90% of Startups Fail. Be The 10% That Succeed w./ Gregory Shepard (Author of The Startup Lifecycle)

Discover the real reasons most startups don’t survive—and what you need to know to beat the odds. In this episode, we unpack the startup lifecycle with investor, advisor, and serial entrepreneur Gregory Shepard. If you're building a business, this conversation could be the difference between scaling smart or stalling out.

🔍 In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• The common traps that even “promising” startups fall into
• How the startup lifecycle affects your strategy and mindset
• One founder mistake that investors quietly notice—but rarely warn you about
• What acquirers are looking for
• Why structure and timing may matter more than your idea

Gregory Shepard is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and author with a track record of building and selling 12 businesses across BioTech, TransitTech, AdTech, and MarTech. Throughout his career, he has successfully led startups, turnarounds, cleanups, and roll-ups, demonstrating a deep expertise in business growth and transformation.

📚The Startup Lifecycle: The Definitive Guide To Building A Startup From Idea To Exit by Gregory Shepard 

Learn more about Gregory https://www.gregoryshepard.com/author

Simple & strategic marketing solutions for the busy coach and consultant. Visit www.reinventingperspectives.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] Gregory Shepard: One of the major reasons why they fail has to do with bad decisions. And so I was like, yeah, of course they make bad decisions, but I didn't expect them to say it was based off bad advice, and I certainly didn't expect them to say it was based off of bad advice from investors.

Investors, mentors program managers and other founders actually were the biggest offenders of giving bad advice to founders. 

It's.

Priscilla Shumba: Welcome to the Lessons of Entrepreneurship, the Journey of Reinvention. I've got an exciting guest for you today. Gregory Shepherd and Gregory has had 12 exits, four private equity awards, and he's a published author of the book, the Startup Cycle, the Definitive Guide to Building a Startup From Idea to Exit.

I'm excited to have you [00:01:00] here, so I'm gonna just jump in and say, how do you know you've got a good idea? That's the first question, Gregory.

Gregory Shepard: What confirms that you have a good idea is levels of validation, right? So the first level of validation is your vision, right? Refining your vision down to the point that it's laser focused. Then the next thing you do is you go out and you start with advisory board.

So you have an industry advisory board, a customer advisory board, and an acquisition advisory board. Those three people, you run your idea past them, and they will tell you what their feedback is on the idea. Most of the time , I don't advise people to say, oh, I have a good idea, and then have somebody else validate they have an 

good idea. You need somebody from the industry, somebody that would buy your company, and then somebody who is going to be a customer to tell you it's a good idea.

Priscilla Shumba: Okay. There's layers to this. , this is getting exciting already. You've sold many companies and for an entrepreneur that's just starting out and that's thinking, what's the first critical step [00:02:00] to building a business? Because there's so much advice online, but what is the first critical step?

Gregory Shepard: I call it the North Star, right? So your North star is what is your business? What is your product? Okay, so that's description, feature, benefit for your business and for your product.

It has to do with your problem, solution, and impact. Okay, so you have those two things. Then the next layer is who is interested in your product? Who , is your customer, that's your persona and your ideal customer profile. And then who would buy your business? That's your acquirer. So that's the second layer of it.

Those two different layers give you enough data to understand. More of a 360 degree view of what your business is. Who would be interested in buying your products and services, and who would be interested in buying your business overall? So the North Star is something that you can change at any time, but it's super, super important that you do it upfront.

There's two things you need to know when you're building a business, where you [00:03:00] are and where you're going. It's like a GPS. Your acquirer tells you where you're going, and your customers tell you where you are. So you get an idea of okay, I'm here in the process of building my business. I wanna go over there.

And then the plan is what goes in the middle, right? Your strategy and your tactical plan goes in the middle of that.

Priscilla Shumba: I'm thinking so many times you hear people say, oh, the plan isn't that important, , it's gonna change. Don't. Focus so much on the plan and when you hear something you don't know how much of that you should take to what extreme how do you gauge what is too much planning and what is just enough 

Gregory Shepard: let me define this a little bit. Okay? A plan has depths to it, right? If you go too deep in the plan into the details, yes, you should not do that, but you should have a plan strategy is, in essence a plan, right? So what is my strategy in terms of building this business,

and it gives you like this long-term run. I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this and [00:04:00]that. That's okay to do when you're looking out into the future. You wanna do that. 'cause you have to have a vision, , it's ready, aim, fire, not ready, fire, aim, right?

That means you have to have a target you can do that by planning into the future. It has to do with how deep you go into that. When it comes to the tactical stuff, you don't need to go. Down to the roots on the entire plan going out five years. You just need to go down to the roots on the stuff you're doing right now.

But you do need to have a plan to show where you're gonna go in five years. Otherwise, you're gonna meander around forever. If you think about this GPS thing, right? If you know where you are and where you're going. That means that you have an address in your GPS. If you just have a city, you're not gonna ever find where you're going.

So it's really important that you think of it that way, that you think of it in terms of, I have a plan, I have a strategy going out this far, but I'm not going super deep into the details on all that. 'cause that will be a waste of time. [00:05:00]Your vision is only a vision until your customers tell you what they want.

Then your vision becomes the customer's vision. Does that make sense? If you keep building with what you have in mind and you don't check that with the customers, you will fail. And most of the time they do.

Priscilla Shumba: Now to the person who's thinking, okay, I've got to get validation from these three groups of people. I can find a customer, I've gotta find someone in the industry and someone to acquire, and you're thinking, will they give me the time of day? For maybe to someone as accomplished as you are, you probably have, the direct 

access to those people, but someone who's thinking, I'm whoever, wherever I am in the world, how do I make myself worth the time for them to give me that access?

Gregory Shepard: So the people that are interested in buying your company, there are people that are paid, they're corporate development people, that's their title, and they're paid to find deal flow. Their whole job is to go find. Deals to look at. These people are gonna be happy to look [00:06:00] at what you have. They're gonna be interested.

They'll have the conversation with you. , you'll be able to say to them, is this a business that you guys would be interested in? If they say no, then you go, do you know any other company that would be interested in this? And I can unpack that a little bit more in a moment. Then there are the customers.

Customers are always looking for solutions to big problems. If that customer's willing to talk to you in the first place it's a good sign, right? It means that you're taking on a problem that they really want solved, there's vitamins and there's medication, right?

Vitamins are nice. You don't need 'em. Medication, you have to have. You're trying to find customers that are telling you that I need your product 'cause it's medication for problems I actually am experiencing right now. When you think about your acquirer, the reason why that's important is because companies buy companies for a synergy and there's two types either make or save money.

Those are the two types of synergies in that world. The majority of [00:07:00] the synergies are to make money. how they make money is if you are an acquirer and you have 10,000 customers and you're a startup and you have a hundred customers, you think they care about your a hundred customers. They don't care about your a hundred customers.

They only care that your a hundred customers are the same as their customers. Because essentially they just wanna sell your product to their customers. There's this term in startups called your CAC to LTV, your customer acquisition cost to lifetime value, right? So how much it costs you to get a customer versus how much is that customer gonna make you during the timeframe that they are your customer?

That's the lifetime value, and it's a ratio. So if I spend a dollar. I make three. If I spend $2, I make 10, whatever it is, right? So they have already paid for the customer acquisition costs for the customers they have. What they're trying to do is raise the lifetime value. . They do that by buying companies that they can use to sell more [00:08:00] products to the customers they already have.

So if you talk to the acquirer and your customer and their customer line up, then you have a valid acquirer. So this is another point of validation that you have the right customer and you're talking to the right customer, and therefore the feedback that they give you is valid to validate that your idea is a good idea.

Does that make sense?

Priscilla Shumba: Yes. What is the idea that such a person want to acquire? If you can give examples of, what you've done so someone can have an idea of, okay, what kind of a product would such a person be interested in and how does it fit together?

Gregory Shepard: Let's say that you are solving a problem in the engineering space and you have an acquirer who has purchased other solutions because they have a bunch of engineering customers. You want to understand who their customers are, and that's easy to do.

You just call 'em, like I said, they're gonna be willing to talk to you. So you call them and you say, Hey, I'm a founder, I'm starting a company. Here's what I'm doing, [00:09:00] and I'm just interested to understand who your customers are, and they'll tell you it's these kind of customers. Oh, okay, great.

What I'm building is something for these kind of customers, and you lay out what kind of customer you have. It lines up with the customer they have. Do you think you guys would be interested in this sort of a product suite to offer to your customers? Whenever I get to this down the line, right?

'cause you're just a startup. You're just getting going. And they'll be like we would certainly consider that usually is what they'll say. If not, they'll just tell you. They'll say no, that wouldn't be something we would be interested in doing. Or they'll say, yeah, that would be something we're definitely interested in doing.

And that gives you the data you need to validate whether or not your customer, their customer is the same customer, and so on and so forth. So an analogy of that would be, if you look at Apple, apple bought Siri. They knew that they needed to have something to deal with. Alexa bought Amazon, right?

They knew they [00:10:00] needed these things, and Google has bought numerous companies to throw into their product suite. All of these companies have acquired a customer. Once you buy an Apple device, and now you're their customer, so now they can sell you music, they can sell you movies, they can sell you a watch.

They can tell you Apple tv. They can sell you a computer. They can sell you a phone. All that stuff, right? Same thing with Amazon. If you buy something in Amazon, now they know they can sell you more and more stuff, when you think about this, you just have to think your whole company is essentially just a product to the company that's gonna be acquiring you.

So your customer and their customer must be the same. If they're not the same, you won't have an acquisition. 'cause why would they buy you? If they don't have anybody to buy your product. So essentially, your whole business is just a product to them. Does that make sense?

Priscilla Shumba: Yes. Now that makes sense. Thank you so much for that. Now, I didn't introduce you, but I'd like to know, Gregory , what is your mission, and if you can tell [00:11:00] us a little bit about yourself.

Gregory Shepard: My mission is to help founders. Initially I worked really hard. Actually , during the Obama administration, I was trying to move money down to startups to help more startups get funded. And they turned me down 'cause they were like, Hey, a lot of these people are failing, so we're doing the best investment we can with the amount of founders that were failing.

So then I launched a five year research project to find out why, when, and how founders were actually failing. And then I wrote the book. The startup lifecycle, which doesn't just tell you founder failure and success, it tells you what to do along the lifecycle of a startup, which is the different steps.

We were talking about the GPS minute ago. This is like turn by turn directions right, on how to go through the startup process. So that's the research project I did. And then that's the book I wrote. Yeah, I've built. 12 companies. I'm on my 13th. Sold 12 companies, sold a bunch of other companies too.

I have a fund with a few companies in [00:12:00] it or a syndicate with a few companies in it. So I have other exits that I've done outside of the ones that I've sold four private equity awards as part of a $925 million deal with eBay. Did a TED Talk. I have a Forbes podcast. I'm a Fulbright scholar.

I've got an honorary PhD. And just busy guy doing a lot of stuff. Pretty normal. I came from a background of diverse folks. So foster an adopted family. I have two Asian siblings, two black siblings, two indigenous siblings, and two Hispanic siblings. And so I have a passion to help people with wealth equality and an environmental impact.

So my focus is both social equality, environmental impact. That's why I am doing this.

Priscilla Shumba: You've lived a lot. You're still living a lot.

Gregory Shepard: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Priscilla Shumba: That's wonderful. You said there was this failing problem. When you approach the Obama administration, a lot of times people think our businesses are failing because we don't have access to funding.[00:13:00]

And then you're saying no. Where there was access to funding, there was still a failing problem. . Okay, so then what is it that we're talking about? 

Gregory Shepard: Yeah, when you do the original surveys and you look at the data out there, that has to do with founder failure. I didn't get funded, was one of the responses that most people answer, right? That just leads you with more questions than answers. Why didn't you get funded?

Was it your idea? Did you not know how to pitch investors? Did you have a bad pitch deck? Did you have a bad idea? Did you not know how to get ahold of investors? There's more questions than answers underneath that feedback. 'cause , another one. Bad decisions. Why did you have bad decisions?

Bad advice. Who gave you the bad advice? Why did they give you bad advice? What I did is dig down into the roots underneath these fundamental things. And when it comes to capital, what a lot of people don't realize is wealth and capital share one thing in common, and that is that they are an outcome.

Not a goal, so you can't [00:14:00] go in it saying, my goal is to raise this much money. Your goal is to build an amazing business and capital is the outcome of you being able to explain your amazing business to the investor base.

Priscilla Shumba: Okay. I like this. More questions and really understanding that it's the outcome. 'cause we do make it the goal because we think it should be the goal. Or at least, that's the general idea of how do you know your idea is good? 'cause my goal isn't gonna make this much money, so the goal is to build a good business.

Gregory Shepard: These things are an outcome of something, right? As an example, if you are trying to, lose some weight, you eat well, and the outcome of eating well is that you lose weight. And It works the other way. You eat bad food, the outcome of that is you're gonna be gaining weight, right?

It's the same thing with business, if you're focused on the wrong thing, your outcome is gonna be the wrong thing, And investors can see through that. If you're just raising money and raising [00:15:00] money, and instead of saying, Hey, listen, I'm trying to build this amazing business and here it is, blah, blah, blah, and you go into everything and then you say, I need $500,000 to get going.

That's a different approach than, Hey, I need $500,000 in order to do this business. Here's my business. You see what I mean? One of 'em is you're focused on your business and this is just something you need to do versus the other one is, I'm focused on raising money.

Priscilla Shumba: Would you tell us some of the things that surprised you when you were doing the research or maybe what you initially thought you were going to find when you began and some things that surprised you as well? I think our entrepreneurs would be interested in knowing that 

Gregory Shepard: Yeah, it was totally different than I thought, right? One of the major reasons why they fail has to do with bad decisions. And so I was like, yeah, of course they make bad decisions, but I didn't expect them to say it was based off bad advice, and I certainly didn't expect them to say it was based off of bad advice from investors.

[00:16:00] Investors, mentors program managers and other founders actually were the biggest offenders of giving bad advice to founders. And that's because if you're an investor, even though you share a common interest in making sure that the thing is successful, you still see the world through the lens of an investor.

And most investors haven't been practitioners, meaning they've never actually built a business themselves. They just invest in the business. So they see it. From a perspective of let's say somebody said, I'm teaching riding a bike, but they've never ridden a bike, but they've read everything about it, but they've never actually ridden a bike.

Completely different perspective. And the mentors. Are there to help 'em too. But the big problem there is that you don't need the same mentor the whole time. If you're in go to market, you need somebody that's really good at marketing and sales. If you're in product, you need somebody that's really good at product, so on and so forth.

So a lot of 'em would stay with the same mentor the whole time [00:17:00] and only rely on that a good founder. will have a mentor that sort of sustains them, but then they'll engage with other mentors that have subject matter expertise in the stage that founder is at. Go to market or product or whatever.

I. Another one has to do with other founders. Believe it or not, a lot of founders that fail are giving advice to other founders, right? And it's okay to say, this is why I failed. But you shouldn't be saying, this is what you need to do to succeed because you haven't done it yourself.

Maybe not the best person to give the advice or what I call a one hit wonder. So somebody who built a company, they had a big tailwind that kind of pushed them in. They got lucky. Basically they sold the business and then they started advising other founders who aren't so lucky who don't have a tailwind and have different obstacles.

And so they can't see those obstacles 'cause they've never faced them before because they didn't have to because they got lucky. Then on the [00:18:00] last layer of this is folks that are just family members and stuff that are trying to tell founders, oh, and they don't understand the risk and they don't understand why they're working so hard and they can't see the vision, and so on and so forth, right?

So you gotta make sure that it's one thing to get advice from people. It's another thing to listen to the advice and make sure that you're skeptical about the advice that you're getting. And that it's good advice for you and your specific scenario, versus broad advice.

Priscilla Shumba: Oh wow. I'm just blown away by that because I would have never thought that is the source of bad advice. I'd have thought that's where you're gonna get the good advice from. I like that nuanced stuff, like what do you actually need? And is this person, an expert on that specific thing and 'cause you think you get a mentor and like you said, you think that's the right mentor to keep for that relationship 

Gregory Shepard: yeah, it's good to have mentors. [00:19:00] You should have mentors for sure. Listen, bottom line is you're better off with people giving you advice than people not giving you advice. But you need to be careful what you listen to and what you actually execute on, think for yourself.

Don't just blindly follow people's advice.

Priscilla Shumba: Those are wise words because. Sometimes you defer your thinking to somebody else because of what they've accomplished.

Gregory Shepard: Exactly. Yeah. You think to yourself, oh, this person's done this amazing thing, so I need to listen to them. But their advice is gonna be based on their own experience, which could be different than your experience. Their advice is gonna be based on their business, which could be very different than your business.

Priscilla Shumba: Wow, that's so good. The nature of entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster. How do you handle, you've been doing this now, 13th time, you're going at it again. How do you handle all those setbacks and failures and bits of success and everything in between?

Gregory Shepard: I do a lot of meditation and I think [00:20:00] meditation is really important for founders. I think it's extremely important because it gives you this place where you can stop and think. People always say, oh, I get my best ideas when I'm taking a shower. That's just because you're isolating yourself away from all the distractions, and you're just thinking, and your mind is clear.

That's what meditation does for you. . What I do is I do a meditation where I see two timelines, two tunnels. So imagine that you're visualizing two tunnels in your meditation, and they both have light at the end of the tunnel. They're both beautiful tunnels.

They look amazing. One of them is your forecasted timeline. This is where you're going to be if you keep doing things the way you're doing them. So you see that and you go, okay, if I do this, then this is gonna happen. And you can see the domino effect of what's gonna happen. You walk to the end of that tunnel, you see the light, and you see basically what your business is gonna look like at the end of that forecasted timeline, whether it be six months, a year, five years, whatever [00:21:00] the other tunnel is, the objective.

It's like a manifested timeline. It's what you wanna create, and they're not usually the same, right? The one, the direction you're headed right now and the direction you wanna head may be two different directions if you're real honest with yourself. So you can change yourself to go with a manifested timeline, the one that you really want, and then it'll change your business organically, right?

Because you're essentially changing the direction you want to go, and you're making. Your forecasted timeline become your manifested timeline during meditation when your mind is clear. I think that this is a really good way to deal with the stress and anxiety. The other thing, and let's be honest, I have stress and anxiety still.

I've been doing this for 35 years and I've done it, multiple times and I still stress. Stress is the pressure of getting something done. And anxiety is when you get carried away [00:22:00] with your thoughts and you're like, what if this happens? What if that happens? Oh my God, what if this happens? Oh, this is gonna happen.

And then, oh, and , you go on this. Little adventure in your head of all the horrible things that can happen, that little adventure, you have to put a stop to by thinking about that forecasted timeline versus the timeline you want. We have in our brains the natural instinct, right? If you look at animals in the wild, they're always really skittish, right?

They're always worried about getting attacked. And that's why even us as adults, if somebody yells at you react. ' cause it's still in us, right? We're still the same way. That negativity, that pessimism is what kept us alive and evolving to where we are. It's useless in a business.

It just gets in the way. So , if you realize that, hey, this is an instinctual thing that my body has that still hasn't been eliminated through evolution, but it's kept me alive. All this time, but [00:23:00] it's not serving me right now. It's not helping me. Now then sometimes you can just put that thing to rest and be like, listen, brain, you're off on this thing and it's not helping me.

I need you to do something that's helping me. So let's talk about how we can make this business better instead of all the doomsday stuff that we've been thinking about up to what's stressing us out. So those are two things, and then the. Final thing is that when you are under stress and anxiety, go back to your plan and look at it and say, am I missing something?

Am I missing something or did I catch everything? Sometimes that will just fix the issue. A lot of times the stress comes from not knowing, right? Not knowing if you're gonna raise that money, not knowing if you're gonna have money for payroll, not knowing if your business is gonna be successful.

The reason why you're doing it is because it hasn't been done. So of course you're not gonna know, right? So then is it time to just talk to yourself and say, Hey, listen, this [00:24:00] isn't healthy. This isn't helping me build my business. These are the strategies I go through. It doesn't mean that it works every time, and it doesn't mean it's easy still, it's still hard.

But those are things that help me.

Priscilla Shumba: Thank you for that. That's really helpful to know that it's normal. I think that's the most important thing to know that it's a normal thing that you're going through.

Gregory Shepard: Oh, it's so normal. It's absolutely normal. And think about what are the biggest changes that we have in our life as human beings moving, buying a house, moving, getting married, having kids, starting a job, losing a job, or starting a business. Like these are the hardest things. There's a handful of things that are like really hard to do.

And if you're a founder, you're taking on one of 'em, like head on, of course you're gonna be stressed.

Priscilla Shumba: I'm interested to know of the 12 exits that you've gone through, maybe you can tell us a story of something that was really memorable about one of them, or one that really sticks out for you.

Gregory Shepard: So the biggest one was the one I [00:25:00] sold to eBay, enterprise Marketing Solutions, and it was my company, affiliate Attraction, and I remember. Laying in bed and waking up for the first week, waking up in the middle of the night, just sweating, just sweating and thinking that it was all a dream and it wasn't real, , and rolling over my bed, grabbing my phone, and looking at my bank account, going, oh.

Whew. Oh my . It was real, that happened to me for the first week, right? Where I was just, I kept looking and looking and realizing, , it really was real. I had another transaction where as part of the transaction, they bought me a car a Tesla. Unfortunately Elon Musk owns Tesla.

I don't like Elon Musk at all. But there was an issue with just me at the table and I was negotiating with them and I was like, listen, I'll take that offer if you buy me a new car and they were like, okay. And then I got a car out of it. So that's another kind of a fun story.

Sometimes the transactions are really clean and sometimes they're [00:26:00] difficult. I've learned, . That you need to plan for your exit at the very beginning and foster this process along so that at the last minute you're not, hit on the side with some sort of stuff that you didn't expect in the middle of a transaction that you're really counting on.

You're like, I want this to happen so bad. And then all of a sudden something happens during due diligence that you didn't expect because you didn't prepare, 

Priscilla Shumba: I've never heard of how private equity is awarded. When I saw that, I said, I'm definitely gonna ask you about that. 'cause I think a lot of people also don't know that side of funding.

Gregory Shepard: When you think about investors, there's angel investors. This is an individual person who invests in startups. There's what's called angel groups, which is a group of angels that get together and invest as a group. There's syndicates, which is like a club. Of investors that invest into companies, there's venture capital and venture capital is a bunch of investors that invest into a [00:27:00] fund.

They're called LPs or limited partners, and those folks fund a fund and then the fund funds your business. And then there's micro VCs. These are basically the same as a vc, just smaller, and they do earlier stage companies with smaller check sizes. Private equity is at the high end of that.

Private equity usually is doing roll-ups where they buy a bunch of companies and put 'em together. They'll do carve-outs, which is where they'll buy a public company from the stock market and turn it into a private company. They'll buy companies to maintain the company and then use the profits from the company to pay back their investors and make.

Money themselves. They're at the high end of it, right? So if you're a startup, you're not gonna be raising money from private equity. You may be selling to private equity, but you're not gonna be raising money from them. If you're a startup, you're gonna be raising money from angel groups syndicates and micro VCs.

Priscilla Shumba: Oh, that makes sense. If you can [00:28:00] tell us one sales tip that you live by having, sold companies to private equity, to investors, to customers, everything in between.

Gregory Shepard: There's three things that investors wanna know, customers wanna know, pretty much, , in an exit. People wanna know it's why this? Why this product, why this company? Why this thing? Me? Why am I the best person? Why am I the best company? Why am I the best one to do this right? And why now?

Why is now the best time to make this happen? So why this? Why me, why now? Those are things that are fundamentally important no matter what you're doing, no matter what you're selling, whether it's a business yourself or a product or service.

Priscilla Shumba: So good. , I'm interested to know what excites you about the future? What future trends do you see?

Gregory Shepard: I hesitate to say AI because everybody is saying ai and I don't even think of AI as an industry. like I think that it's ridiculous that's like saying software, [00:29:00] you know what I mean? aI is everywhere in everything. , it's a part of industries. It's not its own industry, right?

Like people are using chat. GPT, you wouldn't call chat GPT an industry, you would call it a company, a piece of software, right? The evolution of the combination of AI and robotics is gonna make life for humans fundamentally easier. And what I think is gonna happen in the future is that you start to see what happened earlier is you saw the blue collar workers start to have their careers. Vanish because of robotics, right? So people that used to work at car factories and industrial plants and stuff that went away through robotics. Now what you're seeing with AI is the white collar workers. So this is doctors, this is lawyers, this is CPAs and accounting folks, right? Where AI is starting to do a much better job than they could ever do.

So what does that mean? The two of them start to compress, and what are [00:30:00] we gonna do as humans? I think we're gonna end up working less hours. Making more and having more leisure time because everybody's gonna need to work and nobody wants to work as much. So how is the government going to deal with the fact governments around the world deal with the fact that there are just less jobs for people because of , all these different forms of technology?

The only way to do it is to say, okay, let's work less. Right? Why are we working less? 'cause robotics is doing it, AI is doing it, et cetera, et cetera. And let's have more leisure time. So I think that's where we're headed. I think we're headed towards less work, more focused work, using really advanced tools, but less work and more time to ourselves.

That's what I'm excited about.

Priscilla Shumba: If my job is part of the jobs that are gonna be taken up by AI and robotics, then what work would I be doing? Because I think that's the question that a lot of people have on their mind in terms of all this change that's gonna happen in the future.

Gregory Shepard: Yeah, [00:31:00] I think that it's the people driving those things like AI needs a pilot. So you look at what happened with the robotics and plants and stuff, and that there's people now working with those tools, mechanics, working with them. They break, right? So there's people fixing 'em, fixing the timing on them.

When a product line changes, they have to recalibrate these things. Their jobs just transform to something else. And I think there's gonna be people that pilot AI and their jobs are just gonna transform to working with ai on the software side. Every time in the past, 

we have always been scared about our jobs disappearing, think about the people that were all freaked out about sustainability because it was gonna threaten their jobs as a coal worker or threaten their jobs in oil and so on and so forth. Now those people work for solar plants. People in the robotics that were working in factories, they got replaced, right?

Every time a new technology comes out, it leaves more jobs. than it took [00:32:00] away, and that's over history. If you look at it, you'll see that there's more jobs instead of less. They're just different jobs. Our challenge as a species is going to be training these people, to do these new jobs.

Priscilla Shumba: Please. To the audience, the book is called The Startup Lifecycle, the Definitive Guide to Building a Startup From Idea to Exit. Thank you so much, Gregory. I'll probably have to listen to this over and over again. So much has been said that it's been of great value and I thank you for your time.

If you can go to ww dot gregory shephard.com/author, I'll have that linked in the description. Gregory, where can people follow you?

Gregory Shepard: LinkedIn or just on my website, gregory shepherd.com.

Priscilla Shumba: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. I.