How to Create Your Own Luck as a Creator: Justin Gordon's Incredible Journey From Training NFL Pros to Venture Capital to Full-Time Creator

Yong-Soo Chung:

If you ask me, Justin Gordon had one of the best starts to a career anyone could dream of.

Justin Gordon:

I had an internship in undergrad as well at this gym called Fitness Quest 10, where at the time I knew they trained some of the best athletes in the world like LaDainian Tomlinson, Drew Brees, who I saw when I was there. It's like it's half NFL players were there when I'm an intern and I'm next to Drew Brees and shaking his hand and watching him work out and LaDainian Tomlinson wasn't there at the time, but Drew Brees was there, a couple other quarterbacks were there. Darren Sproles was there.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And this internship wasn't easy to come by either.

Justin Gordon:

I had known about the gym because I had read about LaDainian Tomlinson training in Stack Magazine and I knew he trained at Famous Quest 10. So when I had applied for an internship in college, I'm in Wisconsin at the state school in Wisconsin and I apply and I'm waiting for, I think it might have been weeks to actually hear back. You got to do an interview, all these different things and when I got the email, they said it was like hundreds of people that applied. They only took 10 in this internship and they were from all over the entire country. I got it. I remember telling my roommate at the time, "I'm like, dude, I'm going to spend this summer in San Diego." He's like, "I hate you."

Yong-Soo Chung:

But these days Justin does something quite different.

Justin Gordon:

We have an angel community called Vitalized Angels where anyone can join non-accredited and accredited investors, which is the only Angel group I think doing that. There's also Angel Insights on newsletter and Angel investing and also revitalized a newsletter for founders with the best of the week every week.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Justin Gordon went from training alongside elite athletes such as LT and Drew Brees to working with an amazing community of entrepreneurs and founders as the director of marketing and communication at a VC firm called Vitalize VC. How did this happen? Let's find out.

Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm a first generation Korean American entrepreneur living the American dream. I started urban EDC to cater to enthusiasts of everyday carry gear. I also own two other successful ventures, GrowthJet, a climate neutral certified third party logistics company for emerging e-commerce brands and Spotted By Humphrey, an online boutique curating dog goods for good dogs. Through these three ventures, my business makes an annual revenue near eight figures and I'm here to tell you how you can do the same.

On this episode of First Class Founders, I'm sharing with you my insights from an interesting conversation I had with Justin Gordon.

Justin Gordon:

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Justin hosts the podcast Just Go Grind and also has a newsletter by the same name. But more importantly, Justin is the director of marketing and communication at Vitalized VC, a venture capital firm. Vitalized claims to be the only angel group that accepts both accredited and non-accredited investors. I spoke to Justin about his journey from the world of personal fitness to venture capital and came away with a ton of amazing insights such as the similarities between athletics and entrepreneurship. How he applies his learnings as a fitness trainer in the VC world. How he built a network of founders through his content creation. How his podcast got him hired at his current role, and finally what he considers to be the most important quality for an entrepreneur to have.

Spoiler alert, that last one. It is obsession and we'll discuss that in a much greater detail later in the episode. Also, later in the episode, I'll share some of Justin's thoughts on the Silicon Valley bank fiasco that has been unraveling for the past few weeks and his thoughts on how founders can survive in the current uncertain fundraising climate. Let's get down to business. Justin Gordon was interested in sports and fitness from a very young age.

Justin Gordon:

So there's a magazine I still remember called Stack Magazine that I read in high school. And I was always reading workouts of the top NFL athletes, NBA athletes, et cetera, even back in high school. Even before then I was curious about Jerry Rice and how they had this work ethic of athletes and how they just worked their way into being the best.

Yong-Soo Chung:

He went into college wanting to be a strength coach for an NFL team or a college team, but quickly realized that...

Justin Gordon:

The life of a strength coach is not that great in terms of the pay and the hours. And if you want to have a family, you're moving around all the time. You want to progress in the industry, you always had to move different teams.

Yong-Soo Chung:

So he ended up becoming a personal trainer instead.

Justin Gordon:

So, working with more everyday clients, but also people who were athletes but more so everyday clients. I had an internship in undergrad as well at this gym called Fitness Quest 10.

Yong-Soo Chung:

It was here that he met and trained alongside stalwarts at the NFL such as Drew Brees, LT, and a bunch of others.

Justin Gordon:

I'm next to Drew Brees and shaking his hand watching him work out and LaDainian Tomlinson wasn't there at the time, but Drew Brees was there, a couple other quarterbacks were there. Darren Sproles was there.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Justin then began working towards getting a certification to become a personal trainer at University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.

Justin Gordon:

So I was going to school in La Crosse, Wisconsin Summer. I was back in Milwaukee, but I made a Craigslist ad for Milwaukee before I was there. Hey, I'm going to be in summer, I'm going to be there for 12 weeks, but if someone wants to train with me, I'm going to be there. And I had no, no experience, nothing. Someone within a day or two signed up and paid me for these sessions and I'm like, this is crazy.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Sounds quite crazy, but it was also his first foray into entrepreneurship. It became the sea out of which his first venture Just Go Fitness grew, which incidentally was...

Justin Gordon:

A play on my name, Justin Gordon. So play on that was Just Go Fitness, which also turned into my other company later. But yeah, I was basically training people in their homes at parks and eventually it progressed to training online so I could kind of train more people.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Justin began blogging in 2013 a time when the term content creator didn't even exist.

Justin Gordon:

No, it was all bloggers. It was just people who were blogging. They would be called a blogger and they'd be like, who are these people on the internet? Tim Ferris was blogging and people had these big blogs.

Yong-Soo Chung:

He realized pretty quickly that he could only do about 30 one-on-one sessions a week in person, but he could reach a lot more people by using the internet and blogging.

Justin Gordon:

And so I did have thousands of people coming to my website at the time, which is kind of crazy.

Yong-Soo Chung:

At the time, one of his cousins, Travis, used to run an e-commerce company called Car Toys. Travis offered Justin the opportunity to come and work alongside him.

Justin Gordon:

And I was just intrigued because I had done the fitness thing for a couple years, but I was getting to the point where I was like, I really like this business part of it. How do you create companies? And for me it was like, okay, this guy has created a multi seven figure company. He's successful. If I go work for him, I'm going to learn a bunch about what it actually takes to run a company and I'm going to have a lot of autonomy.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And so he joined his cousin Travis's company Car Toys.

Justin Gordon:

About a year and a half, two years in. I thought my skillset was leveling off in terms of learning. And so then my thought process was, okay, an MBA would get me to a couple things. One, a network in venture and startups and other people I know would be valuable moving forward. That was one piece of the MBA, but also I want to move to LA. I always wanted to be in California.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Justin decided that he wanted to do his MBA in California.

Justin Gordon:

I was like, well, if I get an MBA in California, I'm going to then have a network in California. And from a life perspective, this is going to be great no matter what happens with the MBA and the fallback for an BA is like a six figure salary. And I was like, this seems like a no-brainer thing to do.

Yong-Soo Chung:

But before he started the MBA program, he started something else.

Justin Gordon:

So then I started this podcast Just Go Grind in 2018 in June to then start interviewing the same people that I was like having this blog post of 'cause I was like, well, why don't just tell their stories in a podcast? I've been listening to podcasts for years, always wanted to start one.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And it was this podcast that eventually would get him into his current role as director of marketing and communication at Vitalize VC. It's so happened that on his podcast, Justin would interview a wide variety of people.

Justin Gordon:

And as it morphed it was like, I just love the founder conversations. I just want to talk to entrepreneurs. And then as that progressed, it was like, well, if I want to have this show help entrepreneurs, I need to interview venture capitalists because they're the ones on the other side that are giving these founders money.

Yong-Soo Chung:

One of the venture capitalists that Justin interviewed was Gale Wilkinson, the founder and managing partner at Vitalize VC.

Justin Gordon:

I had this network of 200 some people that were founders and venture capitalists.

Yong-Soo Chung:

At the time, Gale was looking to fill a position at Vitalized for a role that was about building and running a community of entrepreneurs.

Justin Gordon:

I didn't even want it at first 'cause I was heads down doing my own thing. But then I was talking to a friend on the walk and I was just like, I'm so curious about venture capital. I wanted kind of get into this.

Yong-Soo Chung:

So he ended up emailing Gale and opened discussions with one condition.

Justin Gordon:

So if I can do my podcast still, it's remote fully, let's talk. And basically I started going through the process and she's like, yeah, the role is yours if you want it, by the way. And then I ended up starting in January of 2021.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And that's how we ended up becoming the director of marketing and communications at Vitalize VC. One of the first things I asked Justin was whether he carried forward any lessons from his personal training world to the VC world, and that's when he let me in on a little secret.

Justin Gordon:

So when you're a personal trainer, you can basically have two trains of thought. There's one personal trainer that basically just freestyles everything they get. They show up to a session, they have no idea what they're doing. They freestyle one thing at a time, and as you getting trained by them, you think like, oh, they know what they're doing. They're doing all this stuff. It must be planned and all this. No, they're doing everything on the fly.

There's the other trainer that plans everything. They have your workouts planned for weeks in advance. They have a program and they have progressions, they have all these different things, but they will tweak it on the way.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And this second style, the one that was about carefully planning and programming for the long term is what Justin is all about.

Justin Gordon:

I was that trainer.

Yong-Soo Chung:

In fact, he likes to see it in entrepreneurs who approaches his VC firm and says he wants to see more of it.

Justin Gordon:

Without that, you wouldn't raise capital unless you have a track record already of having sold a company or similar things or you're not going to raise capital.

Yong-Soo Chung:

I think that as a great lesson for founders who are looking to pitch to VCs. Lesson number one, always be prepared ahead of time. That said, just having a plan isn't enough. Sometimes you might need to tweak that plan depending on how the day has gone for the client in question.

Justin Gordon:

The whole thing is a mind game of motivation. Someone comes to me, I have a plan for them, but they just worked a 12 hour workday or had a terrible day. Their kids were saying, whatever, all these different things can happen and they're coming to me for this one hour session. How do I make the most of this? And you're not always going to kill them in a session. Sometimes you have to ease off. Sometimes you have to be a hard ass all the time. It's always this balance of things.

Yong-Soo Chung:

The combination of these two things, programming and psychology combined over a long term is what produces the results that most people want to see both in fitness and entrepreneurship.

Justin Gordon:

Because even in fitness it was like we can't make that fast of results in a week or two weeks. This is for the long term. It's the same thing with startups. I mean these companies take a decade to exit.

Yong-Soo Chung:

That said, there are also some things that don't translate directly from the world of fitness to the world of entrepreneurship specifically. Two things that don't translate well between the world of fitness and entrepreneurship are stakes and motivation, except when you bring in the crucial third ingredient that brings everything together perfectly.

But before I tell you about this crucial third ingredient, I want to quickly introduce you to the First Class Founders membership. The First Class Founders membership enjoys many other perks such as early access to each episode and an interruption free listening experience. Another huge perk is the ability to listen to the raw unedited interview with Justin as it happened and get a peek behind the scenes, so to speak. In the full conversation, you'll get to hear a lot more of Justin's insights and anecdotes such as...

Justin Gordon:

You're training Drew Brees. You're basically thinking, how do we not mess him up? Because the worst thing you could do is have him get injured. So you're like thinking not... The stakes are high, but you just not mess it up. But this is like we're trying to get things accomplished because he has a season coming up, right?

Yong-Soo Chung:

And...

Justin Gordon:

I interviewed Andrew Gluck from Irrvrnt Capital and he has a very... He used to run an agency, I think one of the biggest digital marketing agencies. It's like when he has a founder pitch, he wants to know what's your customer acquisition strategy specifically, what are you going to do?

Yong-Soo Chung:

The full conversation where we made available to members of the First Class Founders community, which you can join by going to firstclassfounders.com/join. I'll link to it in the show notes as well. I'll see you inside the membership.

Okay, let's now get back to what Justin was saying. Before I tell you about that crucial third ingredient, let me quickly tell you what Justin said about the other two, namely, stakes and motivation.

Justin Gordon:

If you look at the stakes of investing and raising capital, it's so much higher. There's so much more potential, so much more reward versus fitness. A lot of people can slack off and not notice it for a long time. You notice pretty quickly in business relatively speaking.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And as for motivation...

Justin Gordon:

People are very motivated by money and success in that way. Less motivated in fitness, most of the time, unless you get to a point where your doctor says you have to, whatever, it's still hard.

Yong-Soo Chung:

However, there is one ingredient that can bring these two stakes and motivation together. It is something that is seen frequently in both elite athletes and the truly successful entrepreneurs.

Justin Gordon:

Obsession, with all of these people. It's just an obsession and it manifests itself in different ways because people are inherently different.

Yong-Soo Chung:

All the elite level athletes he observed during his internship were obsessed with reaching peak performance.

Justin Gordon:

A good example would be maybe a Tim Tebow, back in the day. He was very loud and vocal and you knew he worked hard, whatever. But there's other people who are quieter like Darren Sproles when he was training at Fitness Quest 10. One of the best running backs in the league at the time. He's like 5'6", small guy, but he was crushing it. He's way quieter. But dude, he works so hard in everything and you can just tell the obsessions there, the little details.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And he sees the same thing in the entrepreneurs who have made it.

Justin Gordon:

And it varies between, like I said, the personality types and how that kind of portrays itself. You may see the loud, boisterous on Twitter all the time, Elon. Then you have other people who are like, okay... For example, the MailChimp founder when he announced this company was worth a couple billion or something like that. I think he had a thousand Twitter followers at the time. People didn't know who he was.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Ben Chestnut, right?

Justin Gordon:

Yeah.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Yeah.

Justin Gordon:

And that's crazy. He was just quieter doing his thing head down, but I'm sure he is obsessed as well.

Yong-Soo Chung:

And that's another good lesson for us to make note of. Lesson number two, be obsessed with reaching peak performance. An important thing to remember here is that the requirement of obsession doesn't apply only to VC backed businesses.

Justin Gordon:

I remember hearing the quote one time ago. It's like, do you think a small business owner works any less hard than someone's doing a startup? And it's like, no, it's just they're doing it in different arenas. The small business owner works their ass off too and they're crushing it in that regard. Whether they have a restaurant or something, they're still working hard, working all day, whatever. They're just a different arena than someone who decided to build a startup. And it's not that they're either one of them are less obsessed or less hardworking. They have just chosen a different path, a different field.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Sure. The startup game has a much higher ceiling, but whether you're a small business owner or a VC, the fact remains that you have to grind. That means knowing what you sign up for is very important.

Justin Gordon:

So when I had a community of founders, it was maybe 90 founders or something. And a lot of times when I talked to founders, especially if they're debating raising capital or kind of thinking about that path, it's just understand what that comes with in terms of expectations. What's going to go on with that versus bootstrapping and trying to find other ways, whether it be getting loans or whatever. Just understanding the game you're going to play and why do you want to raise capital?

Yong-Soo Chung:

Often with founders who are looking to actively raise capital, you'll hear a lot of emphasis on traction during the conversations. But according to Justin, there's something much more important than traction that founders should focus on.

Justin Gordon:

The whole thing about early stage is like, are you going to get to that big company size or not? And so traction is one data point you're looking at. So for founders raising, it's like if your traction helps you prove out that you have validated something or gotten rid of other options or it got you on a track closer to the big outcome that you want, then sure include that and tell about it and use that in your story.

Yong-Soo Chung:

He cites the example of Dr. Iman Abuzeid of Incredible Health.

Justin Gordon:

She talked about how traction isn't what she thought it was in the early stages in terms of raising. It was much more around the story and the market. And some people laughed because it was like she was kind of trashing traction not being as important.

Yong-Soo Chung:

No, the more important data point according to him is the narrative.

Justin Gordon:

The whole thing in early stages is narrative. When we're investing pre-seed, these companies may have maybe a few thousand revenue, maybe a few companies, maybe a few customers, I mean. Sometimes they could have mostly just a product built and that's it. So depending on the founder and where they're at, if they're at pre-seed or seed, that's one piece of it. Where's your traction at? But the narrative around where are you going is the most important piece of it. I mean, if you look at this over and over again, it's like how are you convincing people that you're going to be a massive, huge company?

Yong-Soo Chung:

And why is that important? Because the VCs who are backing these founders are doing so with only one aim in mind.

Justin Gordon:

They're investing in you for a later outcome. And in venture, because of the craziness of how big valuations are, depending on the fund size, that really dictate what they need as an outcome.

Yong-Soo Chung:

When you are a VC, billion dollar exits are not just a preference. They're very much a necessity and perhaps a measure of success even.

Justin Gordon:

When you actually do IPO. Okay, if you're a smaller fund, maybe you do need a company to be a billion dollar exit. But if you look at some of these bigger funds later on, they need multi-billion dollar exits, if not decca billion dollar, 10 billion exits for their fund size to make sense for you be to return the fund.

Yong-Soo Chung:

So what does that mean for you as a founder?

Justin Gordon:

One, when you're looking at the investors, who are you pitching to is important? 'Cause you're going to need to tell that story based on that as well. Then moving the narrative into really specifically how are you getting there? And I think founders get too in the weeds, don't get in the weeds enough actually with some of that. You have to have the narrative, but the clear story for in my head as an investor, can you walk me through how you get there, actually? Tangibly, how do you think you're going to get there?

And we know that it's not going to be that exact path. Everyone understands that's not actually the path necessarily. But have you thought through it where you actually had the detail enough to be like, this is how we're going to get to that outcome. Because you've thought about it enough and you've talked to enough customers and you have a unique insight from your background potentially that you've done that got to this point. To give. me the clarity where your story checks out in my mind where I'm like, oh, you can actually do it and it's plausible that that makes sense that you will do it. And oh wait, you've taken enough action in some ways proving out traction with talking to customers or revenue or customers in a pipeline where you've taken that action already.

So you're a doer, you're not just talking about it. All those things put together into are you going to invest or not and hopefully get over the edge.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Let me quickly condense all of that wonderful advice into a short lesson for you to take away. Lesson number three, the story and narrative matters more than traction while raising venture capital. So make sure you have control of it. I must mention here that Justin did concede that the current market was a difficult one for founders.

Justin Gordon:

As hard as a founder. I admit it's very hard now as a founder because there's just the timing of the market, which we're seeing right now with SVB. What's the market sentiment? That's a whole other thing as well. So you could do it all right. One of my friends, I won't name their name, but they're struggling for fundraising even though I don't think they should be. They have a good pitch and everything. I think it's really just about the market timing currently in sentiment, which is a piece of it that's out of your control.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Justin's reference to SVB, the Silicon Valley Bank, did not escape me. I mean the SVB story is one that has a direct impact on his world of VCs and fundraising. Of course, I had to ask him about that fiasco. I'll tell you Justin's thoughts about SVB fiasco in a bit. But first I want to take this opportunity to tell you about the First Class Founders newsletter.

The First Class Founders newsletter is a companion to this podcast. Each week I add visuals and more context around each episode that's released. For example, for this episode, since I talk to Justin about how both professional athletes and entrepreneurs are obsessed with continuous improvement, I will share my own methodologies of keeping score, if you will. That is how I gather feedback from my customers using a net promoter score. I'll tell you what it is and how I use it in my own business.

Additionally, I review all my podcast and newsletter metrics like downloads and subscriber numbers inside the newsletter. So if you want the full First Class Founders experience, go ahead and sign up at firstclassfounders.com/newsletter. I'll link it in the show notes. I'll see you there.

And now let's get back to Justin's thoughts on SVB. Specifically, I asked him what lessons founders could take from the SVB fiasco. He began with an understandable caveat.

Justin Gordon:

I don't know enough about it to give a very detailed breakdown or anything around that.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Which I actually agree with. It is indeed way too early to draw any conclusions.

Justin Gordon:

Well, first of what, well first thing I'd say is it's going to be a tough fundraising environment regardless. But even we had that same thing last year with valuations going. They were crazy in 2021. 2022 sharp cut in that and was harder to raise as well. But I think with all the market stuff that's going on, there's always going to be something, whether it be another collapse we had years ago. There's always something happening.

But the thing is, as a founder, what do you control? And that's all you can do. The markets are crazy. Okay, so that might dictate do we raised now versus not raised now, whatever. But even when people are fearful and there's seems to be crashing around you. You still can only control and control regardless as a founder. So I have the mindset of not that you don't worry about it, but you focus on the things that are tangibly in your control.

Yong-Soo Chung:

In fact, at this point, he reframed it from a very interesting perspective, something that most founders will probably not considered by themselves.

Justin Gordon:

Think about this. Venture capitalists, especially emerging managers, I mean, they're raising funds, too. So founders aren't the only ones that are going through this. Everyone is thinking about it. If you're emerging manager, it's the same type of thing. And I've talked to a lot of VCs and interview lobby who are raising funds. It's the same thing. They're thinking about it too. It's a harder thing. But what can you do? You control how many meetings you can get, who meetings with addressing your pitch, making progress in your company, getting customers, all of that, and not that you can do anything about the greater market as a whole. Anyway, so with the SVB situation, it's like, well, what can you do?

Yong-Soo Chung:

Given that fundraising is currently facing this tough climate? I asked him if he had any tactical strategies or advice for founders to keep going. He gave me the example of Ooshma Garg from Gobble, the food tech startup.

Justin Gordon:

When that whole industry was basically collapsing. She had a few options and she could have sold off her company and kind of shut it down. She couldn't raise funding. Instead, she cut her million dollar a month marketing budget to zero and said, well, we trust that hopefully customers stick around 'cause we have a really good product, we're doing really good things and in the long run we can turn profitable. And so they cut a million dollar marketing budget.

Yong-Soo Chung:

In other words, you will have to make some really tough decisions as a founder.

Justin Gordon:

Are you going to cut headcount down? Are you cutting spend and trying to find organic ways that you can still grow and survive? Are you taking some type of loan? There's definitely... Crazy thing that I worry about now, people having predatory terms on fundraisers and that sort of thing as well where you're like, do you take that and move forward or not? And it's hardly gave advice on should you or not. 'Cause there's so many factors every founder kind of has to think about for themselves. But some of these things are last resorts, right? Where you're at last resort. So you might have to, which is hard to deal with. I feel for the founders out there going through it all. But ultimately, it's like I'm them to decide how do you stay alive.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Essentially, you got to do what you got to do to survive. There's also, of course, the more grim side of things that people don't like to look at.

Justin Gordon:

Sometimes startups shut down. I mean that's the reality of it, which is terrible. But there are other things you could do, start another one, et cetera, which is not that easy to say or to do, obviously. But I do think you have to be real with yourself as a founder and what you're, you can do. I mean, sometimes it's the idea of never stopping. I'm never going to quit. And you hear those stories, but then other times it's like, oh, they did quit a different project and they started another one that was even better. It's hard to say, but I think just thinking about as a founder, what's important to you, your team, if you can't survive, survive. That's somewhat I would say, but it's a really hard in this environment obviously.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Yeah, no, I think that you hit it right there, which is, I guess that's the skill of the entrepreneur is knowing what levers to pull, whether or not cut marketing or maybe cut down a head headcount. You need to know intuitively which areas of the business drive more revenue and take... I guess you have to take these bets too, cutting down the marketing spend, what if that actually craters the leads even further? And then that could cause even more problems. But you just have to know intuitively and I guess test just to see if it impacts it.

Justin Gordon:

Right. And actually that's a great point and I think still thinking about that Ooshma Garg thing with Gobble, they didn't know what the retention would be. But they knew already at that time I think that they had best in class retention. And so they were thinking, well, we have really good retention, the best in the industry. If we cut this down, we might actually be okay off of current customers. And obviously some could come in organically, et cetera, but or referrals or anything like that.

That is the thing that you're thinking about. You're in these situations, you kind of have to test assumptions because you don't actually know. She didn't know what the retention would be. We could have easily had a story where Gobble just collapsed and they didn't make it right. Everything is survivorship bias, right, of every company you look at. Like 10 companies did it the same way and they survived. So we tell the story, which is always something to remember.

But that worked for her because they did have the best in class retention and she did make the move that, hey, we want to stay around as a company, so we're going to try to find a way to make this happen. Because the mission was so ingrained in her in terms of what she wanted do with Gobble. I think that's the same thing with founders. If you believe in it that much and this is your mission and you're trying to do this and you take it as far as you can. Then if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. There's always a lot of different things to try before you quit. For sure though, to keep in mind.

Yong-Soo Chung:

To use an analogy from his day's training elite athletes. It's like being Drew Brees. You do all the training, you study the playbook and you prepare as much as you can for the game, but then when the game comes, it might be snowing, it might be really windy. You have no idea what those game conditions might be, but you just have to adapt to that and make those decisions on the fly during the game. I feel like that can also be equated to founders when something like an SVB fiasco happens and your skill as an entrepreneur is to navigate and make those calls in the middle of the game to be able to survive another few months.

Justin Gordon:

And just to word it a little differently. So one thing I love from Paul Graham, founder of YC Comb... Or, YC. He mentions, and this comes up again, again in the different founders being relentlessly resourceful. He likes founders who relentlessly resourceful.

Yong-Soo Chung:

Hhmm... Relentlessly resourceful. That's a very interesting way to put it.

Justin Gordon:

It's like when you think about that framework of that wording of their relentlessly resourceful, and you look at their story and you listen to their story, you're like, oh, they were just relentlessly resourceful. They just found a different way to do things and they thought differently. They tried long enough. And it's like that is the thing. If you're resourceful, you'll find a way. It's like, I don't know if it's a Notre Dame thing or whatever, find a way to win.

That's the same type of thing thinking in sports. It's like find a way to win relentless. It's the same thing in startups. Find a way to win being relentlessly resourceful. It's how you do that. You find a way to survive and figure it out. And even if that's laying off a lot of people, going really low burn for a period of time and being able to claw your way back in months from now or a year from now, whatever. Maybe that's the case and that's a scenario.

Yong-Soo Chung:

I know that is somewhat cliched, but I genuinely think that is a wonderful lesson that is worth being reminded of. And I'm calling it lesson number four. Be relentlessly resourceful and always find a way to win.

Justin Gordon:

Most of the time, reason why startups fail, obviously right out of money, they have co-founder issues. There's two big things, but if you can find a way to continue to make money/raise funding/get debt, whatever, don't have the co-founder issues that you can still stick around where someone's still in the business, obviously. You stay around long enough to have a chance to win.

Yong-Soo Chung:

The way I like to see it is, and I think Mark Cuban was the one who framed it this way, but you just have to win once.

Justin Gordon:

Well, and people talk about the failure rates of startups and how high they are. But the thing I always loved is hearing that and then being like, well, what are the failure rates of founders?

Yong-Soo Chung:

What a brilliant way to look at it. The success rate of startups might be low, but when you think about it, every startup founder almost always gets back up and goes at it again.

Justin Gordon:

Serial founders have started many things that maybe you don't even hear about their early businesses. When I think about Tope Awotona from Calendly who I wrote about, I mean his story is ridiculous. He started multiple kind of e-commerce companies that failed, but he learned from each one of them. Then he pours his life savings takes that a loan, goes full maxed out credit cards to build Calendly, and now it's his multi-billion dollar thing. And yes, it's an outlier, but at the same time it's like how many founders have started multiple companies or tried to start multiple companies before they get to one that succeeds?

Yong-Soo Chung:

Yep. To modify that Paul Graham phrase a bit, I would say that founders need to be relentlessly resourceful and resilient. That's the three Rs of entrepreneurship right there. Relentless, resourceful, and resilient.

And there you have it. Those are Justin's four lessons for us today. Lesson number one, always be prepared ahead of time. Lesson number two, be obsessed with reaching peak performance. Lesson number three, the story and narrative matters more than traction while raising venture capital. So make sure you have control of it. Lesson number four, be relentlessly resourceful and always find a way to win.

And a bonus lesson, the three Rs of being a successful entrepreneur are relentlessness, resourcefulness, resourcefulness, and resilience. Before we wrap up, there's one final message from Justin. For all the founders listening to this episode.

Justin Gordon:

If you have a bias for action as anyone thinking about starting things... There's like what the 90% people who don't start things, they're always thinking about things. Everyone has an idea, right? And the only difference between someone who has an idea, someone who acted on it, is the action part of it. That's it. That's it. That was like, that's the whole Steve Jobs quote, the world is created by people no smarter than you. And you can shape it, you can change it, you can evolve it.

So I think anyone thinking about starting things in one, in the early stages of starting things like having a bias for action is how all of these people have created their companies. They took action and you can only see so far, but then as you take a step, you see it a little bit farther as you take another step, you see it a bit farther. But that's all stemming from you moving forward by taking action. So I would say just having a bias for action for anyone thinking about starting a company, becoming an entrepreneur is number one.

Yong-Soo Chung:

You can reach Justin in all the usual places online.

Justin Gordon:

So we'll start with Twitter, Justin Gordon, 212 on Twitter. 212 is the temperature it takes for water to boil. That is why I have that. The extra degree matters. That's why I have Justin Gordon 212 for people who didn't know that. And then Just Go Grind is where I have the newsletter you mentioned, comes out every Sunday. Basically deep dives on founders, some of the best founders in the world Just Go Grind podcasts. Also, you can find if you go to podcast, justgogrind.com or just search Just Go Grind podcast. It's kind of been on pause for a couple months since I've been doing the newsletter, but it will be back.

And then Vitalized stuff, all by the stuff we're doing. We have an angel community called Vitalized Angels, where anyone can join, non-accredited and accredited investors, which is the only angel group I think doing that. And then Vitalize VC for any founders who want to get in touch with us, go there. Whether you're pre-seed or seed, focus kind of on the future of workspace, but pre-seed at the Angel Group and then seed at the fund.

Those are probably all the places. There's also Angel Insights on newsletter, an angel investing, and there's also Revitalize a newsletter for founders with the best of the week every week. So there's a lot of things, but start with Twitter and you'll find it all from there.

Yong-Soo Chung:

All right, that wraps up today's show. In the next episode of First Class Founders, I'm revealing my entire newsletter stack. That's right. I'm going to show you step by step what I'm doing right now to grow my newsletter, which has been growing over 30% week over week. I'll show you what tools I'm using and how I'm using them to achieve this result.

And one more thing before I go. If you are a new listener and you enjoy this episode, you can follow the show by going to firstclassfounders.com and clicking on the link that matches your preferred podcast player like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you're a repeat listener, I'd really appreciate a five star review. I know every single podcast show asks you to leave a rating and a review, but this is a relatively new show and your ratings and reviews really help I read every, every single review.

Please head over to firstclassfounders.com/review and leave us a five star review. Thank you so much. If you want to connect with me, I would love to hear from you. You can follow me on Twitter at Yong-Soo Chung, and let me know if you enjoy this episode. I take feedback very seriously and would love to hear your thoughts on how to improve the show. You can find links to all my social accounts in the show notes. I'll see you in the next episode of First Class Founders.

Justin Gordon:

I think First Class Founders is great as well, and I think we'll both be doing big things in years to come.