The a16z Show - Stories of Startup Survival Mode

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

In this episode from February 2017, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal, former Lytro CEO (now Vice President, Subscription Services, at Google) share stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their companies survive in hard times, including making and living through major pivots, selling new products before they were ready, figuring out financing with market and industry headwinds against them, and more. From their days together at LoudCloud to Jason’s experience at Lytro, and beyond, a common theme emerges: a CEO’s job is lonely in these moments and the hardest thing about a big pivot or change might be in finding the courage to make the decision in the first place. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The story of startups is often a story of survival. What do you do when the markets go down? When your biggest customer churns, when your next major product launch falls flat. And as a CEO and leader, how do you make the right call that helps you live to fight another day? In this episode from February 2017, Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal

shares stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their companies survive in the hard times, including making and living through major pivots, selling new products before they were ready, figuring out financing with market and industry headwinds against them, and more. From their days together at LoudCloud to Jason's experience at Lytro and beyond, a common theme emerges. A CEO's job is lonely in these moments, and the hardest thing about a big pivot or change might be in finding the courage to make the decision in the first place.

Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal. I'm here with Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosen CEO of Lyrao, and we're sharing some founder war stories today, focusing on the theme of pivots, especially since pivot is one of those overused and now seemingly innocuous words that has lost a lot of meaning for a lot of people. Both of you have witnessed firsthand or driven major shifts in company direction. And so in this episode, we're going to cover what it means for decision-making, culture, product market fit, timing when you don't have that much cash left, and to how every startup is actually a series of pivots. I used to think that there were two kinds of startups, right?

There were ones where your idea worked from the get-go, and from then on out it was just up into the right and champagne and caviar, and then there were the hard ones that didn't work out, and maybe you figured it out along the way and got lucky. And I think my worldview has evolved a lot, where I think that really, actually, every startup is a pivot, and it's along this big spectrum from tiny pivots that happen at the beginning to much harder, bigger ones. If we take most, if not all of the biggest, most successful tech companies that we think about today, just about every single one of them went through a bigger, a little pivot at some point

in their history, right? You know, things like Google starting as an enterprise search company and becoming the largest advertising company in the world. That was a form of a pivot. In general, in tech, in hindsight, everything looks great. But when you're in the heat of the moment, there's always some level of uncertainty or pivot or hardship that you have to go through. Intel used to be in the memory business.

Pivoted to microprocessors. That was the legendary pivot that built the PC industry. When I think of building startups, I think of the sort of Jobsian narrative of like you have this vision and a product and you have this incredible view of the future and you're going to build your company towards that. Like next. Oh, well, yeah, I forgot about next. Or Apple, right?

Which he pivoted into Apple. Right. So when jobs came back to Apple, what was that? That was 90, 96, 97, right? I mean, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. They had a ton of products. They were all crap. As the story goes, jobs killed them all except for one that became the IMac.

And that kind of sort of worked. And then from there came, you know, the new power books that worked a little bit better. And then OSX and then the iPod and then and then. But what gives you the confidence to do that? Do you have data? Do you just have it wake up in the middle of night? You have a realization? Like, what drives it?

Andy Greve does a beautiful job of describing this and only the paranoid survive. The decision isn't actually that hard. It's the courage to actually make the decision that's nearly impossible and why nobody ever does it. Because you're basically, if you continue going on your current route, particularly if the company has got some heft and momentum to it, nobody's going to blame you for the market not being there. It's not the same kind of blame than if you go, I'm going to just dispose of all of our revenue and our customers and half of our employees and going a completely different direction. If you get that wrong, that's just such awful consequences. Even if the other path was going to lead you to bankruptcy, at least that's the mistake everybody would have made. So that's really the, I think, the challenge to it and why so many companies just wind down and never kind of make it out of a troubled spot.

very rarely, at least in my experience, are you pivoting into something that you know is going to work or that you've got super high confidence in? You're mostly pivoting away from, you know, near certain disaster for humans in general, change is hard. And when you're the CEO, it's a really lonely job. You can talk to your executives. You can talk to your board, but nobody has the data and the insight that you have kind of all synthesized together in the same way. And it's, very clear that if you mess it up, you've got no one to blame but yourself. When there are no good options, what do you do? And you're often picking the least bad. The challenge of the loud cloud pivot was we had built this company. It had tremendous momentum. We went from our revenue

growth, we went $2 million to $57 million in one year. It's pretty huge. And from five of us to about 650 employees in the same time. So just a year. In a year. And the business At the time was basically like a precursor to AWS. Just 10 years too early. Exactly. Timing, damn it. And we had taken the company public. We had a lot of customers, you know, and we had 500 people, I think, at the time, working the company.

And look, the stock market had not yet given up on us, although they were starting to, you know, we were thinking about $200 million at the time. So also understand how fast it happened. So we founded the company in 1999. we went public in 18 months later, and then we pivoted the whole thing 12 months after that. After IPO. After IPO. So, you know, you're out there four quarters, and then you change the whole business. That was something.

But, you know, it was one of those things where we went to look at a company called Data Return. We were in trouble. We knew we were going to, you know, it was going to be hard not to run out of cash, even though we had over $100 million in the bank at the time, because just, the nature of the market, there was an oversupply of these kinds of services. Pricing was below cost, all that kind of thing. And we looked at this company that was just like us, but probably 18 months ahead of us. They were very close to bankruptcy. And we were looking at them to acquire them because we were going to mix all the expenses together, you know, kind of cut cost, whatever,

save some money. You have two expense structures that are overlapping, and one kind of combined set of customers, so you double the number of customers and then you get efficiencies out of the cost structure and whatever. This is an en vogue play in the late 90s, right, where you take two businesses that really aren't working that well separately, and you put them together and you hope that magically together and with more customers, less cost, they're going to start working. I remember I had taken my first vacation. It was a three-day vacation. Three-day.

I started the company. Took the family to Ashland, Oregon. That was as far as I was willing to go to see. like the Shakespeare place. And I got a call from John O'Farrell, who was running a business development for us. And he's like, Ben, we're sitting here talking about this data return deal. And all of us are going, that company looks like we're going to look in 18 months if we don't do something. And if we do it with, if we do this, it will probably get there faster. And I said, you know, that's exactly what I was thinking. But it was like, like, weird science fiction. Where did you take that call by the way? Where you just like outside?

like a playhouse. Yeah, I was just standing outside, like talking to him on the phone. So, you know, I said, go ahead, kill the deal. And I came back. And I couldn't think about anything, but, like, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. And off of that, we started this project called Oxide, which was basically take the opsware out of Loud Cloud, take the software out of the cloud computing business, the software that ran it and like make it its own product.

That's basically decoupling the software as a service from the actual software platform that ran the data centers? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, and it was like a very hard project. And, you know, we had weird things like servers in the building were named in the software code and hardwareed. Oh, shit, yeah. So we had all kinds of, and the user interfaces were ridiculous and all that kind of thing.

But so we go to do that. And immediately, like, a lot of the smart people in the company were like, what are we doing? We can't be in the software business and in the cloud computing business. And, of course, in the back of my mind, I was like, I'm trying to get out of the cloud computing business. You're 10 years too really. Yeah. At that point, it was pretty clear to me that we needed another path. And then a few things happened that caused us to get there much faster.

Our largest customer went out of business, Atreacts, which made it impossible. for us to raise any money. They had us $25 million at the time. So they even pay you before they went into business? No, no, no, no. They went bankrupt and they paid us nothing. Well, and as that was happening, right, we were about six days away from putting some more capital in the company.

So we did this analysis of how much money did we need to get to cash flow positive? And we needed $50 million. And so it's like, okay, you know, in that point, the market cap, we were like $4 a share, so we were probably worth whatever. $400 million. Does that sound right? I guess it was. So we were worth $400 million. We could raise $50 million.

So we could raise it, but not in a secondary. We had to do this thing called a pipe, which is a private investment in a public entity, or public equity maybe. I can't remember. And so we get it all set up. We're ready to go on the road and do it. And the Monday, we're going on the road on Tuesday.

That Monday, we get the call for Matriac saying that they're going bankrupt. And this was like a city bank and Deutsche Bank built this foreign currency exchange. So we thought they were solid, but they're just like, let that thing go. And they didn't back it at all. They owed us $25 million. So now we were $75 million in the hook. And we had to disclose immediately that we'd lost our large customer because we're a public company. And as soon as we disclosed that we lost 50% of our market cap and we couldn't raise the money.

And so at that point, yeah, that was like ROTR. At that point, it was like, okay, we got to figure out how to pivot. Had you know that Opsware was where it would be at, like that there was something there? I mean, was that just like a guess in the dark kind of thing? So we had some signs. At the time all this was going on, I'd actually moved to New York to run our field operations and implementation team. And we would repeatedly have these conversations with prospective customers. And we'd pitch them on this whole big, beautiful cloud services vision about how they were going to get.

get more efficient and save cost and move faster. And every single one of those meetings would end the same way, which they would say, I like your people. I like your services. I like the other customers that you guys already have. But everybody else in your segment has already gone bankrupt. So I'm sure you guys are going to too. And then they'd pause for a second and they'd say, but you know, this opsware thing that you talk about that you used to run your data center.

It's like, that sounds really interesting. can we buy that? And so there was probably about a six-month period where we would just kind of laugh at them and say, no, we're a cloud services company. We're not a software company. That's part of where Oxide was born from was the realization that maybe there was actually a gem hidden in what we were doing. They had no idea what they were asking us for. Like what they were asking us for in their mind was not what we had. What do you mean by that? Well, look, we built a system to run our business. It was not, a software product that they could buy in their environment with their processes and their people that would work the way they wanted it to. And so the distance from getting that thing from what

we had to what they wanted was long. So that was one of the scarier parts of it. And, you know, when we made the change in the business, the very first thing that came up was many of the engineers were like, we can't ship it. There are so many other things we need to do. And I was like, You don't even know what we need to do because, like, we haven't tried to sell this thing yet. So we got to ship it and we got to try and sell it and we got to find out where the gaps are. That was a long, long journey. And I think at the end, only about 10% of the code base was the original Cloud Cloud software. I mean, to the point where for the first over a year of being in the software business after we've made the pivot,

the only way that you could install the software at a customer's site was you had to bring along a server with you from our headquarters that was already running the software. That's freaking insane. And you'd use that to clone the system in the customer environment. And then, of course, as soon as you did that, just everything would break because we had all of our IP addresses and network naming scheme hard-coded into the software. So it took over a year just to make it so you could install it. In Silicon Valley, there's this thing.

All that matters is a product. Whoever's the best product wins and this and that and the other. if you're short on product and it's going to take you some time to get there, the thing that actually can make the company survive and get a good outcome ends up being management, culture, the organization. The way we got out of it, we just had such an exceptional team and not just individually, but collectively and collectively in the way the culture work, the way the managers work with the employees, that we were willing to basically go through any issue

to get to the goal line. I have to say, see very little of that. Like people get so they just completely neglect the things that you would need to do to execute like that, but we would have died thousand times. It's like going to war, because if you have an army on the field and you have the best weapons,

it means jack should, if you can't coordinate, move, adapt, flexibly, just like go attack, defend, reposition, all that stuff. And not burst into tears. That's the other thing, right? Like, not just go like, this product sucks. What are we doing? Or, you know, like, we've got this crazy customer issue or any of these kinds of things, you know, to not kill each other. People will say, how did you guys keep going in the face of all that? Why? Because, like, it was our company. And the only way to make it through was to run as hard as you could at the wall again and again until you broke through. One recollectual. One record.

election that I have vividly is that that's that's what got us to the other side. Yeah, it's definitely a testament to the culture part because you're right. Like culture's one of those words that we just throw around, but it has this deep layered gravitas to what it actually means. Well, it's who you are. It's how you behave. It's your way of doing things. You know, it's not free lunches and yoga and dogs at work and all that other stuff.

You're right. And people get confused about that, I think. In a lot of ways, I mean, culture doesn't matter that much when everything's going great. culture matters a lot when the shit is at the fan and people, whether it's employees or customers are running for the for the exits. It's having a strong team, a strong culture, a strong belief that what kind of keeps you together and gets you through that hard part. I reread Sapiens over the break. And one of the things that just comes through over and over again is that the thing that distinguishes Homo sapiens more than any other species of humans

before is the ability to coordinate across beyond a group of trusted strangers, like trusted intimates. And that is, I think, to me, the definition of cultures to be able to coordinate all these with that culture is a glue that lets you do that. And adaptability. Yeah, exactly, which is another eco thing. But how do you give up this idea of your vision? I mean, you know, Jason with Lyra, the original founder had such a vision from his work at Stanford, that Lightfield can do all these incredible things. And that's a really tough, how do you sort navigate it when you have that technological driver? And in your case, it was cloud computing. So Ren is the founder now chairman of Lytro. He was the first.

CEO, and he is now a professor of computer science at Cal, did his PhD work at Stanford, where he finished in 2006 on lightfields and building light field cameras and really helped advance a research topic that had been going on at Stanford for about 10 years at that time. You have to go all the way back to the invention of photography about 175 years ago. If you look at how imaging works, even today, the core fundamental physics haven't changed in about 175 years. Rhana decided he didn't want to be the full-time operating CEO. And the thing about it that really, really appealed to me was it was truly a core fundamental

technology in the vein of software is eating the world. Lightfield is all about taking the constraints that have been imposed on imaging by optics and mechanics and really turning that all into software. The founding product vision was really harnessing the power of the lightfield to develop this new kind of consumer camera first, and it just turned out that everything about that strategy was not the right way to do it. You just knew right away? No. No. I wish. When I looked at the prior board decks and the financial plan, Ben was very up front. He said, you know, Jason, one thing you just got to know coming into this company is like, you're going to have to raise money. Now, the good news is

that you've got about nine months to do it. You've got a hot new product on the drawing board that looks like it's making really good progress. I'm like, well, you know, I don't particularly like raising money. I think no CEO feels like that's their favorite part of the job. But okay, you know, transformational technology, hot new product, really supportive lead investor. Like, we can do this. And so that, that's how the conversation went. And then about a week before I officially started, but after I'd already left my other job, I started really digging in with the VP of finance at the time. And I called up, Ben, I said, Ben, I've been looking at the plan and our cash. And I don't think we have nine months of cash. I think we have about six weeks. Oh, my God. That's a huge difference.

How could that be? You know, what do you, what are you talking about? I said, well, certain things even count. It turns out that for the first generation, Lytra product that had already shipped, we owed an enormous amount of money to the tune of, I think, about $4 million to are suppliers who had pre-purchased all the parts and all the components needed for the camera. That is a defining feature of hardware startups where you have to actually lock down those components in your supply chain in order to be able to plan and do a lot of that. Like, this is a unique challenge that's to put in perspective than compared to typical software-only businesses.

One of the worst things about doing a hardware company, particularly a consumer hardware company, is that the timing and the visibility that you have between your supply and demand curves is a complete mismatch. When you're building something new and exciting and disruptive, you really don't know how it's going to do until you launch it and until you start to try and sell it. But the problem is to even be able to deliver it and bring it to market, you need to make big commitments to the tune of millions and millions of dollars prior to that. And the sad, cold, hard truth is once you make those commitments, like that money ate coming back, regardless of how well or poorly your product does.

So that's why you didn't have, you were a lot more in the hole than you realized. Yes. So that was the day one crisis. And so the problem turned out to be with such a diminished amount of time and the precarious financial state that the company was in, raising money on any sort of reasonable terms or kind of market standard terms became completely impossible. I remember one of the less engaged ones wanted to give me some friendly advice. And he said, you know, Jason, I've been doing this a long time.

And what I found is that really you just need to talk to eight investors. And if those eight say no, the company's unfinanceable. And so 83 investors later, we found. 83. I still have that spreadsheet. You know, we found an interested investor. We basically changed the cap table, radically reduced the valuation. But the good news was we got enough capital between our insiders and a few others to move forward

and build what was then our hot new product that we had in the drawing board. Which was, what was the hot new product? That came after another change. The hot new product that we thought we had was the second generation consumer camera. Only problem with that is, and this is really where the pivot came, was that turned, we were still very much in the midst of what turned out to be the real problem, which was that trying to build a consumer business on light field technology was just too much too soon. Yeah, this is where I think is really interesting.

because with a very early technology, like Lightfield, just like with Opsware, the days of Cloud Cloud, 10 years too early with Cloud computing, you can go any infinite number of direction. How do you know when you're making the next pivot that you're going into the right one? Well, this one was very interesting because, so new camera, great, great product reviews. So things are looking really good, basically. We now have $50 million in the bank. I also take my first vacation for the first time in, you know, since joining the company and realized that when I'm in Mexico with my family over Christmas break, and I just cannot sleep. And, you know, I'm sort of waking up every night. Our plan A had been to go build the third generation consumer product. And, uh, and what I realized

on that trip is that it just wasn't going to work. Well, how did you realize it, though? Because your everything looked great on paper. I mean, you have these way reviews. Well, we have this press traction, PR media mention products looking great. Like how did you get that sense? So one, I definitely think that it was sort of the spider sense that we developed that I developed going through the Loud Cloud to Opsware transition where there's something, you can't quite put your finger on it, but you just know something's not working. And for us, the thing that wasn't working, I mean, it was a combination of factors, but the comparison of what we were doing was to every existing camera on the market from, you know, what you had in your pocket. Like a classic category thing. or two kind of the highest end DSLRs. And the problem when you're doing something radical and new,

particularly as an entrepreneur, is you get very excited about all the things you can do that you just can't do with anything else. So that was all fine and good, and that's what really excited the market and customers and the reviewers. The problem was you also have to at least be good enough on the expected value.

How do you do on the basic things that every other existing product does? And that's the part that I can see. Yeah, this is a classic thing that... I think any start. in any category creating field, when you're in an existing category, there's a really interesting thing you're straddling here at this time. So when you had that realization, like, what'd you do?

Yeah, so basically my conclusion was, well, we had enough money to go for our third generation, that just wasn't going to get us there. We were not going to break through. We weren't going to become a mainstream product. You'd be executing on your roadmap, but it wasn't the right thing to do. Exactly. It wasn't the right thing to do. What became pretty clear pretty quickly was, gosh, why should we spend,

all this capital building something that we're not excited about. Why don't we just take what we have and start working right now on the things that we think could be amazing? And those two things for us ended up being using light field technology and virtual reality, which hadn't yet emerged. You know, Facebook had bought Oculus about nine months prior to that, but no consumer products had been shipped yet. And then the other thing was, you know, we would hear again and again from filmmakers from big time directors and movie studios about how transformative lightfield could be in making movies and TV. So he said, why don't we put everything on that? That would have been great other than the fact that, A, we had to start by laying off about 55% of the company

in order to be able to go execute that plan because we needed different people. Second was we were still in market with our consumer products and we needed to sell those through and live up to the commitments to our customers and our distributors. And third was this uncomfortable situation of I had to go back to the board that had really supported us in this last capital raise and say, you know all that money that you guys just invested? I think there's a better way to do this. What was your guys' reaction? Because honestly, no offense, Jason. But if I were on that board, I'd be like, dude, what the fuck? This is like three times we're having this conversation. The thing that you always hope that the CEO gets to is you don't want him to lie to himself.

And in my conversation with Jason, every argument for building a consumer product always comes back to how can you sell a premium product with subpar image quality. Because image quality is the number one criteria for every single consumer. And then, you know, we kind of go, well, like, what about video? And it's like, well, video requires a whole lot of storage. And there are people who would pay anything for light field video, but no consumer is going to pay. anything for Lightfield video. And so that was it. Look, I mean, it is what it is. Did I wish we would have raised the money on that plan? Yeah, that would have been better. Why don't you tell me this three months ago? Right. It was the natural kind of thing. He was feeling it was like I should

have known. I remember that our first board meeting of the year was it was January 11th, 2015. And if I didn't sleep in Mexico, I sure didn't sleep anymore in the days leading up to this because this was the conversation where I was going to tell everybody, what I'd come to believe and what I'd realized. And I basically kind of laid out where I thought we were, what I thought our different options were, and the one that I was recommending, which was to exit the consumer business and focus on these two new opportunities. Did you already have customers in mind? I mean, did you know that you could bank on, say, two Hollywood customers, for example? Hell no.

We were a product. We were 18 months away from a product. There was no product. There was a plan to go explore. possible products. Jesus. Yeah, so we had one guy working on the cinema camera and we had me and a couple of engineers who were really excited about virtual reality and knew that there was something to be done there but didn't yet know what it was. Yeah. And the other thing was that in some ways was harder decision around this pivot than the Loud Cloud Opt for one was, was it wasn't like the

consumer business was completely whiffing and failing and, you know, starting down. Exactly. You could have continued made version three and sold it just fine. But I could see where it was going. We were going to lay a path to ruin for the company if we just kept executing the plant. And so the board was amazing. They certainly didn't cheerily, but they were stoic and they said, well, you know, we didn't invest in Lightro because we wanted to be a consumer products company. We invested in Lyrae because of the power of lightfield technology. So if there's a better way to bring that capability to market, let's go do that. Right. You're still actually in reality executing on the original promise of the research and the technology. This is, I think, very common with any company coming

out of university. They spent so much time, so carefully explaining in detail all the technology. And then you had all these people who they're explaining it to going, well, I don't understand this. I don't understand that. Why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense to me. And then with the new product, it is actually going to, I mean, like JJ Abrams, guys like that. And they're like, oh my God, this is the greatest thing I've ever. We're seeing like I know a thousand things I can do with this like right now. And so when you saw that change, you knew, okay, like even if the first product isn't right, like we're in the right place.

As a CEO, getting that early customer validation that you're onto something is about the best feeling that you can have. Yeah. When you know that something you can do is going to solve a big pain point or open up all these new creative possibilities, like that gives you a lot of confidence and courage to, to go for it. And that's exactly what started happening for us in VR and in cinema. So now you have this conviction that you could build for that audience and that they would really need what you had. You had this really unique technology that wasn't easy for someone else to just come up with. So you had a couple of advantages there. But you're also now doing an entirely

different type of hardware product. So like talk to me about some of the things in between. There's a moment right now because there's a lot of enabling factors already in place with the smartphone supply chain and all other kinds of, you know, cheap computing. You can create a lot more now than it was ever possible. Exactly. So if you look at everything from, you know, autonomous drones and vehicles to AI to things that people are doing in space to, you know, even VR and AR, you've got a class of entrepreneurs who are going after just a really difficult set of technical problems. We go after cinematography, the data rates that you need to deal with because of all the information and the, that you're capturing the light field are just insane, right? At our peak bandwidth on the, on the cinema

camera were capturing about 400 gigabytes of data per second, which is close to a thousand times more than just a, you know, even a today's professional cinema cameras. And so rather than sort of shrinking from that challenge, we started to really embrace it. But does that mean your sell? What does that mean for sales? Like, are you then selling like a, uh, a prototype? Well, so no, the, the beauty of the, of the new business model was not only did we have, you know, a much better product for a much better group of customers, uh, the business. Uh, the business model improved dramatically because the way that we worked today. You know, that inventory problem.

In both cinnamon VR, we really look much more like a SaaS company, a subscription-based company where so today we rent the cameras and we rent the hardware and we charge on a recurring basis for all the data processing, all of the cloud services, all of the software. So, I mean, it was this triple benefit. Our cost structure we cut by about 70% by just not being in the consumer business. We more than doubled our margin structure because, again, with marketing and distribution and manufacturing, a one-time consumer sale is really, really hard. And we found a way to get to a recurring business rather than a one-time business. So sort of everything is painful and uncertain and scary, since we didn't even know really what the product or the market was when we were doing it, just about everything got better.

It kind of actually ties together all the different elements of your career, from Loud Cloud to Opsware, to Ning, to Lyra. where you're at. Any final parting words of advice for entrepreneurs going through similar, both as hard tech startups or just going through any kind of change, which seems like the nature of startups by definition? I mean, the biggest thing that I would say to people is everybody who's decided to do this job or pursue this career has their own set of, you know, hard things about hard things. And I think there's comfort and knowing that you're not alone. So I think that's number one. And then number two is that I think conventional wisdom around startups and other things as you know, stay focused, keep on going, and you'll find a way when I learned sometimes, you know,

the highest form of courage is realizing that what you're doing isn't working and is not going to work, and there may be a better way, as painful as it may be, to achieve something better. The other thing is that a lot of times you'll see a CEO want to get validation on a decision like this. From who? From the board, from the employees, from their mentors, from their, And the truth of this kind of decision is, you know, you make this one all alone because you're the only one in the position to synthesize the knowledge. And so if you ask somebody, should I take like a crazy risk and decommit everything I've committed to this point, nobody's going to advise you to do that.

So you can't get validation. They don't have all the information. And so you've got to make your own decision on it. That's generally where people go wrong. It's kind of like if you're a football coach and the owner says, you've got to play this guy. you got to play that guy. Well, if you go four and 12, you're getting fired anyway, so you might as well make your own decision because you know what to do. That's really the key. And there are, you know, as soon as you look outside for the answer, you're in trouble on that one. Yeah, you know, it actually

reminds me a lot of therapy. You know, the whole point of therapy is to identify patterns in your life and try to change them. And I don't think entrepreneurs have those kinds of like therapists per se. I mean, you have your advisors, your VCs, your board, your cohorts. But I thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. because you sharing this on air probably helps a lot of people think through their own struggle. Thanks for doing it.