#52, Joe Landolina, Co-Founder and CEO of Cresilon— Starting a company in his dorm room, finding ...

Welcome to From Startup to Grownup, the podcast. My name is Alisa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors, and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. Welcome back to From Startup to Grownup, where I interview founders, builders, and leaders to talk about their personal growth journeys to grow into great leaders. My guest today is Joe Landolina, co-founder and CEO of Cressolent, which makes products which stop traumatic bleeding in seconds. Joe started the company when he was 17 years old after inventing the gel technology that's at the heart of their products. Now, as you can imagine, Joe was not such a normal kid. He learned by doing in his grandfather's lab. And you'll hear the massive blooper that happened that made him realize, as Joe says, that chemistry is nothing to be trifled with. We talked about how Joe got his initial funding after posting online a 20-second video of how his product stopped bleeding instantly, and also how as a freshman he ran his company from his dorm room at NYU until they finally went out and got space. We discussed Joe's framework to vet investors and how he built relationships with investors along with a key question he asks investors to make sure they're the right fit. Joe and I talked about the Cresselin employee and how he and the team iterated to articulate what that meant and how they find the right people. We also talked about a cautionary tale of how Joe hired the wrong people in early days, not unusual in the startup world. Joe and I also talked about how he learned management skills and his theory of the pendulum of management. Crestlin's 13-year journey has been very successful, but of course there have been some downs, and Joe talked about how he handled some of the issues that they had and how he handles his own mental health. Joe is so articulate and has such hard-won wisdom. You're gonna love this discussion. So please enjoy my conversation with Joe Landolina, co-founder and CEO of Crestlin. Joe, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here today.

Likewise, thank you so much for having me on. I'm so excited to be here.

I'm thrilled. And, you know, I want to start— I like to start with the founding insight. So can you tell me the founding insight of Cressilon?

Sure. Uh, so Cressilon started about 13 years ago. I was 17 years old, and I was working out of my grandfather's chemistry lab, and I found this blend of two polymers, effectively long chains of sugar, that came out of algae that would stick to skin and it wouldn't let go until you wanted it to. And so we had this idea to take that resulting material and use it to stop bleeding. And what we have today and what we've developed is a product that can stop any bleed nearly instantly without the need to apply pressure from massive gunshot wounds to things like neurosurgical bleeds and everything in between.

That's amazing. And I love how you say you were working out of your grandfather's chemistry lab, like as one does when you were 17. I mean, I guess I would say that from what I know about you, you were not a normal kid. And if I'm not mistaken, you experimented with something and put your cousin into a coma. Is that what happened?

So I, I got really into plant-based chemistries. So, 'cause as, as you can imagine, I, I had a, a very unorthodox childhood and my, my grandfather was an ex-pharmaceutical executive who in retirement decided to start a vineyard. And so I grew up with a chemistry lab across the street from my house and a grandfather who learned lab safety in the '60s. And so his theory was you learn by doing. And, uh, and nowadays it's not terribly advisable to go into a lab and learn by just mixing things together. But effectively, from the time that I could walk, I had a crash course in chemistry. And my parents did not necessarily share that same philosophy with my grandfather. Uh, and so every time I would do something that I shouldn't have, my, my world got smaller and smaller and smaller until my parents assumed that anything that I could find in nature would likely be safe. And so I, at the time, went to the library and got a bunch of books in Eastern medicine and learned herbs and other things that you could put together. And I ended up making something that put my cousin into a very deep sleep. And I'm not sure if I would say coma, but I learned very quickly that lab research and chemistry is nothing to be trifled with. So yes, you are correct in saying I had a very unorthodox childhood.

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I guess I am curious, like, did you experience yourself as kind of an unusual kid? I mean, even saying, like, I went to the library and I looked up all these books, you know, just not something that typical teenagers are doing. Like, was there something, a drive in you, that, like, insatiable curiosity? Did you experience something different about yourself?

So I was always very curious as a kid and I was very lucky that I and my parents were relatively young when they had me. And what that meant is that weekdays, for the most part, I would spend with my mom's parents who owned the vineyard and weekends I would spend with my dad's parents who, my grandfather was a retired stockbroker and my grandmother worked in administration for SUNY New Paltz. And so, What my grandmother would do is if I, if I had an interest, she would set me up a lunch with a professor on a Saturday and I can go in and ask any questions that I wanted from the time that I was a really young age. So I had grandparents that as the first grandson or grandkid in the family, I had the very good fortune of being able to have all of the attention of 4 grandparents and 4 loving and 2 loving parents all at once. Focused on me. And so anything that I had an interest in, I was able to get. And there was a while there where my allowance was even paid in books at Barnes Noble. And so I was able to get my hands on just about anything that I wanted to learn about and the ability to start to explore. And that gave me an awesome foundation for doing what we do today.

Yeah, I can imagine. You know, like you said, It is sort of like you say, it used to be learn by doing, and the sort of culture is not so much into that right now. Like when you just got married, congratulations. Thank you. Mazel tov on your wedding. And maybe you will have kids in the future. And theoretically, if you did have kids in the future, have you thought about how you would raise your kids so that they were able to have access to these kinds of things that you were able to, which were so outside of normal school?

I said, so my, my wife Courtney and I talk about that all the time, and it's something that we, we definitely want to replicate as, as closely as we can, and perhaps maybe in a bit safer of a way than, uh, that, that I experienced it myself. Uh, but there, there's something to be said about, uh, having exposure or having information at your fingertips. And, and I think that the difference is when I was growing up, and I'm, I, I'm not terribly old, uh, but I was at the point where the internet was more poorer for information transfer where you couldn't, you couldn't actually look anything up, right? If I needed information, it was from the encyclopedia set I had at home. And if it wasn't there, you went to a library and it wasn't there, then you had to go talk to a professor to find it, at least in the way that I would experience it. So I couldn't Google the answers to the questions that I had. And nowadays I think that it's both a great thing and maybe something negative in that there's no longer that journey where everything fits into the palm of your hand and the answer to every question or most questions at least is just a search away. And I think that trying to replicate that journey for my kids is something that we're really interested in because it's, you really learn not in the result of a search, but you learn in having to figure out who to get the information from. And I think that that was the most important developmental piece for me. And, and so, yes, it's something we think about a lot. Do I have all the answers there? Not at all. Right. We'll try our hardest.

Yeah. We still have time, thank goodness. Right? Yeah. So you had this discovery when you were 17. Walk me through how that turned into a company.

Sure. And so I, when I was 17, I was an incoming freshman into NYU. And at the time, and so my, my parents, and neither of my parents finished college. And so, uh, they, they gave me very, uh, simple, uh, career instructions, uh, which was, uh, you're intelligent, so you can choose from this list of careers, which is, which was doctor, lawyer, accountant, and, and so on. And, and, and I, I, I picked doctor and, and so, uh, I entered NYU and I, I wanted to become a surgeon. I really enjoyed working with my hands. And, uh, and, but on the way there, I loved the field of engineering. And so I got into a combined bachelor's and master's program in chemical engineering at NYU, which was a 4-year program. And, uh, and I getting into that program, I was really interested in trying to get as much onto my resume as possible to set me apart from other medical school applicants. And so the very first week of school, there was an advertisement for NYU's business plan competition, which had a $75,000 top prize at the time. And I thought, you know, there's no way that we'll win this, but I have this idea that I'd been thinking about. And if I got into the quarterfinals, they gave you free business classes. And I thought that as an engineer, that would make me a better-rounded candidate, and I could use that to get an internship, and I could use that internship to get into medical school and so on. And so, I met my co-founder Isaac, who was at the time a junior at the business school at NYU, and we entered the competition and we ended up winning at the engineering school. We took second place at the business school and, and that gave us enough recognition, enough capital to start prototyping and moving the business forward. And then over the last 13 years, it's gone from what was effectively an idea in a dorm room to now what is 33,000 square feet, uh, of production, a highly verticalized biotech company, uh, with sales across 3 continents.

Amazing. That's incredible. But how did you, so you won the business school competition or the, the different competitions and then you got some capital and you prototyped the product, but was there a moment where, like, I'm picturing then of the early moments of we formed the company, we made our first hires, we, you know, had our first Space. How did that all come into fruition? Was just organic and sort of obvious to you?

So it was organic. I, I tend to be a pessimist, which is the— so in the beginning it was always, this isn't real yet, but when we do X, it will become real. And then X comes and goes and it still doesn't feel real, so the goalposts move out. And so it really, I mean, took me until the first time that our product was used in a patient to be able to say, okay, this is— we're finally where we need to be. And that was about a 10-year process end to end.

Uh, 10 years, 10 years of thinking this is not real yet, or at least we haven't quite made it.

And, uh, it— because with something that's as regulated as biotech, it, it's, it's a very long cycle before you could actually show that there's product market fit. And for us, the great thing about treating bleeding is that you can see the effects immediately. You don't have to wait around for the patient to recover. The patient is either bleeding or they're not. And if you— you can see it happen before your eyes. And that's such a powerful feeling because there's one thing to do it in a research setting, but it's another thing to actually put this in the hands of a surgeon and watch them save a patient's life with something that took 10 years to get to that point, to be in there.

Yeah, totally.

But I, the question was, what are the early stages of the company look like? And it was, it was interesting because I didn't drop out of school, right? So I finished my degree. So I started this as a freshman and I progressively became worse and worse of a student the entire time as this grew. But for the first 3 or 4 years of the company, we were dorm room based entirely. So for the first 2 years, this was being run out of a dorm room. And then we were using my grandfather's lab at the winery to do basic research and things like that and commuting up and down from there. And then we were borrowing lab space from people that we could, you know, beg, borrow, and steal from in that way. And then my co-founder Isaac and I decided in 2012, we were going to get an apartment together. And so we got an apartment with a big living room and that became our office and the the kitchen in that apartment became a very simple laboratory. And wow. And then from there we realized that if we wanted to move forward, we probably had to do this the right way. And so the space that I'm talking from right now is an old 1930s schoolhouse that's in Park Slope, Brooklyn. And we found this on Craigslist. We took it over at the time. We wanted it to just be a lab. And the week after I signed the lease here, we realized that we couldn't outsource the manufacturing of our material, which is what 99% of biotechs do. And it was either shut down the business or become a manufacturer ourselves. And we're not one for just turning the lights off when we're faced with a problem. And we decided, you know what, we'll become a manufacturer. And at that, we'll become the only manufacturer. In the five boroughs of New York. And so I remember it was Christmas Eve of 2013 and I called up the only company that was still open. There was a company in LA that was selling clean rooms and I bought two clean rooms and three months later when they arrived, we became a manufacturer. And so it's been, well, it's been a journey of learning quite a bit of things all along the way. Uh, but yeah, it started— I mean, in fact, one of the employees from that dorm room just celebrated his 11th anniversary of working with, uh, of working with Cresslon. And so we have, uh, a bunch of, uh, a bunch of people old and new, uh, that, that have come together, uh, to, to join the team to, to drive success here.

That's incredible. So once again, learn by doing, right? So like, oh, we need to do this, we need to do this. But where did you get the money to— I mean, you went to Craigslist and you found a listing, but where did you get the money to have that listing? And were you already incorporated at that point?

So we, so we formally incorporated in 2012, and, um, and so that was about 2 years after founding, or a year and a half after founding, uh, roughly. And then, um, we were— we got really lucky. And so I, um, when I was still in the dorm room, uh, we decided that I just wanted to run a, a an experiment. And so we went down the street in Brooklyn to this local butcher shop, and I was asking him when the next time that he would have fresh blood. He told us to show up on a certain day, and we ended up, we got some fresh blood, we got fresh meat from there. And I set a very simple experiment up, which is we had an aquarium pump and we pumped this blood through this piece of meat and we put the, we put our product onto it., and it stopped it instantly. And if you look at it, it's this old video that was filmed, I think, on an iPhone 3 or an iPhone 4, whatever was out at that time. Uh, and I just, I posted it on my personal Facebook. And I, I had someone reach out to me, and at the time Tumblr was, uh, was massive. And, uh, this guy from NYU said, listen, I have a Tumblr, not many people read it, uh, but do you mind if I, if I post this as a GIF on, uh, on that? And it went viral overnight. And so we went from being relatively unknown to being on talk shows. And it just, we had over 8,000 investors reach out to us to try to invest in the business. And so much so that we had to hire a full-time employee just to vet investors coming in. And that's every entrepreneur's dream. And perhaps that's not a situation that can be replicated nowadays. And we were,, both had something that could be distilled into a 20-second GIF with no audio, no text. It was just a bleed that was bleeding. It looked very severe and we can stop it. And it was so eye-grabbing, um, that it just blew up. And so that one video, uh, ended up having over 140 million impressions on it by, by the end of, uh, by the end of that run. Uh, and we were able to put together a group of investors, and that same group of investors that came in, in between 2013 and 2015, uh, as we raised our first round, I reinvested, uh, all the way, uh, through about 6 priced rounds of funding, uh, to just shy of $100 million in funding over the lifespan of, of the company, to the point now where we're commercial and likely will not need to raise additional capital. And so Uh, it, we got very lucky in the beginning, not only to have such an amount of interest, but to be able to harness it and vet it properly, uh, to find investors that would be supporters of our business. And, and so the, the vast majority of our investors, uh, have reinvested more than once into the, into the business across almost every round that, that we've raised. And, and that's been, uh, paramount to this because biotech is, uh, it, it's a waiting game in a lot of ways. And so you need investors that understand that there will be trials and tribulations and, and that have the patience and the belief in the technology to allow us to do what we need to do.

Definitely. Wow, that is quite a story. And I understand, like, kind of like a good problem to have and, and something that other entrepreneurs don't tend to face. But nonetheless, you had 8,000— you said 8,000 people express interest, is that what you said? Exactly. 8,000 investors. That's a lot of investors. And so how did you vet them? I understand you hired someone, but what were the criteria that you used to vet them and how did you create a framework where you could even at, at scale, frankly, go through those, that list of investors?

So, so that, that, that's probably enough information for a conversation on its own. Uh, but really what we were looking for is culture fit. Uh, it's the same way that we look for, that we look for employees and, and we, we have a framework that we call the Crestlon employee, right? And then someone that fits this type of environment. And what we were looking for is an investor that has a track record of investing in companies that are like ours, that is not looking for a quick win, but someone who understands that they're, they're buying into it because they're bought into the mission of the business and, and they want to see the business grow over time. And, and so, uh, and especially off of something like a video that's posted on Facebook that's gone viral, you, you get a wide range of people to come in and want to invest in the business. And so we were lucky that you can, and the cream of the crop floats to the top fairly quickly through that process. So it wasn't like we were running multiple rounds of vetting interviews, but we insisted on, at least in that first round, every single investor that came in had an extensive conversation with either Isaac or myself, if not both of us, and just to make sure that they were comfortable with us, that they trusted us and, and that we trusted them and we were comfortable with them. And, and that builds a relationship because inevitably when things change and when things don't go to plan, that means that we can have a conversation about it, right? There, there's a face behind, behind the name or behind the email, and, and we can get on the phone and, and we can work out a solution that, that's amicable as opposed to it had to be purely a business relationship.

Right. Very powerful. It sounds like actually first and foremost, you just wanted to start establishing the relationship with them so that you could put a name to the face and already have that dialogue going, which is kind of one of the first tenets really of building trust and rapport, which you ultimately will need in times of trouble. But I'm curious, like, what are the other— can you remember one or two questions you asked or what you were looking for when you were vetting them? Certainly someone sounds like someone who had experience in the space. But it sounds like you also wanted someone who would be with you for the ups and downs and had patience. How did you— are there other qualities you were vetting for? And how specifically did you vet for that?

So admittedly, this was, uh, we ran this process exactly a decade ago. And so it's been a little while since I've—

That's right.

You may not quite remember. Since I've asked these questions. And admittedly, I was also a decade younger at the time. So I'm not sure if those questions were that profound. Really from my perspective, it was just having a conversation with them and you can get a really good feel in my opinion for like off of the first 5 minutes or so of having a conversation as to whether or not they really truly get what it is that you're doing or whether or not it's, they're looking at the dollars and cents only and not the mission, right? And I think that, right, you know, we would ask questions that poked at what their personal connection is to the mission, right? Because obviously the great thing about stopping bleeding is that everybody can relate to that in some way. But what we found, and the general archetype of the investor that came in during this period of time of the business, are other individuals that had very deep-seated interest in the mission itself, right? And really love the intersection of biotech and biomaterials and or, or had a connection to New York and wanted it to be built here. But we also had a number of potential end users. So retired veterans, there were surgeons and veterinarians and dental surgeons and individuals that would come to us and say, listen, I want to invest in this business because it will change the way that I do medicine. It will change the way that I can impact patient lives. And so, That was most powerful to me because even today, when my team has a question, the first person we call or the first group of people we call are our own investors that are currently in medical practice. And we can vet them out. We can bring them into New York. We can let them play with the product because there's, again, there's no one else that will be brutally honest with you as someone that has their own money on the line for the success, right? They're not going to want something out in the market, that, uh, is, is not going to do justice, uh, to, to the mission, uh, that we're all fighting, uh, for together. And so, uh, it allowed us to build a really nice diverse group of, of investors, uh, at the angel level, uh, that really, uh, understands what it is that we do and can help the business in an additive way. Or usually when you're looking at, at angel investment, you're just You'd be lucky to find angel investors that are willing to write the size of check that you need to have in the business. And we were able to do both, find investors that are not only willing to write the check, but are able to write follow-on checks at progressively larger sizes and have those investors be value-additive to the business in some way. Yeah. And so whether those investors are opening up foreign markets for us and giving us advice as we're, as we're looking at expanding into Asia or into Europe, uh, whether those investors are saying, I mean, as an example, we're exploring spinal surgery, um, as an indication today. And we have a number of investors that are spinal surgeons, uh, and, and they're the first ones that get to play with this product. And then we bring them into our labs and they, they give us feedback and they are brutally honest, uh, because they have no reason not to be.

Totally. And also, to your point earlier, because you already know them. And they know you and you've already had a relationship for a while. So there's a comfort level there about being brutally honest, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, that's amazing. Now, something you also talked about was the Cresselin employee. Okay, so tell me about that. Tell me about how you establish that. Was that trial and error? Was that like a thing you started day one? Was that something that came later? Like how does that show up and then how does that affect culture?

So, so what's interesting is that actually, so we, we just did a, a leadership team offsite earlier this year. And this exact point was the subject of extensive debate. And because it's very hard, there's a je ne sais quoi about it. And so in the very beginning, it was a, it was one of those, you like, when you see it, you know, type of effects where you could just, especially, you know, we were hiring employees at, or people, teammates out of our university, right? And so there were, there was the type of person that was a go-getter that could see a wide range of data and pull the relevant conclusion there without getting stuck in the books, right? And without getting stuck in the theory that became the archetype for the Crestline employee, where you could just tell that as you're working, as you're interacting with people, right? When you find someone that meets that mold, right? You would say, well, this person fits that mold, right? And then they became the earlier employees of the team, right? And so, you know, we over the years have tried to encapsulate that in values. And in fact, we're in the process right now of distilling the values because we've had For about 5 years now, we've had a set of 10 values that we use to measure employees. And I don't like having 10 values because it becomes really hard to distill and to measure against 10 different factors. And so we're reducing that down to 4 attributes of the employee, and that's getting rolled out to our organization at the end of this month. But all of that is in trying to actually figure out how we can put into words what we mean by the Cresselon employee. And so, and beyond that, I think that, you know, one of the challenges that you face, especially in a highly regulated startup is that, you know, in the early years, you get the founding team plus, like the first 5 employees, the first 10 employees that come through the door. And in that case, it's pretty easy, especially when nobody has experience necessarily, right? To put a team together where you're effectively building a team based solely on soft skills. And then there comes a point in biotech where you realize that soft skills isn't going to save a patient's life. Totally. Right? Exactly, right? And so, Oh, so you need to start bringing in hard skills. And, and so I, I call that phase of company building logo hunting. And so especially in, uh, in this phase, but it's not just a biotech problem, right? But you realize you've raised a seed round, you need to go out for an A or for a B. Uh, and that means that now you need talent that's come in from other companies that you poach. Uh, and you're looking for someone to say, well, this person ran this division at J&J for 25 years. And if they can run that, then this should give you the, the confidence to, to invest a larger sum into our, into our business. And so what you end up doing is you shift the culture really significantly. And we spoke a little bit about this, uh, on the, on that quick clip, uh, that we had a few weeks ago. Uh, but, uh, the point there is that you end up shaking up the culture a lot. And, and so it's necessary because you need to start bringing in outside employees employees from other organizations, but you get this change. And, and then at some point, once you've hit those initial milestones, you're done logo hunting, right? You've built enough of an ethos within the company, uh, to mean that you no longer need to validate the business based on the logos that people are bringing in, right? That there's— you have to focus on hiring only for the blend of hard skills and soft skills. And so In the long approval timeline of biotech, those things get stretched out, right? So these aren't happening over months. This is happening over the period of years, right? Where our logo hunting campaign was 5 years long, give or take, to, to build that skill set. Uh, and so now what we're doing is we're in the next phase of that, uh, which is really looking to tighten up, uh, what those cultural aspects are and make sure that, uh, we're not We're hiring always at all levels of the organization. So today we have about 75 employees, which is very lean for a business that's doing what we're doing, but still it's not small. It's, you have lots and lots of teams that have differences and cultural differences among those teams, among multiple locations. And so trying to harmonize the culture is something that's front of mind because it's necessary.

Totally. It's necessary. And you still have employees who you hired, you know, 11 years ago. And then you probably have employees that you hired 1 year ago or 2 years ago. And that's a very different profile, right? To your point about logo hunting versus go-getter. Like I'm kind of picturing Generation 1, go-getter. Generation 2, logo hunting. Maybe Generation 3 is maybe harmonizers, right? To use your word or something like that. And so how have you thought about maybe codifying the culture and harmonizing. Like if you were gonna give advice to someone right now to say, if you were at the stage that we were at and you were really looking to harmonize all that and also create a template for the Cressland employee that you wanna bring in, what specific advice would you have?

So what it is, is you have to, you have to lead with your values. And, uh, and then what we do is we use our values as a rubric in all interviews. And so what we, first things first, we have the values rated in every single interview. So no matter who's interviewing, no matter what the position is, whether you're an intern or you're C-suite, right? You have a rating of the values for, from every interviewer.

Right. And, and Joe, I just wanted to, I'll interrupt you for one second because give us some exa— and I know you're changing your values and shortening them, but like just give us some examples of some current day values that you're rating that you're looking for.

Sure. So ingenuity is a value, right? Courage is a value. Agility is a value, right? And so these are not necessarily one-for-one things, and that's why finding exact understanding, like finding examples of these and training your interviewers properly on what the example is and what does courage mean, right? What does ingenuity mean? And give some examples there through all of that. Uh, it's really important and it takes up a lot of time, especially the leadership team's time.

Uh, totally.

But it's paramount, um, in making sure that every hire that comes in is what you need them to do. Because especially in biotech, you find this, like, as the organization starts to balloon out, middle-level managers have a tendency to say, I have a need to perform task A. So I'm going to hire someone who's an expert in doing only task A, and I'm only going to evaluate them on their ability to quickly, efficiently, and to the level that I want perform task A, and then they ignore everything else. And so I always use this kind of humorous example within my own team because it actually happened. And so this was maybe 7 years ago, and we have a robust internship program that we that I'm a huge fan of and we've done it. This is our now 10th year and we get about 800 applicants into every 1 intern that gets hired. And this cycle we have 14 interns that have come onto the team and we use it as a big feeder for entry-level positions. And so, but before we harmonized that program and standardized it, every phone screener got to ask their own questions and each intern comes in to do a specific project. And one of those projects was working on a specific lab equipment or a piece of lab equipment called HPLC, right? Which is like a chemical analysis tool. And the question, the technical question that was asked in the interview was, I want you to walk me through how you would design the piece of equipment, right? And so this was a question asked to someone who was an intern whose job it was not to design the piece of equipment, but to come in and sit down and just perform assays on this. And so at the end, you have 800 candidates that are applying for this role and 95% of them get, get knocked out by this screening question. And we bring in 3 candidates, none of whom have a great control over the English language or anything other than being able to know exactly how to build one of these machines from scratch. And at the end of it, we ended up with an intern who could do exactly one thing, which was not what we wanted.

Totally.

And so it's kind of funny, right? Right. But it's a very extreme example. But what I see is that this happens in really small ways. And it's like in company lore, right? We use this example to train our new hiring managers to say, that you want to set the questions and the rubric to be, you know, can you bring in, in every single role, a swing hitter? Uh, you want someone who is not only applicable for the role that you're bringing them in, but they should be able to, to be fluid in some way, right? To be able to fill the needs of the organization as the organization grows and develops. Because in whether it's a 20-person organization, a 75-person organization, or a 300-person organization, As a startup, needs change every single day. And so there's obviously a need to have specific roles and for employees to understand what the expectations are. But if you hire someone to do exactly something in a box, there— odds are if you run the clock forward 6 months, that box won't exist anymore. And so then what do you do with that team or what do you do with those people? And so you have to hire specifically, uh, for employees that not only can perform the tasks but can also have the soft skills to, to morph and to grow within the context of the organization. Uh, and, and so it, it's, it's tricky. And the average manager that I've had to coach through this, it's, it's not intuitive, uh, to, to interview like this. And, and so it takes a lot of effort of everyone working together because when you have If you have 15 hiring managers, you have 15 different hiring and interviewing styles. And what you can't afford to have is 15 different teams, all with unique cultures because everyone interviews differently. And so you have to spend time harmonizing that before it gets out of hand.

Totally. I think that's so profound. And I think you, you're also kind of saying, you know, by default is that you also have to know what you're hiring for, which I think is also very challenging. It sounds like the most simple thing in the world, but you sort of think, oh, we need a little associate to do this thing, or we need even a backend developer, or we need a marketing person. Well, a marketing person, it's not one monolithic thing. You actually have to sort of get into the details of what you're hoping that person does because you're looking not to have the person to maybe build the pipeline. You need to have the person to do the, I don't know, product marketing or whatever it is. And if you don't go through the rigor of defining what it is you're looking for, I think you run into the same problems of asking the wrong questions and therefore getting the wrong person.

Exactly.

Yeah. So I appreciate, Joe, that you, you know, learn by doing and learned by doing in terms of the hiring process and you saw results like the intern who could build the machine that you don't need because you already have that machine. What about, how did you learn to do other key management practices, essential management practices like delegation and giving direct feedback, maybe even how to, how to fire someone. How did you learn how to do those things as you were growing as a leader?

So the thing, like, I, I always describe myself as an INTJ leading E, uh, and so I, I'm, I'm on this journey, uh, where I, I started life as a very strong I I introvert, introvert for those of you who don't know that model. Yeah. And, and I'm becoming more extroverted over time. And what that meant is that the, like my natural state, if you'd met me before this, before this role was that I, I was never the person in the center of the action, right? Like I, I always like to sit back and collect my data and then interject only when, only when I had a fully formed opinion and I was very quiet. And so as a manager in the beginning, I was very trusting. And so I was talking about this as the pendulum of management, right? Which is that you get two types of managers in the beginning, right? You get this very like Machiavellian manager and then you get the kumbaya manager on the other end, right? And so you get like the manager who wants to give orders and say, I need to know what you're doing every 15 minutes. I'm going to micromanage you and I don't trust you at all. And whatever it is. And then you have the other manager that says, I trust you entirely because you work for me. You must be loyal to me. And so I'm just going to give you general directions and I trust that you'll get it done by time. And most managers start out on one end of that spectrum and they, you end up learning very quickly that your answer or your way of management is wrong. Right? It's, you can't be just like that, right? So if you're, if you're too much of a micromanager, people are going to push back on you and you're not going to get the results that you want. And if you're too trusting, people are going to take advantage of that and, and you're not going to get the results that you want. And so what you end up doing is you see this sort of pendulum effect where you swing to the other side. So the trusting manager becomes a micromanager and a micromanager becomes trusting. And then but not all the way. And every time you do that, you end up settling in the center. And so the way that I've described my own journey is that, you know, I started out being very trusting, I swung into micromanagement, and then I, I find I found a balance over time. And so I think a part of that, it has to be done through, uh, through trial and error, falling on your face, having things blow up on you. Uh, another part of that has to be done through having a good team of advisors. I mean, I'm unique in that I, like, my first real work experience was as the founder CEO of this company. And so I didn't really have an opportunity to see this done elsewhere except outside of the businesses that my family had. And those were by and large small businesses. And so not the, not exactly what we're building here. Right. And so for me, I had to learn it. Pretty much trial by fire.

Yeah.

When I'm looking at young managers that we're developing, what I like is the concept of sandboxing. And what I mean by sandboxing is giving a young manager the opportunity in a risk-free or low-risk situation to try out conversations or techniques to be able to fail safely. So they're not blowing something up, right? Like you don't want to In my opinion, it would be a shame to allow a young manager to ruin someone's career trajectory or have their experience here at Cressillon be negative because you're trying to get a young manager to learn on their own without intervention. Right? And so there are ways to mock up those conversations or help them wade into the water with small conversations that allow them to build those chops and see what styles work for that to be able to build a system of just memory and muscle memory responses. And we try to do that through everything. So management conversations is one thing. On the other hand, you have even like professional, like whether it's giving presentations to the board or interacting with third parties, it will, what we try to do is bring young talent in early, uh, so they can shadow and they can see and they can get exposure, um, in situations where we're not putting massive pieces of P&L on the line because we took someone fresh out of school and had them run a contract negotiation or something like that. And, and so, uh, and, and so there's a safe way to do it. It's different for every business, it's different for every individual, uh, but if for anyone who's listening who is a people manager looking to develop people managers that report to them, uh, trying to find that sandbox is critical, uh, to, to development, in my opinion.

I love it. I got so much out of what you just said. You talked about the pendulum swing and how you have to iterate between sort of dictator and trust, kumbaya, and sort of go back and forth on that and find your space. And then also the notion of sandboxing— I love that— and also making sure that they get, I think, appropriate swings. And also the idea of Shadowing, I wanna just point out, because I think that shadowing is a lost art. So the idea of having someone in the room while something's going on so they can be in the room and watch and listen and learn from that perspective. Those are great practices. I would just add, Joe, and I wonder what you think about this, the idea that different people actually need a different style of management. Like some people need, I won't say micromanager, but I will say they're less experienced. They need more specific, clear direction and guidance. And also the thing they're doing is high stakes, so they need that kind of super direction. And there are some people who are both experienced, but also they learn best by doing. So in a safe way, it is like, I trust you, go do it, is the right style for them. So it's both you as a manager learning, but it's also learning to deal with the person that's in front of you.

Exactly true. And, and so it's just what I find, however, is that Uh, the young manager, uh, will try a one-size-fits-all strategy first until they realize that it has to be, uh, it has to be a lot more nuanced, uh, to that.

Yeah.

I, but I, I agree entirely.

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, Joe, you talked about your investors and the idea that you wanted to, you know, biotech takes a while and you wanted to vet them for people who were gonna have the patience. I assume that you've had ups and downs in your business, uh, in your business. Can you share sort of like. A down, a setback, a failure, a difficulty that happened inside your company and how you dealt with it and what you learned from it?

Yeah, of course. I mean, so unfortunately I have no, uh, I have no lack of, of downs to talk about. Uh, you know, 13 years is a long time to, uh, to have down. And really it's not about the fact that the down happened, right? It, it's the fact that we recovered from it, right? And I, I think that to any entrepreneur listening to this, it's, you know, there will be doubts. And I don't know if I told you this, I read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. And one of the most surprising things as a young founder to me, and this is before I had seen my first doubt. So this is while we were still on the upswing, was hearing the story about how he had to take out a second mortgage on his house ahead of his IPO just to pay payroll. And understanding that a company so successful right on the eve of their IPO could go through such difficulty was scary to me at the very least. I just, it didn't compute, but it's true. It happens all the time, right? And in every success story, there's something where it cuts very close to the wire. And for us, I mean, I think the biggest difficulty that we had is that we had to run a lot of our development out of order, uh, with what things are typically done, right? So Crestlot is very unorthodox in a lot of ways. And the biggest unorthodoxy that we have is that, uh, we had to build manufacturing before we launched our product because we couldn't find a partner to do it for us because it just, it was physically impossible to do it. And what we excel at is doing the physically impossible. And so we had to invent this process. And so, uh, that involved getting space in New York, investing a significant amount of capital to build that space out into manufacturing, get permits, get validations, and make sure that this was up to the standards of the market. And so, uh, what we— and so one of the most difficult challenges that I had to make was, uh, we had all this media attention, we raised a bunch of capital, in 2013 through 2015. In 2015, we were ready to launch our product, and at the time we were using a third-party lab, one of the best, one of the top labs in the country, and we'd made 9 batches. And, uh, for the sake of time, I'm not going to go too much into, uh, into all of this, but it turns out that one of the critical tests for release, which is a relatively simple test, which is, is the product sterile or not,, we had sent to this lab and they told us that everything was sterile. Uh, and we were able to prove pretty simply. So in fact, the guy was able to lick a syringe, close it up, send it to this testing center. And we were told that, uh, that syringe that I had licked was sterile. And so it means, um, not, not that I have a very clean tongue, uh, but that, uh, there, there was a problem with the assay. Problem. And this is, and this is a big challenge. I mean, the, like, if you take it out, right? It's, if you have something that's novel, you may not be able to use off-the-shelf service providers in order to mesh with that. And so it dawned on me on the very eve of our launch that if I couldn't trust one of the top labs in the country to do this, we were putting everything at risk. We were putting patients at risk. We were putting ourselves at risk and our partners and our investors at risk. And so if we wanted to do this the right way, we had to do it all ourselves. And so I pulled the plug at the last minute. And so we went back to our investors and we told them, listen, I'm sorry, but we actually need 10 times the amount of capital we told you we need because we need to flesh out the team. We need to build in all of the capacity ourselves. And we did it. And so that which we thought would be, well, a little bit of money And about a year actually took from 2016 to 2020 to do with the global pandemic in the middle.

Wow. Yeah.

And so during that time it was very difficult because we had obviously proven the product worked, but we had nothing commercial. And so it was 4 years of effectively month to month seeking bridge financing to get us to where we need to go. And we got through it. We got through it primarily through grit and determination and a great group of investors that did not turn their back on us through that entire process. And we came out the other side a better business and a better business that's able to truly scale and manufacture at the capacity and the level of quality that the market needs. And we're no longer beholden on third parties. We can do everything in-house, but What it meant was that we had to flip-flop the curve, right? We had to do everything in-house that you usually don't do until you've become profitable. We had to pay for upfront. And so it was not easy. You know, it was pushing the limits. And I can tell you now exactly what time payroll leaves the account and things like that. And so it makes me, there's some karma, I think, in the younger me reading that passage in Phil Knight's book. But it got us to the point where we, you know, at the end of the day, you know, the startup rollercoaster is, you know, lots of ups and lots of downs. And, you know, not a lot of people talk about the downs, right? It's easy to look at the success stories and it's sometimes just as it was shocking for me to see that Nike had had bad times. It's not always up into the right and understanding that it's there and that you have to prioritize your own mental health. You have to prioritize your team and making sure that everything is continuing. And again, we've been very lucky. We didn't, And none of these things included layoffs. None of these things included shutdowns or, or necessarily missed deadlines or, but it, it, it was taxing.

Uh, not nonetheless, I can imagine.

And so, uh, but we, we got through it and, and, and we're, we're a better business for it.

Was there ever a time where you thought you, you weren't gonna make it? Like during that 4-year period when it was month to month and when there, when you were like, you know, watching to see when payroll left and the check clear? Was there ever a time where you thought, oh, I don't know if we're going to make this?

Oh, all the time. Uh, I mean, it was, uh, I mean, or, or at least on, on many, uh, on many instances there. I mean, there was a time when I, I had to pay payroll out of my own pocket, uh, because, you know, check didn't clear in time or something like that. And, and, and so it's, um, like, you do what you need to do to, to keep the lights on. And, and it just, uh, I mean, again, I recognize that not everyone has the support system that we have to fall back on, whether that means investors or anything else. But it's, you know, we were really lucky to have built that support system. And this is where we started this call by talking about relationship building. And this is where having those relationships really matter. And so it's it's critical that when things start to deviate from plan, you can have realistic conversations and you can build trust. And nowadays, I mean, I mean, at least you can talk to my investors, but at least my feeling is that I have a much stronger feeling of trust with our investors because they've seen that even as things were falling down around us, we were able to put plans in place. We're able to deliver to those plans more more or less. So at least with the things that we had in our control, uh, and, and it proved that even, uh, in a down case, we were able to execute as a leadership team. And, and that, uh, that builds trust when you fight in the trenches together.

Yeah, totally. Wow. So one thing you talked about I think is a very important topic, which is about how do you as a founder safeguard your own mental health? Were there times during that period that you felt like, oh wow, I'm burning out, or this is too much for me, or I need support? Or how do you think about your mental health? How did you think about it during the difficult times, and how do you think about it overall? And what are some practices you have to handle your own mental health?

So it's difficult, right? Because it, it's, uh, I mean, the, the job of a founder is nonstop, uh, and, and it takes a toll on you. I mean, even, even in up-case scenarios, I mean, right now we're in a period of rapid growth, and I, uh, realized that I burnt myself out just because we were launching in so many places and doing so many things that I was on a plane and I, we talked about it. I got married last October and I, my first real weekend with my wife at home in New York was Memorial Day. And so it dawned on me that, you know, I have to prioritize my own health. Over most other things or any other thing. And so like I have a few techniques. I mean, the first thing is that I'm very lucky. My wife and I have been together for 12 years. And so she's a great partner and having a support system that isn't at work is critical. And also having a team. So one thing that I've noticed, and as a founder, I, if we had had this conversation 8 years ago, I would've told you, or 5 years ago even, I would've told you that the founder's job is to act as a filter, right? Take all the noise from the world that's happening and filter it to the team so they can stay steady and do what they need to do. And to a certain extent, that's true. But if you are dealing with something, right? If you're fighting to keep the lights on every single day and you're not in the office and you're spending all of your time talking to investors, The team knows what's going on. And so if you're not acknowledging it, having open communication with your entire team is critical. And so, because it means that they don't think that anything is being hidden from them, right? And so, I mean, what's— and so the communication and being open about what you're going through is helpful, right? I remember one of my New Year's resolutions At some point in the middle of this process was just, I'm going to be honest with everyone I'm talking to, right? If I'm going through something, I'm just going to say it. And if they don't care, so be it. I'm going to be open about it. And I tend to, whatever it is that I'm dealing with, I just say it and it's helpful. Also finding time for myself to decompress. And so I walk to the office each way every day. And so I get, I get 10 miles in round trip and, and, and that, that's my time to sort of set my thoughts up for the day and, uh, and ideally not break a sweat on the way into the office. I was gonna say, when it's raining, problem, right?

The wildfires. Yeah.

Uh, but giving yourself the time to do what you need to do to decompress is critical. I mean, like, I'll give you another ex— like, we were dealing with a major regulatory, uh, milestone, uh, for the last couple of weeks. And, and so, you know, I made a policy with our, uh, with the teams that were working on that where I, I gave them, I gave them a cash budget to just go and do whatever they find relaxing, whether that's a spa or a nice dinner with someone, uh, or just go take a weekend somewhere. Just go do it, right? It, it expires. You just have to go find something relaxing, get your mind out of what it is that you're doing because there's this culture of burning the midnight oil and showing that you're dedicated by effectively burning yourself out performatively. And I don't subscribe to that myself, right? I mean, I tell my team, right? If they need me at 3 o'clock in the morning, they can call me. I'm almost always on, right? But I make a point of leaving to go have dinner with my wife. And so I expect that my team sets that on, or my direct reports at least set that example for their teams because it just, otherwise, like there, there's, there are enough problems in this world or in this business and you have to perform at your best in order to solve those problems or at least the problems that are within your purview. And if you're burnt out, you can't do it. And so it's just, well, maybe to recap on the rambling, right? It's finding time for yourself. It's being open and honest, and it's having the support system around you to do it. Unfortunately, mental health has a way of persisting. And so those are maybe treatments, but Nothing is a one-size-fits-all solution necessarily.

Right. And it's never one and done. Right? You've got to keep that practice up of making sure that you're getting time for yourself and finding your support system. I think that's so powerful. And I guess I'm curious, you know, be it like, if I think about kind of the mentors around you who have helped you the most, who would you say are some of the mentors that have given you the best advice or that you've been able to lean lean on the most during this period?

So it, it, it varies depending on the, uh, depending on the challenges. I mean, again, I, I lean very heavily on, uh, on my own team, uh, both for personal and professional things. I, I lean on, I lean on my wife significantly. I lean on family, um, and, uh, so I mean, my, my, my parents have run businesses. My, my grandparents, uh, while, while they were still alive, ran businesses. And so I leaned on them heavily while they were still around. And then I have a group of advisors and mentors, including one that has, so I've had breakfast with him every Wednesday morning for the last 13 years. And it's been uninterrupted. And he's now, I don't want to get his age wrong, but he's in his late 80s. Uh, and, and he was the earliest, or the first advisor that we had, uh, assigned to us by NYU. Uh, and, and he, he stuck around. Uh, and so he's, uh, he, he's been our rock, uh, through, uh, through the times. He's seen the, he's seen the, the ups and the downs and everything in between.

That's beautiful. That's amazing. Now, Joe, this is the question I ask a lot of founders, probably most of my founders on this show, but I'm particularly gonna ask you because of your delicate age, when, when have you ever, or have you ever experienced severe self-doubt or imposter syndrome?

Oh, all the time. I mean, still to this day. And, and so, uh, I, I mean, the funny— like, I think it's probably a clinical issue, but I, I tend to be sure of myself more often than not. And I think that's an affliction many founders also have that make you want to go out and run your own business. But the times when I, so I love having a team I can trust. And so the most comforting thing that I have as a founder, as a CEO, is knowing that there are certain areas of this business where I can trust my team innately to solve the challenges that we're going to be faced with. And sometimes there are certain issues that can only be solved by me. And those are the things that scare the hell out of me because even though I'm sure of myself, I used to say this is so in the situation where we needed bridge funding, right? I can, I'm very good at pulling rabbits out of hats, right? But I don't know if there are, like, if I've pulled 20 rabbits out of a hat, maybe the hat only fits 20 rabbits, right? At some point, right, I'm going to reach into the hat and it's just going to be felt at the bottom of it. And so you can see all these analogies I've used exhaustively with my own team. But the point there, right, is like, there's the— like, where you— where I feel that most are the places where the buck stops only with me. And I don't think that goes away. I think that's healthy. In a way, but it's realizing first and foremost that you need a team around you that you can trust. And so I was dealing with the challenge very recently and it hit me that, so the, you know, the oh shit email came in and your blood pressure goes up and you get that cortisol hit. And I, you know, my response to it was I'm not going to respond right now. I'm going to, I'm going to go take a walk and just think through things. And because again, one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got was if you ever have a hard decision to make, sleep on it. And if the option isn't there in the morning, it's not an option you wanted to take anyway. And so, and that's almost always true. And so, but by the time that I'd come back from my walk, my team had sent me a briefing and answered all the questions for me. And, and, and so, and, and it hit me, uh, that my initial response as the CEO was that I had to solve this problem because it was big and it was existential and it needed to be solved. And then I realized that in fact, this person was the, this guy that's been around for 11 years, right? Uh, you know, he had already like he took the brunt of it, right? And he controlled the situation. He broke the big problem down into small solvable problems and put a plan in action and had already put at least the P&L and his organization that he has control on or over in lockstep to solve the challenges. And it made me realize in times like that, that that is the, that's the key in building a good team around you. Is realizing that in many, as many areas as possible, you can have that support, you can have that trust, and you can have those people that watch your back. And so it's kind of a double-edged sword. So I've been feeling it less more recently because we've done a really good, we've put a lot of effort into empowering the team that we have around us and that's, I haven't had that for the longest time, even if the team was the same people. It was, yeah, it took a long time, uh, to, to get into the swing of that. And, and, and we're, we're just starting to hit that stride now.

Yeah, that's amazing. So it sounds like, and I, I'd like to know what your advice to other founders is to also handle their own feelings of imposter syndrome, but it sounds like having the right team around you is one of the keys that really makes that work for you.

In my opinion, yes. I mean, it's really about realizing that, A, that there's a reason why you're doing what you're doing, right? And so the, and understanding that everyone feels imposter syndrome and it's just, it's, you know, I feel it, my wife feels it, my team feels it. And if everyone feels that it must be something that's normal. And so realizing that it's normal to feel like an imposter is the first step to resolving it. And I think the thing that shook me out of it is when you're used to being the one to solve all of the problems, when you can find people to put around you that will help you solve those problems and having the trust and the confidence in them to finally let go and delegate on those issues is critical. And so it starts to show you that you can do that and it's a process that you can't do that right away. And in fact, in the early stages, like there should be founder involvement in most things. And, but as you, as the organization starts to get bigger, I say this all the time, is that I failed as a CEO if I haven't built an organization that I'm separable from. And so, and that's a hard process to go through, but 13 years in, it needs to be something that I'm thinking of is that I can't have teams that are entirely dependent on me to do their jobs. They, they have to be able to do something, uh, if I, you know, get hit by a bus tomorrow or something else like that. God forbid.

Right. God forbid. Exactly. Well, that, I think that's so powerful. And then that's, I think, one of the ways that you've grown as a leader. How else have you grown as a leader as you've gone on this 13-year journey with Cresslin?

I, I mean, in, in ways that are far too numerous to count. I, I, I just, uh, I, and it's a journey, right? I mean, I'm growing every single day, right? And it's like one of the great things, I mean, again, the benefit of having 13 years of experience here is that sometimes you, you know, you end up hitting the wrong button or putting the wrong search term into Dropbox or SharePoint and you find a file that's 5 years old or something like that. And you realize I wrote that, we did this. I like, I proudly showed this to somebody and, and so, you see, you could see your personal growth so palpably. And so it's in everything. I mean, for me, like I tend to, like I'm very New York and so I tend to have a very strong temperament and strong opinions on things. And I think that I've mellowed out. I've gotten more in control of my own ego and I've I've become more trusting of my team. I've become more able to have the hard conversations. And I remember that as a young manager, it took a lot of activation energy for me to have the hard conversations. And now I'm nearly completely comfortable in bringing things up, not in one big go with preparation, but as they come up. And it helps my teams be be better at what it is that they do. And so it's just, it's a lot of maturity that only comes from being in the trenches.

So true. Yeah.

And not sure if you could hear the Brooklyn in the background, so my apologies. There's like someone downstairs laying on the horn, so my apologies to that.

That's okay. This is authentic Brooklyn. I love it. You know, but just to ask you a little bit more about that, when you talk about like leaning into the hard conversations Is that just muscle memory and practice?

It, it just like, for me, it's not my natural state, right? I, um, like for me, I have two modes or had two modes, which is argumentative, uh, or just completely okay with everything. And that's okay in like even in a restaurant setting, which is the simplest term, right? If my order comes out wrong, 9 times out of 10, it's just, I'm not going to bother to like, if it's not a huge inconvenience to me, I'm not going to raise it. But if it becomes over whatever the threshold is, then I create an issue out of it and then it becomes, and I'm very opinionated about it, right? And so that threshold tends to be high, right? But it's two modes and that's not good from a management perspective. And so for me, I think that, and I see this in young managers all the time too, is that they tend to, instead of wanting to have negative conversations, they save it all up for a performance review where they write it down perfectly. And then you have an employee who's being told by their manager, you're doing a great job, you're doing a great job, you're doing a great job. And then the performance review comes around and they say, you know, thank you for everything you do. However, here are 12 pages of negative feedback that I've collected with a bunch of specifics. And then they get blindsided and it becomes a larger issue than it is because they feel like they're not being trusted. And so I hope I was never quite that bad as that example, but I always had a tendency to lump the hard conversations together until they got over the threshold. Meaning that if I saw a lot of little things I didn't like, I wouldn't nitpick on the little things until it became large enough to discuss as one conversation, which is okay to a point, but it's not a great management tactic. And so I've become a lot better at giving constant feedback, good and bad, to employees, and, and doing that more regularly rather than waiting for a big formal conversation. And, and it, it helps quite a bit, right?

That totally makes sense. And then also, you're not just like saving everything up for this one conversation, but then also, to your point about good and bad, it's like, oh, I know where I stand. And also, you know, you're getting like just normal day-to-day feedback. This is working, this is working, this This is not working. This is working. So it feels kind of like more naturally integrated into the day.

Exactly.

Yeah, I love that. Just two more questions, Joe. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

So you know what, I— so, so I, I could tell you a bunch of regret. Like, I could tell you a bunch of, uh, I mean, we obviously had to change our entire business model a couple of times, and, and I could say that I wish we had known to do this, but in fact, actually, there's technology we use today today that wasn't invented until 2018. And so if I had tried to do this the way I'm doing it now before 2018, I couldn't have. And so we kind of needed this time of doing it. And so, I mean, really, I needed the learning experience of falling on our faces and going through these trials and tribulations because I feel like if I had been in a strongly up into the right situation, this entire time, I wouldn't have built the character traits that I needed to do what I do today. And so I, it may be a bit of a cop-out on this answer, but I really wouldn't change anything necessarily. And so I, you know, I'm not saying we didn't make any mistakes or that our mistakes weren't major, but we learned from them and we became a better business because of it. And so I just, I, I, I, I take it all, good or bad.

Beautiful. I totally hear you. And every sort of step and every moment led you to the next moment, and that's what led you to today.

Mm-hmm.

That's, that's so great. Now, last question. What advice, Joe, do you have for other founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

So it, it's really understanding that it's a process and that it's not going to happen overnight. Uh, and that really everything we've spoken about over the course of this, uh, discussion holds true. It's about building up a support system for yourself, building yourself a group of advisors, and building yourself a safe space, a sandbox, so that you can trial this without putting your business on the line, uh, and understanding that you're going to make mistakes and that when you do make those mistakes, the, the important thing is not that you made the mistake or how you could have avoided the mistake, but more importantly, how you pick yourself back up afterwards. And really, you know, the thing that in my opinion differentiates a great business from an okay business is how they respond to those existential mistakes. And so, you know, if you roll over and say, oh well, I guess we're done now, that's not what you want to be doing, right? It's about learning from the mistakes, changing pivoting and putting yourself on a trajectory to keep growing. And so it's just embracing the journey and reaching out to others for support because it's what I find. And it's the reason why I, well, I tend to share a lot of my opinions in as many ways as I can to as many people as I can because I feel like there's this facade that happens with founders where founders want to pretend like everything is going well because they— it's maybe a hallmark of the job, right? You need to convey confidence in what it is that you're doing. But the fact of the matter is that nobody knows what they're doing until you've done it a few times. And so having that conversation, right? I've had so many founders that, you know, on first conversation tell me, oh, I've got everything under control. Or if I offer help, they act offended and roll their eyes. And then, you know, if I say, well, hey, here's something I messed up, And then you get this deluge of, you know, here's what I'm facing, here's what I'm facing. And, and so being more open and reaching out to support within your own network, whether it's you that need the support yourself or it's others that, that can be supported by you, it, it, it's critical because there's not enough of it in my opinion.

Totally agree.

Wow.

Beautifully said, Joe. What can I tell you? Thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your wisdom and your opinions and all the things. So valuable, so rich. People are gonna really, really get a lot out of it. So I just wanna say thank you so much.

Thank you. I, I appreciate it and thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.