Startups For the Rest of Us

In episode 645, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure where he covers whether bootstrapping is the anti-bro movement, the difference between working with someone good vs. someone great, and the rise of outrage culture on social media and how that doesn’t leave much room for nuanced thinking. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover:  3:28 - The anti-bro startup movement 8:58 - Outrage culture on social media 12:49 - Declining a $9M acquisition at 18 16:14 - What startup founders can learn from outlier performers 22:23- The difference between being good vs. being great Links from the Show: MicroConf Masterminds I Learned 227 Beatles Bass Lines And Discovered This… If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you. Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher Transcript: Rob Walling: I showed up to dinner and I think my belt buckle ... I'd gotten out of a cab or an Uber or something. My belt buckle was literally two inches off to the side. And one guy said, "You got to straighten your belt. You run a conference now." And I remember thinking to myself, "What in the (beep) are you talking about, man?" I've run five of these events, six of these events. This was my house. I remember feeling that. Like, "This is my house. You don't come in here." And it's little levels of disrespect that just don't need to be there. And no one else does that. The only people that have come to MicroConf and said things like that happen to be these overconfident folks who had hopped in. And I'm not ragging on San Francisco per se, but we do know that there's that "startup bro" feel that maybe just doesn't jive with who I am, doesn't jive with what MicroConf is, and it doesn't jive with the community we've built. Welcome back to Startups For the Rest of Us. As always, I'm your host, Rob Walling. And this is the show where we talk about building and growing bootstrapped, and mostly bootstrapped startups, through relentless execution and thinking in terms of years, not months. We know that this is a marathon, not a sprint. And maybe I can throw in another cliché metaphor right here. But no, it's about thinking about things over the long-term and about shipping something every day, but not expecting that to move the needle immediately. Usually realizing it takes months, or in most cases, years to build something great. Thanks for joining me again today. Today's episode is a solo adventure where I talk through a few topics that are on my mind. I'm going to talk about whether bootstrapping, or maybe it's MicroConf, is the "not-bro," the "anti-bro" startup movement. Why today I think, in social media especially, it's cool to be angry and that there's more nuance to a lot of different situations. I'm going to bring up some examples of conversations I've had with my kids recently about that. And then talk about this headline where someone declined a $9 million acquisition at age 18 and then went on to