Luck and Hard Work: The Intricate Journey of a Startup With Eric Marcoullier

March 5, 2024

Luck and Hard Work: The Intricate Journey of a Startup With Eric Marcoullier

Eric Marcoullier is a Fractional Co-founder and Early-Stage Startup Coach at BPM140 Consulting, where he guides first and second-time founders in the pursuit of finding a successful product-market fit. His journey in the tech industry began with the co-founding of IGN in 1996, where he led product and engineering until its sale three years later. Following this, Eric contributed to game development as a producer at Cyberlore Studios from 2001 to 2005, working on titles for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC platforms. With a diverse entrepreneurial background, Eric has founded multiple companies, some of which were acquired, showcasing his expertise in navigating the startup landscape.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Eric Marcoullier shares the story behind IGN Entertainment
Eric's insights gleaned from his early days as a startup entrepreneur
Funding advice for aspiring gaming entrepreneurs
Indie game developments and market trends
Work-life balance and the highs and lows of achieving success
The significance of prioritizing employee well-being
Achieving success: a combination of luck and diligent effort
Why Eric is invested in being a mentor

In this episode…

Startups require resilience, resourcefulness, and a willingness to embrace challenges and learn from failures. Though drive, passion, and vision may fuel an entrepreneur, success isn’t solely dependent on hard work.

Serial entrepreneur Eric Marcoullier emphasizes that achieving success in the startup world is not solely dependent on hard work but also involves an element of luck. While diligence and perseverance are essential, external factors beyond one's control can significantly determine the outcome. Despite this, Eric remains committed to mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs, sharing his knowledge and experience to help guide them on their journey toward a successful startup.

Tune in to the latest episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast, where Lizzie Mintus interviews Eric Marcoullier, Fractional Co-founder, and Early-Stage Startup Coach at BPM140 Consulting. He analyzes the interplay between luck and hard work in steering a startup's journey. Eric draws from his own entrepreneurial experiences to provide invaluable insights and actionable advice, including strategies for securing funding in the gaming industry.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not.

We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Jenny Hsu of Talofa Games. You are a superhuman. Thank you for connecting us. We were just fanning about you before the interview.

Today we have Eric Marcoulier with us. Eric co-founded IGN in 1996 and ran product and engineering through its spit out three years later. He was producer at an independent game developer, Cyberlore Studios, from 2001 to 2005, working on games for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. He started several other companies that were acquired over the years, and far more that went nowhere. Thank you for the intro, Eric. For the last seven years.

Eric Marcoullier: Just trying to be honest.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, very humble and honest. Some companies that were acquired by Twitter. We'll get into that. Over the last seven years, he has coached first and second time founders who have not established product or market fit yet. Let's get started. Thanks again for being here.

Eric Marcoullier: I'm so excited. Let's do it.

Lizzie Mintus: Let's do it. Okay. I want to start with IGN. Can you tell me the story behind starting it?

Eric Marcoullier: Yeah. If you're prepared for a couple of minutes. There's a couple of really good stories. First I'm sorry, coaching mode is always on. So you're just gonna have to live with it. I am a true believer that early stage companies are due to a lot of luck. And IGN only exists because of a dance music CD that I bought when I was 19.

So it was called, Speed Limit 140 Beats Per Minute. A year later, went to University of Florida. I had to sign up for an email address and chose 140 BPM. They're like, no, that doesn't work on Linux. So I said, fine, BPM 140 UFL . Edu. Fast forward two years later, I sent an email to a brand new magazine at four in the morning. I'd bought it in books, a million read through it at this cover mounted floppy disc, this is the era of cover mounted media and loved it. Sent a note saying, Hey, editor in chief, congrats on the new magazine. I love it. Concerned about your cover mounted floppy though. I would love to help. I've got a consulting company here in Florida. And next morning, literally eight hours later, editor in chief rolls into San Mateo and looks at this email and goes, what the hell?

This dude in Florida is going to tell me how to do the internet. But instead of deleting it, sends it to the CEO who bounces it to the publisher, NextGen, remember Next Generation Magazine and Gameplayers. So publisher of those two magazines calls me up. British guy basically calls me up and says, Hey, Eric, your email was forwarded to me. I would love to talk to you about getting our magazines online. However, first, 140 BPM is really fast. You must be into the Omni Trio.

I am pretty confident that I was the only person in 1995 in Florida who knew who the hell the Omni Trio was. And we ended up talking about dance music for close to an hour. And at the end of it, he goes, Hey, you sound like a pretty decent bloke. How would you like to fly out to San Francisco next week and talk about getting the magazine online? I flew out, rest is history. Flat out.

He only called me because he was in the dance music and he noticed my email address. No CD, no call back, no me joining Imagine Media. IGN doesn't exist. So the things that make us successful are quite often the things that we can never, ever optimize for. And you just got to do it all every day.

So that's how I joined imagine media and put. Two magazines, Gameplayers and Next Generation Online, both 1995. When I went and interviewed with Johnny, there were five video game magazines on the entire web. We launched Gameplayers first in, I want to say late October. And that was the first games website out there that had bulletin boards, had cheat codes. It was very much a community site. And then, we launched NextGen a couple weeks later.

NextGen is hilarious. So when I got hired to be the first web guy at Imagine, this was an era when faxes were still really a thing. They hired somebody by the name of Colin Campbell, a very veteran games journalist even back in 95.

They hired him to start a video game fax news service for the video game publishers and developers industry. And the plan was every morning, they would send out a fax to EA, Sony, and Stagnosis and whoever else faxes with news. And after about a month, they decided that was probably not the best approach. And so there was this veteran journalist in the video game space. And I was like, I'll take them. I would absolutely love to have somebody to work with on next gen. He started writing news for us, six to eight articles every day. We launched, and within a week, it just caught fire around the web. Suddenly everybody knew that the one place to get daily video game news was NextGeneration. com.

It's hilarious because this was a publishing company that had never done anything internet related before I was a 22 year old college dropout. I knew loads about building websites, but I didn't know anything about infrastructure, IT hosting, anything. So we had a Mac clone under my desk running Webstar.

You've never heard of Webstar. Nobody's heard of Webstar, but it was basically the only Mac based web server. And here's this laptop that's sitting under my desk. And at 6 p. m. Pacific Time, Monday through Friday. I would hit publish. And all of the new articles would go live. At 6. 01. The entire internet would descend on NextGen. And within 30 seconds to a minute, the web server would just end. Hundreds if not thousands of people all beating up against this pitiful little Mac. And I would literally just sit there, I'd go restart. It would take about a minute and a half to reboot. Webstar would spin up immediately. All of these threads would start going, it would run serve pages for about a minute and a half, and then I would go, restart.

We would just do that for an hour or two every night. That was my penance for being early on the web. And eventually, about six months later, we decided that we wanted to do something more. I was honestly tired of working with the EICs for the individual magazines, because editor in chief really cared about PC gamers and I wanted something broader. And so I went to Johnny, the guy that hired me, and said, can we do something, brand new brand, just online? And at that same time, we now didn't have five or six or seven video game sites on the internet. We had thousands, right? Every single kid with a computer was building a website to talk about Nintendo or Sega or whatever else.

Johnny was like, you know what? We should be selling ads for every single one of these websites. So within three months, we conceived of a PSX tower, and 64. com, Saturn world. Built them, staffed them, and then launched them. The first one went live September. It was 1996, whenever the N64 came out in the U S. The rest is history. An incredible team of editors wrote just article after article that was fun and exciting. It eventually spun out and went public and was great. A lot of people did really well.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you find your co-founder?

Eric Marcoullier: Again, at the end of the day, I co-founded IGN as one of the two people with the idea. We were both employees of Imagine Media. So I went to my boss and said, we should do this. He said, yes, and we should also do these other things. I said, great. And IGN, originally called the Imagine Games Network, hence what that's what IGN actually stands for.

Lizzie Mintus: I learn something new every podcast. Okay, tell me your biggest learning from your first startup and then we can go to your other startups.

Eric Marcoullier: Can I swear by the way?

Lizzie Mintus: This is a safe space. Whatever you like.

Eric Marcoullier: Fantastic. Oh my fucking God. What didn't I learn in my first startup? I learned that I'm not nearly as smart as I think I am. I learned that I am a horrendous manager. And ultimately I learned that what matters most in the universe is really human connection. And at the age of, call it the age of 22 to 25, I knew none of that. And so when Imagine spun out to go public, I was shocked that the 25 year old college dropout that couldn't manage out of a paper bag was not asked to become an executive at this new company that was getting loads of funding.

That was a painful learning experience. Years later when I had another exit and whatever else, I had my first true personal exit. It really put a lot of that in perspective. And in the 15 years that followed, it feels like every two or three years,. I have another epiphany about those years. I'm like, Oh, something else that I didn't realize when I was a stupid kid.

So learning experience really is, be a good fucking human being before anything else.

Lizzie Mintus: That's good advice, all around. Okay, IGN spun out, you're gone and then you worked at Cyberlore Studios next?

Eric Marcoullier: Yep, absolutely.

Lizzie Mintus: And then you bought out the parent company. What's that story?

Eric Marcoullier: Again, so many learnings. I'm going to tell you all the stuff that you don't see online. The editor in chief of one of the PlayStation magazines that Imagine had, he and I were best friends. We were really frustrated that most video games sucked. And we had decided, while I was still at IGN, and he was at Imagine, that we were going to create a consulting company to help development studios make their games better, because obviously the problem is that all the people making games just don't know how to make them fun. And so I left Imagine and kept trying to do that for about a year, moved from San Francisco to Boston, and we had a really hard time finding clients that wanted to be told how to make their video games better. So I started looking for a for a video game job. Went to a meet up in Waltham, it's a suburb of Boston. Found all of the local game studios that were there. And basically just asked every one of them for a job. And nobody was hiring.

But, three months later, Cyberlore, which was in Western Mass, sent me a note and said, Hey, we met you a couple months ago. You should apply for this producer position. Joined them, worked on not really great games. Actually that's not fair. The MechWarrior 4 expansion pack, Black Knight, was hella dope. And again, great fucking team of designers and engineers that built an amazing expansion pack for the MechWarrior franchise.

Then we made Risk. It was originally going to be for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. By the end of the day, it only came out on PC. That was where I really learned that it's not that people making video games don't know how to make things fun, it's that the independent video game studio model does not support making fun and great games. There's stories behind that I can delve into. But made that, and then we made a video game based on the Playboy franchise, which I assure you was wholesome. It was wonderful. It was on the shelves at Best Buy and a couple of other big box stores. I want to be clear, Cyberlord, long before it got there, had a whole story history. They made this fantastic game called Majesty. For people that play real time strategy games, it's still a very unique and million selling sort of experience.

But eventually, Cyberlord did what the vast majority of independent game studios do, which is they go bankrupt. Because again, the process and the business of making video games as an independent studio, highs and lows, they eventually couldn't sustain it. They went out of business. I had been working on making serious games. Always been entrepreneurial. And so even there was like, Hey, there's this new thing, this new industry chase. We got a contract with Best Buy to make video games, to teach all the blue shirts how to basically upsell. And I was laid off. Or the entire company went kaput three months before my first son was born. And then my wife, now ex wife, but my wife at the time, was laid off two weeks after my first son was born. And it was that exact moment that I said, hey, can I put a second mortgage on the house to buy the assets of Cyberlore?

I'm pretty sure it was the postpartum, but her response was we're nearly bankrupt, let's go all in. And so I bought the assets of Cyberlore and that Serious Games company completely crashed and burned. It was an absolute nightmare. I had no fucking clue what I was doing. It did not validate the market at all other than getting one customer. But as a side project had been working on a small startup idea. And in the 20 months from the time that I bought out the assets of cyber alert, within 20 months, we had a sale to Yahoo for something that was completely different. And so again, total luck. If I hadn't taken a second mortgage on the house to go try and do this one company, this other company wouldn't have thrived. You just got to keep throwing baskets up.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So what did you learn from the crash and burn of Cyberlore? Many things. So many fucking things.

Eric Marcoullier: There we go. Good math on you. First and foremost, what I learned is that the publisher indie relationship is totally broken. I'm sure you've heard this from other people. I'm sure you've heard this from your customers. But at the end of the day, Independent game studios only survive, generally speaking, unless they've done incredibly well, think back in the day Origin Free, pre sale to EA. If you are just a working studio, you only survive when you have a contract and that contract is very uneven, right? You get pre production where you only have a handful of people, it's obviously more these days, but back in 2003, let's say that pre production might require eight people on staff. And then you hit production and suddenly you're bringing on 20 or 30 people. What pays for your company to survive is being in production. What frequently happens is that you get to the end of your pre production milestones and everybody looks around at each other in the room and says this isn't fun. This game sucks. We haven't figured it out yet, and you as a dev studio have two options. Either work for free until you figure out how the game is good, or you say, oh, we'll fix it in post, right? We need to start collecting those production milestones, so we're bringing everybody on. We're gonna make all this content on this game that is fundamentally broken, but somehow we're gonna fucking fix it, and that never happens. And so that's broken.

Secondly, if you are a triple A independent studio, two and a half million or 5 million qualifies as triple a level sales. If you have sold a game in whatever genre, first person shooter, and publisher comes to you and says, we want you to make X. You say, great. We're available. It'll cost 75 million dollars.

They go, great. They can do the basic math, this sells at least two and a half million. We're gonna make bank on 75 million, fucking go for it. If nobody's available? Then it just goes out to bid and it's like playing the worst game of name that tune ever because you know that a triple A game is going to cost you maybe not $75 million, but certainly $50 million, maybe $ 300 million. Look at Spiderman 2.

You're not going to get that money, right? You're probably not going to get $20 million. And so you start thinking, how low can we bid and still keep our studio afloat? And suddenly your bidding $5 million, $6 million for a game that's going to get in the market competing against $200 and $300 million games.

You know that you're not going to actually be able to finish that game for $6 million. The publisher knows that you're not going to make that game for $6 million. But everybody plays along with the Kabuki theater. They sign the contracts, because what happens is you get a third of the way or halfway through production, and the studio has to go hat in hand to the publisher and say, hey guys, we need another $4 million.

And the publisher goes, great,. Not a problem. Love the game that you're making, we believe in you. Here's your $4 million. And, we're gonna add a couple things to the contract for this game. One is we're going to ensure that you never see any profits from this. And two, we are going to insert a right of first refusal clause that says for up to a year, if we decide that we want a sequel, you will unilaterally do this sequel at roughly the same terms. And so once you're done, once you send that gold master out, you're furiously searching for that next game project. And every fucking publisher goes, hey, that game that you just shipped. Does that have a roofer clause? And when they find out that it does, they mostly skip because what they don't want to have happen is you have a game in production for them and then be contractually obligated to take everybody off, go make the sequel.

So it is a game in the games industry that is built to destroy independent game studios. That's what I learned in five years of making games.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. So what's the solution? Tell me the answer now.

Eric Marcoullier: It's funny. I was just listening to the Raph Koster podcast with you. Obviously that dude is so smart. There's a reason that guy's a legend on the industry. And the way I look at it is there are three ways of making games. You can either be true indie. You can be an independent studio that works for publishers on contracts, or you can raise venture capital. They all have different pluses and minuses.

Indie studios make small games. You're never going to make the next Quake or Wolfenstein or Doom as a studio with six people. You're going to make it among us, you're going to make a mobile game, whatever else. But you can probably, to some degree, keep your own agency and really win or lose based on your own success. There's 12,000 games in the the Steam store right now, but you at least have a chance of making something and paying your bills, working as an independent developer for publishers.

It's a stacked deck and it's only gotten worse in the last five years because now there's half as many publishers as there used to be, right? Activision Blizzard now part of Microsoft. Shit, they're taking that publisher off the table. All the companies have been acquired by Take Two, right? It's just fewer and fewer number of publishers. I don't really know what's good about that. That model allows for one thing. You put 30 people or 40 people under one roof. And if everybody looks at each other and says, we're going to do a death March, EA spouse style for the next two years. And we are going to build a 20 million game on an 8 million budget. You may have a breakout hit. If that happens, fan fucking tastic. Your next game, you're going to make for 70 million. Go you. But that is a hard slog. It's starting out, starting a startup.

Option C, the venture funding model. It is not good at all for AAA scale games. And that's what a whole lot of game studios are really learning right now. And so if you want to go into the venture scale side of things. You either need to be making game tools, which has some challenges, but it could be really fun, right? You're making the next shader. You're making the next, I talked to somebody today that's looking at doing a generative music tool for creating dynamic music. Pretty dope. You can sell a lot of companies or make small games predictably and reliably and get somebody to give you a bunch of money to start doing that more and more.

But holy shit, if you want to make a triple A scale game, I wouldn't even fathom doing it as an independent studio. It's a fucked up market right now.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, there are a lot of top games that are Roblox and Fortnite Games right now. That's another interesting new avenue.

Eric Marcoullier: It is. Of course, Roblox took 11 years to catch on. And there was a lot of money that was poured into that business. Famously, Fortnight was a complete fluke, right? They were doing the save the world or whatever it is. So that's the entire reason that the concept of building is in that game, because they were building a single player game. And then they saw a PUBG and was like, hey, we could build something like that, and that became the game. So much luck. And the one thing that the video games industry will always have going for it is, people like me, when I was in my late 20s, early 30s, truly loved video games and just wanted to be a part of it.

The machine grinds people up, and there's always new people that come in and say, I would like to do that, not knowing just how hard it is. But, holy crap, when you actually play a game that you made? And you're enjoying it, even better seeing somebody else playing a game that you made and they're enjoying it, nothing better.

So I get it. I don't think we have to worry about the industry anytime soon.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, still growing overall. Talk to me about funding advice. There's so much money going into seed stage companies right now, but series A is hard, series B, although I saw a hundred million for second dinner today.

Eric Marcoullier: Nice, right on. Again, I'll go back to tools, small games, triple A games. The challenge with funding in the video game space is that, at least when you're talking about triple A games, it is completely orthogonal to the way that venture capital typically works. And I'm telling the watchmaker how to make a watch, but for the purposes of your audience, those of who have never engaged with venture capital versus traditional games. Let's talk about traditional game publishing.

So again, like going back to what I said before with the publisher says, we need a game that looks like X and you go, great, that's going to cost us $5 million or $10 million if you're a triple eight studio, $70 million. They're like, great. Signed up for it. You go through your pre-production milestones and there's always the chance that the publisher just says, screw it. We're canceling this project. You especially see it in internal studios, but you never have to sell anybody else, right? You make the game. At least you start doing pre-production and the production, and everybody knows what they're getting. And there is a commitment from the people with money that says, if you keep meeting your milestones, we're going to keep funding this and we're eventually going to put it on the shelves. You only have to ever convince one group of people, one company, that this is a game that needs to get made.

In the venture capital world, let's take games out of the picture for a second. You're a startup, right? You're Gnip and a company that started years ago. And you go to early stage investors and you say, I've got this idea. Maybe I've got a little bit of traction. I need a million dollars to go grow this business. And they give you the money and you start to grow or you get more traction, you get better metrics. You don't typically go back to that same investor to get more money. You go to a new investor, a new group of investors. And you say, hey, now we've got more traction and you should put $5 million into us and they go, great, you're looking good. And so they put $5 million into you. And now you've got more traction and more traction. And you go to yet another group of investors and you say, we've got all of this traction, give us $30 million or a $hundred million dollars.

And each time, each stage gate, you're talking to a different group of people, and you're showing them progress, measurable fucking progress, that allows them to somewhat rationally go, we should invest in this one, but not these six, or these these hundred.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, a hundred.

Eric Marcoullier: Now let's talk about how a AAA game is funded. I have so many friends whose startups are on fucking fire right now because of VCs. The Independent Game Studio right there is just a handful of founders. And they're like, we've got this vision for a brand new type of first person shooter. And they go to early stage investors and they go, great, here's a million dollars. And so they get their pre production done. No users, no reason for anybody to know whether or not this is actually a good game. Other than the new batch of investors to look at it and go, yeah, that looks like fun. Here's $5 million. You know what $5 million gets you for a traditional big budget game? Like 5%, 10% of production. And so it's 18 months later, you're $5 million and more, and you got to talk to another group of investors who have no idea who you are. They're looking at this game that's had 6 million poured into it. No fucking traction, no users, no nothing. And an entirely new group of investors are looking at a broken toy, trying to figure out, should we put $20 million into that.

Let's say you get your 20 million. Generally speaking, if you're making that true AAA scale game, you've still got to go to one more investor and you've got to convince them to put $40 million into your half finished game.

The entire VC model is it is based on the idea of somebody else taking your portfolio over the finish line, and that is based on traction, something that does not happen in the space. So when it comes to VC funding, for games in 2024, pools are great small games, where you put out a first game as an indie and it gets traction and you say, hey, we would like to make five more of these. Or we'd like to grow this thing in the market and put out more levels and put out sequels and put out whatever else. That traction is so critical.

The thing that I think I'm most excited about in the next couple of years is we're probably going to see the end of AAA funding for games in the VC space. I think we're going to see an absolute renaissance in indie studios with some level of funding $250k, $500k, $750. A good smart team can do a lot with $500k so i think we're about to see an absolute new benchmark in terms of crazy games that are fun and have higher production value than we've typically seen in indie level games. And that's going to be great because they only cost 10 bucks right. So yeah, get ready to buy a lot of five and ten dollar games

Lizzie Mintus: What games are you most excited about right now in that space? What's an example of someone who's done a great job with a little amount of money?

Eric Marcoullier: Oh man, it's certainly old news, but I think that the guy behind Vampire Survivors just absolutely crushed it. I was late early. I was probably first 10,000 players of that game, but certainly not first hundred. It was still, I think it was probably a second release. We had two maps. The base level of weapons and buffs and whatever else. For the next year and a half, just watching every month or two, him putting out the next set of things. It was fucking crazy. It was amazing.

The thing that saddens me about that is because that guy really only ever seemed to have any interest in PC, there are so many knockoffs that basically took exactly that vampire levels, I was thinking of it as like our defense, but you're the tower and you can move. There are so many of those games on the iPhone and Android. If he had raised capital and built out a small team, he could have absolutely dominated that. And I know he made several million dollars, but maybe multiple orders of magnitude more that he could have done. So when it comes to small games, I think that dude is the standard.

So often, it seems like the really great indie games come out just unexpected overnight. So I don't know what I'm going to be playing next. I actually just bought a PS5 because I'm really excited about Grand Theft Auto 6, 18 months from now.

Lizzie Mintus: Of course you are.

Eric Marcoullier: I haven't played Grand Theft Auto since GTA 2, when it was still top down. So I am truly excited about seeing what the second most grossing game ever looks like, next gen should be pretty cool.

What are you excited about on the game side?

Lizzie Mintus: What am I excited about? I need to play Paleo. I'd like to play that game. I'm playing Among Us. I am working and I'm exercising and I told you I have two little kids. I'm doing that.

Eric Marcoullier: So the last thing that you can possibly do is play games. I get that.

Lizzie Mintus: I have to play games, which is funny. I do, for market research. I have to be informed. I have every possible kind of console, right? But, am I doing a lot of my free time right now? No. I don't have a lot of free time right now.

Eric Marcoullier: Can I tell you something sad? In my 20s and 30s, the absolute best vacation for me was buying a bunch of video games, Find a bunch of books, DVDs, movies, just a lot of content and just literally going off the grid for a week and just consuming content nonstop.

This past holiday between Christmas and New Year's, bought a PS5 for the family, but basically it was just me, bought a bunch of books and spent seven straight days just staring at screens and pages. At the end of it, I was like, wait a second. What the fuck did I just do with a week of my time?

Lizzie Mintus: No, that's a fantasy. That's a mom with young kids fantasy. Maybe even like checking out of my house. Actually, even just being in a hotel is my fantasy. Even like Holiday Inn, I don't even need anything nice. Just as long as nobody needs anything from me.

Eric Marcoullier: I totally get it. Totally get it.

Lizzie Mintus: I look forward to those days.

Eric Marcoullier: But for a weekend, two days sounds blissful. I spent a week playing video games and I can honestly say, I wish that I had that week back.

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, okay.

Eric Marcoullier: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. At the end of it, I was like, wait a second, there are so many things I could have done with that week. And not like working, but even connecting. I think I'm making the pivot to more social games and multiplayer games, which I never did in my twenties and thirties. So I'm excited for what this new generation brings. Maybe I'll see you in among us.

Lizzie Mintus: Let's do it.

Eric Marcoullier: Let's do it.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm a pretty social person and I really don't like to be inside of my house. Maybe I'm restless. Even my little three year old, he tells me, if we've been inside all morning, Mama, let's go somewhere.

Eric Marcoullier: That's awesome. That's amazing. Hold on to that.

Lizzie Mintus: That's my little clone.

Okay, you worked at this game studio and then you started a non-game company and then it got acquired by Yahoo. You had other ones that got acquired by Twitter. I'd love to hear about your life, ups and downs, how you felt about yourself during this crazy series of exits.

Eric Marcoullier: Oh, shit. I think I feel like you read a blog post or two.

Lizzie Mintus: Maybe.

Eric Marcoullier: We are told by investors, by our peers, by the media, whatever else that you work hard, you sacrifice, you do whatever it takes. If, lo and behold, at some point, you have that exit and you make some life changing money, everything gets better.

It is a lie. Absolute lie. Nothing changes except the size of your bills. One of the few things that I really am happy, with my father from my childhood is that he got me into high end stereos. Back when I was 12, a high end stereo certainly wasn't a thousand dollar shit. But I got my first set of separate, not like a stereo, but individual components when I was 12. I leveled that up when I got my first job at Imagine. Then a couple years later, I just constantly upgraded stuff. And when I finally had that exit to Yahoo, I went out and spent like $30,000 on a stereo. And it was really nice. It's actually right back there.

It's wonderful and I enjoy it, but it didn't fucking change my life at all. Not even the stuff that I bought. The same week that we sold my blog to Yahoo, I beat the shit out of my car with my bare hands because I realized I was still married to somebody I didn't love. I was miserable as a father. I was out of shape. I had no fucking life. And it was all supposed to change. It was all supposed to be better. And it didn't. It was just the same thing, only, higher costs. It's definitely something that I'm trying to teach other people every chance I get, which is you can actually be happy and fulfilled right now. You can do the things that matter to you without having a multi million dollar payoff.

And the insane thing is, people pay me $30,000 to $40,000 a year to help them with their startups. They meet with me for an hour a week and they pay me between $600 to $800 an hour, and I can't get people to pay me 5 grand a year to teach them how to be happy and fulfilled. And Maslow's hierarchy, it's a real thing until you achieve fourth level, you have the esteem of your peers. Nobody cares about self actualization. I think we're hardwired for it, but it is insane to me that theoretically we work in order to fund a good life, but people will gladly pay through the nose to learn how to be better at their job. And won't pay anything to learn how to be better at life. Again, lessons learned. Don't wait until you have the exit in order to actually focus on the shit that matters.

Lizzie Mintus: So what can you do if you're a startup founder? You have two little kids. It's not me. You're in a slog.

Eric Marcoullier: I swear to God. Title podcast, Eric Marcouli, it promises you that he can teach you how to be happy, that's all I fucking care about. Everything else, whatever.

I will tell you right now. It's actually pretty straightforward. The first thing is, if you go online and you look up how to be happy. What should I do? Everybody tells you, gratitude, religion, fucking connection. You look at the top 10 results for how to be happy. There's a thousand different things, certainly a hundred different things that you can do. I don't know about you, I don't have time to do a hundred different things every day. I can't every single day check in, was I helpful today? Did I practice gratitude? Did I journal? Did I go to church? Did I do one of a hundred different things?

Lizzie Mintus: Sure, yeah. No.

Eric Marcoullier: Exactly. Literally, that would be our day. I think that most people are drawn naturally to the things that make them happy, right? You glow when you talk about your kids. And you started a company, right?

Very few people start a company because they hate business. Very few people work specifically in the video games industry for very long, if they don't actually love that, that, that industry. And so it's not so much doing different things. It's doing the things you're already doing differently.

And honestly, there's not a big shift there. For me, what I coach is you figure out your most important values in life. And that's such an arbitrary thing. If I was to ask you, what are your like top five or six values? Without making it up on the spot, could you tell me like what the most important things in your life are?

Lizzie Mintus: I thought about it for a while. Yeah, but do I have it rehearsed? No.

Eric Marcoullier: So for me, excellence, fatherhood, intimacy, connection, music, creativity, and strength. Those are the things that really derive meaning for me week after week, month after month, year after year. So you figure out the things that matter most to you. And again, iterative process. You're going to pick some stuff and you'll be like, after a month, you're like, Oh, you know what? Like this other stuff. These three, fuck them, doesn't matter. I don't really care. These other ones, dope. I like these really like focusing on these things changed my month. Let me try some other things that might work.

So you figure out effectively what matters. So for instance, let's say creativity. Creativity is one of my, one of my values. Creativity is basically just creating something from nothing. Creating a really great blog post can scratch my itch for creativity. I do stained glass. I do carpentry. Not nearly as often as I could, but when I do it, it can absolutely create that itch.

I do a monthly CEO dinner and in the moment of being there with 40 CEOs and a handful of other people, there's definitely a sense of creation there. Once you figure out what those things are that connect you to that, you basically want to figure out what the difference between a normal run of the mill experience versus that sort of like touching God. How are you really connected with that value?

Fatherhood is one of my core values. I love my children. My children are arrogant pricks a lot of the time they're teenagers. They're teenage boys. And so quite often, like driving my younger son to school, it's 15 minutes of silence, right? That is not a great fatherhood moment. But what I do know is that when I feel most like I'm being a great dad, it's when one of my kids has the spotlight. I'm talking far less than I'm listening and they're equally engaged. So I'm asking them questions, and they're feeling very seen and very heard and they're very excited about whatever it is and I'm fully focused on them. It's not, yeah, okay, quit talking because I got to do whatever else on my computer. I'm fully engaged and they're fully engaged. The world just closes down. Knowing that means that if I am being thoughtful and I'm driving my son to school, I might in that moment think, oh shit, like I'm talking too much. Ask more questions. And if that flips around, then that one last little bit is just recognizing in the moment, like this matters.

Music is one of my values. One of the ways that I know that I'm really connected to it is I have like a psychosomatic response to music. If music is really hitting me, I dance. I fucking move like it is a bounce. And every once in a while, I'll be listening to something. And I'm moving around. I'm like, oh, wait a second. This song. This is it. At this moment, I am connected to music and you only need to feel it for a second to feel this absolute like prison of joy.

And then you just sink right back into it. For me, it's when that world really does just shrink down. I once had dinner with a friend in Chinatown, New York. We got together at eight o'clock at night and, places jump and whatever else is totally busy. We're talking, she and I are absolutely reviving. And at a certain point I realized that it was utterly quiet in the restaurant. I looked around and there was nobody. The staff was like meekly standing in the corners. And I realized it was 11 o'clock at night, the place had closed at 10. The staff just didn't want to interrupt. In that moment to be like, Oh, holy shit. Like I've connected with another human being doesn't require an exit. Doesn't require doing anything differently.

It just requires knowing, like for me, I have to full screen a blank browser. If I'm talking to somebody and I can see my text and I can see my email, I'm going to be fucking distracted. I can fix that, right? And then that moment, like when you and I are absolutely vibing to be like, oh shit, I actually did it. I connected with another human being. You can do that tomorrow and your life will be better for it. No matter how good your life is now, it can always be better.

Lizzie Mintus: I heard this talk from the wealth manager who managed Bill Gates' money, Elon Musk's money, and he was talking about the things that made somebody at that level who could have literally anything in the world happy.

Eric Marcoullier: What did he say?

Lizzie Mintus: Dinner with a friend and then going on a walk. That's one of the best things. But that's so easy, right? You need probably no money to do that.

Eric Marcoullier: Yes. Absolutely. I could walk right out that door right there and go for a walk. Money is a great insulator from the bad, but it doesn't generally create the good. There is no value or no meaning itself in money. All it is a means to an end. One of my favorite phrases with my fiance is, if we can throw money at it, it's not a problem. That's a privileged statement, but at any given level, as you increase, there's more and more stuff that you can throw money at, right?

I have written off at least in my mind, one of my cars that my kids are getting, because I figure one's 18, one's 16. One of those cars is getting totaled.

Lizzie Mintus: They're gonna crash it for sure.

Eric Marcoullier: They're gonna fucking crash it for sure.

Lizzie Mintus: For sure.

Eric Marcoullier: And I am very much in the privileged and blessed space of being able to say, you know what? Doesn't fucking matter. I was expecting that. We can buy another car. Please don't crash this one. But, if I got some rare disease, I probably can't afford to get the world's best care. Elon Musk can, right? Bill Gates can. Bill Gates can fuckin eradicate malaria in Africa. At each level, you can insulate yourself from more and more bad stuff, but all of the things that really matter to us as human beings, at least from a self actualization standpoint, we can do today without any money. I don't need to have any money to have friends. At least friends that would still like me if I was poor. There are those people out there, I promise.

I'm really excited about more people just trying to look at their lives right now and saying, I'm doing this work probably because I love it. Even if you work at, I don't know, you work at a shit SaaS company as a developer, can you honestly say, I love the meaning of my job? Probably not. But if you're a developer, maybe what you really value is focus, right? Figure out how to do whatever you need to do with your meetings to get flow at least once a day. And in that moment, when time's just going by and you don't even notice it. The ability to go, oh shit, I'm doing it. I'm like, I'm just coding. That's great.

Maybe one of your values is development of others, right? Service. Great. I can go find an entry level developer and become their mentor. Everybody has the power in whatever they're fucking doing to connect it to the meaning that matters most to them.

Lizzie Mintus: And to make their life better. Maybe that's a very privileged statement, but I think many people complain, but what are you doing to help yourself or other people?

Eric Marcoullier: Absolutely. It takes effort to be happy. Welcome to my TED Talk. Thank you for listening. I totally want to interview you. I feel like nobody has done that.

Lizzie Mintus: Let's do it.

Eric Marcoullier: Great. All right. So tell me, first and foremost, how did you end up running a recruiting company in the games industry?

Lizzie Mintus: Starts at a bar. Actually, maybe it starts in my childhood.

Eric Marcoullier: They're all good stories.

Lizzie Mintus: When I was a kid, my dad had a company. He had a sawmill and he would take me to work with him. He'd try and teach me how to do all of these things. How to balance a checkbook, how to do physical labor, which I was not into and he was really disappointed. But although I don't want to work at a sawmill, what I did, I saw him take care of his employees. He'd give them fish bonuses, like he'd buy a thousand pounds of salmon and send them all home with fish. He'd get someone a custom made guitar. He'd take them on fishing trips. Nobody quit and everybody loved working for him because he'd always go out of his way to make them happy. And I watched him work hard. I think he set a good example in that way, so I always wanted to have my own business or at least I always thought it was possible.

He is not someone who would ever tell me, hey, here are the things you need to do. Hey, why don't you talk to this mentor? None of that. He was just like, Hey, I think you're going to figure it out, which is also my parenting style too.

Eric Marcoullier: I love it. Yes.

Lizzie Mintus: I worked at sales and Nordstrom. I knew I didn't want to work in sales, but I learned a lot and I met somebody at a bar who was a friend of a friend, right? Had I not gone to this bar, who knows what my life would be?

Eric Marcoullier: That!

Lizzie Mintus: It's the butterfly effect, but also making it happen. So she told me, she was a recruiter. You talk to people, you help them find jobs. I was like, that sounds great. So she introduced me to her friend who was this quirky guy named Ted. And I connected with Ted and he's why don't you interview the recruiting company? Knew I needed to get a new job, but I didn't really know how. So I interviewed and then they sent me this really basic rejection letter. And I was oh, this seems really like generic. Whatever. You're not a fit. We're going to go forward with other candidates.

So I was looking through the CEO's profile and then I was looking at people who'd left him reviews. And I was looking at this guy and I messaged him and he messaged me back and then he asked if I wanted to get on a call. He's a career coach. And I said, I love that. He was like, Hey, if you really want this job, what can you do to really go above and beyond? What can you do to convince them that you should work there? And I was like, okay. I'm going to contact the CEO and I'm going to say, I want to have a meeting with him. And I'm going to tell him that I think that I would be one of his best employees. And I'm going to do a lot of research because I didn't research that much when I was interviewing. So first I talked to him. He really just wanted to tell me about his company and how great it was.

And I was like, I know. It's really great. I want to work here. I'm interested. And he said, okay, why don't you come back in? So I came back in, I was so nervous, but I had my notebook. I'd written down, what is JavaScript? What are all these programming languages? All these terms I knew nothing about. It was the tech recruiting job.

They ended up offering me the job and I ended up being their best employee and I worked there for four years. But I always had this itch to scratch. It was the pandemic and it was not an environment that I wanted to be in necessarily. Not an uplifting environment and I was pregnant. But no one knew I was pregnant cause it was work from home, which was awesome. So when I found out I was pregnant, I said, okay. I think I need to quit.

I made my business plan, and I quit. I had a non solicit, so I couldn't solicit anyone new. I didn't. I just reached out to my network. And then it just exploded. And then I had a baby, and I had two employees. I went back to work five days later, which is not a good thing. I don't advise. It was just a situational kind of thing. It was what I had to do, but I could nurse. I could talk on the phone. And I could type, and I'd be like, oh, there's my baby here. I'd start work maybe at 11 a.m. and I work late and weird hours, but I made it work. Now I'm here.

Eric Marcoullier: So many awesome things in there. One thing I want to call out because you mentioned it as well, saying that so much of success is based on luck. Doesn't mean that you just get to sit on your ass and wait for luck to come from you. We manufacture luck by doing as many things as possible, reaching out to as many folks, going above and beyond in your interviews, like not taking no for an answer.

All of this is 100% true. You just don't know which one of those things is gonna pay off, so you basically just have to keep buying lottery tickets. So completely agree.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. And going places. I've read many business books, but especially when I was starting my recruiting career, I wanted to do a good job. I read every self help book. I'd go to seminars and one of them, the advice was just go out to lunch. Get to know the people in the cafe, get to know their names. Maybe they'll be your friend. Maybe they'll introduce you to someone.

Jenny was on the podcast. One of her investors was someone from a fitness class that she was running, right? That's awesome. That's luck, but that's also you putting yourself out there and meeting people and making an impression on people, and that takes you somewhere.

Eric Marcoullier: Hells yes. 100% also I love the fact that your dad owned a business and that he did those individual things for people. Something that I learned at Imagine, first time, Jonathan, Johnny gave me a bonus. He was like, hey we've talked about dance music so much. You've said that you always wanted to make a dance music. I could give you $2,000 as a bonus, but I want you to go out and I want you to buy $2,000 worth of music equipment.

Yeah. 30 years later, I still remember that bonus. And I remember the second bonus. The second time I ever went snowboarding. He offered me a trip anywhere in the world to go snowboarding. And I went to Mount Hood over 4th of July weekend. And the idea of snowboarding while looking at a lush green forest, I'm not a religious person, but it's a spiritual thing.

Your father cared about his employees, which is pretty obvious. That's a really amazing thing to learn when you're a kid.

Lizzie Mintus: It's fun to see. They'd bring me little toys and always take me there and have me meet people. He told me, here's what I'm going to do, right? This person's coming. I know they like this or we're going to take him out to dinner. We're going to do this thing that they love. I love doing that. That fills up my cup. I like to make other people happy and bring other people clarity, which is really just what recruiting is. So it's fun. I remember it.

By the way, when I started my recruiting job, it was terrible. I made no money. I had no money. I was making 75 cold calls a day. It was terrible. I was driving an hour each way to work. And I remember talking to somebody, but telling them about what recruiting was. And they're like, I think that was made for you. That's perfect.

Eric Marcoullier: My mom was on the opposite side when I was very young. She was a placement counselor. When I was 19, I lost my scholarship to Tulane, New Orleans. Wonderful place to get an education, not a great place to go to college. Too many distractions. But so I lost my scholarship to Tulane, and I came home and my parents were like, absolutely, you can live here as long as you need. We're gonna give room and board, we'll pay for community college, but you have to find a job. You have to pay for gas and dates and whatever else you want to do.

And me being a punk 19 year old, I was like how do I do that? And my mom handed me a phone book and literally said, start with that. And I'm like, what does that mean? And she goes, open the phone book to start calling and saying, I'm a college student and I'm looking for a job. I'll do anything. And that sense of, even though you were, I imagine you were hugely successful in sales and then you pivot to a new job. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be successful day one. You put in the fucking effort. You started with A. You just did all of the things you had to do to learn.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That's what you have to do. You have to eat shit for a while. Your first job's not going to be a good one, probably.

Eric Marcoullier: Sometimes you luck out, but generally speaking, you have to pay your dues. And the thing with mid career choice, I was making 100k when I was 25, I'd imagine. Back in 1999, that's pretty good. Especially for being 25. And then I decided I wanted to make video games. I had no fucking experience. It didn't matter that I started one of the biggest websites on the internet. All right, I'm making video games now and I'm going to be a project manager. And they paid me 30 grand and it was fucking fair. I busted my ass, I got raises, but I wanted to do this other thing more than I wanted the short term money.

Tell me that isn't the basis of any startup founder, right? I had this conversation today with somebody where they were saying, should I do A, B, or C? And I'm like C's fucking off the table, don't do that. But at the end of the day, which of these choices would you be happy with spending five years on if you never had a pot of gold at the end of this, right? Let's say you can pay yourself some basic salary, you raise capital, you bootstrap, and you can pay yourself a living wage, but that's all it is for the next five years. Which of these options in front of you would you literally just say, thank you, universe. This is what I was meant to do.

The money shouldn't be the goal. If you're going to take a mid career change, which seems like everybody's doing these days, choose something that you're excited to do, that you're willing to take the sacrifice on income, because this is what you were meant to do, right?

Like so many people asking like friends and woman that I'd never met before this morning that I was talking with for an hour. She's so what are you going to do next? And I'm like, coach! This is what I was meant to be doing. I'm 50. And I did my years of startups. I loved them and I hated them and they were challenging. But this, helping other people build their companies. If I was completely supported, sugar mama, or had made more money than I did from my acquisitions, I would be doing this exact same thing. I'd be helping founders because I feel excellent when I do it. There are very few meetings that I have where at least once I don't go, oh man, like that was fucking useful. Like she's going to remember that thing. And there are a lot, not every, but most meetings that I have with somebody, whether it's a new client, new prospect, old client, at least a couple of times a week, the world just shrinks. It's just me and that other person.

Just in coaching, I am getting nourished by the things that matter most to me. And it feels like so many founders are just looking for the payday. You don't want to build a startup. You want to have a startup. Those are two very different things.

Lizzie Mintus: It is different. I think that's true for 99 percent of the time, except for if you, let's say, you have a lot of kids, you live in San Francisco, you're a single parent, your kids are going to college. You might have to make some different choices, but for the most part, yes, when life allows you to. Even if you're uncomfortable and you can't live your cushy life, you should do that unless you have that precedent. I would agree.

Eric Marcoullier: There are definitely outside constraints.

Lizzie Mintus: I have one last question. Who have your biggest mentors been or your biggest coaches and what have they told you that has really stuck with you?

Eric Marcoullier: This is gross and I don't like saying this. I haven't really had any. The flip side of this question is who do you admire most? I don't really admire people and I don't understand what that is. It's probably like this combination of TMI or very weird or whatever else. I don't think I know most people well enough. Like Bill Gates, I know he made a lot of money, right? I know that he built Microsoft, but if you actually asked me what did Bill Gates do day to day throughout his entire Microsoft run? I don't know, right? Steve Jobs. So many founders are like, Oh, I should be an asshole like Steve Jobs. I'm like no. Steve Jobs was successful despite being an asshole. That's how smart he was. But if you ask me, what did Steve Jobs actually do? Maybe I should go read the Walter Isaacson book. But I don't really know famous people enough to be like that person or that person is really worth admiring.

What I can tell you is, as an adult, the first person I worked for was Johnny. And Johnny's complete management practice was handing me a copy of the one minute manager and saying this might help. You cannot fathom how bad of a matter manager I am and that didn't help right? Johnny was like Eric's smart. He'll figure it out, right? You're parenting style, that was his management styles. Eric will figure it out. And I did on some things. It's pretty cool, but nobody ever wanted to work with me. And after that, I worked at Cyberlore. Joe Minton, who, if you haven't had Joe on the show, he would be an absolutely fantastic interview.

He's one of the co founders of DDM, big game agency. Knows more about games than I could even hope to learn in a thousand years. But anyway, he was our, he was the CEO of that company and he was busy. Like he was the sales guy. And so there was nobody in the company saying hey, this is how you project. Everything was learned by a process of failure. Almost every single company since then that I've worked at has been a startup that I started.

I've never really went out and got mentors. On that front, the thing that I can suggest to founders out there listening is, I've had advisors, but I've never used them. It's a very common problem with founders as we go and collect advisors. And then a year later, we're like, why don't we give them a quarter point or half point of the company? They didn't fucking do anything. Because we actually have to engage with them. They're busy. If you were mentoring somebody, you're like, I got two kids. I got a business. I got to exercise. I got to do all these other things. Got to get out of the house. The last thing you're doing moment to moment is thinking about that company you're advising.

While I am ashamed to say that I haven't really had any great mentors. I'm more ashamed of saying that's on me because I never proactively reached out and managed it. And that again is something that all the founders and developers and everybody else in the games industry out there listening, you can fix that. You can go find people, put something on the calendar for each one of you to talk every month and problem solve.

Lizzie Mintus: For anyone listening, Eric is available to be your mentee.

Eric Marcoullier: Quite possibly. Who do you look up to?

Lizzie Mintus: I'm just kidding. There's a lady named Christy Johnson, who has three young kids, started a business, has helped so many women in entrepreneurship, just helped with the most basic things when I started my company.

Janice Machala and Chris Mandarino have helped me so much. I have so many people that I ask for help all the time. I ask people for things all the time. But that's how I get things in life.

Eric Marcoullier: Can I be on your list as well? Will you remember to ask me for shifts?

Lizzie Mintus: I would be happy to ask you for things. Sometimes I get volunteered. For my wedding, my jewelry store who made me my ring. The guy's hey, you can wear anything you want for your wedding. Just pick whatever you want out. And he wrote me an IOU on a piece of paper. But I think I was like, Hey, maybe I asked him like, do you ever loan stuff out or something? You just have to ask people for stuff.

Eric Marcoullier: Yeah, it's true.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm not ashamed to ask.

Eric Marcoullier: Who do you help?

Lizzie Mintus: I help people probably once a week. I'll have a call with a candidate who I don't have a job for but needs help. Help with their resume. Especially if it's a woman, close to my heart. Help having confidence in themselves that they don't suck and that they've just been maybe doing their job search wrong. Maybe they're just applying or their resume doesn't explain their career gap, or they had their own startup and now they want to work for somebody else, but nobody's going to see that. And they haven't explained it. That was the one last week. So I help people in that way.

And then sometimes I help companies find out what they're really looking for. Because they don't really know what they want. Or they think they know what they want, but they copied a job description from Riot and they're like, yeah, we want this you don't even know.

Eric Marcoullier: You said that in the very beginning, right? You get to the why.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, why do you want this? And why do you want this job, right? Do you even want this job? What do you need?

I just like to talk to people about what they want. We've been talking to Eric Marcoullier, who's co-founder of BPM 140 Consulting.

Eric, where can people go to have you coach them, become your mentor, find out more about you, read your blog?

Eric Marcoullier: First of all, Marcoulier. com, which I'm going to start, there'll be a link in the description, I'm sure, but M A R C O U L I E R. com. The easier thing to spell is ObviousStartupAdvice. com, speaks to how I

look at anything that I provide. And then connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on LinkedIn, that's where I'm doing most of my writing these days.

And 100%, anybody who is starting a company, anybody who is thinking about starting a company. I will do my absolute best to make an hour to sit down, hear about what they're doing. Like I said, if I were absolutely independently wealthy, I'd still just spend 40 hours a week helping founders because people do cool stuff. And I like hearing about it and being helpful. So anybody that wants some free coaching, send me a note and I'm happy to do

Lizzie Mintus: thank you so much.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

We'll see you next time.

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