Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPLive: Start Up School with Netflix and Kickstarter Founders, Marc Randolph and Yancey Strickler | Uncut Version

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Join Hala for a Live Young and Profiting Podcast Episode with former Netflix CEO Marc Randolph & Kickstarter Co-Founder Yancey Strickler as they discuss the fundamentals of building a start-up and sharing their tips and tricks for success   ***Meet the Moderators***   Marc Randolph -Marc Randolph, the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, and a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. As well as the author and podcast host of “That Willl never Work.   Yancey Strickler is the co-founder of Kickstarter, father of the philosophy of Bentoism, and author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World.   Social Media:   Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Follow Hala on ClubHouse: @halataha Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast. A place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halla Taha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast,

we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, And that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of XFBI agents, real estate

moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and bestselling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, had to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young and Profiting Podcast. Welcome, you guys are tuning into a live episode of Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast. I'm your host, Tala Taha.

And today we are joined by a rock star panel. I'm calling it Startup School because two of our guests here today are Epic, and I mean Epic Startup Founders. We have Mark Randolph. He is the co-founder and the first CEO of Netflix. He's also a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor and advisor. He's also an author and the podcast host

of that will never work. And we also have Yancey Strickler with us today. He's the co-founder of Kickstarter. and advisor, he's also an author and the podcast host of That Will Never Work. And we also have Yancy Strickler with us today. He's the co-founder of Kickstarter. He's the father of the philosophy of bentoism. And he's also the author of This Could Be Our Future, a manifesto for a more generous world. So today is all about getting schooled in the world of startups.

We're going to talk about how to get into the right mindset to start a business, how to come up with your next big idea. And if you guys didn't know, 50% of startups fail within their first five years. So we're going to be spending a lot of time about the key challenges to be aware of when it comes to product market fit, when it comes to funding, hiring the right people. And we're also going to go deep and talk about the purpose of business. And maybe that it's not just all about generating profits and let's get started. So let's kick it off with the guided interview. So Mark Yancey, you've both been on Young and Profiting Podcasts.

So if you guys want to go check out their backgrounds, their full stories, I've done in-depth interviews with them both. So make sure you guys go check out those episodes. But I do want to introduce yourselves to everybody in this room if they don't know you. So I was doing research for this show and I came across a really interesting stat. And that stat is that a 60-year-old startup founder is three times more likely to succeed than a 30-year-old founder. So basically what this stat says is that the older and more experienced you are, the less

likely you're going to experience failure as an entrepreneur because theoretically, if you take a lot of risks, you started a lot of business, you fail a lot, you get more experiences. And then later on, you might come out with your breakout company, like maybe company two or three. So you both are co-founders that for major, major tech companies like Netflix kick starters. I want to know what ages did you start your startups? Did you have a lot of failure first or did you guys hit success right out of the gate? What is your

perspective on failure and Mark? I know you have a pretty strong opinion on this. So let's start with Mark and then we'll go to Yancey. Well, first of all, since I'm kind of a data guy, the really interesting question is not whether you're at 60 year olds or more likely to succeed Would be a first-time 60 year-old founder versus a first-time 30 year-old founder In other words, I think the dominant factor isn't necessarily age Although of course having a little bit of maturity helps. I think it clearly is the fact having done it before because you're right You know you were saying second third time second, third time, Netflix was my sixth

time. So what do they say, six times a charm or something like that? So I totally believe an experience. And I believe in the critical importance of getting experience even before you start a company. If you're really serious about this, you should be starting when you're a kid. You should be selling lemonade. You should be starting when you're a kid. You know, you should be selling lemonade. You should be starting clubs. You should be doing magazines. You should be doing that process of trying to convince other people. They should follow you on some crazy journey.

You should figure out about how do I sell? Figure out how do I possibly raise money at these really small scales. And doing that over and over again, you're absolutely right. There is pattern recognition. And eventually, you begin to narrow down the number of things that are new to you. So you can totally focus on something that's crazy new, not the recruiting, not the fundraising, not the product piece. But what is your crazy new idea?

I think that makes a lot of sense. And Yancei, I'd love to hear your perspective. Was Kickstarter your first company? Did you have to fail a few times before you had break out success like Kickstarter? And what is your opinion on failure? Yeah, I loved your answer, Mark. I was 28 when I started working on Kickstarter. And I didn't exactly think I was being an entrepreneur. You know, and it was my first company I had started.

For me, it was just an interesting project that I just couldn't stop thinking about. Looking back on it, I had started a record label before I'd started Zines, I had a band. I didn't get any of those things as being entrepreneurial. Those were just creative projects. For me, Kickstarter was also just a creative project. You know, but when I think about why would someone succeed when they're older? I think everything that Mark said is on point,

the other thing I think about as being someone's getting older every day is just, you have a better sense of what you're good at and what you're bad at. And I think a lot of where people get into trouble as founders is they're being asked to perform in ways that just might not naturally match up to who they are as a person. And I think once you are older you have a better sense of yourself and so you're less likely to do that. But the one counterpoint I keep thinking about in this and I think about this often is if you think about like a musician, a 50 year old guitar player or trumpet player, they might be at the absolute height of their technical powers.

But yet for a lot of musicians, their best music was written in their 20s when they're younger. And even though they might be more technically proficient when they're older, there's like a passion or kind of an energy that isn't there. So just thinking creatively, I think that there is something in the youthful energy that is hard to replicate. And that does seem to diminish over time. That's really interesting. I love the fact that you brought up that when you're younger, you're more creative, you're probably also more likely to take risks and you don't have any like

institutional knowledge that's like bugging you down when it comes to your decisions and things like that. So I think that's a really interesting point. Let's talk about mindset because I think that the first step to learning how to build your dream business is really telling yourself that you can and actually believing that you can do it. And I think we all agree that not everybody should be an entrepreneur. And so I would love to understand what you guys think makes a good entrepreneur in terms

of their personality traits or the background experiences that they should have before starting a business. Why don't we start off with Yancey first this time? Yeah, I mean, it's such a different mindset, you know, being an employee versus an entrepreneur. As an employee, you're kind of waiting for things to be done for you. And as an entrepreneur, you know, nothing happens unless you do it. I mean, I remember I had a day job throughout the pre-launch days of Kickstarter. For like three years, Kickstarter was nights and weekends and more. Well, I kept a day job and the notion of quitting my day job to do this full time was a really

scary thing because I had no financial security. And once I did it, I could feel this change in how I saw the world. And it was switching from, you know, kind of almost passively waiting for things to happen to instead just feeling this compulsion that if I don't do it, it won't happen. If I don't do it, it will never happen. And it's like now that I'm on the other side of it,

it's hard for even me to articulate how big a shift, mine's that shift that was, but I did feel that real change in how I saw the world. Thank you so much, Yancy, for sharing that. Mark, I'd love to hear your opinion in terms of the personality traits that make up a good entrepreneur and what qualities you think an entrepreneur should have

before getting started. Well, and they don't necessarily need to have them before they get started. In fact, not to dissect the question. I'll get to the answer in a second. But the most important thing is don't let anything get in the way of getting started. The big danger is thinking I fill in the blank. I have to quit school. I have to quit my day job.

I've got to get a computer science degree. I need a certain skill. Anything you do, which delays that start, is a mistake. In fact, that actually probably goes into trait number one, which is this predisposition to action. I think the really defining characteristic of an entrepreneur is someone who kind of thinks less and does more, who does not go back and think about the problem and let's put

together a task force and let's evaluate. They go, fuck it, let's just figure out if there's a quick, easy, cheap way we can test this. Let's try this. Let's just jump in. Not going to stand here, looking to try to figure out a see around the corner. I'm just going to take a few steps and see if the view is a little bit better from there. I think that's the big one. And there's a whole ton of others. But maybe one other off throw out there is what I've noticed is that really great entrepreneurs

have this weird ability to almost intuitively know what are the one or two critical things they have to focus on to make the business go. I mean, and this is, don't forget, startups are notoriously under-resourced. There's a hundred things broken. You just don't have the bandwidth to do all of them. And so your ability to kind of sense that, okay, these will fix themselves. These are going to be screwed up no matter what I do. But if I focus on this one or two, I can really change the game. And then have

the ability to put the blinders on and focus on them. And it's a really bizarre kind of set of skills. But I just seem as to be one of the things that keeps coming up over and over and over again, not just in the things I've done, but in the work I've done in the last 15 years of working with, you know, hundreds of other entrepreneurs and scores of other startups. I totally agree. So both of you guys disrupted industries, entire industries kickstarter. You essentially disrupted at least drastically changed the fundraising landscape and Netflix, which is the company that Mark co-founded, disrupted DVD renting.

So I want to talk about the types of questions we should be asking ourselves when it comes to thinking about that next big idea that could change the world. And Mark, I know that you love to talk about experimenting new ideas. It's something that you always talk about, and that will never work your podcast and your book. So let's go to you first.

How can we start to think of that next big idea that may disrupt the next industry? Oh boy, I'm like gonna be, I'm feeling like Mr. Contrarian here today. I'm gonna say, stop thinking about that next big idea that's gonna disrupt the world. Listen, I don't know about you, Nancy, but listen on the day one when I started it,

it wasn't like I was going, oh yes, rubbing my hands together and grinning with glee about one day We're gonna be disrupting Hollywood. We're making our own movies and our own TV shows and they'll be this Netflix and chill thing No, you know, you're going boy this video rental business sucks and it's huge. It's like eight billion dollars. There's got to be a better way to do this But you're not thinking about Disrupting it. You're not thinking about taking over it. You're going I wonder if I can carve out Ten million dollars out of this eight billion dollar category. God that would be awesome and you're really for me anyway I just focused on Solving an interesting problem.

And it's only as you solve that when you go, oh, I've actually had a good spot to solve an even bigger one. And then you solve that and you go, oh, I actually could do an even bigger one. And these things creep up on you. I mean, listen, you know, two of the, I've done seven companies now. Two of them were huge.

And several others were pretty decent. And a couple of them were total abject failures. But it would have been impossible on day one for me to know which were which. And it wasn't like I recognized that this is going to be the big shot. Oh, this is just me trying to pay some bills. All of them started off the same. And they just kind of grow up to be what they want to be. I think that's awesome advice. Yanceh, I'd love to hear your thoughts in terms of how to come up with a good idea to start a business for. A lot of businesses start with a question like, why can't I or shouldn't I be able to?

And for us in Kickstarter, it was just why can't I as an artist just go straight to my fans to make shit? Why do I have to get approval from a record label or film studio or a grant board to get you know 10 grand that put something out to my fans and I know who they are and you know we For us as founders we experience that personally as people who did creative things But we also felt that as fans and a question question like that, you're initially just think, well, it must be there.

I just haven't found it before. You know, I just got to like overturn a rock and then when it's not there, then you just feel like, well, I guess I just have to make this. But I agree with Mark that for me, it didn't start as a big idea. There was a period pre-launch where it's like, you have too much time on your hands. You're not spending uptime building.

You're spending too much time planning, and then you come up with the kind of disrupt every industry kind of thing that you look so silly and retrospect. But generally, that's a sign that you're not building enough if you're thinking that way. But if you're starting from something that you personally experienced, and I'm not saying anything new here, but that is a good sign. And for me, I've started multiple things, you know, don't have the multiple successes at mark, but in all cases, it's been this thought of, of,

why isn't that I can't do, you know, X. And I think that if you just, just try to answer that question and then maybe talk to some other people that you think might also have that question. You might get a sense of what your MVP looks like pretty quickly. I got to jump in. I got to totally agree with that. That's simplest method of looking for this idea which could potentially disrupt the world is just basically asking yourself what's wrong. Like you said, it's that why isn't there? Why can't I? You know, that is such a powerful Why isn't there? Why can't I? You know, that is such a powerful mode.

And then the most distinct pops in your head, you just gotta go, let's try it. But I totally agree. It's a fairly straightforward process coming up with the idea. It's that next step, which I think screws people up. Well, and the good ideas are ones that you can't shake that question.

Because I've had that question, why isn't it that I can't do this? And then you never have that thought again, which means like, it's because it wasn't that relevant. But there's some things that you just can't shake. I mean, while I was CEO of Kickstarter, I had a why can't I, and it was why can't I be an announcer for NBA games or like the Oscars? Why can't my friends and I talk on that instead of just listening to the TV? And that actually ultimately led to me to create a pre-clubhouse as like a side project that I

launched in 2016. That was purely so I could announce NBA games. And so all this, you know, just solving your own problem and being curious, yeah, it treats you well. You could trust that. I love everything that you guys are saying. So question for you, Mark, I know that, you know, you didn't get the idea from Netflix because you got the, like you had wanted to start a business

and you and Reed Hastings were brainstorming all the different types of businesses that you could start. So could you shed some more color in terms of the process that you guys took to come up with those ideas and some of the ideas that you threw out and how you kind of decided that you were going to go ahead and start off with this Netflix idea and continue on with it? Like, how did you decide that was the idea you were going to choose? So the first thing you kind of have to understand is that I'm not.

It's still not, but I certainly wasn't a movie guy. So this did not spring forth from some deep passion about cinema. I didn't even call it cinema. I was just kind of a startup guy in general. You know, when the company that I was working for, the company that Reed Hastings had found that it was running, that I had joined when he bought one of my companies. When that was being in turn acquired, both of us were kind of going to be out of work, and it was kind of what's next. And for me,

it was let's start a company. Reed was going to go back to school, but of course, wanted to keep a hand in. So we had this kind of natural thing about, okay, what next? And for anyone who's done that, it's one of the most fun things in the world is to brainstorm, okay, what should we do? What could a cool business to start be? And listen, you do that all the time, you don't even have no intention of starting it,

it's such a fun, intellectual game. But in our case, we were kind of playing it for real. And the way this would work is read nice to commute to work together. And every morning when he picked me up, I got in the car, and I'd be ready, and I'd go, okay, here we go. Here's today's pitch, and I would lay one out for him. And again, these were not music ones.

They had some common denominators. They were all about e-commerce. They were all about personalization. They were all about things that I was already interested in. But otherwise they were all overlays. I mean, I think we talked on your show about the, you know, one of them was personalized shampoo by mail. Another one was custom dog food. Another one was personalized sporting goods that were made one of a kind to exactly the specifications.

But this process was almost identical each time. So I do this pitch and then we'd be driving and he wouldn't say anything. He's been looking out the window and maybe a minute would go by and then maybe a minute and a half, two minutes. But you know, I'll be patient. I know it's coming and then finally maybe three minutes in you'd turn and go, okay, that will never work. And then boom, it goes this brilliant dissertation and dissection of the idea. You know what? The market's wrong, it's too complicated and whatever. And then I, you know, I'm no baby, I launch right back at him. I've done my research, here's the numbers, here's what will work.

And we would just beat this thing up together during these 40-minute commutes. And we would just do that day after day after day, trying to find one which would at least survive the initial intellectual attack. And one of them was, of course, this idea of doing video rental by mail. My whole previous first career was in direct marketing. I had done two catalog companies and I certainly knew all about shipping stuff all over the world. This could be a way for us to actually attack blockbuster, but it was VHS and it

wouldn't work. So that got banned in the two. The breakthrough for us, which led to us deciding to actually do something, was when we heard about the DVD Which we realized was thin enough and light enough and small enough that we might be able to actually use the us male rather than having to use FedEx or DHL or UPS and Then we did that classic as we were talking about earlier in the room You know would think do more think less and just said rather than going, working on a business plan or debating this further, let's just find out whether in fact this works or not. And we went and wanted to mail a DVD to read.

We couldn't find a DVD because they were in test market. So we settled for mailing, I used music CD to his house. And when that got to his house in less than a day for the price of a stamp, that kind of was all we really needed to say, okay, this actually might work. Let's just give it a shot. I love the fact that you didn't waste time

on a business plan. You didn't spend weeks kind of, you know, drafting everything out and studying the market. You took action and just mailed yourself a music CD and was like, okay, this actually works. Let's just give it a try and you just did something and that taught you a lot more than a business plan, what a, because you just got to see if it worked or not.

Yancy, I'd love to understand if the idea for Kickstarter came first or did you and your co-founders want to start a business and then decided that Kickstarter would be the right idea, or was it like Kickstarter was just such a great idea and you guys decided, all right, we're going to have to start a business because this is such a great idea. Yeah, it started with my co-founder, Perry Chen, feedback in 2002. We wanted to throw a concert in New Orleans. He was going to bring these Austrian DJs

to come play a show. And it was going to cost him like 20 grand to make a show happen. And he couldn't do that, but he had this thought of, instead of me having to front this money, well, why couldn't we just propose the idea for the concert online and people could put up their credit cards for tickets, but they'd only get charged if the show was sold out. And that way, he wouldn't have to make a choice whether or not the concert happened. It could be a collective decision by everyone who cared. And so that was the idea for crowdfunding and for Kickstarter.

And he had had that idea about two years before we met. And he had just had kept thinking about it and sitting on it. And we met when I went to a restaurant where he was a waiter and we started hanging out and became friends and I worked at a .com which I think made me possibly the most technical person he had met and so one night after service we just started talking about the idea and talking about the concept of crowdfunding and which as a term that did not exist yet and I initially remember being skeptical, but this is like the height of American Idol.

And I was like, this sounds like the American Idolization of everything. And like, I don't know that we want to have that exactly. But in thinking about it more, what we really saw was that this is 2005, we really saw it was just that the web allows all these niches, niches, and subcultures to happen, and that the real need for a product like Kickstarter and for something like crowdfunding is for everyone who's isolated in their own little town or whatever they are, but they have this online

community that's happened to. This is a product that will exist to bring those two groups together. And we just believe so deeply in it, but we were, you know, three artists trying to start a company and trying to start a website. And this is like before tech is as easy as it is now. And so there was like three or four years of really making every mistake you could possibly make. And it being so painful because of how convinced we were of the power of the idea.

And during those years, we pitched every VC who had meet with us, especially on the East Coast. And with one exception, most of them hated the idea. You know, it didn't think the idea of crowd funding or Kickstarter was interesting. I heard a lot of people say things like this sounds like a website for starving artists, you know, artists are starving for a reason. There's already enough, you know, artists swimming in too much music and movies, all this kind of stuff. When we shared the idea with creators who are friends, yeah, they loved it. They loved it. You know, they would respond by saying, holy shit, like, can I invest money in this? Like, can I? How can we make this? Like, I would have five things I'd post there right now. And so most of our early investors were artists who directly

knew what the experience was about. And then there's just this fire that you have. And this is the fire that's a combination of creative people, my tribe, the people I care about, we all see this. And also the powers that be don't see this, they think this is lame. You know, that just drives you. And so every day, you know, we would just wake up just wanting to launch, wanting, you know, wanting it to be there, being terrified, and this is the day we wake up, and we find out the other people working on this idea, finally launched and beaten us, or something like that. And it was agonizing, getting it out the door. But for us, it was really just believing so deeply

that this is gonna work and this just makes so much sense. And we get that these money people don't understand it because they're just a bunch of rich dudes, but we as fans and we as artists, like we know that this is exactly what's needed. And now it's like rich people can't wait to throw their money into the creator economy, but at this point, it was hard to justify why an artist should be paid by the public. And just in our soul, we believe that was so important, and that we had to normalize that.

We had to socialize that and really elevate the arts and elevate creativity. That's something that's worthy of that. That's the part of the Kickstarter legacy that I feel most proud of to this day. Oh my gosh, I can hear the passion when you talk about it, and it's no wonder that it's become such a success. So I want to talk about

Yancy's philosophy of bentoism, and I think this is going to be a great conversation between you two, because I'm thinking that you guys might have different perspectives. So, Yancey, you wrote a book called This Could Be Our Future. It's all about bentoism, which is a philosophy that you created that really tries to help move the world away from the idea of financial maximization

where businesses really revolve around making profit to businesses that are led by deeper values. And so as tech advances and the field is getting level with more platforms like Kickstarter in terms of funding, I think it's getting easier and easier to launch a business. So I'd love for you to kind of explain what bentoism is so that everybody's on the same page, it's kind of a new phrase that's out there right now. Explain what bentoism is and then maybe talk about some

of the values you would like future startups to have when it comes to starting a business and what you think those values should be. And then I'd love to hear Mark's thoughts about bentoism and things like that. So, Gancy, let's kick it off. Let's give some context around bentoism. Let's do it. Youly rubbing my hands together.

Yes, so the bento is a very simple idea that I came up with. It's an acronym bento for beyond near-term orientation. And it's a very simple framework, a two by two matrix, that helps you see the full picture of any situation. And these four boxes start with now me as the box in the bottom left, what each of us as individuals want to need at any given moment. And this is the part of us that wants to feel safe and secure, that has desires, that has a desire for say, well, for it to be loved. So we all have this now me part. the bottom right we have our future me the person we are trying to become

You know that future me Becomes you know the person we want or don't want based on the choices we made at any given moment And the top left box of this two by two is now us so the people in our lives who we care about and we care about us our Decisions affect them just as there is affect us and then the top right is future us I think you about the world our kids will inhabit and everyone else's kids do. And so this very simple four boxes of NALME, future me, NALME, future us is a map to really the impact of every choice we make. Every decision leaves a footprint in all these spaces, but the issue that most of us have,

and that we struggle with, is that we really have a very limited self-awareness beyond this now-me space. We know what it is that we want right now. Maybe we can see like a week ahead. But for many of us, you know, really thinking about the future implications of our decisions is really cloudy. And most of us fail to think about the key people in our lives as much as we should. And so the bento is just a very simple tool, the simple two by two matrix that is a user interface, a way to make decisions to have all those spaces in mind. Now, what this leads to and what you're getting to, how is that once you start to see all these dimensions,

the values that are important to you begin to change a little bit. Because while it is important to now me that say we're getting paid, we feel safe, we feel secure, you know, our future me voice, they're thinking more about what kind of legacy are you going to live? What is the ideal version of you look like? How do you make decisions that are building to something you're really going to be proud of? You know, you're now us as saying, what are those core relationships in your life and how

healthy are they? And how much are they? And how much are you really giving to the people that need you? And how much do they give you? Like, how good is that part of your life really? And then future us, you know, for whatever you're doing right now, like, what is this going to mean for your kids or the rest of the world if you keep acting the way that you are?

And so this just becomes a way that all these spaces become just very active in your decision-making. And so the bento method is a way of seeing your organizational decisions or your personal decisions through these lenses. And what it does is it just widens the frame. For you as a company it means a good choice isn't just the one that satisfies like Wettelhead or Q&Goles. It's also what's the one that will satisfy like our brand ideal. This thing that we say we want to be or that we are, what's the choice that company makes?

How do we think like a future main? Or if we're launching a new product to our customers, how do we do it really seeing them as a core part of our consistency and people who have certain expectations or promises that we've made to them? Then how does this decision contribute to this ultimate vision, this futureous vision that every company is working towards, like Microsoft's putting a computer on every desktop. And so these are things that are present in our lives

or present in our companies. And the bento and the bento method is a way that that becomes very literal and very actionable. And it doesn't make it that money doesn't matter or that short-term decisions are wrong. It simply puts them in a larger context. And I think what it ends up showing are the choices that produce not just the outcomes we might want in this moment, but that are also leading us towards this ultimate destination.

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all lowercase. This is Possibility powered by Shopify. Awesome. Break down of bentoism. So Mark, I'm going to throw it over to you. I'm not sure if this is the first time you've heard of bentoism, but what's your thoughts around the belief that any decision right or wrong when it comes to businesses all about making more money, making more profits? Like, what are your thoughts about the values outside of just profiting in business? First of all, I am familiar with bentoism may not intimately, but I've certainly have seen this represented. I didn't even know, now I'm meeting the originator of it, I am familiar with bentoism, may not intimately, but I've certainly have seen this represented.

I didn't even know, now I'm meeting the originator of it, which is pretty cool. And listen, what's possibly could be said against that, but being more aware of how the decisions you make are impacting not just you and your company, but the rest of the world and not just now in the future. It's a wonderful framework for things.

And I'll certainly go on record and saying that I've never believed that the sole purpose is economic gain, certainly not individually. In fact, I spend so much time lately really trying to dispel that myth that that's what entrepreneurship is all about. Trying to fight against all of this cultural imprinting that the reason you should do this is because you can be rich or famous or whatever the media is communicating about what entrepreneurship is. It's much more a personal fulfillment job. So the challenging thing is, and these are all, these, all this sounds great, but the question really is, how does a founder put these things into action? And it's really why I counsel

so many people that you have to be so deliberate at the beginning about how you set expectations for yourself, for your company, and for your partners. And I'll just give you a simple example. I tend right now, you know, actually having you answer, I know it's the perfect counterpart to this. I mean, there's certainly many, many ways to raise money to try and support your dream.

It turns out that most of the time for the companies that I'm involved with, venture works great. There's certain aspects to it that I'm very familiar with. I know how to use it. Most of my companies are venture backed. The problem is that if you come in and say, I have this vision for what I want my company to be,

it's mission driven. But you're not clear with your investors that that's what the purpose of your company is, you're gonna have a problem. And that's what I think creates so much conflict. Because if you go to a classic venture investor, not necessarily a social impact investor, but a classic venture investor,

and they're going to invest in your company, they're not doing so because, oh, wouldn't it be great to support Mark's dream? Now, they're gonna give you money and they expect it back, and ideally they expect it back times a hundred. And once you accept that money, you have an obligation to do what you can to make that happen. And that's where you begin having this collision

between what you may want, what you may feel is right, and what you feel this obligation is to the partner who you've grown into your project on with certain expectations. I think you bring up a really, really good point. Yancy, I can't remember what the business model was called, but isn't it true that Kickstarter isn't not like, it's like not a normal company in terms of you guys are really reporting to shareholders. Don't you guys have some sort of a different business

model where you don't really need to, it's not really about keeping the shareholders happy? Well, we're a privately held PBC, a public benefit corporation. And so there you do your for-profit company that has your fiduciary responsibilities to your shareholders, but that's balanced one-to-one with the responsibility of producing a public benefit, a positive public benefit. So it's trying to evolve the model a bit, but I was really nodding along very fervently to much of what Mark was saying, especially as it gets into those, when you have those differing expectations, say, between a founder and their investors, and where that, you know, I've seen that become problematic. And I think where you see that becoming an issue is especially where an entrepreneur will fall into the

story, the media story, the socially approved story of like a big funding round equal success or this sort of press equal success or this sort of attention equal success. And perhaps chasing those things rather than what is for the betterment of the business. And that's where you might find yourself raising too much money or from the wrong investors because you're chasing a headline or chasing an idea of what you think being an entrepreneur is supposed to look like versus here's what this business actually needs. Here's what puts us in a position to succeed. And that's hard.

It's hard to escape those narratives. I certainly found it hard often while I was a CEO to succeed. And that's hard. It's hard to escape those narratives. I certainly found it hard often, while I was a CEO, to escape the narratives of what I thought a tax CEO was supposed to be. Even as I talked to my other friends who were taxeos, and we're all like, yeah, none of us live up to this story. But those stories that were told, and I think they are largely media-driven,

really have a strong effect on us. And so I think that where this gets entrepreneurs in trouble is thinking that raising a lot of money is success. And maybe it is, but that also could be that you've put yourself in a position where you have to either hit a home run or you die. And those sorts of positions that makes it hard to make good decisions, makes it hard to build that long-term value. Even if you are raising BC money, the slow nickel is better than the fast dime, I think

in a lot of cases, because these are not 100-meter dashes. These are long races you're a part of. I totally agree. Mark, did you have something to add there? I was just going to say that, first of all, I completely agree with that is that raising money too fast is so dangerous and scary because even though you may come in with this notion that I'll be great to have a nice work just unfortunately it's crying out it's locked in the closet and it's crying out to resist that temptation and which ends to accelerating before you're ready But what I was going to really say is that there is this other Problem which is that products Take on lives of their own

They grow up to be things that you didn't anticipate You know even just for example a looker, which is the company I was involved with starting after Netflix that For example, a looker, which is the company I was involved with starting after Netflix, that was supposed to be a lifestyle business. It was supposed to be small, supposed to be web-only, supposed to be all self-service, something we could just run from our houses. But unfortunately, the product didn't want to be that. It didn't want to sell for $69 a month.

It wanted to sell for $69,000 a month, which requires all of a sudden you're hiring men and women who carry briefcases and wear suits and fly all over the country. Those things are not the kind of things you can do with a lifestyle business. It's a ride. Hey guys, good to chat. Mark, Nancy, great to meet you. So good to see you again. Everybody here as well. Thank you.

So Steve Olscher, founder, editor, and chief of podcast, magazine and creator of Club Pod here on the platform. I've been in the tech world since 93 when we launched a store on CompuServe's electronic mall. That's how far back I go online. And that's eventually became liquor.com, which we exited to Barry Dillers I see in 2019. And Mark, I just wanted to get you a take on it.

And of course, so, you know, be answering anyone else who's familiar with this. It's interesting because what I have always heard, especially in the world of liquor.com, when we raised so many different rounds over the years, is the mantra was always, if someone is willing to write you a check, you should bring on as much capital as you possibly can because you never know

when the rainy day is coming. And because you know people can be so very fickle in terms of where they invest and how different industries go in and out of favor, much as you can see today. I mean like if we look at Clubhouse, I think if you look at the traffic and some of the, much as you can see today. I mean, like if we look at Clubhouse, I think if you look at the traffic and some of the things that are going on here over the last couple of weeks, especially last couple of months perhaps,

I think they'd be hard pressed to get to a $4 billion valuation today versus where it was two and a half or three months ago. So either gentlemen here, I'd love to hear your take on just that philosophy and even as it relates to Clubhouse itself, because as I said, when they raised the 100 Miller, whatever that last round was,

I don't even know if it was disclosed at the $4 billion valuation, I bet you they're pretty happy to have that in their war chest right now. I'll jump in for a second on this. It's interesting because of course philosophically, I say, no, it's crazy to raise money when you don't need to raise money.

The temptation is always suspended, there's always more delusion, it's just bringing one more voice onto one extreme onto the board, the other extreme onto the cap table. That said, I've certainly done it. I have seen people who are willing to throw money at you and said, I'm not going to say no, it's because you'd be great to not have to worry about where the next round is coming from. And it's briefly, I don't think I would take the valuation of clubhouse as any kind of indicator of anything. From what I understand, that the value, that was an insider valuation, I think that was

Andreson coming in again, as opposed to a market driven competitive valuation. And I think that whether Andrescent is able to get a share of Clubhouse, it doesn't make a difference Whether it's what the percentage they May have gotten for their investment or Put it other way. They wanted a certain percentage and it didn't make a difference On the margin what they spent for it.

For them, it's in all or nothing bet. It's either this explodes and becomes something like Instagram, something like Snap, something that ends up becoming one of the big, or TikTok, big dominant social networks, or it doesn't. And their risk isn't that dramatic, and with evaluation they paid for, it doesn't necessarily define their outcome much at all. So it's easy to say, oh, they grossly overpaid, oh, it's swung. Oh, it wasn't it great to get the money at the time. I don't think that was a consideration.

That was just basically saying, let's put these guys in a position where they can have the resources to chase their opportunity. And I think they were smart to take the money. Yeah, and it is a really interesting bit of information that I don't know if that was publicly disclosed or if that's just simply knowledge that you have around that. But how interesting would that be if in fact the valuation came from the group of people who would most benefit

from an increased valuation, especially as they looked to move to a third or fourth round or whatever that might be, where they're actually setting the valuation. I mean, that's kind of where I think the independent entrepreneur at this point, especially the smaller businesses that are looking to grow, really get caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of the financial instruments and the complexity of the game here.

And arguably one could say that the average owner, the average CEO, the average startup founder who's looking to build a business doesn't have that degree of sophistication to be able to understand how this game really works. And ultimately it does a huge disservice to so many in various ways. That's why I have job security. One of the things that I, you know, the way I spend a lot of my time is as a mentor to early stage entrepreneurs. But the whole point is it would first when you begin forming this deep relationship with

a founder. And you're really coming in and essentially becoming a partner. The expectation they sometimes believe is it all help with technology or marketing or go to market or sales. But in reality, so much of what a founder needs help with is these deep strategic decisions like that one. Who do I take money from? How much straight money? When do I raise? Who do I bring on the board? These people, a lot of people I work with, you know, they're forming a board and not only have they never shared a board, they have never run a board meeting. They have even been to a board meeting.

It's a very overwhelming thing and you're right. Decisions you make have very, very long lasting and significant consequences. Awesome. Questions, Steve. Thank you so much. And I want to get into failure. So Steve actually brought up funding so we've got that one checked off the box and that is actually the number two reason why startups fail they run out of money so I'm glad that we got to touch

on that but I want to talk about some of the other reasons and actually somebody here up on stage has a question about failure so we can start it off with that and then I'll get into some questions. Malcolm, it's got a question on failure. I'd love to hear your question for the panel. Yeah, definitely, thanks a lot. So yeah, basically I was doing a company and I've just gone through the process of resolving it after working three years on it and it definitely still burns like hell. And I found it helpful to reflect on kind of things I learned from there and like jotting them down before I kind of pivoted something totally different. So I was wondering, what is the one biggest lesson

that you guys have learned from failure in a past company? I think I've learned more than once that, and it's the same with the relationship, but that everything in the beginning is material. How things start, what those initial conversations are like, what expectations are set, conversations that might not seem meaningful, often echo, for a long time. So I think how you start, you really can't be too deliberate which is something Mark said

the other place where I just see you know I've just seen a lot of you run out of steam you hit levels of burnout I've certainly gotten there even if like a company you may succeed certainly I think everyone will experience that personal feeling of like do I have more to give to this but to me a lot of the dies cast with how things start. I'm curious what you would say, Mark. I think probably the single most frequent question I get asked is, how do I know when to give up? And the answer usually is you don't give up.

You get forced out. I don't mean forced out of the company. In other words, you just can't raise that last round of money. Something goes wrong and all of a sudden you're done, that's with a with a whimper, not a bang. And I've never really had a wind anything down. And to me, the ones that were the closest were the ones we recognize, we're not gonna make it. And it could be just because, oh, it's a great idea, but it's too soon or I just don't have enough money or I made some fundamental error too early on.

But more likely what usually happens is this is very nature of starting companies, you're starting things and you're requiring three or four dependencies in a row to go your way. You know, Netflix, if the DVD hadn't achieved widespread household adoption, if you could go on the way to the laser disk, I wouldn't be on this call today. So certain things have to break your way and sometimes they don't. Other times you go shooting up in the stratosphere, only to realize there's nowhere else to go. So in other words,

then you're kind of saying, I'm gonna navigate the soft landing. But you're right, it's not a pretty thing, but it's part of it. And I, in my opinion, kind of gives you this opportunity to move on to the next one. Awesome, Malcolm, that was a great question. So we're talking about failure right now,

and actually the number one reason startups fail, 42% of startups fail because they offer products or services that the market doesn't need. So basically there's no product market fit. So I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts around how do we determine a product that really has demand, how can we test that idea before we actually get too far down the line? Because a lot of the times we have a great idea, we think it's going to do great. Technically we can do it, we have the funding, but then there's no demand, and then that's the number one reason why startups fail. So anyone want to kick that off first?

I'll go first on this one, I guess. I hear a gazillion pitches, even existing companies in the worst scenario is the company who has a solution in search of a problem. They have this product. It's the best product, but now they're frantically searching for someone who has a problem that needs it. And that is just the kiss of death. And it's just so much stronger to reverse things and to start by really understanding what problem that you're trying to solve and deeply understanding who has that problem

and in what circumstances and who else is trying to solve that problem? Because then you really have a very, very focused search for what your solution is going to be. So much of what I work with the earlier stage companies on is these methodologies to try and validate their ideas and I don't mean minimal viable product stuff because even that I believe is building way too much. It's being able to take the concept and figuring out how to isolate the one component that's your true question and figure out how to hit that off the person who you think has this problem. I certainly know that you can get to a point where you don't have a product market fit. I'm just not, I'm just saying if you say if you're stuck, there's one thing to go. I really understand this problem and I can't find the right product for it.

But it's an excuseable if you have the right product and you can't find anyone who wants it. I love that. Go ahead, Yancy. Yeah, that was all great. I would just build on that. Yeah, especially early on, I think you want to be building for an actual customer and not an imagined customer. There might be that person that you think out there that has all these needs, that wants all these feature sets, but if you don't actually know that if you haven't had conversation more than once, then I think you might be tricking yourself. And that leads to what I think is also a step that people kind of skip or overlook, but learning how to explain

your idea in a way that other people connect with it, that they are excited by it. That in its own tells you a lot, can tell you a lot about what your product actually is. So for us, a word artist trying to pitch people on Kickstarter and we're struggling to get our demo done, that led to having to have conversations about this over and over for multiple years trying to explain the idea of crowdfunding for anyone

knew what it was. And as painful as that process often was, it was incredible for letting you know how to talk about something and how, letting you know what's actually interesting about your idea. Because you do that enough and then you see the moment that people's eyes glaze over because you're boring them or you're becoming too complicated. And you learn to tighten and you learn what it is that people are really excited by. And that I think can be like a pre-MVP process. Just can I tell a story that lets people see this

and get excited by it? And you know, that's a lot of the hurdle of getting people to care about a startup. I want to add one thing to this. I loved when you said, build it for a real person, rather than an imaginary one.

And I'm going to go further. I'm going to say, build it for one, not for many. Don't have this huge audience of people who you're envisioning this works for. It's so powerful. If you can say, I have one person that I can get to do this, rather than 100 people who are all as slightly different needs and desires. It's kind of that strategy that says that you define your market by its center, not by

its boundaries. You pick the ideal persona where you know their name, their hobbies, how old they are, where they live, what they do, what they're struggling with, and you're building it for them. It's just a really nice way to focus your product management and product development efforts. So this is related to what we were just talking about, but instead of trying to figure out a product fit, what about companies that have started offering a service or product, and it is revenue generating already, but how, when do you decide that it's not going to be viable in the long term, especially since it is generating revenue, and since you have found the product market fit? So that was my

question. Thank you. As soon as you know it, you use that is that right there is what sinks so many companies. You look at what the Fortune 50 looks like now and look at what it looked like 25, 30 years ago and they're almost completely different. And it's because these large companies, they have a sustainable business, they're making money. Oh, they can clearly see that the world is changing, but we'll wait and do it later. Right now we're doing great. And you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you end up being blockbuster. I was on the phone this just morning with the company at work. There's a big big international bank and they are fighting that all the time with they know that they're facing

threats from all sides. They know that Fintech is coming in and nibbling away in small bites but will soon be bigger and bigger bites. It's just so hard for them to get their company to take these things seriously because right now those nibbles are one and two percent nibbles. But if you recognize what customers want in the future and you're not willing to go get it, I guarantee you, you're just leaving yourself wide open for someone else to eat your lunch for you. Awesome. Thanks for that follow-up question. Right now, we're talking about the reasons why startups fail. Another reason why startups fail is because they run out of cash.

Steve brought up a great question earlier about taking on investments and things about that. We didn't really talk about crowdfunding. One of our guest speakers here is the co-founder of Kickstarter. I want to talk about all the different ways that we can fund our company. So we can bootstrap, we can go with crowdfunding, we can go with raising money. What are the pros and cons of each one of these? If you guys can kind of share your insight

in terms of how you think people should get funding for their business. If you guys think we should bootstrap, if we can, if you think we should, you know, always strive for funding. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's very outcome-driven. What you as the entrepreneur or the creator really want to see happen in the end, if you're aiming to control your business for the long term, I think bootstrapping is running a business

that operates in the black and then keeping closed control is, you know, a way to do that. But I think what's been interesting, you Kickstarter began opening up these different ways for things to get funded. But, you know, I've been very interested in, you know, the growth of crowd, crowdfunding investment and people experimenting with dowels as a different structural and organizational type.

And even for the current project I'm doing, the Bentos Society, I'm using a pay-witching member model that I'm using to fund the operations of the organization. And I'm really enjoying the idea of working within a budget that the community sets and trying to grow something out from there. And I just think that the degree of optionality that's available in funding, you know, if you want to go for a large scale, there's certainly a lot of money out there.

But now, if you're looking to take a project to a community level or to serve a specific niche on the web, I actually think that there are funding mechanisms now that you can properly work with that, and that aren't going to have this mismatched expectation. So I love the diversity of options that are there for any kind of project right now. I don't have a lot to add. Certainly Yence is certainly a tremendous authority on these alternative funding mechanisms

having, in fact, invented one of the most dominant ones. I will only say that my opinion every company should start as a bootstrap. I think that you should absolutely not ask for money from any source, perhaps crowdfunding is different, but certainly not from professional money, not even maybe even friends and family money, until you've gone out and demonstrated that the thing you're working on has some merit. You've proved some of the fundamental uncertainties and I think there's a great discipline about doing that on your own. Using your own money or using tiny bits of money which is barely pay for

what you're trying to work on. It just forces a discipline that I'm going to prove this and that once you've demonstrated it, you have not built something repeatable, you have not built something scalable, and that's what you're going to, then you know what you're asking for the money to do. Yeah, just to build on that, I mean, that's exactly what I'm doing now with bento society where there are people that have offered me money, I could raise money for this now, but to me, the worst thing in the world would be to fund something that ultimately people wouldn't care about. You know, and I might waste years of my life, and I would much rather create real meaning,

create profitability, create growth. And then put money on top of that once I know that there's something real here. To me, being trapped in something that's not working, but you have to do it, like that is maybe an ultimate worst case scenario. I would have to agree. I feel like I know too many people that always seem to be raising money for companies and then nothing ever happens. Like, no product ever comes out.

It just seems like they're in this routine of creating companies that raise money and then nothing ever happens. And it kind of seems like a scam. I really agree that you've got to bootstrap it first, see if it works. And then if you need more money, if everything's taken off, then I say raise money. But I'm not the co-founder of a billion dollar company like you guys. So what do I know?

The short definition of this is when you go in to raise money, you do not want to be waving your hands and saying, imagine if you will, you want to go in and say, look at what I've already proven. That's the point where you're ready to say, I now know what I'm building, I know what it can accomplish, I have some confidence, and I have some enthusiasm for it. Totally we're aligned on this. Yeah, so earlier in this conversation, we were talking about, when is it the right time to kind of throw in the towel and kind of close shop

that this was a failure and move on? And I think being a good entrepreneur is knowing when to quit. But there's this buzz word that everybody always says pivoting. When I know Mark Netflix started as a direct mail service, mailing DVDs, and then you guys pivoted to streaming. So pivoting is like I said, a really hot word these days, especially in COVID or post COVID. So how do you know if you need to close your business or if you need to just pivot, like what is that decision-making process like? And maybe let's start with Mark since you did it with Netflix.

Well, you would only close your business if you couldn't pivot. I mean, certainly the very first thing you're trying to do is if what you're doing is not working is trying to move to something that's going to work better. But I wanted to spell it, pivoting isn't always necessarily, it's not a defensive position. It's an offensive position too. And the reason people sometimes think that it's this defensive thing, that it's what you do when it's not working, is because as I mentioned to the person who asked the question a few minutes ago, it's because they say what needs to happen, but doing that is going to impact their current

business. In other words, it's not a question of just doing something on the side, but the very act of doing the thing they can clearly see as the future undermines their existing business. And if I, let me say two seconds, give me a quick example of what I'm talking about. So as a company I worked with, which was a large manufacturer, it sold through multi-step distribution. They sold to distributors, and they had very high price salesmen, some distributors.

And the distributors sold the retailers, retailers to end users, price cuts stepped up all on the way, but it was this dominant product. It had like 80% market share and they were raking in the money. And then of course what happens is all of a sudden someone develops a product pretty similar and begins selling direct. It's about half or less the price and begins taking very small amounts of market share because they have no brand. The other guys have the dominant brand.

So the CEO, she's an intelligent person, she goes, I see what's happening. This is easy. We'll start our own little direct consumer division. We'll head this off to the past with our marketing strength, our product strength, our brand strength. But of course, the minute the word gets out, they're thinking of selling direct, they get the call from the big distributors. Who go, whoa, you're going to compete with me? Oh, no, thank you. I'm going to drop the line. And there are $900,000 a year salesperson goes, oh, you're going to make my job harder by competing with us?

I quit. And then, of course, now the decision is not, do I do the right thing? The question is, do I pursue this direct business, which is going to represent in a good case, 5% of my revenue, and to dump my main core business by 20 to 30%. And on one hand, direct is the future. But it's a really hard thing to do because you have to go to your shareholders, if your public's even worse, and say, we're going to have down quarters, four, or five quarters in a row while we transition this business

to direct. And that is why you pivot as a proactive step. And for example, I'm sorry, I'm rambling on here, but you got me on a really good one, is that you look at the beginning, Netflix was renting and selling. And we were 98% sales. We couldn't figure out how to rent. And the problem with that was not just, oh, we can't get rental going, is that when you try and do both the same time, it's really hard.

You've got to pick one. And we go, the future is going to be renting. Sales is commoditized. We're going to lose to Amazon. So we're going to walk away from 90% of the revenue to focus on that. Same thing happens when streaming comes along. It's hard to do both. The future though is streaming. So you're willing to walk away from your DVD disc business and trash your numbers to invest everything you have in getting streaming right. And companies that don't do that either because they're unwilling or unable or scared. Just leave it wide open for someone else to come in and take that share.

The pivot has to be a offensive move, not a defensive one. I love everything that you said, Mark. Thank you. He has any thoughts about pivoting and when we should pivot in our business. I can't speak too much about pivoting, but just thinking about when to stop or when to know, when to pull the plug. I coach and work with a variety of founders. And I've seen more than once that when things are tough,

when growth isn't happening, when someone's really feeling kind of under the gun, often it's like their health will suffer. I know so many entrepreneurs who have gone through crazy health things at young ages and it's been during times of extreme stress. And that's where you really get these kind of breaking points as a founder where the business is struggling, your personal life is struggling, and it's like everything is sort of telling you that this is not working.

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Great point, CNC. I totally agree. So, guys, we're going to get into the Q&A portion of this segment. And we're going to get started with this Q&A. There's one last question that I definitely want to ask. And then I'm going to kick it over to Caitlin Elizabeth, and then if any of the mods on stage have a question, just flash your mics so that I know. And my last question to Yancey and Mark is, how much or how little should we pay attention to the competition? Like when you guys were at Kickstarter and Netflix, were you studying the competition like crazy and like assigning people to kind of spy on the competition or were you guys kind of

just operating and doing your own thing and not paying attention to your competition? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that whoever wants to kick it off first. I focused on the customer, you know, I focused on creators and I was always very aware of what all tools are creators were using, because a creator has a lot of different things they have to do, so I always wanted to know what their toolkit was about, but that wasn't specifically to keep out the competition angle. I was felt like time spent talking about competition was just it's defocusing you from your own story. If we're doing our thing right like most markets can have room for multiple players

if you're smart about how you're focused and how you execute. So, you know, for us, we would have the team, especially sales-related people, would have to focus a lot on competition because they might be in some one-on-one sales scenarios. But overall, I always felt like it was to the detriment of the company.

I could see that, Mark, what are your thoughts on this? I entirely agree. I think that it's certainly in some scenarios you have to be cognizant of what the competition offers, largely in sure that you're actually offering something to customers which is not already being offered. You have to be doing something which allows you to differentiate yourself. But you should not be focusing on that and responding to every little move. Your job, at least in an early stage company, which is what I'm familiar with,

is entirely about delighting your customers. All the rest can wait. You need to, at the beginning, just to light the customer and everything else will follow from that. Make sense. Okay, guys, we're gonna start the Q&A. So Elizabeth, I love your question. I think it's really relevant.

Please ask your question to the panel. Sure thing. Thank you so much for this room. This has been such an intriguing conversation. So my question is, how do you deal with people who just don't get your startup idea? And how did you push through the nasares

and the early stages? My startup idea came from my own lived experience being a patient, being misdiagnosed, which almost led to my death. And the solution that quite literally saved my life is a scalable solution to crowdsource health solutions. But communicating this to people who've just never been in my shoes or have never been sick just don't get it.

But our customers are fervent believers. But people who've just never been sick, investors, a lot of people that I'm talking to in the startup world, they don't really get it. So how do you bridge that gap when you know that your solution can really save someone's life? We have strong believers, strong customers, but people who've never lived that experience, like how do you bridge, do you have any recommendations on bridging that gap? Thank you.

I don't know that you can, but I think it could be that those people who have had the same experience are going to be your believers, And that's where things start. Nothing's going to start with everybody loving it. And it's just never going to work that way. But can you find those ten people, those who have many people who do connect, that one investor who did go through hell? And honestly, that's all it takes. If people don't get your story, it's hard to sway them.

Honestly, it probably takes it until their personal life, like requires them to realize it, to have that same depth of feeling. But that's okay. You don't need everybody to be a customer day one. You just need to find those people who do feel it and they will be there. I'm not sure about how to bring customers along.

I would probably agree with you. Yeah, and see, you can't. You've got to find the person who your solution resonates. But certainly if you're pitching your idea to potential employees or you're pitching it to potential partnerships or you're pitching it to potential investors, I may be a minority in this, but I just don't believe in ideas. I don't believe in your idea. I don't even know what it is. Every idea is wrong.

Almost no company, no company, maybe present company, except with Yencey, is successful doing what their original idea was, which is why getting someone to believe in the original idea doesn't really make a difference. And it's kind of the same answer I had before when I was talking about the fundraising piece of it, which is that the thing to do is to prove it to people. And I work with a lot of people who are business side, marketing side, and they're trying to confine engineer to build their idea for them. And I go, you are just wasting your time, you're never going to find that just way too hard. I said the best thing you can do

is figure out a way to demonstrate that what you're talking about is real but actually doing it in a non-repeatable, non-scalable way and then what happens is when you show them what you're working on they will be drawn in. They'll go oh my god this is amazing you're actually it actually working. And you're doing it in this completely crazy manual way. Maybe we could. And then they're in. People believe in things that are working. And sometimes you just have to kickstart, feel pardoned using the term, kickstart, things yourself. Elizabeth, was that helpful? Oh, yeah, this was extremely helpful. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Of course. Thank you so much for having the courage to ask your question.

So another question that I'd like to be asked is from Mazear. I loved your question. Please ask the panel. Hello, thanks for bringing me up. So my question is that do you think that the era of starting a company from very small setting with minimum investment, probably everything

only around time investment and enthusiasm is over. I'm asking that because I'm coming from machine learning background and wherever I come up with an idea and I want to try it myself, the first thing is that I need to have access to a large amount of data which costs money. And then I need to run it on a cloud platform to make something reasonable and again that

costs money. It is not possible to really afford implementing and executing that idea coming up with some prototype only from my own investment and my time. So that was my question. Did you guys get that? Yeah, I do. I mean, no, the error is not over. In fact, we're in the golden age. I was tempted to go, oh, boo, who? I mean, listening, you know, we did Netflix, you know, was in 23 years ago, that was hard. You wanted to do an e-commerce website. Well, you had to write the damn thing yourself.

You had to write every line of code for how to put together a website that could do commerce. You, now, all right, you're going to Shopify. All right, back then, if I wanted to serve the web pages, I had a buy the servers, I had a wire them up myself, I had to put them in the closet, I had to figure out how to cool it, how to go redundancy, how to do the switches and the bridges. Now, you got Amazon Web Services and you're up in a few minutes.

Back then, I wanted to take payments, I had to write all the software for the portals to the banks myself. Now I got PayPal, I got Stripe, I've got a million different payment options. Now these days, you can demonstrate with your ideas any good for very, very, very little money and you can do it very, very, very quickly. The distance between your idea and your ability to demonstrate there's validity to it is extremely short and extremely cheap. So don't think I have to launch my company.

You don't need to launch your company. You shouldn't launch your company. You should use your cleverness to figure out a quick way to be able to demonstrate to someone else that what you've uncovered actually will work. And then the money comes. But stop thinking I have to do all this stuff. You don't. If you're clever, you can figure out how to prove your idea works without actually doing it all the way. In fact, just doing it very, very, very simply and easily. I'm sorry, I'm being harsh, but there's absolutely no excuse for you not getting out and

demonstrating that you're talking about works. It's not going to be repeatable. It's not going to be scalable. It's not going to be big big, doesn't need to be. It could also just be worth thinking about, like Mark said, past parts of the technology industry similarly had a high, had such a high technical barrier to entry in the past

as like the computing power is for anything ML or AI related now, but you could study some of those past sectors and see what happened, how was it that they transitioned from having such a high technical bar to then having these on ramps for developers to use them? What are the products like that that could exist in this space? Like what are the sort of transitions that are needed? And maybe that's the problem you're solving. You're solving the problem of the next round of ML entrepreneurs and that's the problem you're solving. You're solving the problem of the next round of ML entrepreneurs, and that's the insight you're having by coming at it at this moment in time.

Mazear, was that helpful? Yeah, that was very helpful. So I believe that coming up with an efficient prototype of the idea is also part of the innovation. I mean, to be innovative on that side as well. Thank you. Yeah, I'm sorry to be hard. I didn't mean to be. I just want to try and knock you a little bit and go,

don't imagine what this thing looks like fully formed and believe you have to build that. There's intermediate steps which will allow you to attract the resources you need. So I'm on your side. Sure, thank you. Thanks so much for your question and good luck on your entrepreneurship journey. Okay, so we are running up on time. I want to be respectful of time. So, Yancy,

Mark, I'm going to ask you guys your last question and I love to leave all of these episodes on a high note. And so I want to know what is your one piece of advice that you would give a new entrepreneur, maybe somebody who's scared of taking the leap, they're in a corporate job, they have this security blanket of their corporate job, and they have a great idea, they feel like it has product market fit, they feel like they can handle it, but they're just scared, they're scared of going out on their own and taking that leap. What are the words of encouragement that you would give them?

Let's start off with Yancey and then go to Mark and then we can close out. Entrepreneurship is just like the pro-level path to personal actualization. The level of maturity, you will have to develop the hard conversations, you'll be forced to have, the ways you'll be forced to confront your weaknesses, but also to discover these strengths that you have. It's ultimately just gonna turn you in to a wonderful person. It's gonna be painful, it's gonna take some time, but I really feel like it's just an acceleration

of self-understanding that will just benefit you for the rest of your life, even regardless of what happens for the business itself. I love that, Mark, what are your thoughts? I gotta write that one down. The pro-level path to personal actualization. I love that. I think that if you're lucky in your life,

you get to do these two important things. You get to do the things you're good at, and you get to do the things you like. And if you're feeling that being an entrepreneur, being a founder, doing your own company is gonna give you that level fulfillment, then life is too short not to go for it. There are a huge, many, many, many ways now

to do all this stuff that mitigates so much of the risk. Don't quit your day job. Don't mortgage your house. Don't pull your kids out of school and begin feeding the dog food to save money. You know, there are ways to take this idea. You're so sure we'll work. It has product market fit and increment your way in. And you can always stop. Nothing is irreversible. If it works, if you like it, it is the most incredible way to spend your time. I'm actualized. I couldn't be happier. I have the best possible on life I could. And it's all come from being able to spend my day sitting down with really smart people,

solving really interesting problems. And it's hard to imagine someone not also wanting to do that too. But good luck with it. Oh my gosh, I absolutely loved this conversation. Thank you so much, Yancy, and Mark. It was such a pleasure to have you. I think there was so much value brought up in this session.

I can't wait to listen to it myself. We're here every single Tuesday night, 8 PM Eastern. That's a normal time for these live shows. Yancy Mark, again, it was such a pleasure. Make sure you guys follow them here on Clubhouse, follow them on Instagram. Make sure you guys tune into everything that they got going on.

Yancy Mark, before we leave, where can everybody find you and find more about everything you've got going on? Why don't we start with Yancy, then Mark? We can close the show. Yeah, I'm at ystriplur.com, first initial last name, dot com, and then you can learn a more about the bento method at bentoism.org. And if you are curious about my book or about the podcaster,

about all of my other ways I try and pontificate about stuff, kind of all things Mark Randolph, is at Mark Randolph.com and for those of you that's actually a website for those of you who haven't seen a website in a long time. But it's Mark with the say Randolph with the pH Mark Randolph.com. Awesome thank you guys so much this is Hala and friends signing off until next time have Have a great night everybody. Thank you again Yann Seymark and have a great night. Bye guys! Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive and more creative? I'm Gretchen Rubin, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project.

And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben Podcast. My co-host and happiness guinea pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences about cultivating happiness and good habits. Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness without spending a lot of time energy or money. Suggestions such as follow the one-minute rule. Choose a one-word theme for the year or design your summer. We also feature segments like know

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