Lessons from 25 years in business

`0:22:56`

what was it like in the early days? What's it like now? All the new things that are harder weren't harder before, and now they're hard today. Do I like doing this kind of hard work, or would I rather do...? You just amass this history, and so you tend to just call back to it, and look back to it. So you opine for the early days, or you reminisce, I should say. "Yeah, it was so much easier when we were 20 people." "Yeah, but we weren't doing this, and times were different, and you can't go back anyway." But, it's interesting. Next year I'll be 50. We'll be doing this 25 years. I'll have been running this company for 25 years. Part of me thinks, "Is that enough? Maybe that's enough." But right now, I'm really excited about what we're doing. We're doing some really great product work, probably the best we've done in many, many

`0:23:41`

years. Launching this new thing called ONCE, which hopefully we're going to build three or so products next year under that category. I would like to write another book. We finally have another idea for another book. So there's just, right now, this outpouring of energy. I'm trying to be very conscious of my energy interest. Right now, I'm getting energy from the business. There are times in the past where the business sapped energy for me. If it SAPs too much, at some point, you start to think, "Is it worth it? Do I want to keep doing this?" Right now, I'm fueled again by it. But, I don't know what it'll be like in a year from now. I really don't know. I think I'm more conscious of that than I've ever been given how long I've been doing this. Also, I always have this strange fantasy, I'm always curious, "What would someone else do with this place?

`0:24:27`

What if someone else could just step in tomorrow? How would they run it? No one's ever had a chance to run it but me. What would they do differently?" I'd have to be completely detached from it to let them really run with it. But, what would they do? I always have this curious about that, I would say. Not curious enough to find out, but still curious. It's always in the back of my head. What do you think they'd do? I think they'd probably be focused on growth. I think there's opportunities that we miss all the time. I think that we are stuck in a certain... Stuck sounds like a negative term, but I don't mean it that way. But, we're stuck in a certain groove. We do things the way we do things. We change the way we do things here and there, but we're not really jumping into a new groove. I think someone would jump into a new groove and run the company differently, maybe make