Transcript: Jacques Fu - Co-founder at Stax, Author of "Time Hacks"

Host: Hey Chuck, uh, welcome to the Startup Project.

Guest: Thanks for having me on the show. Appreciate it.

Host: Um, you know, you've done a bunch of things. Uh, I was just going through your profile and uh, you created, uh, I think you're co-founded Assist Rx, you're running Orlando Devs and some other cool and interesting stuff. Uh, and now you're at Stax, uh, payments. Uh, but before getting into all that, can you give a little background on your journey till, uh, Stax?

Guest: Yeah, um, you know, I can uh, talk a little bit about just sort of how, how I got into it. But, you know, my family, uh, we, you know, have an entrepreneurial background.

So, um, you know, my parents and, uh, you know, even, uh, my, uh, my, uh, adopted brothers, they're, um, all in, you know, the family business of real estate. They do different things.

So, um, some of them are real estate agents and some of them did, uh, investing. Um, but so, you know, we had a very entrepreneur spirit within the family.

So it was sort of always, uh, a part of our culture that we would go out and, you know, create our own businesses and and run our own, uh, companies.

And so, out of college, you know, I, uh, you know, was working in the family business, um, supporting them with technology. So I tried to, uh, to do a startup in compliance. Uh, it went okay.

I pivoted into a, uh, another healthcare technology company called Assist Rx. So we built some e-prescribing software. Um, and then, uh, and then we, you know, uh, did well. We grew to, you know, over 100 employees by the time I left.

Uh, and, you know, I kind of, it was maybe my sixth year there and I was, you know, again, it had grown to a size where I wasn't sure if, um, I was getting to do as much building as I really wanted to. I like to create and start things new.

So, uh, we, uh, I teamed up with uh, Suneera Madhani and we started Stax. Uh, it was originally called Fat Merchant.

Um, but, uh, you know, I, I, uh, exited that company and and started again and now we, uh, you know, we've, we've got over 300 employees and uh, it's the largest company I've I've ever built and, uh, we are the first unicorn, uh, in, uh, from Orlando, uh, which is, uh, has it been an amazing experience.

Host: Uh, how what was the exit like for Assist Rx?

Guest: Yeah, uh, you know, they, I personally exited, so, so my, uh, co-founders, um, uh, they, they bought me out.

But, you know, it was a, it was a good conversation and, um, we, we left on great terms and I think that's always something to keep in mind is my personal philosophy is to always leave on a, on a good note.

And so, uh, once we had certain projects and and things in a good place, we had a very, you know, robust sort of transition plan so, so that I can, you know, continue to work on other things.

Host: And how did you, uh, end up starting Stax after that?

Guest: So, uh, I met Suneera Madhani at our local tech accelerator, uh, called Starter Studio. And, you know, they needed someone, uh, who could lead the technology side of their business.

They were, uh, Suneera was the pioneer of subscription-based payments, but she needed a technology to go along with it. So I joined the team as CTO so that we could build our technology platform for small businesses.

Host: And today, what does Stax do?

Guest: That's a, yeah, great question. You know, it's definitely evolved.

Uh, you know, originally, our goal was to help small, small and medium-sized businesses, growing businesses, continue to scale and be their, you know, one-stop payment solution.

So, in the beginning, uh, if you're familiar with the industry, it sometimes gets a little bit complex. If you think of, you know, a veterinarian's office as an example, um, they will have, uh, a terminal, right?

And they have to get a processor for that terminal and, um, maybe if they want to do invoicing, then they have to go get a different solution, right?

And then if it's a shopping cart, then they have to go figure out how to configure that and how to deal with, you know, maybe go sign up for a Stripe account.

And so, our goal was to take out all of that complexity so they could have one single platform that could do, you know, omni-channel payments, right?

Whether it's, you know, in person or whether it's online, to be able to facilitate all of this commerce without having to go to all of these different point solutions.

It was costing small businesses a lot more money than they needed to pay to pay and also just creating a lot of friction in their business. Um, so that's, that's how we originally, uh, went to market.

Uh, what we found was we had a lot of software companies asking us how can they integrate with all of our technologies, whether it's our recurring billing or our API or or our, uh, our terminals to take the credit cards.

And so, through that journey, uh, what's really been nice is we've been able to help SaaS companies become payments companies.

And what that does is give them another source of revenue because they can actually take advantage of, you know, we can provide them technology, right? They can take advantage of all of our learnings.

We also have been selling payments directly to the market, uh, for, for a long time.

And so, we give them all of the tool, all the same tools that we use internally to be able to embed payments within their SaaS software, but also monetize it by, uh, charging, uh, you know, a transaction fee, uh, for their end customers for the ease of use of being able to activate payments.

So if you think about it, maybe I'm a software for attorneys and I, you know, have, you know, invoicing capabilities, but maybe it's not that great, maybe it doesn't help if I need to do retainers, maybe it doesn't do recurring billing.

Um, maybe it's just, maybe I don't even get, uh, currently any revenue from that. I just allow people to integrate Stripe. What we do is we say, hey, we we can provide you all the technology.

We can give you the capabilities to do things that your customers can't do today. Maybe they need to also swipe cards when, you know, the, uh, the client comes into the attorney's office. They need to physically swipe a card.

We can give you the hardware as well to integrate with that all in one package and help you, you know, increase essentially the recurring revenue of your software.

Host: Um, you you brought up Stripe a couple of times, uh, and it's easy to make Stax and Stripe comparison, but how are they two different?

Guest: Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, so we are really focused on uh, providing a full payments business on, on our platform to the, to the what we call ISVs, but to SaaS companies, right?

And so I think the difference is is, you know, we want to turn SaaS companies into payments businesses and we want to get out of the way. We just want to be sort of in the background.

Um, the, you know, some of the keys to that is we allow the, um, the ISV to, uh, to leverage our all of our technology.

So let's say they they're not ready yet to build all of the reporting, uh, that goes along with the payments or they're not ready to build, uh, a recurring billing module or something like that, right?

Uh, we allow them to white label the same technology that we sell directly to the market, uh, and, and basically do a single sign on.

Um, so they have to do just a very little integration and they can and provide an entire omni-channel payment suite to their customers, whereas Stripe is primarily just an API. It doesn't have any, you know, user facing, uh, sort of software, right?

You you kind of need a shopping cart or something else to to integrate it, whereas we have everything out of the box.

Host: So you're let's say if you're a software, which is a SaaS software for a, you know, for gyms, right? And that software, which is on that company who just selling to gyms, can use tags to create a new payments product within their software product. Like is that the right way to describe it?

Guest: Correct. That's exactly. Build a brand new line of business, a new line of revenue and really just double your valuation as a business.

Host: And that would appear as their own product and not as tax payments per se.

Guest: Exactly.

Host: Got it. Uh, that makes more sense. Um, so talk to me about like, uh, how your role has evolved at Stax, right? Like you started, you know, when you met two people in an accelerator to now, uh, if I'm not wrong, are you the CTO of the company?

Guest: Uh, no longer CTO, I'm now the, uh, Chief Innovation Officer. Um, we did, uh, you know, hire another CTO. Uh, his name is, uh, Chris Stayments and he was actually one of my mentors, um, from another publicly traded company, um, in town.

But, um, you know, I think it's it's been a very fulfilling journey for me, you know, starting off I brought, uh, it was basically just me and my, um, my good friend Daniel Walker and we were the first engineers basically.

But we were everything, right? We were we were QA, we were the writing code. We were doing the the product design, like everything, um, soup to nuts. And so, you know, at some point we needed to grow.

We needed to hire other engineers and continuously evolve our roles. Um, pretty soon, you know, we were, uh, focusing more on architecture, focusing more on user stories.

And then at some point we got to the scale that we could actually hire, uh, a dedicated product, uh, managers to be able to help us really focus on taking our product to the next level. Then we got, uh, UIUX, uh, resources. We had at some point QA.

Uh, we, we actually ran without QA for, for a number of years and relied on automated testing and a lot of tools to sort of fill the gaps where we didn't have resources in place. Uh, and so, yeah, it's, it's constantly an evolution.

You know, when your business is doubling or tripling every single year, the nature of what you do, uh, is going to be different and, um, that flexibility, I think, in, in that growth mentality for us is what has kept us successful.

It's to not always just think we're going to do the same thing next year, but how can we learn from the previous year? How can we grow and and take ourselves to the next level? And not, not everyone can do that and that's okay.

And, um, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't have to be that way, right?

Like, uh, you know, an example could be maybe you're, um, a engineer and you just, you like, you know, staying in the code and you don't really, you want to continue develop in your technical skill set but not necessarily on the management, uh, or business side or project management or anything like that.

Um, you know, you can stay within the organization and just focus more on, you know, architect level work or or you know, maybe you don't want to be a manager, but you can be a team lead. So there's lots of different paths, right?

And, and you don't always have to be sort of, uh, the, uh, the, you know, going, uh, taking the the business or the management path, um, as you develop your career if you start out as technical.

Host: So, I mean, uh, looking at what Stax does, you know, I can think of Square, Toast, and some other companies sort of in the similar space. So I have like a two-part question.

Like what enabled, you know, uh, I've heard figures like $20 plus billion in payment processing that Stax is doing right now.

I don't know if you're if the number is right, but what enabled Stax to grow, uh, looking back when you have you definitely had some competition, right? Uh, maybe not direct or indirect.

Um, looking back, what worked or what really that product market fit moment for you guys?

Guest: Yeah, I think it's, it's not going to sound too revolutionary, but I think listening, listening to your customers and seeing where the, the market is going, uh, and we kept, we were very open-minded, uh, in the early days as to, you know, how we were going to evolve, right?

Uh, we did have a vision to really solve the pain points of the business and I think that's where we excelled was we focused not on just processing credit card transactions or processing them a specific way like only online or only in person.

We focused on the fact that the, the business is the, the business owner is has a commerce problem, right? Like they need to be able to generate revenue. They need to be able to capture this revenue.

They need to do it in ways that customers want to be, you know, take payments and to engage with that business. And so we looked at everything holistically and said, well, we are starting with payments, but how can we help them?

You know, how can so, you know, we've added on since, um, we have reputation management software because one of the ways, uh, number one ways that customers find new businesses is through online reviews, right?

Through the through, you know, Google reviews or Facebook, etc. And so we said, you know what, it's not directly payments, but it's payments adjacent, right?

The next thing that they're going to do when they find your business is they're going to transact with you.

But in order to transact with you, they need to discover your business and so we created a module right in our software and, uh, to enable them to do that.

And that's just one example, but, you know, we don't think of ourselves as just a payments company.

We really think of ourselves as enabling commerce for the businesses and that requires us to think about their problems, not just our vision for how we think it should work.

Host: Uh, I mean, since you're deep embedded into fintech with Stax, what are some of the opportunities that exist today, um, I mean, be that for startups or, uh, just thinking about different problems that exist for merchants or otherwise?

Guest: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that there are interesting challenges that exist within each vertical. Uh, so you mess mentioned like a gym as an example, right? Um, so if I was a gym software, right?

I wouldn't want to just think about payments as in, okay, let me just put in, let me, let me have the gym owner invoice the the customers, um, or maybe recurring billing makes, makes sense, right?

So you, you invoice the customers every, every month for whatever their gym membership is. That sounds very simple, right? And we can, we can enable that, uh, with payments and we can help that gym software build that.

But what are other ways that you can use payments to create more revenue and solve, uh, solve problems for those gym business owners, right? Ultimately, the the gym software's customers.

You know, maybe they have a a personal training arm of the business. How can payments, you know, be part of the gym membership?

So maybe if you upgrade to a certain plan, like you have a silver, maybe if you go to, uh, gold, you get so many hours of of personal training as a part of that, right?

And now you're moving, your software, if your software enables that and enables those options, right?

Uh, what you're doing is you're creating a relationship with that gym owner that you're helping them grow their business and in, in different ways rather than just facilitating a transaction.

So, that's, that's what I would say, um, you know, that's what I would recommend to the to the SaaS software providers as to, you know, what they can do to to really help move the needle.

Host: Oh, it I mean, uh, I think before the conversation starting we talked about, you know, investing and angel investing. Uh, how did you or like when did you get started doing angel investing?

Guest: It was it was actually a couple years back. Uh, you know, I had an opportunity, um, I heard that a, um, you know, a friend within our network was, uh, doing some, uh, doing a round.

And, you know, I thought for a long time like, I'm not sure if I'm really an angel investor.

I mean, you have to, um, I don't remember exactly, but I think it's like 250, you have to make at least 250,000 a year, um, or if you have a million in assets, there's like certain qualifications to be an accredited investor.

Um, and many people are accredited investors, but they don't, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have, you know, a lot of free capital to just invest. But what I've discovered is, you really don't have to go all at once, right?

Like you can, you can as an angel investor, you can decide how much you're going to put into each deal. Uh, a lot of them have minimum, you know, minimum deal terms and you'll have to go with a syndicate, right?

Because usually, uh, as a, uh, when when you're raising funds, um, they don't want to take anything less than, you know, 250,000 or something on as a check because on the cap table that's get, that gets very messy from an accounting perspective to have too many people on the cap table.

Um, but within the syndicate, within your group of investors, right? If of angel investors, you can say, I want to put up five towards the 250, right? And then let the other investors put in in, you know, the rest of the funds.

So, you know, I think a lot of people who wouldn't normally consider themselves as as people who could invest, could probably set aside, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20, um, k a year and do one deal a year, right?

And after 10 years, you've got a decent portfolio of, uh, of startups. And I think it's actually easier if you only have to do one a year because you can really just wait for the best opportunity, right?

Like some, something that you feel really strongly about or or something that's in your area of expertise.

I think that's also a dangerous thing for angel investors is, you know, not only if you're new to to angel investing and don't know how to evaluate the fundamentals of a company.

The other, the other issue is if they're in a in an in an in a domain, uh, or an industry that you're not familiar with.

So I try to invest in startups that, um, I fundamentally understand, which is typically SaaS startups that sell, you know, that are B2B.

Host: Got it. Uh, and, uh, how many startups have you invested, uh, since you started?

Guest: Uh, I think about 20.

Host: And did your perspective of what angel investing is and, uh, sort of after investing in 20 change?

Guest: Yeah, I think, um, look, I, you know, after a while you sort of, when when you do it's very exciting, the first three or four deals, it's very exciting and you feel this, this sense of ownership, um, and, and pride that you're, you know, helping these companies in a very significant way.

As you, as you get to, I feel like as you get to like the 10 mark or maybe the 20 mark, then you start to realize like, oh, I need to think about this. Uh, at the end of the day, I should be making a return, right?

And so, once you've got enough deals out there, you start to look at it a little differently as a portfolio rather than just individual deals.

And so now, when I look at my angel investing portfolio, I compare it to my, uh, my retirement portfolio, right? And there's a lot of similarities.

You know, I've I've got, um, you know, a lot of people, uh, invest in in ETFs, but they may also have other companies that they, they buy, you know, they stock pick, right?

And so you have a a portfolio that's maybe a collection of, you know, large cap, mid cap stocks and some, uh, and some, you know, ETFs and things like that. And you look at the return, you know, over time.

Um, and so if you have a lot of, you know, a significant amount in in in your angel portfolio, you're naturally going to compare it to the, you know, other public equity portfolio that you have, your return should be higher, right?

But you also should have a lot more volatility.

Like you should expect most of those investments to return zero and you should expect a few of those investments to really 10 or 20x whatever you put in and they make up for all of the, all of the other, you know, failed investments because it's, it's higher risk.

So, if that if that's not happening in your in your angel portfolio, then you have to really evaluate if if that's what you should be doing because you could put then, you know, the same amount of money towards public equities and get a better return, right?

Um, and you know, just general rule of thumb, I think a lot of people use, uh, 7 or 8% is a as a conservative, um, expected return over, you know, a long period of time, you know, investing in in the, in the stock market in an ETF or and an index fund, you know, is what I usually recommend.

So if you're not getting anything close to that, you might as well stick to, uh, trading stocks, right? Uh, publicly traded stocks. So that's probably the biggest difference now is, uh, yeah.

Host: Just to double click on that because you wanted the retirement comparison with angel investing. How much of your portfolio is in angel investing versus, you know, other, uh, investments?

Guest: Yeah, it's it's it's now about, um, equal. Um, there's still probably more in retirement.

Um, but I imagine for me personally, the angel investing will eventually, if I continue to do it, will eventually be more, uh, than retirement because I'm investing in in in, uh, startups at a faster pace than my retirement account is growing.

And plus you're limited as well. If you're a higher income earner, um, there are limits to, you know, how much you can put in your retirement account, whereas there isn't in my angel portfolio.

Host: That's interesting because right, like if if you follow like regular advice of, you know, angel investing or any sort of investing, like angel investing is supposed to be the riskier, uh, bet and you're saying that you're almost equal on both sides and that's sort of like what I've seen, uh, with talking to other angel investors or VCs in general is because people who are either founders or investors who basically made their bank in startups are usually more, um, at least in terms of percentage are into investing in in startups versus people who are not into startups that much.

And I think, uh, what do you think?

Is that because you're closer to the startup ecosystem and the deal flow access or, um, you know, the, because you've seen a couple of exits, uh, that makes you prone, that this seems like a lesser riskier versus it actually is?

Like what is sort of like, if you have, uh, have you self-evaluated that, uh, portfolio, uh, diversity?

Guest: Yeah, I think the if I if I was purely trying to optimize my returns, right? Where I will have where I'm thinking about, um, how do I get the most amount of guaranteed return, right? For the rest of my life.

I probably wouldn't do angel investing at all. Right? So that's, you know, you can, you can for sure say that.

Um, but yeah, the familiarity, the fact that I've raised funding before, um, and that it's turned out very well for me and and we've, we've, you know, our original investor group, uh, at at Stax exited at, at 20 times, uh, their investment with us.

So when, when you get some experience with that, you, you get more comfortable like, oh, yeah, okay, I sort of see how this works.

So, so I would certainly expect that angel investors, um, or, you know, people who who have been founders to be, you know, uh, more, more often are not, uh, angel investors as well. Uh, but for me personally, it's to, it's to give back.

You know, I've, you know, got enough now, um, where, you know, I'm, I'm able to max, you know, what I put in my retirement and so the rest of these funds.

I still want to make a return, but if I can make a return while helping other co-founders on their journey, um, you know, that's a good feeling.

Host: Yeah, angel investing, it's definitely much more fun than other sort of investing, but only if you can do it and because it takes a certain amount of network, you have to be plugged into certain unique networks, uh, and usually founders are the best people positioned to do that and who eventually become investors.

At least that's the trend I've seen. Uh, or you or you've worked in one or two startups and grown through the startup, early employees or startups again are, uh, good at this.

Um, but, uh, talking, talking about something related, uh, what do you think of the whole crypto and Web3 space, uh, both, um, you know, in terms of fundraising as well as investing.

Um, and since you're also, you know, primarily have been a in the engineering side, then, um, what do you think of the technology versus investing and, uh, what do you think are really the use cases?

Because I think right now we're seeing a sort of, uh, crisis of confidence, um, in crypto and like I've, I was just reading the other day that this batch of YC has basically zero crypto to investments, uh, yet, right?

So they have like 66, uh, announced startups and there's zero crypto or web startups in the current YC batch. Um, and if you compare that to the previous batch, there were at least 26, uh, crypto and Web3 companies out of the 250 plus companies.

Uh, so even if you take proportionally, it should be around, you know, five or eight, uh, companies already in the program, right?

So I mean, there's definitely a, uh, crisis of confidence, not just in terms of like retail investors, but also, um, the investor class, the VC class, I would say because I mean, what is more VC or investor class than YC. Um, right?

So I'm curious your take both, uh, from a technology perspective, um, as well as, uh, someone who's done, you know, Indian investments.

Guest: Yeah, if we, if we just, you know, focus on cryptocurrency in general, um, you know, I think blockchain technologies are interesting. Um, I think cryptocurrencies is a, a cryptocurrency is a great, uh, use case for the blockchain.

I think there are a lot of other ways that they, you know, um, people have attempted to commercialize blockchains, but the, the ones that I've seen, they tend to be not that much different than a, than a database, right?

Um, it's just a distributed database. And so you have to figure out, well like what are the reasons to commercialize a distributed database that would be more advantageous than just a regular database. And oftentimes startups fail to find that.

So that's what I've sort of seen in the early days. That's why cryptocurrency is sort of the leading use case so far of, uh, the blockchain class of technologies.

I think the issue is that there was a lot of conflation between, uh, you know, cryptocurrencies, uh, and you know, the technologies that power them versus the value of the of the coins, so to speak, right? That they're minting.

Um, so I think a lot of the early investments were, you know, some people have used the term Ponzi schemes.

I don't, I don't, you know, that's a bit negative, but I do think they're not a fully transparent and I do think that they're trading on an idea of a future, a promise of future projects based on these, you know, blockchains and and really they're just sort of, uh, self-trading within their made up markets and these made up valuations.

Um, and so, you know, when there has been, uh, successful sort of investments, um, in the short term, a lot of the times it only looks that way because the supposed value of that cryptocurrency might have been propped up with, uh, essentially investor dollars, right?

And that and those in, uh, those investor dollars prop up a market that didn't exist.

And once people realize that there's really, you know, no fundamental or or intrinsic value to these, uh, to a lot of these coins, um, then, you know, they, they, they lose their investments.

And so that's what we've we've been seeing they, you know, with these alternative coins, is there really isn't much of a use case because a lot of the value of a cryptocurrency is just the adoption, the number of people on it, right?

Like so if, you know, what's the value of the internet? Well, the internet, it's just because all of our applications have this common way, um, that we can talk to each other.

So now everyone can go, if you have a website, anyone can go to it and can interact with whatever you put on there. And that's, you know, the value of the internet and, um, Google makes up a large portion of how people access the internet.

So they, you know, they sort of skim some of the value of the, you know, the of of the internet.

Um, anyway, I know that that's a, that's a long-winded way of saying, I think the value in, in cryptocurrency is going to be basically the number of users transacting, uh, with that cryptocurrency.

And, um, and that's just not there for a lot of these, uh, alternative coins.

So I think, you know, when it comes to Bitcoin and Ethereum, I do think that they, uh, represent, they, they represent, um, vehicles that have a strong promise in the future of replacing some portion of what we do today through, you know, credit cards or PayPal.

Um, but, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know if that answers your question.

Host: Yeah, I mean, uh, one side effect that I've noticed with crypto is, um, like if you think of a regular startup investing cycle, right?

Even just as an angel investor or at least stage investor or a CDC investor, the it it's sort of like a linear trajectory, right? You start a company, there's a preceed round, CDC round.

At some point there's a growth round and at some point you go to IPO and exit.

Uh, what cryptocurrencies really did is sort of like short circuit that line into a circle where the early investors who are much more risk prone are also investing at the same time as the retail investors.

So what happens is like retail without understanding the risks that an early stage investor understands are taking the risk and now there's also like you can argue whether by being vocal about a particular currency, you're actually promoting that.

Right? So, you're basically taking that straight line where, you know, it takes seven to 8 10 years to get an exit into like two to three years because you can liquidate those tokens in a public market without actually going into IPO.

So I'm curious how that story will actually come out.

Guest: Yeah, I mean, I I've definitely heard of instances.

I can't think of the specific examples at the moment where essentially the investors, you know, propped up the market for a coin to your point, the retail, uh, came in and also, um, invested.

And then once the price reached a certain amount, the, um, the investors, uh, you know, exited enough that they made a return and then kept the remaining coins, um, but then also kind of crashed the prices a little bit on the retail so because they sort of, uh, you know, skimmed the demand that was there.

Um, and so that's a little bit, I think misleading for the retail investor on what is actually sort of happening in the market because they don't have the, the visibility to sort of analyze, um, you know, who's doing these trades and who's who's kind of generating the volume.

A lot of the times it's, it's self-trading, um, between the same entities.

Host: Yeah, I mean, the, the twist in all the argument is like everything is transparent, uh, but yeah, everything is transparent, but it's really hard to look. Um, right?

So that even though it's like transparent, you're throwing everything at the user. So it's really hard for the user to look at it and like find really what's happening.

So that's sort of like the dichotomy of the situation of, you know, everything is transparent on the blockchain argument. Um, but, um, I also wanted to talk about, um, I I see that you've also made a podcast and you wrote a lot about time hacks.

And I'm curious what are like a couple of things, you know, um, that, uh, that work really well for you and what are the principles that you follow for managing your time?

Guest: Yeah, so I, I have this, uh, short acronym that I always use, which is, uh, to if you want to add time, you know, I use the ADD acronym, which is, uh, automate, delegate and delete, right?

And I try to do one of those, uh, one of those things every single day. So I think about, you know, how can I do something, put a system in place, uh, you know, integrate some software, um, or, you know, maybe choose not to do something, right?

Uh, and and do one of those every single day and I'm just taking something off of my plate, right?

And so that that leaves me with essentially every day that I do that, I get more space for other productivity that I can apply to a specific specific projects I want to apply to.

I think the other thing that's really important is just recognizing that things take time. And, you know, if you have these these bigger projects, if you want to spend time with your kids, for example, right?

It's really important to understand like what does that mean? Because if thing if you just say it, uh, a lot of times you don't get around to it because you, you don't have an intentional way of getting it done.

You just say, oh well, when I have time, I'll do it and I want to spend more time with my kids or I want to spend more time with my family. But there's, you know, a limit. There's, you know, uh, other things that you have to get done during the day.

And so

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