Today I'm here with John Tabis, he is the founder and former CEO of Bouqs, a wonderful and now very large venture backed flower delivery company. Since exiting Bouqs, John is now a partner at M13 where he leads venture building at the M13 Venture Studio. Fair summary?

This is what I do.

Yeah, great. it was the quick quick overview. We're here on a Monday morning. We were hoping for Friday with beers, but instead we're, we're Monday with zoom.

It's basically the same.

No, it's not. No, it's totally not. I am just waking up. I'm trying to wean myself off coffee. We'll see how it goes. and I usually publish like, it usually takes me a couple of weeks, but like a big Olympic week weekend where you watch it all.
So much, so much Olympic time this weekend, and I was literally lamenting the end of the Olympics, like it's coming, right? It's going to be over, cause it was such a great weekend, right? The men's hundred meter was insane. I mean, I got, super into the hammer throw. The hammer throw defies logic. How do they know when to let go? I don't understand it. It's complete madness. I think yesterday we probably spent six hours on the couch watching the Olympics. It was fantastic.

Yeah. Does it make you think about like your own athleticism?

Yes, for sure. I ran the 400 and the 800 in high school.

Wow. Glad I asked.

And I was saying to my wife, I was like, I think it was the 800. I was like I'm super stressed right now. She's like, why? I'm like, cause our guy’s on the inside and whenever I would run track and I would be stuck in the inside and there'd be people all around me, I get super stressed and I would literally let everyone pass me, I would go to the back so I can get to the outside and run around them again, which makes no sense. But it just gave me anxiety like I can't go anywhere, trapped in this little hole of emotion and physically by these other runners. And so I'm like, you got to get outside, bro. You can't stay in there. You're stuck.

I don't think they do that. I don't think they,

They don't do that.

That's a terrible idea. That's not the way you win the race. Of course, you know, but my anxiety would not let me be all smashed in there amongst those bodies. I would worry about tripping on their foot. And then I'd feel bad that I tripped them or someone behind me would trip me. It freaked me out.

Did you play in college?

No, I played soccer at a pretty high level. I played up to Olympic Development Region 1. And then I had some offers to play at, like, smaller schools. And at Notre Dame, they said, we'll make you a preferred walk on, you'll probably make the team and I was cut in the first month of my freshman year.

So, that didn't pan out. But I say, like, look, life happens for a reason. I didn't make the soccer team. And so I got back into music. I started a band and the guy who was the guitarist in the band is my co-founder in Bouqs. So, you make a soccer team, you don't start the band, you probably don't become best friends with that dude, and you definitely don't start a business that defines your career.

So, you know,

Yeah.

Things work out the way they're supposed to work out.

I love it. I quit college sports and ended up studying computer science, which is way dorkier, but that's how I begun my founder career.
It's basically the same as starting a cover band called Sexual Chocolate. It's basically the same.

No, it's, it's actually really not

Just like Mondays and Fridays with beers, they're the same.

Similar, similar. Oh my goodness, I love it. Good start. Good start. Thank you. Sorry, sexual chocolate. That's great. And that's your co-founder for Bouqs?

Yeah, Juan Pablo Montúfar Arroyo, he was the guitarist. We did like terrible versions of, of like 90s and 80s cover songs. And we had all of our friends who had no musical capability whatsoever, like, not like no rhythm, no tone. We had them be like the backup dancers and the, and the backup singers. And so we were like equal parts, comedy and music.

I'm not sure if you know Tara Roth, you will at some point, but she and I are the backup singers. We have no rhythm and no anything, but we're great backup dancers, backup something.

You're like the hype ladies for whoever's singing at the karaoke bar.

That is correct. Okay. I want to talk about M13 because that's, you know, what we're supposed to talk about, but can we start with Bouqs because I'm so interested in the

Oh, I thought we were just gonna talk about the Olympics and karaoke.

Yeah, and sexual chocolate

Yeah. I feel like that's what this podcast is about.

And shark tank. Dude, I have so many fun things for you. But no, so, Bouqs, if I understand your story, it started with your mother doing customer service. True?

True. My mom at the time was 70 years old. so backing up. So JP and I are buddies, right? And I had just left Disney to work at Shoe Dazzle. So I was like a month into my startup world slash venture back slash everything ecosystem. And he just called me. He's like, Hey, he's like, I'm, general manager of a farm in Ecuador doing roses.

Great, beautiful farm on Cayambe, the active volcano. And he's like, they're just looking for new sales channels. He's like, you guys are e commerce. Like, tell me what you've learned in your one month at Shoe Dazzle. And we started talking about like the different sort of business model challenges of the way flowers have been run for him as a farmer and for the end consumer.

And the list was long, like it's a really tough business as a farmer. And they're, it's treated as a commodity, which means they have very little power in the value chain, even though they produce the product. And the consumer is kind of ignored in this, space as well. Like if you look at the business models that were prevalent at the time, there was no one really caring about the consumer.

So you're like, wait a second, the grower of the product and the buyer of the product. Are the two least important in the value chain like what's going on? How weird and so it was pretty easy to build a thesis around like, hey let's try to fix that. But we weren't like, let's go raise a million dollars and like dive in.

It was sort of like, let's just do this as like a side thing. Like, you know, I'll keep my job. You keep your job and we'll just try stuff. And so like I hired a dude from UCLA to be the developer just on equity and cash if we ever raise any money, which I don't know if we ever will. And then JP worked for free and I worked for free and I got my mom to be the head of customer service at 70 years old.

My sister was our HR person. She did HR for like, it was truly like the most hacked together, Sort of, you know, band aided together sort of operations beginning. me and JP put in 4, 000 bucks. We had 13, 000 total invested at the beginning of the business. Four from me, four from him. And like my mom put in a thousand bucks and my sister put in two, she really wanted to put in 4, 000. I was like, I can't handle it if we lose 4, 000. So I'm going to take two.

Yeah. I totally get it.

We just hacked it together. And it was like the world's ugliest website when it launched, but the flowers lasted two weeks and people were like, Oh my gosh, that's so much better than what I normally get. How do you do that?

And then it just grew really fast organically from there.

Wow. No, I like that because I think too many people nowadays are like, I have to raise a million dollars. Like, man, 13,000,
And back then we had to actually build our own e commerce website. There was no Shopify in 2012. So now it's like, you know, chip in a chair, like you got a shot, especially in commerce, but there's so many tools now. But we were also, I wasn't ready to like, I'm a weird mindset for starting a company because I'm like half my mom and half my dad.

My dad was a public school teacher. He never did anything entrepreneurial, but he always had like these crazy schemes and dreams. He would talk about how, Oh, I should have bought that McDonald's franchise in 1980, whatever.

And my mom's like, pay the bills, put the money in the bank, be safe. Right. Total opposites. So , my career up till that point was all, like, I worked at Bain and company and Disney, like it was very safe.

And so it was like, well, we'll just do this. It's like an option if it works and it creates some money, Great. And if it totally fails, like it was a fun experiment. and then it worked. And so then I was like, okay, well, actually I got laid off. And then it was like, I don't have a choice. I guess I should probably make this work. It was the worst timing. I had a nine month old baby. My wife worked in public education. We had just bought a house in Venice.

And I was like, this is not the best, but like, let's give it a shot. And it worked.

I mean, but now, and I want to hear more about it but like, one of my friends talks about a V1 marker. Which is something in airplanes where like, that's like lift off velocity or something. he says like, when you, you set your V1 marker and it's like, you know, X number of sales or your wife has a stable career, whatever it is that enables you to quit your job.

But I mean, do you do some of that with your startups now where you're like, Oh, I can see enough traction that yes, we should continue to pursue this versus no, let's scrap that and, try a different plane?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's sort of what our studio is built to do is to remove some of that decision making from someone on an island with no information, no context, no data. So we, a lot of people that we are aiming to work with, what we call founders and waiting. There are people that should be founders, but aren't founders for some reason, right?

Life's in the way. They don't have the right idea. They don't have the right team member. They don't have the technical chops. It might just be time and experimentation. Hey, keep your job at insert big tech or whatever company you work at. We can develop this concept for you with you. And so we do is look for momentum. We look for V1 markers, whatever that thing is. All the time.

So in I've been here for a year doing this in our first year we explored, I want to say like 80 things. We worked on 38 of them and we funded four and one of them we funded last week. So we're killing, you know, 90 percent of the stuff because it's not getting that clarity of problem solution fit.

Because I want to hear the the story of the Bouqs a little bit. Like, what was it? Was it that you said the flowers lasted for two weeks? is it because you sort of reinvented the supply chain? Like what was it that made it all come together?

Yeah, I think it was a combination of two things. So the supply chain innovation was real and is like the core differentiating factor for what we do. And now the technology that enables it is a big part of it as well. So what we said was you have farmers, you have exporters, you have importers in Miami, then you have wholesalers around the country, then you have florists, and then you have order gatherers online who send those florist orders, that doesn't make any sense.

No supply chain needs to be that, long and complex. It doesn't, especially one that's dealing with fresh, very fragile, literally with an expiration date product, right. It doesn't make any sense. So we said, look, eliminate everyone, but us in the farm. And we'll use the technology to do the same stuff.

And so we stitched together a supply chain that takes it directly from the farms in Ecuador and Columbia and sends it to the end consumer. It takes the time it takes to get from the farmer to the consumer. Which is normally about two and a half weeks from when it's cut to when it's delivered to the house.

We knock that down to one to five days. And so, our flowers aren't better. They're the same flowers. They're just not wasting all their time at all these steps along the way getting to the end customer. And we don't have this last player at the end, the poor florist, who's stuck with an order from a customer that isn't their customer. Where they're making 50 cents by being part of one of these wire networks. And they're sitting there looking at their very fresh stuff and going, I can send the brand new stuff I got in today that I paid for with my dollar, or I can send the stuff that's older. And they're going to send the stuff that's older. And they should. It's not their customer they're not banking on long lasting. It's like, I'm going to do the best I can to make this 50 cents or 1 dollar from this wire network. We eliminate all that. We just send it directly from the farm. So it's just going to last a lot longer.

Okay, can you just give that to me? Like there's volcano in Ecuador flowers get on a boat, a plane, like how?
Yeah, it's all air. So way the technology works now is, we take orders now, you know, millions of orders a year, and it goes into the machine. The machine's going to look at sort of what's best for the customer, what's best for the business. And it's going to rank sort of where those flowers should come from.

It's running all kinds of math on inventory, decrementation, how old inventory is, when did it come in? When does it need to go out? When do we need to order more? And it's divvying those orders up. If it sends it to South America, it will translate it into the local language. It will give them what's supposed to be packed when they'll cut it, they'll prep it, they'll pack it, they'll ship it directly from there. It goes to, in a cold truck to the airport. The airport, it goes air into Miami. And then we flip it over to FedEx and FedEx delivers it across the country.

From there, it handles import customs, you know, all that stuff, all in the system. And the magic of that is the freshness, right? It gets there faster. So it lasts a lot longer. Our waste rate is between one and 3 percent in an industry where it's 50%, five, zero percent. So we eliminate 90 percent of the waste. And you can feel really good about what you're getting and you get a better price because we're eliminating all those players, you know, along the way, the sacrifice you have, and this is why we're now moving into retail, is that it's generally not as fast or nimble, right?

If you have flowers locally, you can deliver it today in hours. Our machine has generally been pretty slow, but now with the addition of these whole food stores, we're starting to see that we can fulfill that need for the customer as well and keep the waste rates down in that low single digits, even though we have the retail presence.

So interesting. Do you think that it makes sense for other verticals, like you really done something end to end in flowers, but you said they're perishable, they're, you know, need to be there the right time. Like all that stuff. Does it make sense that other verticals are going to undergo where there's going to be who just like take over the whole supply chain?

Yeah, you know, I mean, we talked at the very beginning, like, hey, if we got really good at this, we could do this in this industry that, you know, coffee was the first one, you know, but every industry has so many nuances about the way their value chains work that we learned very quickly, like, oh, you can't just do this again. It's not at all the same. Coffee gets imported, unroasted, and then you roast it closer to where your customer is. That's the way the process works. And if you roast it in South America and then ship it, you're not getting that much savings. It's not that different. You're not necessarily going to get a big shift in the cost, but there are businesses that do this.

One of our investors invested in a similarly sort of situated coffee company. I believe it's possible, but I do believe that like, we thought we could copy and paste. And then we learned that what we built was really built for this category.

Interesting. One more just on your entrepreneurial journey, like you guys ended up with subscriptions pretty early, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's something I cribbed for sure from, you know, watching Brian Lee and what he was doing in sort of all the subscription innovation stuff. And I was like, I don't know if it's ever going to be big, but this is a category where it makes sense. We actually had three subscription types when we started.

We had the, we called it regular blooms, which is sort of like a traditional subscription at once a month, once a week, whatever frequency you wanted. We had special occasions which you'd literally subscribe to a date. Every year I want my, my mom to get flowers on her birthday. So then you just can never forget.

It was, you know, great. And then the last one, which was my favorite, it's called Just Because. And you would subscribe to a number of times per year, and the algorithm would randomly pick dates and you would just surprise somebody with flowers. Never in the same week or anything like that, but like you pick three times a year.

You might get one in two months and then none for three months and then one, one, you know, whatever it is, but now you're a thoughtful person surprising your loved one, but you didn't have to do the thinking. The first one got pretty popular. It was like 10 percent of revenue in the early days. The other two, I think just were too unique.

People just didn't understand them.

Now our subscription program is massive. We have by far the largest subscriber base in, I think, in the world for flowers.

And you know, it's a nice eight figure business. But we've sort of combined all those thoughts into a single program where it's just wildly flexible. You sign up for a periodicity normal, normal is once a month, but then this month you might send it to your mom, the next month your sister, and then you might put it on pause for two months, and then you have it come to your own home for two months because you want some fresh flowers.

So it's just an easy way to sort of dole out the gifting at a drastically reduced price.

So the thing I talk a lot about with my entrepreneurs that I'm working with is iterating. So iterating and not getting false negatives. I feel like false negatives are the easiest thing to get when iterating because you try something but unless every, you know, website marketing, all of your checkout flow, all of your funnel, you might get a false negative and think people don't want this. Everyone says in business school, just iterate. But I never find it that easy.

Yeah, it's not, it's not. And honestly, I think it's, 50 percent sort of gut and your understanding of what you want to build and 50 percent of the data, like the purist product, people that I would hire. And they'd be like, no, look, this is 0. 3 percent higher so this is the winner and I'd just be like, no, like my gut says, this is what our customer wants. Like we have to give this to them, right? And sometimes you just have to say like, this is what I want to build.

What I knew was there was a use case for subscriptions in this category because the product dies.Replenishment has to happen, , but that was, ended up being kind of wrong. What it really was, was people started using it as just an epic way to give a gift. On Mother's Day, instead of giving flowers once, I'll give you them for a year. That's a 600 gift. That's like a big gift, but it's like 40 some bucks a month.

And so it's like, it's, palatable in that moment. And that's what made the subscription product work

The thing that I think we're very lucky with Bouqs, which is our original vision and where we are today. I think the very early employees might disagree with me on this because we were a little bit pure, like too pure about the mission. But like, it's still there. We're still farm direct, farm to table, sustainably grown, fresher flowers for less, like all that's still there.

But like, we shouldn't be too precious about the exact way it gets there, so long as we're not ruining that customer promise.

I feel like I hear that like strong convictions loosely held, but the breadth of the vision or the mission or whatever you just called it. I think that people don't talk about that enough, which is, you need to know what is the absolute core, core piece that you don't compromise on.
And actually, I think people think that their mission is to never, you know, the supply chain needs to be this and this, that, and that. And you're like, actually, no, the only core piece is serving a customer or whatever it is for you.

Well, one of the things, you know, we have two really tough moments culturally around this, conversation that we had one was, we're going to actually open up, you know, distribution centers, because for the early team, it was like, no, now we're like everybody else. And I was like, no, we're not. They're going to come in. They're going to go right back out. We're not going to sit on them for two weeks and then sell the really old stuff. They're going to come in and go right back out.

But for some people, that was just unfathomable. It's like, this is not what we signed up to do. Yeah. And then the second one was moving away from some things that we thought were really interesting innovations but ended up not being the customer preference.

One was the beginning, I was like, we're never going to sell a basis. Everyone's got like a hundred vases in their house. They never use them. Like, why would you sell a vase? How annoying to sell a vase? That was my thesis. We didn't have any vases. And literally the number one contact we got from customers was, I want to buy a vase.I want to buy a vase. I want to buy a vase. And then I looked at vases and I was like, wow, those are 50 to 75 percent gross margin. We should sell vases, right?

It's like the same thing with flat pricing. We had one price when we started. Everything was 40. That was it. 40 bucks flat. No fees, no nothing. Now we have, you know, delivery fees of three different sizes at different prices.

We've got Premium and because people want choice, they really do. They were, handed in by the one price. We couldn't offer everything we want to offer. So those things, while they felt very core at the beginning, you start getting the customer feedback. You start learning like, no, that isn't the thing that they really care about.

They really care about this other stuff. So let's keep that pure and let's, be flexible over here. And you know, now I have a hundred bases in my house and I never use any.

No, but that's exactly my point. That's exactly. It's a great example of letting go of something you thought was core of your mission. But look, now you sell vases. It's fine.

Yeah, people love the vases. They're great.

Okay. Tell me about your job now.

Yeah, so, you know, ran Bouqs for eight and a half years as CEO, knew in year three that I didn't want to be CEO.

Wow.

I literally started the business because I thought this was an interesting problem to solve. I loved my co-founder and I wanted to be a CEO. That was like my life's dream. and then the first two, three years is you're just a founder, right? You're just trying stuff. You're shooting from the hip and it's all vision and hope and magic and all this stuff. And then all of a sudden you have like 50 people that depend on you and your managing them and you're managing the people that they manage.

And it's, it's a machine and it was not what I was great at. I was great at first part. But like I just closed a series C of, 30 million dollars and like, I'm not going anywhere. And so then it became this process of sort of finding the right time in place to step away, but not out. became executive chair. I was in the business full time for a full year alongside the new CEO. But I knew like for me it was, this creation process that I created.

I just want to, birth new things in the world and then be like, you can parent them. And so I looked for a while. I tried to start a fund to do this. I had known Carter and Courtney for a long time. , they invested as angels and Bouqs back in 2014, I think in the Series A. and I, we had talked about, you know, their incubator and the first time around, it wasn't the right time.

And the second time around about a year and a half ago, two years ago, almost they said, Hey, like, We've had this thing for a while. It needs sort of like a new leader. What do you think? And I was like, let's give it a shot. So I came on as the EIR uh, for six months, tried to figure out what this thesis that we talked about earlier around momentum building experimentation could look like and it's been it's honestly, it's like, it's the perfect job for me, like I say it all the time, I'm so afraid of not having this job someday because we get to spend every day with just the art of what's possible.
And we're talking to people who have that glint in their eye around building something. And there's nothing cooler than that person at that moment. Right. And so, we spend all of our time exploring problem spaces with people that know those spaces.

And sometimes the business comes out of it, sometimes not. And if it doesn't, we give them the work and we're like, we hope this helps you on your journey. And if we do it, we write a check, we get some comment and we help you build the business. And we don't, we have, you know, M13 invests pretty broadly, you know, across the sort of spectrum of business models, we definitely have like a sort of consumer software, consumer tech and tech enabled consumer sort of bent because of where I come from.

But, you know, in our first four businesses, we have a FinTech business, we have a SaaS business we have a B2B CRM business, and we have an actual consumer tech business. And so very few restrictions. What I say to people all the time is like, Hey, look, everyone has ideas. Anyone around this ecosystem has an idea at some point for a business, including VCs, and I offer this to you and your partners as well.

Let us build it for you. We'll go build it. We'll go run it down, and if there's something there, great, you can invest alongside of us, we can get the structure in place we'll find the right CEO, founder to run it, and we'll package this thing together.

A lot of studios focus on sort of shared services, they have, you know, 20 engineers, 15 product people, whatever it is, and they spend most of their money on building. That's not where we add value. We add value through sort of the, getting the right pieces of the puzzle together in the right way. So that when we write a check, it has an outsized chance of success at a pace that gets up the J curve a little bit faster.

Because you can hire all those same resources with cash, and we're going to give the founders cash. So, you know, the glint in the eye, like, tell me, like, who are you trying to meet? What do they look like? What are you asking when you're meeting people? What are you trying to get to know?
So we meet, I'd say a couple different flavors of folks that we end up building things with. you know, just given the, the makeup of the firm we meet famous people and in large corporates who are like, I have this problem. I wouldn't say that's most of what we do, but that's maybe like 10 percent of the time that is like, Hey, we can be the studio that helps get this thing from zero to something.

What's been really surprising to me, honestly, is I thought we'd get a lot of first time founders because they'd be nervous and they want to, like, have the help. A lot of the folks that come to us are second and third time founders. because they'd been through the ringer. And they know what it's like on an island. And by the way, I'm the same way. If I was going to do it again, I would not do it solo. No way. It's just too hard. Right? It's just a heck of a journey to bear sort of all that on your own. And I had a co founder, but he was in Ecuador.

Right? Like, he lived the whole time in Ecuador. He didn't come up to the States until like year three or four, when we could afford the 700 flight.
And so I bore a lot of that solo, and I look at these founders and I'm like, I'm so glad that you see that you want and need help. It's very mature. It's very smart to give up a little bit of equity to have a village and a tribe around you helping you get this thing up the hill because it's all just so darn hard. And generally the way that we work is we just say like, okay, which of these is worth some amount of your time?
There's no commitment. Just would you spend two hours a week or five hours a week? Like, what would you do? And we just start working on it. And like I said, either the momentum happens or not, like often people be like, Oh, yeah, I'll spend two hours a week. And then pretty soon they're kind of like, okay, I'll be the CEO.
Can I do it, right? because they get addicted to this solving the problem.

I actually think that's the best test. I saw that you teach at UCLA. Yes?

Yeah.

What are you teaching? Is it Journey to the Entrepreneurial Mindset?

Yes, it is.

I like that. I have so many thoughts. What are some of the big themes you're trying to convey there?

Yeah. So the energy behind starting the course which this is going to be my, this coming year will be my sixth year teaching it. Was I took all the classes at Anderson, and they were all very good courses that you would take if you were going to become an entrepreneur, but they were all so academic. It was like, this is the thesis behind all the stuff.

Then I went and founded a company and it was a disaster. So often, cause no one even told me like what to even worry about. Like no one said like, Oh, when you have 25 to 40 people, your culture is going to explode. Like no one told me that after it happened. Everyone's like, Oh yeah, that happened to me too.

And so I was like, let's build a course that marries the very academic with the very practical to prepare someone for what the journey is actually going to be like, hence the name of the course. And so we take people through like, how do you develop an idea? How do you build a team? How do you maintain culture? does it look like to raise money? the last sort of section is just around the, the mental, emotional, personal journey of what it is to be a founder.

What do you tell people about developing culture or getting through the bad times?

So, I learned this lesson the really hard way. I was dealing with a tough moment in Bouqs, and I went to my buddy Jason Nazar, who have you had him on the podcast?

I ought to. I know him. I like him.

He's a good one. Jason to me was like, he's one of those advisors I got really early just being like, hey, you're two years ahead of me, you will have seen this stuff, like talk to me about this stuff. And so I had lunch with him and he's brilliant, brilliant man. And probably one of the best founders in LA. And he says, listen, he's like, if you have someone who's neutral on culture, they got to go tomorrow.

Like not negative neutral. And if they're negative, he's like, they, got to go tomorrow.

And I was like, dude, that's like really hard. Like some of these people are like big positions, big titles, but people that everyone rely on or the board thinks are great or whatever. He's like, no, he's like, they got to go. And I didn't listen to him. And I signed up for a year and a half of pain, unlike anything else I've ever experienced in my professional life.

I mean, it put me into depression. the company really struggled. We struggled to keep people. We struggled to hire people. It was really bad. If you go back to, this is probably like I don't know, 18, 19 ish. You go on glass door and find reviews of the culture at the Bouqs company and me in particular, it's a complete and utter disaster.

And rightfully so. So I didn't do what Jason said. I did not maintain the bar. And so the number one thing I say to people about maintaining culture is like, if someone starts to skew neutral, you get them back to positive immediately or they have to go because once they become negative, it's cancer. It spreads so fast and you won't even know what happened.

She'll be like, what happened? We were this. Bright eyed, bushy tailed, , mission driven company where everyone was here to, for the right reasons, we're all going to do it together. And now all of a sudden there's infighting politics and you're like, what is going on? So you cannot let it sort of start to slide as soon as it starts to slide.

I was in over my head. I didn't know what to do. But Jason told me, and that's what I tell people now. It's like, if you're pushing a boulder up the if someone's watching you push. They're not pushing down, but they're watching you push. Do you really want them on your team? If they're on the other side pushing down the hill, certainly you don't want them on the team. They're trying to crush you. But like, if they're just watching, they're not throwing all their weight behind the boulder, then they probably shouldn't be around.

Yeah, that's really strong.

So much easier said than done.

yes, that's where I was going. Great. But I mean, does just getting rid of people like that, that a that's hard, but does that really get you out of your own dark times? Like not to be too personal, but I find that really hard to get out of your own personal dark times, even if you clean up the ranks a bit.

A hundred percent. No, I mean, it was a, it was it probably took us two years to get the company back to a good place. And, you know, I did a lot of therapy. I'd never done any kind of therapy. I did a lot of therapy that certainly helped. But like to be, if I was super honest about it, like there's still a decent amount of trauma in there from that period.

Like I, I had a very sort of false view of my own competence that I could just figure everything out.
And then I was confronted with something that was highly personal because I was the problem, right? I literally was the problem and I was completely failing at it very publicly.

And like, my psyche was not ready for that at all. It was not something I'd been through before. I didn't know what to do. There wasn't really anyone to talk to about it. Like my wife was very supportive, but she's like, I'm a public school teacher. And I got, and I just had twins.

Like, you know,

Oh, Oh I got a whole story about that too. Our house flooded like a week before she gave birth to the twins. While I was in this dark space, I was going to the house every day at 5 AM to like, literally like lift a hammer and nail and like try to clean stuff up as a complete mess. But the important thing on the cultural side is once you see it start to happen with a person, you rectify it then so you don't get sucked down into it, right, because then you don't have to have this massive claw back out.

But then also it's a big thing that I work on here is at M13 is you have to steal people around sort of the mental and emotional health they have to have to be ready for these things. You have to talk to them about it. You have to prepare them. You have to give them the tools. It's like, you know, nowadays it's relatively common to talk about mental health.

But like, people don't talk about it as enough. Alright and the sort of prevalence of these issues in the founder community the sort of risk taking psyche that, founders have in general will make these swings so much worse than they need to be.
Totally. I went through that where I thought I could figure things out for myself, but I just got stuck in such a negative place and I should have figured out how to get help sooner.

Right. And getting founders to get out of that, headspace, they put themselves in, I did it, you did it, everyone does it where you're just like, I have to do it. There's no one else that can do it. And it's like, well, right. You are the founder. But I said to people all the time, my class now, like, yes, you're the founder and the CEO as a founder.

You hired yourself to be the CEO. That's it. It's a job. You didn't have any competition. You have to interview with anybody because you put yourself in the job, but it's just a job. So why do you do we as founders all of a sudden put this extra existential, like no one else thinks this way. And in some ways it's very good.

VCs depend on it. You need someone who's going to run through a brick wall to make this company work, but it's wildly unhealthy.
and that's probably where I'm most passionate now is like, Hey, I can have empathy around it, but more than that, like I've seen the potholes. Let me help you navigate this road so that you avoid some of those.

I like that, like, it's one thing to have empathy, it's another to actually be helpful,

Yes,

I like that, okay you are from Rural Ridge, Pennsylvania?

I am. I love that you looked up Rural Ridge.

It's the best. Rural Ridge, Pennsylvania is an hour and a half outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the hills. It is a community of still about 300 people. We had a stop sign, no stop lights. We had a bar and a post office. then that was it. It was an old mining town where my grandfather worked in the mine, you know, immigrated to the us, worked in the mine, and then, like, this little tiny community formed around it. I was probably related to about a third of the town. cousin's house was next door, my other cousins were down the street, Grandma and Grandpa were up the street, other cousins there, second cousins here, Aunt Bubi. I don't even know if Aunt Bubi and I were related, but she was Aunt Bubi.

Like, you know, really tiny town kind of the middle of nowhere. Parents are still there, still go back once a year.

But now, you are, like, it's 180 degrees. And I know it's not like you went from there to hanging out with, whatever, Paris Hilton and Richard Branson, but like, you're in Palos Verdes Estates, is what I was learning earlier. Like, what do you think, if you think Rural Ridge, where you're related to a third of the people and Aunt Boobie is there, like, what do you want for your kids? how do you think about, like, the best of all the different worlds?
Yeah, you know I struggle with this a lot, the kids are 12 and the twins are nine. And you know, I always had this need to like, to find bigger and better, My sisters, I don't think, were the same way. I was also a complete accident, like, eight and a half years younger than my oldest sibling, you know, all the stuff.

I had this, like, you know, dreams of the big thing. Whatever it was gonna be, music or movies, you know, something big and glitzy and glamorous. And now I live in, like, the suburbs. It's a nice town, but it's the suburbs of LA. It's the burbs, like kids ride their bikes and, you know, it's quiet and all the stuff.

And that journey, like nothing feels very different. Like there's lots of, you know, flexibility and lifestyle now and stuff that didn't have back then. I know lots of people who are wildly successful and that's cool. And they're great humans. And I have lots of connections with those people, but like for my kids, I wish more than anything, just like sort of, I think probably very influenced by the pandemic, like calmness and like peace. I don't care what that looks like for them. That looks like, you know, more glitz and glamor. That looks like, a very different lifestyle. I just wish for them this calmness that I feel like is so not present in today's world and we try to foster it at home, but like, I'm also a very hyper dude. And so there's not a lot of calm around me. But that's kind of what I wish.

Peace and calm, not my specialty either. Uh, Do you think about how to affect that?

Yeah. Like we did this exercise where we, my wife and I talked about like, , what do we care about in our family? And we actually printed out a big poster. It's like to be a Tabis is. And it's like, to be driven, to be curious, you know, to be kind. Like, we have this thing on the wall and every night at dinner, in theory, we're supposed to talk about one of those things and how we exhibited that trait that day.

And I think back to growing up and I'm like, parents never once talked to me about anything like that. was just assumed in the culture of the family that like, you would be away. And like, I don't know if that's good or bad, either one. But my hope is that like, this generation is getting a level of education at an age about what it is to be human, how to be human, how to deal with being human, that no one history has ever had.
Right? Like every day on Instagram, I get the like, this is how you parent in a way that does this, right? And I'm in the algorithm, like, I'm deep in it, right? I liked some things and now I'm in it, but like, how amazing to be at this time when we're actually, like, I'm talking to my kids about mental health at age eight, at age nine when I did literally did not have a conversation about it until I was in my early thirties and having been broken by an experience of my business.

Yeah, no, I think the same thing and I could spend a lot of time talking about the younger generations and their approach to life, but we are out of time and we will save that discussion for Friday over beers. In the meantime, wishing you lots of luck with all this exciting company building.

Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. The audience can check us out at m13.co/launchpad or obviously all of them, m13 and m13.co and I really appreciate it. This was super fun.