Using Thought Leadership in Start-Ups | Eric Youngstrom | 444

Let's talk about category creation and thought leadership. Most startups, as well as new business units within existing firms, struggle with this challenge. How do you introduce your target audience to a solution that they haven't purchased yet? Category creation and thought leadership work hand in hand., and they can help organizations, especially startups, punch well above their weight. You can use thought leadership to educate an audience, prepare them to understand the opportunity, and then help close new business. Today I speak with Eric Youngstrom. He's currently the founder and CEO of OnRamp Funds. Over the course of his career, Eric's been involved with multiple startups as well as worked within large organizations. Today we'll be talking about category creation, how startups use thought leadership, and how to engage your audience with new ideas. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership.

Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Eric.

Thank you. Excited to be here today.

So you've been part of large organizations, you've also worked in startups for many years, and where I want to start our conversation today is Why is thought leadership something that should be on the radar of a startup? Why is that a good use of time, energy, and scarce funds?

Most startups are solving a problem in a way that they believe is unique to the market, which then means they need to be able to explain what their solution is and its unique functionality and how it uniquely addresses the problem they're trying to solve. And to do that, you know, one, you need to just put a lot of time and thought into why you're going to start this business, right? And what problem you're solving and why you care about solving that problem. But then two, you need to actually tell that story to your potential buyers. And so the thought leadership piece there is how do I come up with, you know, how do I explain what we're doing in a way that helps my prospects understand the problem that they have, maybe in a way they hadn't thought of it before, and how this solution actually solves for that problem. And I guess kind of maybe jumping forward or around, part of what happens is the best way to acquire customers is through content, right? Because it's content that explains your story. It's content that tells, one, why you're trying to solve this problem. Two, what about your solution is unique and is a better way to solve that problem and is a reason for that customer to come to you. And so if you spent the time really thinking through those things and figuring out how to articulate that for your audience, that thought leadership drives your content. That content then is what drives your unique customers to come to you. And it is not a short-term marketing investment. It is not a PPC campaign that drives customers today. And you need to be doing those things. And that's where, you know, you'll be paying for some of that. But what really should happen over the long term is your thought leadership and the content that results from that the PPC becomes an amplification of it as opposed to PPC being the primary driver of new customers. And so from my perspective, the thought leadership is how you tell the story of your startup to the world in a way that then resonates and drives, you know, your market to want to come to you and engage with you and creates customers for your product.

So let's stay on telling that story to the world because I think there are multiple audiences for startup. One, it can be your target buyer, whoever that would be. Two, it could be media journalists, et cetera, where you're trying to get attention. If you're in software or certain other industries, it could be an analyst that you're trying to say, no, no, no, we've got a better mousetrap and we want the analyst to agree we've made a better mousetrap. And then it could also be investors. And being able to tell that story upfront and say, I have an idea for a better mousetrap, but I need your help to build it and take it to market.

Right. No, all of the above. All of these are the audiences that you're speaking to. And first and foremost, right, is your customers. Because if your customers resonate with your content and the thought leadership you're bringing and the approach you're bringing, then you're going to have a business that's a growing concern. Secondly, I would then put your investors because in the early stage you need the investors to buy into that as well. And they're probably actually your first audience depending on how you launched that business. And then finally, it is the media, right? Because as you build out your content strategy, a lot of that content can be repackaged in ways that the media responds to and wants, right? Media is desperate for content to go share with the world. And most journalists don't have a lot of new content on their own. And so they're looking for partners to actually bring in a perspective or knowledge or information that they don't necessarily have. And they can, you know, either fill part of a bigger story or be the story itself.

So the other group that comes to mind as well is your early hires, whether it's someone that you're recruiting to be a partner in the organization or it's someone with a specific skill set. They have to not only understand the idea but believe in the vision. And thought leadership can be used to tell that story of how the world could be.

Yeah, from that perspective, right? That's your recruiting pitch. That's the interview, right? And the interview is as much, well, depending where you are in your company size, right? The early interviews are, does that candidate have the capacity, the capability, the experience to come execute for you? But simultaneously then they're interviewing you. And so you're telling the story and sharing the passion around what it is you're doing. And so again, there are startups out there and I guess it's a little unfair here. I think of startups as being technology-based startups that are going to be VC-backed, right? So you can be a plumber and start your own business and I don't know, maybe that doesn't need a lot of thought leadership. I would imagine that thought leadership would still be valuable there because maybe there's a new way you want to go solve some of those plumbing problems. But from a VC perspective, right? Yeah, you're selling this vision that you're going to change the world. You're going to, in the case of OnRamp, you're going to help more small business owners be sustainable and reach escape velocity with your working capital solutions. And how does that happen? Because I promise you when people hear SMB and working capital and accounting, nobody gets excited. There's not a lot of passion that shows up there. But when you translate that to, hold on, that is the growth engine, that is the fuel that turns over the SMB car, and this is how we're going to go help a million SMBs in the United States reach sustainability and then grow their business beyond that, that's something you can get really excited about. So it is that translation of, look, this is a very niche problem that you might be solving or a big problem you might be solving. But you got to be able to translate that to tell the story. And thought leadership is storytelling.

And with that, something that you are speaking clearly to your audience, that you know, they know you're talking to them. And also, more importantly, something they care about, right? Because as you said, in the case of OnRamp, your company, it could be something that could put people to sleep if you're going, yeah, we're talking about details on financing and that sort of thing. Yeah, I'm chasing customers. I've got other things that I'm busy about. Don't bother me with that. Right?

Right. Or don't bother me right now with that. I guarantee you every single one of OnRamp's customers and the business owners that we support, they have passions that are not working capital accounting.

Right, right.

But they run a business. And so that becomes something they have to solve for. So, you know, having content, having, you know, this is where your website comes into play with how you present your content. That it's there when they're ready for it. And we're there when they're ready for us, not vice versa.

Well, and some of that is preparing the ground, whether you become visible to them. Like you said, pay-per-click is one way to get visible in front of people, but you want to be there long before they have that problem so that when they do and it gets on their radar, they go, oh, I know who to go to because If the building's on fire, it's harder to help them if they've got a severe cash flow problem.

Right. Yeah. And that's where I think what's interesting about thought leadership in this perspective is, and we haven't talked about this category yet, but is you're also talking to partners, right? And so there are a lot of challenges and let's use QuickBooks as an example. QuickBooks is great accounting software. But they're one of the reasons they're so great is they've done such a good job with their accounting partnerships, right? The accountants that then tell everything integrates with— right. The accountant says to the small business owner, use QuickBooks, everything integrates there, and I can go log into your QuickBooks Online and get your taxes done right away. And if you actually invest that upfront time to set it up right, it works really, really well for you. It's a great example then of the thought leadership that goes into that. But that's very specific to the accountant's needs, right? Maybe not the kind of day-to-day end user's needs, right? So it has to be addressed, but then the thought leadership has to then speak to a partner differently than maybe the media where it really is all about the SMB versus your sales team where it's all about, I've got to get the SMB to take this or I'm a partner team guy, I got to get the accountant to then sell through this product.

So let's talk about how you've used thought leadership over your career, whether with OnRamp, which is your current organization, or previous projects that you've worked on. Have you had an example that you can point to of, and this worked because we used thought leadership? And if so, can you tell that story?

Yeah. I mean, I'll give one example. We used to be in the identity theft world or identity protection world against identity theft.

Well, yeah, you want to be on the protection rather than the theft side.

So we sold, you know, we had a white label platform and we powered a huge percentage of the retail brands in the market. But when we first launched, it wasn't a category that existed. So, you know, I don't know at the time that I would've said what I was doing and the team was doing was thought leadership, right? In that context, this was more than a decade ago, this was 15 years ago. But what we were doing was finding a way to go craft that story and then take this, you need to go protect these customer, your customers' identities. How do we then package that into all the different pieces that we do, starting with just how do I get your attention, right? Like you think credit monitoring's enough, it's not, you gotta do more, right? So how do I get your attention? And then how do I help you understand how there's a team out there that can help you with this? And then how do I then translate that into, and this is why your customers care about this. So I will tell you, you know, in looking back, it's all thought leadership that then is content creation, right? Content's king. But if your content's no good, right? You actually don't take a position or you don't know the problem you're solving. That's not thought leadership. That's just random thinking at that point. So that worked incredibly well. So I guess to close the loop on the story, then we went out to bank processors. We went out to banks. We went out to retail brands. And we were able to, you know, I think when that company sold, something like north of 50% of the identity protection market in the country ran on that platform. So it had become an incredibly powerful tool for an organization that didn't know how to or didn't have the resources to go direct to consumer. We found a way to go in by creating the wholesale category.

Well, and that category creation piece, I think ties very well to thought leadership and the world of startups, right? If you're looking and saying, I've got a better mousetrap, but how do I get the world to pay attention and understand it? Sometimes you've got to get clever and say, who will pay attention or who aggregates our customers? And I can educate a channel easier than to try and go B2C.

Right. And if that channel is already providing what may be the V1 version of the product, but you can then come to them with, hey, this isn't just V2, it's V6, and here's all the reasons that's important, right? And in the identity protection world, it was, hey, we're monitoring for criminal arrests. Is your identity being used by a criminal and he's getting arrested under your name so when the warrants go out, it doesn't find him, it finds you on accident? Well, why is that important, right? Why is it important to monitor your home's title so that it's not being, you know, stolen from underneath you and all these different data feeds, right? And as the internet exploded, data exploded. So how do you tell that story? If your partner has the customers, it's a heck of a lot easier for them to go take a V1 to V12 product than it is for you to go from nothing to what you would consider your V1, but is far better than the market. But now you gotta go tell that story for people who aren't ready for it.

And that ability to work with a partner who has aggregated the audience that you're trying to reach, the buyer who needs your solution, makes life a whole lot easier.

It does. It does. Well, and what's great about that too is our partner network, they were— the broad majority were competitors. And so as we introduced these new products through the first couple, all of a sudden their competitors saying, "Hold on, we need a product. We're going to lose because now we don't actually— we're not keeping up with our competitors." And it just became the opportunity for us to be the leader in that space and actually take out a very, very robust platform, then one, one, its market, but not direct to consumer, right? Direct to partner and then letting the partners be the aggregators to all those end customers.

So when you think about thought leadership in the startup world, is thought leadership something that's sales-led, that is marketing-led? What side of the house does it sit on and does it depend?

I think it's executive-led. I think that for a good startup, your executive team needs to be really thinking about the problem you're solving and trying to identify the themes that then drive the content. I think on the marketing side, it should flow through marketing because that's where you're, that's where you should be able to take those themes, those ideas, and then articulate them in a way that's really going to resonate. And this is where I think content marketing begins to diverge from thought leadership. Thought leadership is delivered via content marketing, but content marketing becomes more than thought leadership because it becomes clickbaity and really more designed as search optimization as opposed to high quality. Now, Google keeps trying to figure out how do we only, you know, how do we get to the quality stuff to the top? But there's still a quantity game that gets played there. But if you can then create high-quality thought leadership content, how do you then take and repurpose that into other pieces of content, maybe smaller snippets and things that still have quality as opposed to just what you see so often, right? Is a paragraph that uses that keyword like 6 times in 4 sentences and you're just like, I'm exhausted from reading that. You didn't need to say it that way, right? But you won the search, but you didn't solve the problem.

I can search as a user of Google, find 6 pages that say the same thing because either a content marketing writer scraped the same content in original sources or worse yet, an AI bot scraped those pages and gave another rewrite of the same information. So when you play on the content marketing side, you're trying to play for rankings, you're trying to stuff keywords, all of those things. But in many cases, when you're approaching an issue like category creation and solving a problem that people don't know has been solved, you don't have the keywords on Google that people— people aren't searching, right?

Right. For what you want to solve, you have to go— you're going to create that content and play the long game, which then means you've created the keywords and, and the market begins to recognize, hold on, I've been searching for the wrong thing and here's what I need to search for. But that is a long-term, it's a long-term game and you have to be prepared to, you have to make that investment. I would say from day one. And again, if you're going to be a VC-backed startup, you've made that investment from day one because you're telling early-stage investors that story. You're telling the early employees who are following your vision in that story. And then it's your job and your team's job to then translate that into Let's start telling that story in our website, in our blog, and how we go to market so that we have quality content. And if we're going to do the other things that help to prime the pump, if you will, great. We'll use all the different levers that are out there, but let's not lose sight of every month more quality content coming out. I will say that the other part that becomes interesting about it is I'm a believer in that if you don't open your mouth, you'll never prove that you're an idiot. Right? But the flip side of that is when you're thinking about this thought leadership, you're actually going out to the world and saying, no, this is the way to do it. And you're going to have to put up with people are going to say you're wrong. And so then when it comes to something that's accounting related, you want to make sure you're right because there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time, accountants, doing just this sort of thing. So making sure that you actually know what you're talking about becomes critically important. Because if your thought leadership is just dead wrong, you're going to lose the opportunity to go build that market category. And so, you're waiting for the world to come back and tell you maybe you are an idiot after all.

So, there's a couple different ways to present that content, right? There's the, you come down from the mountain with the tablets and say, "This is the way the world should be, must be, will be," versus, "We see this as a possibility," right? One is an invitation to conversation saying, we see this trend, here's a possibility, versus this is the way you need to do it. And I think based on where you are in the cycle and maturity, you can ratchet your confidence up and down depending.

Yeah. No, I would completely agree with that. And I do think there's an opportunity to say, this is the way we see it. There's also, and people, the flip side of that whole open your mouth, prove you're an idiot, people also like when people have passionately held views. Look, I do think this is the right way to do things, and I know that there's more than one way to do this, but I think those are inferior paths. Not that you can't be successful with them, but that I just think that you should do it this way. And in that case, then people will respond to people who have passionately held views and are willing to go to bat for them. And so that's the other side of it is, look, this is not a view that's just flip-fint or because I read one article online. It's a firmly held one from experience. And then that I think also resonates in the thought leadership because you're actually always thinking about these things and refining your thoughts. And then you have this passionately held view, but you can still invite to a conversation.

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Well, and I think the most dangerous thing there is silence. If people passionately agree with you, great. If they passionately disagree with you and they're coming from a place of expertise, which may or may not be the same as your expertise, right? So you've used the example of accountants. If someone who's an accountant raises their hand and says, "But have you thought about X, Y, and Z?" And you go, "No, tell us how that impacts us," then you have a great debate and a conversation. And both sides learn, right?

Right. And we may find from that accountant, oh, great, you're right. Those are real valid points if you're a services business, but we're actually trying to solve a product problem, right? A product business problem. So yeah, and then, but is there something to learn and transport from that into your world as well that can further enhance the product? And this is where even talking to your customers comes into play, right? Because your customers are going to teach you things. That then inform your thoughts and then can be translated back into that thought leadership and perhaps then trying to loop back to marketing. So those customers can be part of your marketing strategy, part of your thought leadership team because they also bring an important voice to bear and could bring in high-quality thoughts that translate to high-quality content that then translate to an improved position in the market and helping more people.

Well, and even on the customer side, having a customer who is passionate in saying, man, I wish you did X, Y, and Z, or I don't know why you do this way as a piece of software or technology. Why can't you? Someone who's bringing those insights, push and challenge from a perspective that internally you may not see. And so again, it comes back to, I'd rather debate a position with smart people who have a different point of view than to have them just go, "Eh, not interesting," and walk on. No, let's argue.

Yeah. Debate is a fantastic thing, right? And it does help you then grow your opinions and either maybe strengthen them, but now you know, now you're like, "Well, I've actually spent the time really being challenged on this and yet I've come to the same conclusion," or I've spent that time and it's changed my conclusion, maybe not 180%, but if it's redirected me by 2 or 3 degrees, that actually may get to a better outcome. And that's what we should all be looking for, right? Is how do we continually improve the products, the businesses that we're building ourselves as individuals, right? And the debate that comes from smart people is the number one way to do so.

Yeah. And it's sharpening your go-to-market. It's sharpening your ability to talk to different audiences. Whether they're buyers, influencers, et cetera, the more capacity you, your sales team, your marketing team know how to reach an audience and know what objections they might have, that's all good work.

Right, right. Well, and as you start to bring up the sales team, right, that's the group that then engages with your customers more than anybody. So, the time and energy put into thought leadership from a marketing perspective then also has to be translated to that sales team's perspective. How do we go train them in our example, right, on working capital and on the accounting treatment of that and on some of the unexpected impacts of inventory and sales turnover and velocities and whatnot. So that when they're having a conversation, they're actually answering really challenging questions that are faced by our customers and they bring a level of expertise. And they may not be accountants, but they still bring a level of expertise to understand the problem. And which then means when a customer approaches them with something they haven't seen before, they're smart enough to say, okay, hold on, that's a new wrinkle. We haven't seen this. How do we help with that? And that then becomes that feedback and that feedback loop into our business, right? That then is, it's not just Eric's engagement with the market and the debate, right? It's everybody in the organization's engagement with the market and the conversations, the debates, the pushback, the the praise that then continue to refine what it is you're building as a product for your market.

Well, I know you have a background in logistics and delivery, and one of the things that I think about in terms of the sales function is that for thought leadership, the sales team is the last mile between you and the customer. And if your sales team, A, does not understand the idea or the piece of thought leadership, they're not going to talk about it. And B, if it's not something that aligns with their sales quotas, targets, et cetera, they're not going to talk about it because they're comp-driven, right? They know what they need to hit for numbers. And if it's nice to talk about, but it's going to only touch 3 years from now, no, no, no, I'm here to talk about today.

Right. Well, and you want your sales team to be driven on those numbers, right? Because that's— that the business is going to see.

I mean, that's gravity. That's oxygen.

But you also need that team to have enough curiosity, right? And be empowered to actually identify how you're going to grow the business. But I mean, I think, I mean, this day and age, right? The thought of an unempowered team member seems bizarre to me, right? I mean, Toyota has proven like, hey, anybody on that manufacturing line can stop it because something's wrong, right? That's empowering every team member, right? But I think that needs to translate. Well, I think in most startups it does, right? Startups are by default learning organizations. Learning organizations spend a lot of time thinking and a lot of time making mistakes. And what we say here at OnRamp, right, is just make mistakes fast and let's learn from them quickly. It's okay to make mistakes. It means we're going to go figure out how to do things better the next time. The mistake is to repeat it, right? Like, hold on, why are we making the same mistake twice, right? That means we're actually not thinking, we're not actually responding to what we're learning and then applying that so that we don't let those things roll back through the system.

So how do you align the sales team with thought leadership in a startup? How do you get them to care?

Yeah. Well, one, it starts at recruiting, right? Because you're telling the story. Like, this is what we're passionate about, what we're trying to go do. And why we're trying to do it and who we're helping. You know, in our story, right, we provide capital to help businesses turn over. That's not very exciting. You know, the mission is helping small business owners achieve launch velocity, helping them actually grow so far that they actually outgrow what we can do for them because that means there will be more successful small business owners out there. And the more successful small business owners in the world, the healthier, happier, freer, safer the world is. It's a diffusion of economic power to a broader population of people. So, you know, that passion, you know, helping small businesses, helping your local community in your country is what we're excited about. And then, you know, the beauty of a startup is you're a small organization. You know, when we started with our sales team, we had a total of 9 people. So it's not like there's a CEO in an office with a door closed, right? I'm a CEO with the same $30 IKEA desk that every other employee has in the same open floor. And it's my belief that one of the things I like about the way we're set up is I get to overhear these conversations that the sales reps are having, and then I get to go and say, "Hold on, here's an important piece you were missing in that conversation. How can I help?" And as the organization's gotten bigger, we're about 25 people now, I can still hear those things happening, maybe not as frequently because the team's much more trained up, And the beauty is as a new rep comes on, there's a sales manager who's really close, but that person's our head of sales now has been here for almost 2 years working on this problem and he's able to overhear these things and go to them. But now he has the expertise that I brought when he came on. And then the other reps sitting next to each other are sharing that, "Hold on, you missed this. You got that wrong. Let's help you there." That's one of the beauties of the early stage business, right? Is that you're all growing together and you haven't gotten so big that everybody doesn't know each other, right? Then where I think it's interesting from a thought leadership perspective is as a business reaches that, what is it? Is it the Dunning-Barre number where like 150 people is as many people as you can know, whatever, or something like that?

Dunbar. It's Dunbar.

Dunbar. Yeah. So when a business reaches that stage, organizations begin to develop and then you have the organizational politics occurring. That's, I think, probably the more critical time for thought leadership because that's when you're going to have people coming on that aren't directly known by the CEO anymore. The CEO has not been part of the recruiting for that person, right? Hasn't been intimate with it. And that's where you're going to start to see the silos show up, right? And hold on, are you— Do you understand what the business mission is, right? And then what we're doing for the customers that we have, then how do you translate that into your specific function in the organization you're in? That's an interesting inflection point for a business. And I'll be honest, I typically leave when a business gets that big, but it's taken 4 or 5 years each time to get there. And it's kind of a natural evolution for a guy in the startup world to kind of move at that point. So that'll be an interesting thing for OnRamp, right? As we reach that velocity and size is how do we continue to teach new people who are coming on what it is we're doing and then make sure that as the sales and marketing team who are learning from the market and learning things, how do we make sure that's translated back to the product team, the engineering team, support teams, right? Partner networks and things like that when it's not when you're no longer able to sit in a room and kind of overhear conversations and tune in on the interesting ones.

Right, right. And you've talked about this as a long-term play. And each time you've gone back to, well, with hiring, it starts with hiring, right? With employees, with the VCs and funding, it's the early conversations when you're actually trying to raise funds. All of these things work best when you play the long game. And in this case, like you said, getting to a growth point of maybe 150 employees, 4 or 5 years, whatever you're looking at in terms of time, but you're thinking from the beginning, the initial ask of capital all the way to the exit and planning that through line because you can't create a category with a mindset of, "Okay, 6 months we're going to exit. Let's focus on category creation." That's backwards.

No, I mean, look, the best played land— excuse me, the best laid plans, right? I mean, we know where they go, but the truth of the matter is if you don't have a plan, you're going to get nowhere. The point of a plan is more of, "Hey, here's our North Star and we have a map and we think we're going to go this way, but okay, great." Turns out I-5 is out, so we're going to take the 405 around. You know, there we go. Not a darn thing wrong with that. That's actually just smart. So you do want to have that kind of plan and vision around where are we going while being nimble enough to react to what the market's telling you. And again, having articulated your thought leadership and translate that into, you know, content that tells that, that tells the story you want to tell and the problem you're solving and the how and the why. Of it all then allows you to look at that and say, hey, great, here's what, you know, here's this wrinkle. You know, COVID has changed things. Well, how are we going to respond to that? Right? It's the reality of the world. So our product has to adapt to that. Great. We've taken a detour on our map, but it doesn't mean we're not trying to get to that same endpoint. Right? We're still trying to, you know, finish that cannonball run from LA to New York, New York to LA. Right? But you go through Kansas City, do you go through, you know, do you go around the city? Right? Or, you know, what other destinations do you want to hit along the way?

And you're adapting along the way?

Yeah.

A lot of metaphors in there, sorry.

Yeah, no, that's fine. So as we begin to wrap up, I've got a question for you. You've been CEO and in leadership teams of a number of startups. Okay. And you've taken a long view in terms of thinking about how thought leadership fits in. What do you know now that you wish you knew earlier in your career? And the reason I ask is there may be other CEOs of tech startups who aren't thinking about thought leadership at this point. So what advice would you give your younger self?

Learning to articulate both the problem you're solving and why your solution is the right one is critical and it warrants getting beat up. It warrants actually going out there and letting people challenge that, right? And so being open to that, I think is really critical. But the sooner you actually start to spend the time of putting pen to paper and really trying to nail down both the problem you're solving and how the solution works, the sooner you're actually going to start moving on that thought leadership path. Now I will say, when I was younger in my career, I didn't think of this as thought leadership, right? The way we talk about it today is different than—

It's different.

Absolutely.

But the lesson is there, right? Which is you've got to be able to articulate what you're trying to do. And from that nugget, right? From that core principle of the problem you're solving and the why of it all, right? The why is going to drive the passion, right? And then the how is the solution. Those two things together, right? If that's what you're really want to go after to do, then allows you to go build a team. It allows you to build a team of investors, build a team of employees, build a team of partners, ultimately building a team of customers who are along and share that vision. So the sooner you start doing it, the better. And the more you're focused on what is that guiding star and then how does everything else we do around that translate, I think becomes critical. And then From there, that takes a tremendous amount of thought. How do you then translate that into how are you going to communicate that with the world, the content, if you will?

One thing that I want to underscore in what you said, because I think it's very much the entrepreneur's mindset and it aligns very well with thought leadership too, is you will get beat up when you put your ideas out there. And rather than having thin skin or being fragile, the ability to take in feedback and adapt how you tell the story and the message and even make it stronger is absolutely necessary.

Right. No, look, it's interesting. You need a team around you of advisors, board members, what have you, who are willing to go toe-to-toe with you and have the debate. You also want to know and respect, like, look, there are times they're going to do that with you. They're really irritating, but it's an important part of the job. It's also great when they can look at you and say, look, you know, we've done devil's advocate long enough. Now let me take your side and see, can I help you refine this because of the challenges that is brought to you? You know, that's a great advisor, right? Somebody who can do both and help you move through that and strengthen your ability to take to take the heat so that then the next time you hear that from somebody who's maybe an investor, like looking to challenge you to make sure that they've got the right investment, that you're actually ready for that, right? Like, oh, I've been through this. I've been through this ringer before and here's the outcome, or here's the answer that helps to resolve this, right? And not every investor is right for your business. And so they might not agree, but a lot of times they're not looking for agreement. They're looking for intelligence and let's call it the fortitude, right? To take the heat and keep pushing forward.

Eric, this has been a wonderful conversation. I want to thank you for taking time to talk about thought leadership. Thank you.

Startups with us.

I've had a great time. Thank you so much for inviting me.

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Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.