Kass Lazerow
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Mike, do you want to go?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
I think we did a better job these last, I would say, 15 years than we did the first 15 years of working together. And we've learned some rules and cheat codes over the way. We talk about it in the book. But part of that is you have to prioritize your health so that you actually can function, right? But you have to put it on the calendar.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And whatever that is, it could be like for me, a lot of it is... non-negotiable workouts, and also just quiet time, like no other, no talking, nothing, just quiet time. And burnout's a real thing with entrepreneurs. And it's like Mike said, it's very lonely. It's also, you have to have really thick skin because things happen so much
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And there's so much criticism and feedback that's going to be coming your way from people who think they're being helpful, but you have to be able to start to realize that the doubts that you have to be able to put those aside and have the discipline of your brain to say, I'm going to keep focusing on those big rock priorities. And that mental discipline is what
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
creates the burnout, in my opinion, because you've basically been holding your breath for however many years and you get to some kind of finish line and then you just feel exhausted. So our rule of thumb is prioritize something for yourself at least 45 minutes a day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
One of our new friends says it's coffee with her dogs in silence. Just that's what it is. It has to be prioritized.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Well, I was used to his ideas coming out at any time or any place. That is something that I've always been used to with Mike. And that starts from the minute he wakes up to the minute he goes to sleep. He will say, I have an idea. I had thought maybe it just wouldn't have come out while I was in the recovery room with our third child, but he, I'll let Mike tell it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
He was, saw this big announcement from Facebook and he could, he just couldn't help himself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Exactly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
I think the ego happens a lot. It comes forward. And I think a lot of founders get blinded by their ego and pride. And we see this a lot when things aren't working. So let's just say a founder has told us that X, Y, and Z need to happen this year, and that's their plan. And when there's enough data that they're looking for, They're looking at that basically says none of it's working.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And also the focus of a lot of parents that are helicoptering and just doing everything for them. I think the other part of the confidence issue is we don't let kids fail safely when we have 18 years to let them pretty much fail safely, right? If not 22.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And we're just not letting them make the mistakes, letting themselves pick themselves up so that they learn that you can learn things from failure. I think that's the other part of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Yes, exactly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
It first starts off with when you start your company, right, and you have your vision, most investors are going to ask when they're thinking about investing in you, what's your exit strategy, right? Who do you think could either acquire you and could you go public, things like that? We always were watching Salesforce.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And Mike did such a great job with getting our name out there and really building relationships there. with so many different investors whether they invested in us or not. But when we thought about how to get bigger, And you look at all that Mark's done, we really wanted to start to replicate his formula for success when it came to sales.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
So when I thought about it, I was like, okay, I would love to get Susan St. Ledger here. She's just fantastic. And it was a big lift, I will tell you that. If you see me right now, I'm in a T-shirt. And perhaps you know this, John, Susan does not wear T-shirts unless she's playing basketball.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
so no she is always dressed to the nines to the nines and during that era she had i just remember she had chanel cuffs on both wrists she just looked fantastic so the first step was for me to learn how to dress up a little bit to get to her level and then it was a series of mike and i dating her literally
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
getting to know her, flying out there to meet her, having conversations, asking her what her career goals were, and then aligning all of our interests. And I don't know, how many meetings do you think we had, Mike? So many, so many. I don't know, 10, 15 different meetings. I was going back and forth across the country multiple times every couple of weeks just to keep talking to her.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And I think I got the confidence because we were at a point where when you're at 50 million in ARR after three years and you're basically projecting to double it, you need to have professional help when it comes to sales. And she was what was going to be that professional help.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
It validated us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And not like intimidate them or be intimidated by them or make their life harder. You have to be humble enough. And again, this is where you might say ego comes into place to say, this is not what we did best. I remember Mike and Jeff Raghavan telling me the story of the first meeting with Susan. And she kept asking them, well, why are you doing this way?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Mike just kept saying, that's how we know to do it. And she's, well, that's the wrong way. And he's, okay, let's fix it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Awesome. That's why you're here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
That's when the ego gets in the way. You start to see them trying to convince themselves that they shouldn't pivot or that something's not working because they tell themselves stories. And those stories are attached to their ego.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Absolutely. When we thought about, and Mike can tell you that we had other offers that were significantly more. But when you think about, first of all, the great fit, we needed sales expertise. But we really did it because we believed and always have about giving back, right? The more you give, the more you get. Someone called us do-givers instead of...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Really thinking that if you can tie people together by the good you do, it just makes such more of an impact in the world. And we loved his one, one, one model. And it was just a big part of our decision.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
I think from the beginning, I've always loved Mike's brain and it's just this, it's this place where anything can happen, where he can think about anything and he can come up with just ideas over and over again. And I've always been an operator. So I even think when we chose each other as partners, it was just the glue. We were just, it was Yang. It was like a perfect compliment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And it's always worked well because when you have founders, you really do have to stay away from other founders that have the same skill set because you will get stuck in this kind of paralysis of decision and micromanaging and you won't have trust and someone's always going to have a bigger opinion and There's going to be a fight. But for us, it just worked very well and it has kept going.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
We also know that we have weaknesses and we do have gaps that we've always surrounded ourselves with other people who fill in those gaps and they become the expertise that we don't have.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Do you want me to answer that one, Mike?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
I think in 2012, when Mike and I started going on the road, well, Mike was on the road every week, but I was starting to go on the road like every other week to open up offices around the world. He decided, and I'm a huge dog lover, don't get me wrong, but he decided that he was going to get a puppy instead of the adult rescue that I had given permission to do for the family.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
So I think that was a really hard moment. But in terms of, I don't think business, I think Shape Matrix was a difficult time for you. I didn't necessarily support it, but what do you think?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Okay, okay. I'm aggressive aggressive.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Thanks so much for having us, John. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
I would give them the following, which is you're not going to do it perfect. There's no way to give 100% at work and 100% at home and to try to forgive yourself. And I will tell you, being on the other side, when we did our biggest and most successful company, I had a 5'3 and newborn baby. So five years old, three years old and a newborn. And 20 years later, they are doing so well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
They're thriving. They saw a mom that worked really hard, that was generous and loves giving back. And that is almost more important, the modeling than you do than being there 100% of the time. So it's not going to be easy. You're going to feel a whole lot of guilt and everything's going to be good.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Well, in the beginning, when you are a startup and you're going zero to one, you're definitely going to need people who wear multiple hats. So if you looked at a couple of our first employees, they did multiple things in the company and you can't really divide out departments or processes really yet. But once you start getting customers and you start having that repeat revenue,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Then it's time to scale. And that's where money balling really comes into play because you're going to have to make decisions on where does everyone fit best and they need to do that one thing. So finding teams, we always found people through people we knew and then we incentivized others. all of our team to bring in their friends. We had that theory that birds of a feather flock together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
We knew that someone was not going to bring someone in that wasn't going to be the same kind of, we call them buddies back then, buddy that we all wanted, that would work hard, lift people up, root for everybody and be supportive. So that really helped. Hiring managers, very hard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
You also got to be very careful about who you promote as a manager because you better make sure that they're doing their job and also leading at the same time before you promote them. So it's a combination of really understanding that over time,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Not everybody scales, which is a really tough lesson because you might have a ton of people there that are really cultural anchors in the company, but they can't move forward in a scaled company, in a big company. And you have to be the leader who can make those decisions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
You go first, Mike.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
I'm going to say, who are your first five hires and why? I want to see how are they going to build a team? Do they need a team? Do they think they need a team? Do they know what they don't know? And I want to hear their reasoning for those hires. That tells me a lot about how they think, which is why I usually do all the due diligence on our investments with the people side of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
They should just go right to Amazon. It's there. They can get it at shoveling shit. It's right there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Thanks for having us. Appreciate you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Both of us feel, John, that as an entrepreneur, it's not always glamorous and it's not full of glory. There are times often throughout the day that you're going to get punched in the face and you just got to start shoveling your way out of whatever mini crisis or mini failure that you're having. And we liken this whole experience of being an entrepreneur to golf, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
You pretty much hit really awful shots until you have one really good one that keeps you going. So we thought this metaphor was perfect for an entrepreneur. And that's why we included shovels.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
So as we started the company, we started golf.com because I had a dream to help recreational golfers track and analyze their game online, be able to get scores on leaderboards of all the tournaments going around and book tee times and really get an official USGA handicap. So we started this in 1998 in the fall And by December 99, during the dot-com boom, we were acquired by Chipshot.com.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And they were going public, so they told us they were Sequoia-backed, and they had all their paperwork ready for filing their S-1 to go public in the spring. In March of 2000, just when everything was crashing in the dot-com era, we got a call from the CEO that told us that Sequoia had backed out, they were out of money, and they were going bankrupt and pulling us back in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Talk about a real punch in the face and wishing we could take a mulligan if we're going to keep using like golf terminology here. It teaches you a lot of resilience. I think Mike and I would say that we learned the most from golf.com in that failure right there. Personally, I replayed in my head over and over again, like due diligence. What did I miss? the relationships.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And I just kept going back and back into my mind, trying to remember anything that I could have missed. But it really is, being an entrepreneur is a test of your grit and your ability to endure suffering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
I couldn't agree more with you, John. I think the ego happens a lot. It comes forward. And I think a lot of founders get blinded by their ego and pride. And we see this a lot when things aren't working. So let's just say a founder has told us that X, Y, and Z need to happen this year, and that's their plan.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
And when there's enough data that they're looking for, they're looking at that basically says none of it's working. That's when the ego gets in the way. You start to see them trying to convince themselves that they shouldn't pivot or that something's not working because they tell themselves stories. And those stories are attached to their ego.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
Mike always says being an entrepreneur is giving people a front row seat to your failures, right? Because it's hard to have the wins. And that's where we think that the ego gets stuck.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
He slammed his hand on the desk, which back then we didn't have FaceTime or Zoom or anything like that. So we could hear the actual hand hitting the desk and yelled at us, don't shine the turd. And it was a lesson for us in that ego has to be put aside. You can't tell yourself stories to make up what the data is actually saying. And our sales were okay, not great, but we had this story and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kass and Mike Lazerow on Why Building Big Requires Feeling Deep | EP 620
They're good. We're getting there. And that we have taken care forward with us for every single investment, every single person that we can tell that story to. And it has served us really well.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And also coming back to what you said, Ryan, which is, does the entrepreneur or do the co-founders know what they don't know so that they're filling in the gaps, those holes you talked about earlier with the right people around them in their leadership team? So I'm always looking for that.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
I'm looking for humble, pie kind of entrepreneurs and ones that know, say, look, this is not my expertise, but here's the person who does it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Yes.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
It's kind of like. I mean, we're talking startup world here. So if you want to get a group of people to jump and take a risk and work for you when you have nothing but like air, right, as promises like, hey, we're going to make this a big company and you you really are just. selling them a story, right? You're selling them an outcome.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
You're selling them a feeling they get when they come into the office. Then you also have to make sure that you show up every day and you're no better than they are, right? You're a good leader. You're going to handle, you're going to make the tough decisions and you're going to be a hundred percent transparent and you're you're going to lead by example.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And that can be, you know, putting together mailing lists, like we used to do in the old days, like everyone's stuff in envelopes, or in our golf.com days, we'd ring a bell and everyone would start packing golf balls into packets. Or it's basically saying, like, we're going to give back to this community. And we want everyone to be a part of what we're doing, because it's really incredible.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
So it's all about leaders shoveling first.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
All right. So, you know, we're Cass and Mike Lazaro, and he and I have been working together, if you can believe this, 28 years together. We started working together when we were just dating, and I had this crazy idea to start Goff.com. where avid golfers could come and track their handicaps online and book tee times. And then we started a big company called Buddy Media.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
I agree with you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
You and I are going to be friends on this. And I think it, listen, I think, you know, COVID really did impact a lot of people and it really changed how people work. It also changed people's perspectives. And I think somewhere along the way, probably, you know, result of, you know, helicopter parenting, right? You know, all of us wanting more for our kids, but not letting them fail. Right.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
You need to have really good. You have to have kids that can fail right in safe ways so that they understand that they are resilient and can overcome failure. So you have that. Then you get, you know, COVID and then you have technology.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And I think you're getting this this collision of all of these traits and producing people who, you know, they kind of want to work, but they don't want to work that hard. Right. And they need a lot of encouragement. And that's on top of like the previous generation that needed a lot of validation, right?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
That they were the greatest things in the world because somehow in our country, we give out trophies for second, third and 50th place.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
I'm not talking about the Olympics.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Okay, but I hear it. I hear what you're saying. I hear... I felt your pain as well. And there's this kind of like, yeah, I'll do what I can between these hours. And, you know, we got to get back to wanting to show up and rise to occasions, that kind of mindset. Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And we ran that and grew that. It was the top social media marketing platform for all the top Fortune 500 brands. We sold that to Salesforce in 2012. And we've been investors and VCs since then. And we wrote this book, Ryan, because we want to help entrepreneurs. We want to help them with the cheat codes. We have like 50 plus in this book.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And we're really here to connect with your audience and help them to not step in the shit that we have stepped in.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Yeah, expectation.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Wait, wait, what?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
That's exact.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
You know, Ryan, when you said that you thought everybody was just this driven, I related it exactly to my thought. I thought everyone in the world was going to be as competitive as I was. or I am, and wanted to win as much as I did, right? Or not lose. And that's been a lesson that I've had to learn over 30 years.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And I think what helped me overcome that one was to really start concentrating on people's strengths and how they can be puzzle pieces to a great team, right? And fit them. And then my expectations went down because we were using their strengths, right?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Or moneyball them and put them in a different position.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
It's exactly it. Like, it's funny that there's this conflict between, you know, you're selling a story. So it's going to be a little bit more rosy than perhaps you know it is at the time. But then don't shine the turd when it comes to, you know, X, Y and Z. Mike used to have the tendency to tell a lot of, you know, tell things that were just more rosy than they were.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And he learned it the hard way. in a board call after we kind of refinanced the company of golf.com and started it over. And our new board just, I can still remember it. He slammed his hand down on the speaker and was like, don't shine the turd.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
It's just self-awareness. And I think you already have it, Ryan.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
You need someone who's not going to drop the ball when you hand off things to them.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
For me, I will only speak about me, but I really have my cup filled by helping people. So I often feel like less productive or just less me if I'm not giving. So if you said to me, like, why are you guys still investing in things? Because we want to give back as much as we can. We spent 18 years helping Cycle for Survival.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And I think one big thing would be that there is no more cancer and that Mike and I were like a small part of that through our network, through being the first corporate team for Cycle for Survival. I would love that. That would be like... boy, like, I don't know, it would just be such a joyous thing. And then touching as many entrepreneurs as we can.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Yeah, they go to shovelingshit.com and they'll see it there. And we have tons of packages and extra bonuses if you just buy one book. So we're trying to help as many as we can. So send everybody that way.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Yep.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
So if you can believe it, back in 1998 when we started the company, the only URL we could get at that time was golf serve. So our original company's name was golf serve. And then we backed into this asset that we were able to buy. Mike, who is it from that we bought it from?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Yeah, from NBC that just had it dormant.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
$289,000.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And don't forget, Mike, that ShipShot had already transferred in those like two and a half months. They had transferred the bank account. So we had no access to anything.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Well, I was mad. I was really, really mad.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
It's, you know, it's a muscle that you have to develop and you get better at it the more you do it. So there's a lot of fear that you build up, right? Like, oh, my God, I don't ask this person for money. Oh, my God. At the end of the day, you know, it really is about your own fear because all they're going to say is yes or no. Right. It's like they say, no, just move on.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And that's something I think for me, Mike's much better at it than I am. But for me, I think I just realized, oh, like the worst thing could happen is they just say no. Right. That's it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
And they need the revenue to survive.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
The split is totally there and you're dead. Yeah, you nailed it because that's exactly what you need. When you have co-founders, you really do need to figure out like how to balance out the skills. And if you overlap, there's going to be just absolute micromanagement and like paralysis of decisions.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
So the best thing you can do is have a co-founder or more than one co-founder that had different skills. And that's when things really gel and you build this like implicit trust and you can move very fast.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
Hi, thanks for having us.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
It's the mental bandwidth that it takes up in your brain going, is this person really doing their job? And then that takes you away from doing what you're great at.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
SHOVELING SH*T: The Entrepreneur's Messy Path to Success with Mike & Kass Lazerow
When I say I'm going to do something for Mike, he doesn't have to worry. When he says he's going to do something, he delivers. So when you have that and you're starting a company and then you're running it and then you start to get like super fast and you hit the gas and you're scaling, that's what you need. You need someone who's not going to drop the ball when you hand off things to them.