Rob Walling

And I had to persevere instead of escalating every problem to my boss or to someone else.

And this was a really good skill for me to learn because when you're an entrepreneur, the buck stops with you.

And although I could pull the ripcord, I could drive somewhere 45 minutes away.

And if I couldn't find someone, I could feasibly just drive 45 minutes back to the shop and tell people I couldn't find them.

But that's a huge waste of time.

And it kind of shows incompetence, you know, it shows you didn't try hard enough, like figure this out.

And I was 16 at the time, 17, 18, I think I did it.

I did it in summers and during holiday breaks.

And I learned that things are often less clear than you want them to be.

You know, you want all the instructions to be perfect and you want...

people to have thought this through.

But realistically, everyone's in a hurry, someone scribble something down, sometimes you can't even read their handwriting.

And I would just have to figure it out.

And that was a really good lesson for me to learn as a teenager, given that founders operate with incomplete information all the time.

And that as a founder, you have to make progress without perfect clarity.

Like that's a core skill of being an entrepreneur.

Both of those lessons were things that were driven home for me, you know, and I think it was very helpful.

And the other thing was learning to not throw problems back to necessarily to the person who asked.

Now, sometimes I did have to go find a pay phone and call someone.

And that was me pulling.