Venture scale vs. bootstrapping

`0:27:42`

a chill life. Not super stressed, growth-focused obsessed, need to build a billion-dollar company. Do you think this path is something everyone should do? Is it a specific type of personality, a specific type of product? Do you recommend people that sometimes do go this big shot venture scale route? I'm glad there are some people who do that. I'm glad that there's some businesses that- People who do that. I'm glad that there's some businesses that wouldn't have worked out had they not taken a bunch of funding and went big, clearly. And there's many impressive businesses that do that. But let's face it, those are extreme outliers. The majority of companies on this planet run like ours. They're bootstrapped, they don't have any money. No one's willing to give them a penny and they open up a shop somewhere, they do something, they put their shingle out and they launch a website or whatever and they try to make

`0:28:28`

it work. So most people are doing it our way, even though in our industry it seems like we're the outliers, but we're not. We're actually incredibly boring and mainstream, really. If you were to pick any random business owner on the street, they'd run their business like us. I got to make more money than I spend otherwise I'm out. I don't have this big cushion of millions sitting in the bank that I can just spend on things. So they're pretty, they keep an eye on costs. They think about this carefully. But yeah, I'm glad there's people who are going for the moonshot and doing it their way and doing it a different way. And the world moves forward sometimes because of those businesses and it's great. It's great and I admire them. It's just that it's not the path I would take and I think because that's not who I am, and I think this is the important point that I want to get across, is I'm not really, hopefully

`0:29:13`

I don't come off as encouraging everyone to be like me. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is this is a way to be. It's an alternative to what you're often hearing in our industry, which is like go big or go home, raise a bunch of money and get huge and unicorn status and the whole thing. That's a way. Just know though that basically almost nobody makes it that way. Really, almost nobody really makes it that way. And there's a lot more room to make it and to build a successful business, if you throw out that outlier and look at all the other places you can land as a business. So my interest is optionality. If I could land in 135 different positions and have a sustainable business, that's great.

`0:30:00`

Versus saying there's only one way I'm going to be successful or happy. Those odds aren't really in anyone's favor. Even though of course some people win the lottery. And I'm not saying it's luck. There is luck, a lot of luck, including we're lucky that we've made it. So there is a degree of that when I say lottery. But really the point is that there's only a few slots for a few companies like that at any one time. Meanwhile, there are hundreds or thousands of slots for other kinds of companies to make it if they don't go for the moon. Just to close this thought around whether, if you have an idea going the venture route makes sense. What do venture scale companies need to achieve? What investors look for that to even work out? To your point, it almost never works out. What is it you have to do for it to feel like, okay, this is a venture scale idea versus