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Erik: What's been the most uncomfortable part of starting a company?
Phil: I think generally there's uncertainty when starting a company because you don't
really know what's gonna happen. There's a theoretical idea of what's gonna happen and,
you know, you sort of, you know -- If I build it, they will come sort of mentality. But
then you also have the possibility that you know you open the doors to the business, whatever
those doors may look like, whether they're real physical doors or philosophical doors,
and no one shows up. You know, so that's kind of the worst-case scenario, so I think there's
initially the trepidation of, you know, what if I'm the lone voice in the forest and no
one's really interested in this. Once you fight past that stage and you feel like, "Okay,
I think there's something here and there's some traction." The next biggest thing is
taking something that's just an idea that exists within one person and turning it into
something bigger than yourself. And I think that's where you need to, in a way, start
to relinquish control over the asset even if the asset is an idea or a physical space
or what have you, you have to feel comfortable bringing other people on board and letting
them run with the vision. Until you can do that, you find yourself kind of firmly limiting
your scale to how much you can grow and then you start to become the bottleneck to the
growth. And you can't do that. So I think those are the two biggest challenges you kind
of -- initially the fear of trepidation thing, and then after that, it's about identifying
resources and relinquishing control, so your idea can really become a company, because
that's a metamorphosis, just because it's incorporated, doesn't really make it a company.