I have that now. I mean, the podcasting I do is so successful, and Tim Ferriss has been going through this. Lex Friedman went through it. The podcast that they did became so successful. They had a hard time having other things in their life that they wanted to pursue.

1:04:02So Lex was telling me he wants to do a startup. I think he's been pretty public about that. And he's trying to balance being a famous podcaster, making tons of money from the ads and doing that. Tim Versailles, so I just tweeted, do you want me to do more podcasts or do you want me to do less podcasts with higher video production? And, you know, when I was going to text him, I'm going to text him, do what you want, Tim. I want you to do what you want. Now, I want you to do more audio once because I don't care about video. But he's looking at all the other podcasters who came 10 years after him and did this like high production.

1:04:33I think he's got knocked off his game. where he's like, what do I need to do here? You need to do what you enjoy. Do what you love, right? That's the freedom it gives you. And you don't have that early in your career. I don't want to presume the question behind the question, but if you read biographies of successful entrepreneurs who have made a lot of money when they're much older, they all say, I miss being young and building something, and I miss building something with a group of people. And not having the resources. Yeah, and like the money. Obviously, it's a luxury statement to say they don't care about the money because they're very wealthy, so they don't have to worry about the money.

1:05:08But they all say the same thing, which is like building something with a group of people that you enjoy spending time with is the thing they miss more than anything else. Here's the other thing I'll tell you. I realized this after a couple of friends of mine passed away. Me going skiing on the mountain, me owning a ski house. I own a really nice ski house. I can ski in and ski out of Lake Tahoe. And I ski 20 days a year in Lake Tahoe. And then there's somebody else who does 50 days a year, and they're broke. They bought the same Epic Pass I did for$800, you know, season pass. And they get twice as many days as me, three times as many days as me.

1:05:46I'm jealous of that person. They get to ski three times as much. And I was trying to explain this to somebody. Like, when I go to dinner with Elon, myself, and then somebody who's broke, and then somebody else. The steak that we order tastes the same to everybody. And there is an upper bound in almost all of these things that you can buy. And we both drive the same car, a Model Y, because it has full self-driving. It's the best car ever made. But he also owns a really nice Porsche, and I'm buying this super nice Corvette Hypercar. And it's like... That's your money. Well, no, I'm just like... But I'm not going to drive it.

1:06:23So I talked to him about his Porsche. That was his dream car, and you're selling it now. I'm selling it now. And so that tells you everything you need to know. It's like. 15-year-old me is very pleased that I bought the Porsche. Yeah. And now 46-year-old me is like, okay, done. Done. You hit the checkbox and you move on. It's a great question. Another amazing episode. Thank you to William Barnes. Thank you to Amanda Bradford. Thank you to our friends at Jetro. And congratulations to all of the great founders in the first cohort of Founder University. If you want to learn more, go to founder.university.

1:06:51You'll see a link for Saudi, Tokyo, Japan, and the U.S. programs. Apply. What do you got to lose? Maybe you'll be the next founder that changes the world and that we invest in and hopefully we can join you on that journey. See you next time on The Swing Startups. Bye bye.