Live Webinar - The Startup Lifecycle

Hi everyone, welcome. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar. Um, today's focus will be on the startup lifecycle, a crucial concept for any entrepreneur, mentor, and investor. And today, Greg Shepard, founder and CEO of startupscience.io, is here today to guide us through the topic. So during the webinar, please feel free to ask any questions you may have along the way, and Greg will answer them live for you. So Greg will be joining us shortly. Hey everyone, we're just having some slight technical issues. Stay with us, you're not going to want to miss this. We're just fixing these technical issues and we'll, we'll be live shortly. Thank you.

Hey, Greg. Hello.

Hey, it's good to see you. Um, we can, uh, this— the event started. You can get started as soon as you— as soon as you want.

Okay, great. Hello everybody. I, uh, I really appreciate your time and energy. I know everybody's super busy, so I'm gonna go ahead and jump right into this. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through a bit about founder failure, the startup lifecycle, and a few other things. So because of the tool that I'm using, I'm going to go ahead and use this view instead of the share screen. Every time I try to do the slideshow, it turns off the webinar. So Please bear with me. So this is the startup lifecycle, and I wanted to give you guys a little bit of background on me. So I have done 12 startups and 12 exits, 4 private equity awards for transactions between $250 million and $1 billion. I've written, I think, about 100 articles, been on a few hundred podcasts. I have the Forbes podcast radio show that I also— it's called Startup Science. I am autistic and dyslexic, but you don't need to feel sorry for me. I have a different operating system. So this is a neurotypical operating system, and this is an autistic operating system. That, that's actually a scan of my brain, which is kind of fun. I, uh, have a track record, as I said, of 12 startups and 12 exits and the private equity awards. And then I've also authored a book, uh, do a lot of keynote speaking, a lot of other things along those lines. I've done startups, carve-outs, turnarounds, cleanups, uh, been an investor, a founder. in a lot of different spaces. This is a list of some of the companies that I've started and sold. And then this is a list of some of the places I've been seen in. My original goal after I had my last exit was to try to give back to founders. So I went into politics and got to meet Barack Obama. He's just a really cool guy. And I wasn't able to give back through politics. It was just too— I was trying a top-down approach and I needed to do a bottom-up approach. And I learned that entrepreneurship is the way because it means an escape from paycheck-to-paycheck living. Our future depends on startups. If you think about over history, things like Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, just name it. What you've seen is you've seen a constant increase in founders creating our future. So I believe that the future of our species completely depends on founders because corporates don't seem to be developing anything that moves and evolves us into the future. It also reduces wealth inequality across gender, race, and different cultures, and it can help this little Earth that we all share together. The problem is 90% of founders fail trying to go through this process. This to me was something that was inexcusable, so I invested $500,000, 5 employees, and 5 years to find out why startups were failing. So I'm gonna go into that a little bit and this is going to give you some insights into the startup lifecycle itself, which is what I'm discussing. When I first went in here, I was after why, but it wasn't why that was the issue. It was when and how founders were failing. So this interesting sort of, uh, combination of data was, uh, gave me a perspective that I never had on startups. And one of those things is that you have 3,200 venture-backed startups. So these are people that actually got money that failed in 2023, destroying about $27 billion in capital. 60% of the fails of the startups failed between pre-seed and Series A. And that is a big number. And after Series A is where everybody inherits their money. So remember, this 60% isn't in this 3,200. The 3,200 that you see there are these people after Series A, which is usually when venture gets involved. So what I found is that 90% of these startups were failing for the same reasons And 80% of them were failing for the exact same root causes over and over again. So I thought if I can drop the failure rate by educating people on those initial reasons, we can make more founders successful. So let's talk about the startup failure rate defined. So one of the things is that you, when venture capital investors and a lot of people, including most founders, are looking at their business, They're paying attention to the financial numbers, which are lagging indicators. So if you're paying attention to financial indicators, lagging indicators, it's like driving a car looking behind you the whole time, because what you don't realize is that by the time financials actually happen, well, it's too late to do anything about them. And that's why it's a lagging indicator. So when these lagging indicators happen and the financials are already too late, then it causes investors to lose confidence. You get fewer investments, less cash comes in, and running out of, out of money is the first reason why founders fail. But what you really have to ask is, why did they run out of money? And over here, why did they get the wrong team? Why did they have pricing and cost issues? So this standard data was like the first layer of a multiple-layered stack of issues that are associated with this problem. The first thing that I ran into is not understanding the lifecycle. So if you think about it like this, in order to build a business, you have to know 2 things. In order to do most things, you have to know 2 things. Where you are and where you're going. So what we did is we created a process after all of this research that outlines that. So the first thing is the innovation lifecycle. The innovation lifecycle is value creation. This is where you're creating value, money value, financial value, and value capture where you're actually capturing that value. The most important thing when you're looking at understanding the lifecycle is knowing what you're supposed to do at the right time. And that timing can demonstrate the difference between success and failure. So if you look at the innovation lifecycle, the first part is value creation. That's your vision stage. of the lifecycle and the product stage. Then you get into value capture and the value capture is from go-to-market, standardization, optimization, growth, and exit. So those are the 7 stages of the lifecycle, this value creation piece and the value capture piece. The rounds of funding, and usually people will say, oh well, I'm at this stage or this phase in the lifecycle because of a round of funding. Funding happens in the lifecycle. It is not the lifecycle. It's just another thing that happens during that. The timeframe that we studied was 3 to 5 years in terms of this, and then these are the stages. So you can see that there's the vision stage, trying to ideate and figure out what exactly you're doing. And then after that, you have the product stage, which is building your product, your pilot, and your prototype and trying to get your product market fit. And then you have your go-to-market. Your go-to-market is where you go out there and you try to get these customers engaged in your product over time. But the big problem that most people make is they go right from go-to-market all the way to growth and they skip over standardization and optimization. So this is a huge reason why a lot of the founders fail. I'm going to explain why. Go-to-market is just to show that you can go to market, that you can grow sales and you can do it profitably. What happens is when you hit go-to-market and you skip over this and go right into growth is that you're not prepared for the growth. We see a lot of businesses actually fail because they're not prepared for the growth. And I'll give you an example. One small example is that if you're starting a business and you go to go-to-market and you're trying to hire people, the average cost of hiring somebody is 33% of their first year salary to get them to 75% productivity. Meaning 100% productivity means that they're fully ramped on and they're working. But these people are 75% productivity for 33% of their first year salary. So if you're paying somebody $100,000 a year, that's $33,000. If you're going into growth and you're hiring 5 or 10 people at a time, you can quickly see how you can put yourself out of business by growing. Most investors are telling people to go straight from go-to-market into growth, and that's because they have to show that to their LPs and, you know, they're trying to rush through the process. But as a founder and a practitioner, you need to go into standardization first. Standardization is where you simply— and I don't mean an employee manual or anything fancy— you get a wiki and you simply say, this is what happens at this time, and this is the person that's accountable. So, as an example, you will have an area in the wiki for marketing, and you'll say, here's when these different things happen. It could be a calendar or a triggered event. So you could say, as an example, the first Monday of every month or every Friday, or you could say every time I get an email confirmation or something like that, a certain thing happens. And then you write down how it happens. And when I say how it happens, I mean exactly how it happens using plain speak. So click on this, go here, fill this in, click this, you should see this, do this. Sort of like what you would see in like Apple support something. Now you go from there into optimization. This is where you go look at the stuff that you did during standardization to find areas of optimization. Now, going back to the example that I used earlier, if you hire somebody new and they're getting onboarded and they go through a little, you know, onboarding ceremony, and then they get in, they use the standardization to make sure that they're doing things right. Without impacting everybody else. If you go straight into growth, you don't have the happening. So you have a bunch of employees running around, weren't trained, don't know their job, and in order to figure things out, they're interrupting other employees. So now your productivity actually goes down instead of up. So it can send you backwards. You think you're fixing the problem by adding headcount, and you're actually making the problem worse. The other thing is. When you go into optimization, you're trying to figure out areas of what lean calls waste. So waste are friction, friction creates heat, heat creates fire, this is where things are going back and forth. So, you know, so-and-so says, yeah, send it to me and then send it back to this guy and then send it to this place and send it to here. Optimization is creating consistent flows with as much as possible one way, one way where the data is flowing from one place to another, Reducing that friction. And those are 2 examples of why you want to do standardization and then go into optimization. Once you've optimized, now you can get the main valuation drivers of growth, margin, and retention with real numbers. Going back, tweaking, going back to optimization, looking at what you can do, going back to optimization— this is a, a logical process that everybody does. If you're sending traffic to a website You don't just blast traffic, right? You send traffic, you go back, check your data, you figure out what you can do better, and then you send more traffic. So this is a logical process that you go through. And then after you figure out your conversion rates in the scenario that I just used, then you go into growth and spend your money. So it's ridiculous to go straight from go-to-market into growth, even though you start growing through this, you're not really focused on it until you know you can get quote-unquote profitable growth, which changes everything. So we have this platform, Startup Science, that guides founders through this whole process for these different startup assistance programs, uh, in an effort to try to give people the basic understandings of things so then they understand it, they understand what questions to ask, and they understand how to work with their program managers and, uh, the mentors that they have. The second big thing is value valuation driver alignment. So these are at-scale SaaS value valuation alignments. Valuation are the things that your, your company is being valued off of, and it's always growth, margin, and retention. So if you align growth with sales and marketing and you align The gross margin with shared services. This is like operations, finance, legal, HR, IT, anything that's a shared service. And then you align your revenue retention with sales and support. These are the functional areas that actually impact these areas. And that is how you get your business where the people that are running the functional areas are motivated because they have a number on their head to achieve and they know what they're supposed to be doing. Product and marketing goes through all of them. Another huge reason was bad decisions. So one of the really bad decisions that you saw on that graph was team. So the right person at the right time. What I mean by this is that what I see often in the data is a founder, you know, hires a consultant. Maybe they hire somebody that used to work for corporate or somebody that worked for— they have a big name, vice president of You know, name the big company. And as a result, that person is not a tactical person. They don't have the actual experience to go in and structure a CRM and write the emails and build out the configuration and all that stuff. There's somebody that's used to hiring people to do those things for them. When you're doing a startup, you need somebody that can not only handle the strategy but also the tactics. associated with actually doing the work, not hiring people to do the work. Product. So use case pricing validation is fundamental, meaning being able to know that the pricing that you have works for the customer and understanding that a good piece of software, in the case of software, should be introduced to somebody That's it. Not sold, introduced, and the pricing should support that. The exit— this is a fundamental problem that we see in the lifecycle that a lot of people struggle with, and this is understanding who, why, when, and how much you should sell your company for. I get into a lot of arguments with investors and people about— they're like, well, it's too early to talk about an exit, and that's not true, and I'm going to explain why. If you are building a company and you're selling it to an acquirer, an acquirer is going to buy a company for one of two reasons: either to make or save money. The majority of times it's to make money. That is called a synergy, right? Those two things are a synergy. So in the case where the make money is the synergy, the reason why they're doing that is they've already got a product and they already have paid the customer acquisition cost for all of these customers that they have. And what they're looking for is to increase their customer acquisition to lifetime value, LTV, ratio. That CAC to LTV, for example, says if I spend a dollar, I make 5, or if I spend, you know, a pound, I get 5, or whatever currency. Now, if your acquirer has already spent that money, then what they need to do to increase the customer acquisition to lifetime value metric is by getting more customers to buy a new product that they don't currently have. Now, why did I tell you all that? Well, if the acquirer of your company is actually really buying you for your product, then shouldn't you make sure that that product aligns with your buyer's customer, your acquirer's customer, Before you get all the way to the exit. In fact, shouldn't you do that as soon as possible? Like I said up here with product, essentially your whole business is a product to the people that are requiring you, to the business that's acquiring you, the corporate or whatever it is that's acquiring you. So if you think about that, wouldn't it be ridiculous to build a product without having a customer and validating your product with a customer? It's the same way with an acquirer. You got to do that upfront. So you figure out who's going to buy it. You run it by them. Why would they buy it? Well, the synergy, which I talked about. When would they buy it? This when is usually 3 to 5 years. It depends up to you. A lot of people try to stretch out the acquisition. Investors are really pushing, you know, to, well, save it and let's go big and let's go big. And a lot of founders fail because of that. So a lot of founders also fail because they're going for a unicorn. Remember, your investors that you're talking to usually, especially if it's a VC, they got a lot of deals out there. If they lose a deal, it's a write-off. If you lose, it's a really big hit to you. So when has to do with what is the best timing for the acquirer and you. I've sold companies as soon as a year and a half. I've sold companies without any revenue at all. I've sold companies with very little revenue and companies with a lot of revenue. So understanding when is the timing of that acquirer. It's also really important because when you think about selling a company, I want you to think about the old game musical chairs. This is a game where, you know, you get like 10 kids You put 5 chairs in the room and then you play the music. When the music stops, kids sit down. The kids standing are out of the game. Same thing with acquirers. You may have 5 acquirers and 100 startups trying to sell to those 5 acquirers. Somebody is going to be left standing. It's going to be the people that don't know who those acquirers are and aren't timing out when they should sell the product to them. Because when you start to see other startups coming into your acquirers, you start to see your seats being taken. So it's really important to understand that. How much? Well, just like pricing is a big deal here, how much is a big deal down here. And what I mean by that is what sort of multiple and is the multiple gonna be on top-line revenue or bottom-line revenue? And then you look at the other acquisitions they've bought over time. So if they've made other acquisitions and you're saying, oh, 3 times top, and here's 4 acquisitions they made, none of them exceed $25 or $50 million, then you know where you're sitting and you won't go over. The approach is really important as well. So making sure that when you do your GTM, You crawl, validate, walk, validate, and run when you get to the growth section, like I said earlier. So this is really, really important. I see a lot of people, they go into go-to-market, they blow all their money, and then they go back to the investors and they're like, I'm out of money, but we're in go-to-market and we've driven some leads and the numbers don't line up and then the investors don't back them. because they think that the people aren't interested in their product when really it could— most of the time it just has to do with the fact that the go-to-market was off and they didn't tune it as they went in a very agile way. They just boom, went out there. And everybody's heard of agile software. It's the process of small incremental improvements over time based on outside data. Same thing with go-to-market. So your ICP, which is your ideal customer profile, and your persona is the person. They're not the same at all. The company is after something that's good for the company. The people that work there, maybe not. In fact, most of the time what I find is that what's good for the company is not always good for the person that works there. And you're selling to a person, Not to a company. So I've seen a lot of scenarios where somebody's trying to sell something that's really good for the company, but the person they're talking to is like, I don't want to go to my CFO and explain this, or I don't want to go to the COO and try to say why we need this, or I don't want to go try to get money budgeted for this, or it's going to put me out of a job, or it's going to make things more complicated. It's going to create a ton of change management. So it's really important. That when you're putting together your go-to-market and your salespeople, that you understand the person you're selling to even more, and it's counterintuitive, than the company. Because what's good for the company isn't always good for the person, but you can't sell your product unless you get past the person. Performance. So let's talk about this a little bit. These are the 4 functional areas that the startups come out of. So you have your shared services, your sales and marketing, product and engineering, Engineering and your service delivery, and this is how you define success in those functional areas. We're going back to the KPIs so that you can measure your success from an investor's perspective. They're looking at your financials, your P&L, your balance sheet, your statement of cash flows, and the valuation of the business. From a CEO's perspective, you're sure you have to look at the financials, but you're really. Focused on the leading indicators because those are the things that create the financials. If you focus on the financials, you're too late. Now from the— this layer down here, so this is your functional area leaders layer. These guys are focused on valuation drivers, growth, margin, and retention like I showed you earlier, and leading indicators. This layer down here, meaning the next layer, are the actual departments, people that work for them, they're all focused on leading indicators and only leading indicators. You don't even want them focused on anything else. I, uh, I use an analogy. So, you know, I was trying to lose weight. I had a belly, and I'm like really trying to lose weight. And I would go in and I would sit on the scale or stand on the scale, and I would stand on the scale and be like, oh, I weigh this much. And I realized this is a good analogy. When you weigh yourself, it's like looking at the financials. The damage is done. What you want to do is you want to call attention to what you're eating and how you're exercising and that sort of stuff. Those are leading indicators as a perfect example. So an example of that would be a leading indicator for a sales and marketing functional area would be marketing content. Marketing content creates leads. Leads create sales calls. And sales calls create customers that give you a net promoter score, which is the satisfaction of your customer. So you can see that little waterfall, right? Marketing to sales, sales to service. The lagging indicators for this— for marketing content is the leads, for sales calls is the pipeline, and for the net promoter score, customer service is customer satisfaction. And that creates the valuation drivers. So I'm going to give you guys some really cool stuff here. These are actual KPIs that you can use if you're in a technology company. So first you have your performance. So this is whether people are in budget. That's the first one. How much revenue growth in terms of revenue growth in terms of the percentage gross margin, EBITDA. Those are your valuation drivers. You have your funding drivers right here. So that's your lifetime value to CAC ratio, your burn rate, your runway, and then you have your time to revenue. So how long does it go from a market qualified lead to a customer, from a customer to active, from active to revenue, and from revenue to your CLTV? So then that's customer lifetime value, the CLTV. So now what you have is you have your valuation driver itself. This one is a margin valuation. So you see how these KPIs line up with the valuation drivers? There's margin growth and retention. Every KPI has to have that. And then you have which ones are leads and which ones are lags. So you can see how you can build this thing out. You don't have to use mine, you can build your own. Then you have to make sure that it also aligns up with your financials. Right? Because remember, your KPIs should create your financials. So what you have here, you can see, is you have things that drive valuation and things that drive financials. Then what I do is I always have— and this is just in the spreadsheet— planned, actual, and better or worse. What did you plan to do here on this line item? What did you actually do? And what's the difference between the two? That changes everything. So I'm going to go ahead and move into this next session here, or this next section, excuse me, which is what do we do for you and how do we do this? So we're trying to make it so that you can avoid needless failure, so you can remain proactive, and so you can mobilize funding rounds. All of this stuff is in the book. You can go get that book from Amazon. The study, the research that I did, all the stuff I've learned on the lifecycle itself is in the book. This is the QR code to scan the book, and I'm going to go ahead and open this up for questions to see if anybody has any questions. Any questions?

Hey, Greg, we have, um, we have some people talking in the video chat.

Cool. Love to answer any questions anybody has, and if you liked it or didn't like it.

Yeah, yes. So Corey, Corey Gilbert says no questions, which means you did an excellent job, Craig. Thanks. Mike Milk asked, what was your first exit?

My first— so this is funny, I don't even count it actually. I built a bungee jumping company, um, and, and, uh, sold that, and that was my first one. But my first, uh, real one was a non-depository bank when I was like, I think I was 21 or 22, and I sold that to another bank. I think the first real decent one was when the internet started. I built the first online travel insurance company and sold that to Travelex. And then I built a foreign currency business and sold that to them. And then I built a passport business. I built all these companies related to travel and sold that to them. That was like probably the first one that I was like, Oh my God, this— you could really do this.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Actually, let me think. Actually, before the internet came out— that's a good— let me ask you that. And before the internet came out, I built an applied environmental biotechnology company, and I sold that to a company in Canada called Epicor. I think that was my first, like, real transaction.

Amazing. Okay, uh, Amelia Nickel has a question. So what was the moment you felt failure and how did you move past it? So let's just say, you know, the first moment or the biggest failure you had and how did you move past it?

Yeah, I mean, I think that you fail all the time. At least you should. You know, people oftentimes think of failure as a negative thing. I think failure is necessary and just stepping stones. So, and I talk about this a lot with people. If you go to the gym, in order for you to grow muscle mass, you have to work until you fail, till you're exhausted. In fact, you tear your muscles up in order for them to grow. If you are training for a marathon, you're running until failure. So this is not just something that's in business. This is organic in everything that we see. It is evolution, right? Those things that fail die off. Those things that succeed grow and flourish. And that is how the world— that's how the organic— organically how the world works anyway. Our little Earth, everything is a process of evolution, which is a process of failure and success and adaption. So I think that in my case, I fail all the time. So, I mean, I try to anyway. I try to fail a lot of times trying things that haven't been done. I think that it's less about how you fail and more about how you analyze in retrospect on your failure to use it as a movement in evolution. So I'll tell you my first— I can tell you a couple stories about big failures that I had. So that biotech company that I sold to Epicor, they owned a bunch of shrimp farms and fish farms all over, uh, all over, uh, Asia. And a hurricane came in and wiped them all out, and my stock that I had sold it for, uh, went from being worth quite a bit to being worth hardly anything overnight. Uh, this was my failure to like look at the, the acquirer and what they were doing, and I was just so excited to sell the business. That was a pretty painful, uh, painful scenario. Another one was I was building, uh, this company Affiliate Attraction, the one I ended up selling to eBay, and I was working on this business and trying to build this business, and I had a buyer lined up. So I went to the buyer, showed him the business, and exactly what I warned everybody about happened. which is where the acquirer said, well, about half of your customers we don't care about because they don't meet our customer ICP, ideal customer profile. So we're going to cancel them and we're not going to pay for those. We'll only pay for these. So I had to actually reject the offer, get rid of all those customers, and rebuild the whole thing over 5 years with the right customers. And that's when I learned that lesson of failure, which hopefully everybody that's listening Uh, does it make— and anybody is taking the courses and stuff, trying to make sure that you guys don't fail for the same reasons I did.

Okay, great. So we have another question from Andy. What are your thoughts on creating new businesses focusing on education, such as tutoring and professional development? Any tips or advice?

I think that, uh, creating educational business is the future. In fact, you know, one of the interesting data stats that I ran into earlier this year was that there's a drop about 33% of people that are going after advanced degrees are no longer going after advanced degrees and going into entrepreneurship. So education, and what I'm trying to say when I say that is education is very liquid or at least should be. In other words, what has happened previously in education is people put some curriculum in place And they leave the same thing in place for decades and decades and decades. And with the exception of things like history, those things should be evolved and changed to what we're doing now. There are certain things that people are spending a lot of money learning that are not gonna help them in the future. I think that creating educational courses, tutoring, and things that help people through routes that actually end up in a career where they can pay off their student loan and survive, I think is the future. I think it's a great idea. Um, I would say that, and this is just for everybody, I always focus when I'm building a business on aggregation points. So if you are out there and you're trying to get every single customer onesie-twosie, that can get very expensive. It's like fishing in a, in a, uh, the ocean. with a fishing rod. You know, even if you do a lot of advertising, you're still fishing with a net, right? It's a lot of ocean. So what I do is I find aggregators. In other words, people that have the fish in a barrel. And anywhere you find an aggregation point, you're gonna have a lot better luck. So if you're building something in that educational sector, find the aggregators. So schools, tutoring organizations, people that have already done the hard legwork and the expensive legwork of getting those customers And then partner with them.

That's an amazing answer. And do let me know what you think. If any of these answers help, just let us know in the comments as well. And if you want— if you have any follow-up questions, if Greg has time. All right, Andy said he loves that fishbowl item. All right, so Corey has a question here. So can you describe a typical Capstack, King of Startups. Do you start with business credit lines of credit— sorry, you start with business credit lines of credit and move up to convertible notes or B4 equity? In my experience, trying to secure investors a healthy line of credit with a dollar amount that can be used as leverage when raising money. Hmm.

I think, well, I can tell you this. In the first part of what you said, I think that, you know, if you look at the Fortune 1000 companies in the world, I think the last time I checked, which was like in January, I think it was in January, not really sure, but last time I checked, the far majority of them were using founders to create their future. So it used to be that R&D departments for corporates would have like an army of people in a big building and they were trying to figure out what to build. And now they outsource to startups. So now those typical teams are like 5 people instead of like 50 people and they're using startups. So I think that the future does depend on startups, to your point, and founders 100%. And I think 100% that the founders are creating the future over the future, you know, in the, in the short run and in the long run. And I think we've seen that. Like, look at— we had all these— nobody was doing electric cars. Tesla came out, broke the glass ceiling, and now people are doing electric cars. There was big box stores everywhere spending a tremendous amount of money shipping things from distribution center to distribution center to distribution center, repackaging and fuel. Amazon came out, disrupted the whole space. And you could go on and on. You could see disruptions after disruptions. Um, and I think that the— your point about the corporations having all this power, and you are absolutely correct, they are not creative. That's why they have to outsource, but they do want to know what's going on so they can build things out. I hope that that's helpful. Oh, you had a different question, so let me, let me answer this, this question.

So, um, so it was going to read it out loud. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that the future of our planet depends on startups. That's why I've dedicated my life to it. I think that you— we haven't even seen corporations or politicians do very much to help with inclusion or building businesses that help with environmental cleaning up the past, sustainability, helping with the future. And inclusion, doing it with people that are otherwise marginalized. I think that, uh, that this is changing because of founders and startups. Yeah, they pass regulation and stuff, but there's always ways around that. It always works when things from the ground up start. Uh, that's why I got out of politics, because I was trying from the top and I couldn't do it. So now I'm working from the bottom up, and it's clearly working. Uh, IP protection. So I see Kathy had a question about IP protection. So this is actually a really good question. There's a couple different ways to see this. Uh, I've had scenarios where I have one in one of my portfolio companies right now where they had a patent, they got sued for their patent, they won, but it cost them $700,000. The interesting thing about that is that the people that sued them for the patent found it because they had a patent. So sometimes if you go into these patent libraries, you can see people coming up with ideas. And so it basically tells somebody exactly what you're patenting and what your idea is. And sometimes they can work around it. So in some scenarios, you're protecting yourself, And in other scenarios, you're actually putting yourself on the radar. If you're going to do a patent and put yourself on the radar, make sure it's a good one and it protects you holistically all around. And always be sure that just because you have a patent doesn't mean you're not gonna get into litigation. So it doesn't mean you're not gonna spend a bunch of money. So there's, it's, there's 2 blades on that sword, right? Putting yourself out there, And making it so everybody can see you and protecting yourself. So I hope that's helpful.

Oh, Betty.

So Betty has a question about the trademark. Yeah, I think trademarks and copyrights are really important. Patents can be really expensive. And, you know, we talked about that a little bit, but trademarks, absolutely. You definitely want to do your trademarks and your patents. I mean, sorry, your trademarks and your copyrights. Any more questions? Frank is typing something. We have Mike, got a bunch. All right, so, uh, I'm waiting for them to comment. You're welcome, Betty. I hope that helps you. Uh, the best— okay, so, and you're welcome, everybody. Thank you for saying thank you. I don't know if that sounds kind of funny, but, um, so the first time— as a first-time founder, can you identify indicators of success or failure? So let me, let me, uh, talk about this in a different way. I always tell people that you need a handful of things to be a founder, to be successful. So the 5 things, you know, a handful: focus, drive, enthusiasm, discipline, and optimism. Um, focus you have to have. If you can't sit down and focus on something, which is really hard for a lot of founders including me, But if you can't sit down and focus on something, you're going to be in trouble. Drive. You have to be driven to make something happen. So if you're going to be successful, Frank, you need to choose something that you are really passionate about, something that you're really, really into, something that, you know, is worth more than the money, but you're actually enjoying the process. So that's focus and drive. Enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is contagious. You can't get good people to work hard or investors to get engaged or customers or anything if you don't have enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the thing that grows the human spirit to move forward in a positive way. So optimism is the next one, and optimism is just the biology of hope. Right? So you're, you're trying to make sure that you're hopeful about the future. If you're not optimistic or hopeful about the future, why are you going to keep going? And then discipline is the last one. And I think, I think of discipline as the linchpin, right? Like, if I don't want to do something, if I'm tired— I, yesterday I was really tired and I was really having a hard time, and I just applied discipline. Discipline is something that gets you to do things when you don't want to do them. Discipline is the thing that gets you to jump in cold water. Once you get going, you're in. So that's how I think about it. I can find founders that have that handful of things, then I can make things happen. Oh, corporate M&A. Can corporations get too big, Mike? I think that corporations Can get too big, but I think that there is a natural process with companies. They, they go through a cycle just like anything else. They go through death, they go through rebirth, they go through evolutions and cycles. So, you know, I do think companies can get too big, but I think that the market will prevent them from getting so big that they can do any damage. And I think we've seen that in the past. You've seen all these big box stores go out of business. I mean, Yahoo got eaten by Google and how many people got eaten by Amazon and put those big companies out. So companies that they can get too big if they aren't careful, they can lose their footing. So I think they can get too big. I haven't seen very many get so big that they can't, still produce good results, but it does happen. I mean, in oil and gas, it's happened a lot of, in defense, it's happened, you know, where there's these gigantic companies. But I think it's all about startups just cycling, right? So you have a company, startups are building, changes the company, startups come in, changes to the company again, and ongoing that way. So Kathy, a product-specific question. So when it comes to developing software products, so the way that I think of it is that you wanna go in at the cheapest as you can, and a no-code option is a really good option. So you don't need an engineer. It's not hard to do. Anybody can do it. Find no-code. There's a good site called We Are No-Code. And these guys will teach you how to use no-code. You can build a pilot and a prototype and you can show it off without spending a lot of money on engineering. So no-code to me is the best option if you're not an engineer to get something to make sure that it works and get funded. You're welcome, Frank, and you're welcome, Kathy. There you go. Andy's in there giving everybody a little bit of help on, on code. Thanks, Andy. It's called— oh, if you're asking me the site, it's called We Are No Code. There you go. Corey's got it. Any other questions? I, I do, uh, I do talk to people. Um, the best way to get a hold of me is to message me on LinkedIn, but it's going to take me a little while to get back to you. If you want to, uh, link with me on LinkedIn, I can't— I'm— I have the maximum amount, so I'll see your messages, but I won't be able to accept your invite because I have too many already. Thank you, Mike, for your comment. And, uh, Andy, I hope that's helpful. Thank you, Lloyd, and it's good to see you. Thank you, Iman. It's good to see you, my friend. I appreciate you attending. We will do this again. We're going to start doing a lot more often. A lot of people are requesting it, and I'm happy to do it. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you guys! I really appreciate these really nice comments. It means a lot to me. It's it's I really do appreciate it. I'm humbled, and I thank everybody for your time and energy. And I really hope sincerely I've been helpful to you. Have a fantastic evening, afternoon, or morning depending on where you are. I appreciate it, and I'll talk to everybody later.

Goodbye.

Oh, uh, you can go into the resources in the platform, Andy. So you can go into, um, the Gravity platform So go to Startup Science if you're not a member and you can just join. It's free. Everything's free. So you can knock yourself out. There's a lot of resources in there.

All right.

Goodbye. Have a great afternoon, day, and evening and a great weekend. And there are things for disabled people. And you can reach out to me on LinkedIn also, Andy, because I'm really passionate about that space. I hope everybody has a fantastic evening, afternoon, and morning. I appreciate your time and energy. Thank you so much.

Thank you.