Stephen Bartlett
speaker
413 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Stephen Bartlett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And then it takes like another five years. And a lot of people, that's it. Like they restart, they go off, crash and burn. And it takes another five years to build something that can create generational wealth. So it's about a 10-year slug. And here's the really hard truth about it.
If you have a job right now, for almost all of that five years, you quit your job because you don't want to work as hard as you are and you want to make more money. And as soon as you quit, you will realize that you are now going to work way harder than you were, and you're going to make less money for an extended period of time.
The one benefit is that you get to claim all responsibility for how little you make and how much you work. Because you're like, my boss is an idiot, and it's me. But it's the truth. And I think that in some ways, having that... Optimistic ignorance is actually one of the really redeeming traits of entrepreneurs.
And one of the really hard parts is that the biggest jump you have to make gets so immediately reinforced from the freedom you have from being able to chart your own path. But that big success of quitting one thing and starting another, you need to immediately forget.
And I think that fundamentally, that is why so many entrepreneurs keep doing it is because the first time you do it, it's the biggest rush ever. You quit your job, you do the business, and you get some first traction. And that first dollar that you make when the new business, it's like the best dollar ever, right? But it's such a strong reinforcer that what does it reinforce?
It reinforces stopping what you're doing and starting something else. And so I think one of the fundamental errors of entrepreneurship is that sometimes the jumping ship to start this thing is the lesson that you need to immediately unlearn because after that, you have to just stick with it for a very long period of time.
So two things. So one is, I had this tweet that went like super viral, but it was like, first time founder, hey, I need you to sign an NDA before I tell you my business idea. I know you've gotten it. I know you have. Third time founder. Here's everything I have. Here's all the documents. Here's all the projections. It's probably all wrong and this probably won't work.
But I have a couple smart people and I think we'll be able to figure it out. It'll probably cost longer and take longer, cost more and take longer than we think. But we think it's worth a shot. Because everyone who's been on both sides of that understand, like the entrepreneurs got it because they're like, oh my God, I was that guy.
And all the investors get it because they're like, oh my God, I deal with this guy all the time. But actually what you just said with the many, many iterations that from your original idea until what actually happens is... Yet again, one of those demonstrations of the difference between a beginner and expert. A beginner has binary thinking. So they think this worked or it didn't work.
And if it didn't work, then I need a new idea. Rather than having the nuanced thinking of a master or an expert or advanced person who says, What about this if I click into it? I break it into its component parts. What about this didn't work? Okay, it's not that meta ads don't work or advertising doesn't work.
It's that we didn't nail the hook in our ad or that we didn't make our offer clear enough on the landing page or it was not congruent with the advertisement or, you know— the offer itself wasn't very compelling or it didn't have, it didn't like, it was just this, everyone's coming in and saying, yeah, I kind of want that, but this is actually my issue. We're not solving the core problem.
So it's, it's always in the, in the details. It's always in the sifting through the many small things that you find the kernel that ends up fixing the business. I mean, I know that Facebook was trying to fix their virality issue, and they were locked in a room for days trying to figure out how they could get more users to retain on the platform, right?
People would sign up, but then they wouldn't do anything, and then they'd drop out. And so finally, Zuck just said, okay. we have some belief that if people have more friends, that they will engage. And so they didn't, and here's the thing, like with the uncertainty, they couldn't prove it. He just was like, I feel like that's better than them not having friends.
And so he said, all right, the new goal is 10 friends in 14 days. That's the goal. So we have to create the experience so that we can get it to introduce them to 10 people or connect them with 10 people that they already know on the platform within 14 days. And as soon as that happened, then obviously Facebook took off or continued to grow.
And so he wasn't like, oh, Facebook doesn't work anymore or social networks aren't going to be a thing. It's usually way smaller and way bigger. the adjustment you need to make is much more nuanced than what you originally expect.
If the foundational principle of like cutting hair, mowing lawns, whatever, it's like this problem exists and I can charge a certain amount and make a profit on it, then there's nothing wrong with the business. It's just what is the constraint that's holding us back? And then usually zooming into the constraint and realizing there's 20 things that are contributing to the outcome, not one.
And that's where expertise and you develop that expertise by trying and failing. Yeah. And that's just the name of the game. And so I think you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for failure without internalizing it and feeling like you yourself are a failure as a result of failure.
Yeah.
And this goes back to the who. Which is if you, at some point, if you want to have a really ridiculously successful company, it will require more lifetimes of expertise than you can live. And so then it becomes a recruiting game. Like very quickly, almost all business becomes recruiting.
Which is how do I, I mean, if you listen to Zuck talk about it, you listen to Elon talk about it, you listen to Steve Jobs talk about it. Steve would talk about how the best players that he had in the company, he would set aside like a year to 18 months to bring them in. Amen. And he said, every time I, you know, I knew who I wanted.
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