Will Schroeder
Founder & CEO, Startups.com. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivehostinvestor@wilschroter ↗LinkedIn ↗startups.com ↗
Wil Schroter is an entrepreneur who has launched ventures including Blue Diesel, Swapalease, and Fundable. He currently leads Startups.com and co-hosts the Startup Therapy Podcast.
Everything Will Schroeder said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Schroeder: Agencies are a terrible business model due to infrastructure costs
“Agencies are a really shitty business model. It's the easiest business to get into and the hardest business to get out of because once you're in it, And once you have that much infrastructure, we had ten million dollars a month worth of payroll. Think of what …”
Schroeder: Collapsed Zirtual had 400 assistants effectively billing at 75% capacity
“They had 400 people that were full-time billing at 75% capacity. You work that backward, that means they have a hundred people billing at zero percent capacity.”
Schroeder: The practical difference between being broke and wealthy is remarkably small
“The difference between being broke and wealthy is a very small sum of money. In other words, especially early in your career, I was 22 at the time. If you can pull together enough cash to buy a house, to buy a car, to furnish your house, which by the way is no…”
Schroeder: VC valuations are worth zero when evaluating potential startup acquisitions
“Also, personally, I don't care about VC valuations. So if, you know, if you were to say, Hey, this, the VC say it's worth sixty million dollars. I'm like, yeah, it's worth zero to me.”
Schroeder: Zirtual has been consistently profitable since Startups.com acquired it
“It's been profitable ever since we bought it.”
Founders claiming they must work 80-hour weeks need better time management
“Anybody that's working 80 to a hundred hours and says they can't work less, I would highly challenge that.”
Founders disproportionately experience bizarre, life-changing crises at age 37
“There is a freak anomaly about the age of 37. I can't tell you how many founders at the age of 37 specifically
Have hit this bizarre life-changing event. The life events are all different, but it's always at 37. I can't figure out why.”
Founders taking on outside investors or service clients still have bosses
“You take on investors, you have bosses. You take on certain clients, you know, in professional service work, you have bosses.”
The first two years of spending venture capital are inherently inefficient
“The first year to two years of spend with a VC money is so wildly inefficient, by definition, because you're experimenting like crazy, right? So you have this massive amount of inefficiency between validating the idea, getting the right team, trying all these …”
Schroeder: 50-person Blue Diesel won a $250M annual Eli Lilly account
“And this scrappy 50 person company ends up winning a two hundred and fifty million dollar a year piece of business.”
Schroeder: Only invest or hold equity in businesses you can control
“I only really want to invest in or have stake in What I can control. Yeah. Right. So I, at my, at the time, and maybe I would have made more money. I don't think so. But at the time I distinctly remember thinking, I don't know what you guys are doing with thos…”
Schroeder: InChord sold to Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder for 'ungodly' sum
“Well, it sold in 2001, 2002. It sold to a guy named Dan Snyder who owned the Washington Redskins and had made an ungodly amount of money which is why he owns the Redskins in in the, in a, I think a pharmaceutical sales outsource sales organization or something…”
Schroeder: Successful founders often feel like frauds unless they repeat their success
“I felt like, unless I could do it again, that I was a one-time hit, that I was a fraud, that I just happened to be lucky, I was in the right place at the right time, and I have to do it again. This is a completely unwarranted, idiotic feeling, That most founde…”
Schroeder: Self-funding multiple studio startups simultaneously creates severe capital drain
“An interesting thing happens when you start burying all these children that are these startup companies, whether they're going good or bad, they need lots of money. And when you're doing one or two, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But when you ge…”
Schroeder: Studio infrastructure advantages faded with the rise of off-the-shelf tools
“It was also back in a time where you had to build everything from scratch, whereas now there's so much off the self stuff, it doesn't have the same advantage.”
Schroeder: Clarity wins on expert quality rather than total expert headcount
“Clarity doesn't win by having more experts. Like, we have 20,000. We're long past the point where we have saturation in almost every category. Our issue now is the quality. Right? So are those folks attacking enough quality? The number of people we had would b…”
Taking $250k off the table is a founder's most life-changing money
“If you can ever take a 250,000 dollar check off the table, it will be maybe the most life changing money you'll ever have, because it's all the money that you need to do all the things that you haven't been able to do for a very long time.”
Client services is the easiest business to start but hardest to exit
“Client services, professional services is always the easiest business to get into and the hardest business to get out of.”
Startup needs are uniform until launch before becoming highly segmented
“Once you've launched, once you're in market, it kind of becomes a different path and it becomes highly segmented depending on what business you're in, but getting up to the launch point is, is pretty uniform.”
Will Schroeder completes his core productive work in three hours daily
“So I would probably say I'm available for about 50 hours a week, and I would say my core focus hours of where I get productive things done are about three hours a day.”
Founders should explicitly outline an anti-goal list of things they refuse
“And what I tell the founders, particularly young founders, and it's not specific to them, but the earlier you can get started on this list, the better. Is make that list first.”
Acquiring an existing product usually beats spending equivalent capital to build
“So if I could spend 250,000 dollars to build my own product, or 250,000 dollars to acquire somebody else's product that probably spent even more trying to get into it, in most cases I'd take the latter every single time. Because the one thing that, that money …”
Schroeder: Startups.com is a bootstrapped, eight-figure business with over 200 employees
“We've got a little over a million companies in the platform. We're bootstrapped started in 2012. It's an eight figure business with a little over 200 employees.”
The other half of the tape: Will Schroeder's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rob Walling 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Startups For the Rest of Us 2
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Will's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Startups.com | 1 | 13 | — | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |