Steve Arntz: [00:00] “Steve, in three years, I will have made you a millionaire. I can guarantee you that. And if you do not take this job, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

Joe Grover: [00:11] Welcome to The Real F Word.

Joe Grover: [00:18] Welcome, Steve. I’m so happy to have you here today because we’re going to talk about failure. We’re going to talk about your journey, and you’re a successful entrepreneur, intrapreneur. You’re a successful and respected business leader. I respect you for all that you’ve built and all your wisdom and experience. And today, I’m really looking forward to unpacking your career arc and journey and then talking about your latest startup as well.

Steve Arntz: [00:46] Well thanks for having me, Joe. It’s good to be with you.

Joe Grover: [00:48] And we were talking about failure and why that’s a word that entrepreneurs have such a difficult time saying and facing. In fact, as I’ve invited other founders to join the podcast, they’re initially like, “Yeah, I’ll be open and vulnerable.” And then I might get a call or a text late at night, and they’re like, “Hey, I’m not quite ready to talk about it.” And they’re just not ready to maybe admit that there’s some finality to the word failure, and they’re not ready to admit that maybe this is the end of the road for a business or a startup that they’ve been working on. Why do you think entrepreneurs struggle with this word?

Steve Arntz: [01:25] I think part of it comes from the different dynamics that you have to create for the different audiences that you need to be on for. So, when you’re in front of your team, with employees, people that you work with regularly, they need to know that it’s okay to make mistakes. And that word failure can be really strong and punishing—can end with another F word like fired. And so creating safety is probably one of the reasons why entrepreneurs are scared of it. They want to create safety for others. And so by talking about their failures as learnings as opposed to failures, it hopefully creates safety for people to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes and continue to move forward.

[02:10] You need to project out confidence to investors. So you’ve got your employees, you’ve got investors, and then you’ve got your customers as well. And so, even preparing to come talk to you today, I was thinking, “Okay, what would potential customers and current customers think if they heard the podcast and realized how big of a failure I regularly am? Would that reduce confidence for those customers? Would investors be less likely to give me money? Would employees feel as safe and confident in what they’re working on giving their heart and soul and energy to?” And so there’s just these different contexts that you live in. So I think you just keep it to yourself. Every day, you just beat yourself up and like, “Why am I such a failure?”

Joe Grover: [03:00] Yeah, this is why I love talking to you, because that’s so reflective. And I think it’s so accurate. And the question is are entrepreneurs and founders that talk about failure openly and that are open and vulnerable, does it actually have the opposite effect? Does it create more confidence in customers and employees and, I don’t know, and maybe investors? And maybe the word failure has too much finality to it, and that’s why people just never want to say it.

Steve Arntz: [03:29] Completely agree. Yeah, I think that—I’ve got this vulnerability diagram that I draw on the board sometimes. And on the far right is your board meeting, and then on the far left is your therapist. And the vulnerability continuum is what it is. It goes across that. And I used to treat everyone like my therapist from a vulnerability perspective and go all the way far left every single time, no matter what. Go to the board meeting? Let’s go far left. With my wife? Let’s go far left. And with my friends? Let’s go far left. And the wake-up call was when my wife told me—someone that I’ve been married to for 17 years at that point—and she says, “I can’t go far left with you anymore. Your therapist is there for you, and your coach is there for you just a little bit right of that. And then I’m there for you, just right of that. But get your crap together with them, and then let’s go vulnerable where you need me specifically.”

Joe Grover: [04:41] So this vulnerability continuum is fascinating to me. Where are we on that continuum today?

Steve Arntz: [04:47] We’re definitely at that spouse to coach level. We’re not going to go therapy deep.

Joe Grover: [04:54] Someone once said the name of this should be Entrepreneur Therapy Podcast.

Steve Arntz: [04:58] Yeah, I think, yeah, we won’t go there. I won’t need the Kleenex over there, but we can go to places, for sure.

Joe Grover: [05:07] Well, thank you for being open to have this conversation. You have a very interesting career journey, and I want you to talk a little bit about some of the opportunities that were in front of you that you didn’t take along the way. And I wouldn’t maybe frame those as failures, but I think they’re interesting nonetheless as we think about your career journey and arc.

Steve Arntz: [05:31] Yeah, so they might be major potential financial moments that I failed to take advantage of. And in hindsight, we could put whatever story we want on it. But I actually got fired from my first job out of school. So, I worked for Entrata, which was Property Solutions at the time. I was their 27th employee. And I went a year with them and flew out to India and just did a lot of really cool things.

Joe Grover: [05:59] In a product role, correct?

Steve Arntz: [06:01] Uh-huh, and their first project manager.

Joe Grover: [06:04] Okay.

Steve Arntz: [06:05] So I sat right next to Dave Bateman, building this company, and Johnny Hanna and Brett Weber, some really great folks who’ve gone on to some great careers. And one day, the CEO is saying, “Hey, you’re the best hire I’ve ever made.” And then two weeks later, I come back from India, and he asks me to come to his office. And there’s a box there, an actual cardboard box there, and he says, “Just put your stuff in there,” and, “This is the end of the road.” So, “Appreciate the work you’ve done here.” I said, “Can I get my pictures off the laptop?” And he said, “No, BJ’s already wiped it.” And carry my things in a box.

Joe Grover: [06:51] No explanation?

Steve Arntz: [06:53] No. There was some explanation. I think I wanted to be the CEO too, which isn’t probably terribly surprising considering you go on this entrepreneurship journey. And he told me that I was unemployable, and he meant it as a compliment. And since then, I’ve been able to use that as a compliment for others as well who really have that aspiration to really lead and build and do their own thing. But at the time, it was a miserable failure. I’m sitting there with a box of my things, and you glance up behind your shoulder, and you see all your friends in the second-story window trying not to get caught watching you cry your way to your car.

[07:35] And I called my wife, and I said, “You married the wrong person. I’m just a complete failure.”

Joe Grover: [07:42] Wow.

Steve Arntz: [07:43] And she said, “Come home.” So I came home, and she said, “Why don’t you write him a letter? Just write everything that you’re feeling and thinking. Write him a letter.” So I write this letter to Dave, the CEO, and it’s two pages, front and back. And then she just grabs the matches and said, “Let’s light it on fire, and then let’s put this behind us.”

Joe Grover: [08:10] Wow. And tell me how that felt.

Steve Arntz: [08:16] It was really amazing. We talked about failure as finality, and it really allowed me to just acknowledge I failed at this, and it is over, and there is no going back, and there is nothing that I could say or do that would change it.

Joe Grover: [08:38] So, let’s talk about—so, you get fired from your first job. What next?

Steve Arntz: [08:43] So the university I was attending had an incredible career center nobody takes advantage of. Twenty-six counselors just ready to sit down with you and do all these assessments and give you the best counseling ever. Nobody takes advantage of it. So I go in there, and I tell them I just got fired, and they give me three different assessments. And they said, “If you take these three assessments, you’ll get an hour appointment with one of our counselors.” And they said that 90% of people never come back. I go home immediately, take the assessments, immediately come back, they sit down, they go over it all with me, and they say, “You really have a propensity to be an entrepreneur. Have you thought about entrepreneurship?” And I said, “Yeah, I have my own business that I ran and that I sold. It was a tiny little business. We sold for $30,000.” And they said, “Well, you should go to a business plan competition.”

[09:38] So I went to the mobile apps business plan competition on the campus of BYU. And a bunch of people presented. And one of them was a diagramming software company. And I got really excited about this because I had been working as a project manager for a Fortune 500 company, and I’d been using Visio. I was the only person I knew who used Visio. And it’s this diagramming tool. And I was like, “Holy crap, this is going to change everything.” And so I walk up to Ben Dilts and Darrell Swain, and I say, “I’ll do anything to join Lucid Software.” At the time, there were just two of them. There’s actually a third one, Kimmy Orton, who no one knows about. She was leading marketing at the time. And I just begged my way in, and they said, “Well, meet us in the tax lab next week, and we’ll talk about it.” And we spent an hour together, and they said, “Well, what can you do?” I said, “I can do whatever you want me to do.” And so they let me jump in. And so I was the fourth person with Lucid Software.

Joe Grover: [10:44] Did you have stock options?

Steve Arntz: [10:46] I had no idea what this was. I didn’t know I should ask for them. I didn’t know stock options existed. I didn’t know what a startup was. And so I jumped in with them. And then Ben and Darrell had signed up for a business plan competition or a pitch competition with FundingUniverse. Brock Blake was running this company called FundingUniverse. Now it’s Lendio. It’s progressed all the way.

Joe Grover: [11:17] I was there the day he started or took over FundingUniverse.

Steve Arntz: [11:21] Amazing. Just imagine all of the angels that are currently investing in startups here in Utah. They were all there back in 2009. And one of the people who was there—and I went there because Ben and Darrell wanted to go to class. Like, “We can’t skip class to go to this pitch competition.” So I go pitch Lucid to—some of the ones I remember—Rob Wuebker, who’s up at the U now, and John Richards, and then Karl Sun. Went table to table with an actual physical card deck, pitching Lucid. Five-minute timers, switch tables. There’s Karl.

Joe Grover: [12:01] Remember that speed dating event for angel investors and VCs and entrepreneurs. I remember that well.

Steve Arntz: [12:06] And I told Karl the story of how Google was going to acquire Lucid, and that was a bold story to tell someone who was the first intellectual property attorney for Google who opened the China office.

Joe Grover: [12:21] Did you know this when you told him that?

Steve Arntz: [12:22] I didn’t. I had no idea who this was.

Joe Grover: [12:24] That’s amazing.

Steve Arntz: [12:25] And I’m just like, “Google’s gonna buy us. It’s gonna be amazing.” He comes up after, he hands me his card, and he says, “You got some of the details of your story wrong, but I really want to learn more about your company.”

Joe Grover: [12:36] Wow.

Steve Arntz: [12:36] And his card said the letter k at google.com with a line through it, and it said Karlson@gmail.com. So sorry, Karl, people have your email address. Probably could have figured it out anyway. But we met with him over breakfast the next morning, and he became the CEO of Lucidchart.

Joe Grover: [12:59] Which has become?

Steve Arntz: [13:01] A multibillion-dollar market cap company.

Joe Grover: [13:02] It’s amazing. We shared an office with them, and I just saw they had a climbing wall in the lobby of their office, and they were just growing and growing and growing over the last several years.

Steve Arntz: [13:13] And I had a job offer at Accenture, and I talked to Dave Grow about it, and I was like, “You just came from consulting. What should I do?” He’s the CEO now at Lucid, and he’s like, “Well, here’s what was my experience at Bain, and here’s what you could learn there, and here’s what you could learn here.” And he’s very kind. And Darrell had, without permission, probably, offered me 10 percent of Lucid to stay.

Joe Grover: [13:36] And you said no, because you wanted to be a consultant.

Steve Arntz: [13:39] I said no, because I wanted to be a consultant at Accenture. There’s more to the story, though, because I was also interviewing at the time with Qualtrics, and Dan Watkins was leading a little sales team there at the time. He’s now done some really great things and traveled all over the world with Qualtrics and built up really large sales engines and go-to-market engines. Really talented.

Joe Grover: [13:58] Yeah, the single most successful—I mean, Lucid has been wildly successful, and Qualtrics is the single most successful business ever started in Utah. But those are probably the top three or four or five.

Steve Arntz: [14:09] Yeah, and so we’ve got Property Solutions I got fired from.

Joe Grover: [14:15] Entrata.

Steve Arntz: [14:15] Entrata is a multibillion dollar company.

Joe Grover: [14:17] Lucid, 10 percent, that might be worth a few bucks today.

Steve Arntz: [14:20] Yeah.

Joe Grover: [14:20] Then Qualtrics. Was there an offer there?

Steve Arntz: [14:23] Yeah. So Dan brought me in. He showed me his machine that he was building at a go-to-market engine, and offered me a job on a sales team. And the final interview was with Ryan Smith. And I go into Ryan’s office, and it’s got pictures of Pebble Beach and all the golf courses he loves.

Joe Grover: [14:37] For those of you tuning in from outside of Utah, Ryan Smith now owns the Utah Jazz and the NHL hockey team.

Steve Arntz: [14:44] He’s kind of a big deal.

Joe Grover: [14:46] Yeah. So what did Ryan say? What was that like?

Steve Arntz: [14:48] He put his feet up on his desk, and he’s just the most confident person I’ve ever met. Just said, “Steve, in three years, I will have made you a millionaire. I can guarantee you that. And if you do not take this job, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

Joe Grover: [15:08] Wow.

Steve Arntz: [15:10] And I walked out of the office, I got on my little flip phone, and called my wife, and I said, “We’re moving to DC.” And she said, “You didn’t get the job.” I said, “No, I got the job, but I don’t know that I want to work for Qualtrics.”

Joe Grover: [15:30] Wow. So, looking back, he was right?

Steve Arntz: [15:35] He was right. I would have been, probably.

Joe Grover: [15:37] He was right about the money, but was he right about that it would be the biggest regret of your life?

Steve Arntz: [15:41] I haven’t thought about working for Qualtrics again in terms of, “I wish I would have since.” I think everyone respects what Ryan has done in Utah for the Utah community, and he’s done it the right way.

Joe Grover: [15:58] But it wasn’t your path.

Steve Arntz: [16:00] It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me, and why look back?

Joe Grover: [16:04] Now, would you consider that a failure or just a missed opportunity or neither?

Steve Arntz: [16:10] I mean, for me, failures are real, but they get packaged up into success eventually.

Joe Grover: [16:19] That’s right.

Steve Arntz: [16:20] And so, I’m not in this chair if it’s not for all of those things, and this is where I want to be right now.

Joe Grover: [16:28] So you leave consulting, and you find yourself in Instructure. What was your role there? And I think this was your first experience with failure.

Steve Arntz: [16:36] Yeah, and it’s interesting that you say your first real experience with failure, because, professionally, to really fail, you’ve got to put it on the line. You’ve got to take a shot. And up to that point in my career, I was mostly taking shots on behalf of others; it was their thing. And this was the first time that I really had some true ownership and stake in what I was building. And it started as just a normal little product manager but was given an opportunity to build a product from zero to one inside of this big corporate environment, which is a really unique opportunity. So you’ve got this big publicly traded company and they say, “Hey, here’s a little bit of a blank check. Go build something.” And you have just a blank canvas to paint on. And so at that point, you really are putting it out there. And if it screws up, then it becomes your failure. And so we built this product, and we took it from zero to one million in revenue. And it was part of a bigger, broader suite of things. And I was initially just leading this one product, and then I went into product marketing, and then into strategy, and then started to work with the sales team. And we just kept pouring money into this platform.

Joe Grover: [18:07] Tens of millions?

Steve Arntz: [18:09] We’re talking hundreds.

Joe Grover: [18:11] Hundreds of millions.

Steve Arntz: [18:13] Low hundreds.

Joe Grover: [18:13] Low hundreds, yeah, but an incredible amount of capital.

Steve Arntz: [18:16] It’s a nine-figure investment for sure in this new product. And commercially, not a success. Whether it was a success for Instructure is another question, because it really created a more addressable market for them: 50-billion-dollar TAM instead of a one-billion-dollar TAM. And so that helped with the IPO and a lot of narrative. And there’s all sorts of ways you could spin it into a success for Instructure. But for me, I was flying around the world trying to convince people to use this product. And I had put my heart, soul, blood, sweat, tears—and I mean that literally—into this product. In fact, if we want to get really, really vulnerable, while flying in 2019, I went on 26 trips to, I think, eight countries.

Joe Grover: [19:18] Every other week, you’re on the road.

Steve Arntz: [19:21] Sometimes multiple times in a week. And in the process of that, I ended up perforating my septum. Down the middle of my nose, there’s a hole.

Joe Grover: [19:33] Wow, how did that happen?

Steve Arntz: [19:36] It’s just a lot of congestion inside planes, and a lot of challenge there that you end up with a hole down the middle of your nose. And some people have it. Some people have a perforated septum, and you’ll never know who they are, because it’s one of the most embarrassing things ever, but it’s probably my biggest failure is that I did something to my body that cannot be repaired.

Joe Grover: [19:59] What’s up, fail fans? As we’ve listened to so many guests on this podcast, that the road to success is often paved with failure, with a lot of challenges, and even full-on face-plants. But there’s a thing that you could do to help skip some of those bumps and bruises, and that’s really where the consultants at Amplēo come in. See, Amplēo offers fractional executives in finance, marketing, and HR. And these are people who’ve experienced a lot. They’ve been in the trenches. They’ve built businesses. They’ve failed. But here’s the kicker: They’ve learned from those failures, and now they’re applying all that wisdom to your business to support you so you don’t have to learn the hard way. I mean, think about it: Instead of stumbling around in the dark and hoping you don’t hit the wall, you could bring someone in who’s already mapped out that room, right? Amplēo consultants and experts have worked with and for numerous companies of all sizes, and they’ve gathered insights on what works and where to focus and how to actually grow your business efficiently.

[20:58] So while we embrace failure on this podcast, there is no rule that says you have to fail at everything yourself. So check out Amplēo and see how their fractional executives can help your business move forward and avoid those painful learning curves. Sometimes the smartest move is learning from someone else’s failure. Visit Amplēo.com to learn more.

Joe Grover: [21:20] So you’re traveling a ton, you’re selling this product, and what was the success rate there? I mean, obviously you’ve spent a hundred million plus.

Steve Arntz: [21:30] I mean, we were basically losing always.

Joe Grover: [21:32] Really?

Steve Arntz: [21:33] Yeah. Our win rate was under 10 percent, and our enterprise win rate was under 5 percent. And it was being pitched as an enterprise play that would end up expanding our market significantly. And so everything felt like it was resting on these big deals. We’re flying out to a global pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, and then in New Jersey, and then we’re flying to a telecom company in Seattle, and these big global brands. And we’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on these dinners and events for these singular deals.

Joe Grover: [22:13] And they’re not buying.

Steve Arntz: [22:13] And every single time, we’re coming home empty.

Joe Grover: [22:16] Empty-handed.

Steve Arntz: [22:17] Yeah.

Joe Grover: [22:18] I mean, how does that feel?

Steve Arntz: [22:21] I mean, I remember coming home and just lying on the floor in my bedroom and just weeping. And Rebecca, my wife, had to remind me this is not all yours to carry. There are 300 other people working on Bridge, and it’s not your fault.

Joe Grover: [22:50] Why do you think you took so much ownership?

Steve Arntz: [22:57] Some of it’s probably arrogance. You think you’re more important than you are. And I think that’s in so many—

Joe Grover: [23:03] Like you could single-handedly help this company succeed, but if it failed, it was also squarely on your shoulders, and yours alone.

Steve Arntz: [23:13] Yeah. So there’s a little bit of that. There is an element of whoever tells the best and loudest stories gets to lead sometimes, and that was a little bit of what I was doing: telling really great stories, inspiring people to keep going, people saying, This isn’t working. Steve, I need to go find something else.” And me saying, “We’re almost there.”

Joe Grover: [23:38] Yeah, which, that’s the strength of the entrepreneurial leader, right? To be able to inspire others to come along on these journeys that are irrational sometimes. And the signals are all around us that this may not work as intended, but it takes that founder mentality—even though you weren’t the founder, you were behaving as such—to really keep people working and inspired and motivated to help hopefully get this to the finish line.

Steve Arntz: [24:08] And that was the first time—I love that you say that, because that was the first time in my career that I was faced with a decision of failure or quitting.

Joe Grover: [24:21] I love this, so talk to me about the difference.

Steve Arntz: [24:26] For me, the way that I defined it at that point was I want to either fail or succeed, but not quit, and so I will stay here until they ask me to leave or it is successful. And that decision was one of the most empowering decisions of my entire career, to where you just look it straight in the eye—failure or whatever it is—and you just say—

Joe Grover: [24:58] “I don’t care.”

Steve Arntz: [24:59] “I’m coming for you.”

Joe Grover: [25:01] I’ll take either outcome, but what I won’t take is quitting. I won’t take quitting. I won’t stop, because if I stop, then for sure I’ll fail. But if I keep at it, then you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that maybe this doesn’t turn out, but there’s a chance that it will. Was it the hope that the success was still possible?

Steve Arntz: [25:21] Oh yeah, absolutely. I thought right until the last day we’d find some way to make it work.

Joe Grover: [25:26] You never doubted.

Steve Arntz: [25:28] I mean—

Joe Grover: [25:29] I mean, you’ve certainly had along the way, you’re like, “This is hard.” But you kept the hope.

Steve Arntz: [25:33] It’s interesting to hold two things in your hand at once: this tension that it’s about to be over—

Joe Grover: [25:41] Yes.

Steve Arntz: [25:41] Completely zero, and it’s about to become the biggest thing ever, and to hold them both equally, with respect, at the same time.

Joe Grover: [25:53] So what was the outcome? How did that end for you? What did the—

Steve Arntz: [25:59] It was similar to the Entrata story. I was told that Instructure was going to be bought by private equity.

Joe Grover: [26:10] Yep.

Steve Arntz: [26:11] And that they were going to divest the corporate business, and because of that, the folks who were invested in growing that business at the time—innovating, creating new things around it, trying to get into new markets—were no longer needed. “And so here is your parachute.” And there’s this really cool plaque—I think it’s Billie Jean King in the stadium where the US Open tennis is played. It says, “Pressure is a privilege.” I think that for some reason that’s popping into my head that failure is similar.

Joe Grover: [26:50] Sure.

Steve Arntz: [26:51] It’s a bit of a privilege. Because quitting is not dishonorable. It’s not. There are so many reasons why you should quit on something: It’s impacting your mental health. It’s impacting the things that are more important to you in your life personally, your family.

Joe Grover: [27:10] Financially.

Steve Arntz: [27:11] All sorts of reasons that are valid. And being able to say, “I’m going to go to the end,” is a privilege to where I had the financial position, the support of my family.

Joe Grover: [27:23] And you did, right to the end. Curiously, we’re using Bridge in the firm that I’m at now. We use Bridge. And so every time I log into that platform, I think about you.

Steve Arntz: [27:37] That’s cool. And what’s interesting is that my whole career has been in technology, and you’ve used the piece of technology that is the most popular about Bridge, which is a deck of cards. And so in that journey, there were many successes, but it is unequivocally a failure for me personally. In my career, I set out to do something and was, without a doubt, unsuccessful in what I set out to do.

Joe Grover: [28:12] Yeah, it’s a great story to remind us all that it’s not just founders—and you are a founder and a CEO now—but it’s not just the person who starts the business, right? In fact, my biggest failure story was a company that I didn’t start but I was the CEO of, and I felt the same level of ownership and responsibility and stewardship as a CEO of a company that I didn’t start as most founders feel. And I think you operate that same way. You were operating as an owner, even though you weren’t, and you internalized that whole experience in a way that’s very founder-like. And maybe you are unemployable, but in the best way. So you took this experience and you said, “I’m going to do it on my own,” right? And you’re like, “I’m going to do something new. This is my opportunity. I’m going to take the shot.” And you started Campfire. Was it Campfire on day one?

Steve Arntz: [29:10] No, it was called Book Club. 

Joe Grover: [29:12] That’s right, that’s right. And how’s it going? And can I just say I’ve been a customer of Campfire, and it’s had a few evolutions, right? The business has evolved. And I’ve watched that firsthand. But love the mission and love the product. And you know that I’ve been a vocal advocate for what you’ve built. But it hasn’t been easy. Adoption hasn’t been easy. And timing is a key part of the entrepreneurial journey, and whether it’s a success or a failure. And your timing has been—

Steve Arntz: [29:46] A little off.

Joe Grover: [29:17] A little off.

Steve Arntz: [29:48] Yeah. Yeah, we were two years late to predict a global pandemic, so bummer. 

Joe Grover: [29:57] Yeah.

Steve Arntz: [29:57] Would have been nice if we knew that was coming. Would have started a little sooner. And then HR technology has had two down years for the first time in 30 years. They haven’t had a down year—that market has not had a down year in 30 years, and then two in a row. And people are not as interested as they once were in developing leaders and people inside of their companies. And so timing has been a challenge. I think that, as a whole, it is the most successful thing that I’ve ever done. I feel like it’s impacted more people positively than anything I’ve done. When you work on something that scales to millions—let’s say Lucid or Instructure—Canvas: Millions of people use it. I think Canvas is a top 10 web property by visits because so many students use it so regularly.

Joe Grover: [31:00] Every day. 

Steve Arntz: [31:00] Every day.

Joe Grover: [31:01] My kids are logging in.

Steve Arntz: [31:02] They have to use it. It is a massive success. The actual impact it has on each of your kids? They’re not like, “Canvas changed my life.” Campfire has gone to a depth of actually impacting people in a way. That has been something I’m very proud of. But it’s been built—it’s basically a success built out of failures, and just failure after failure after failure after failure. We had 1.2 million dollars in contracts out at the end of 2023. And I cannot express to you the level of pain from email after email after email after email saying, “We’ve frozen budgets. We’re taking a look at the economy. There’s a lot of layoffs coming. We’re just going to have to pull out here.” And to go from that level of feeling successful to zero that quickly is so painful. 

[32:22] But we’re still alive. Five years in, and I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a success to compare yourself to others. So, looking at the stats and saying, “Oh, guess what? Only 2 percent of startups make it five years. We’ve succeeded.” That’s not success. Your startup? You’re not entitled to a startup. The entire world is engineered with antibodies everywhere to destroy startups. Startups are viruses. They are. The whole system is designed for you to fail. And so nobody owes you anything. And so success is not making it five years or six years or seven years or continuing to raise money or any of that sort of thing. You need to actually put something into the world that’s valuable and impactful and sustainable. And so the number of companies that actually are successful by that definition is very small.

Joe Grover: [33:30] Very.

Steve Arntz: [33:31] So we’re all failing.

Joe Grover: [33:33] Yeah, we don’t talk about it in those terms. 

Steve Arntz: [33:36] Yeah.

Joe Grover: [33:37] But talk to me about your definition of success, because the other thing that is so impactful for me to hear—and thank you, just, thank you for being so real, because we have all felt those moments of probably despair is the word, when things seem to be going well and then a turn of a market, right? The economy shifts. A competitive dynamic changes the landscape. It changes our business. It changes our trajectory in ways that are jarring to us and requires us to lay off employees and requires us to pivot and to figure out how to capitalize a business in a difficult market. And so I think entrepreneurs take great heart in knowing that they’re not the only ones that have felt this and have received that email from a client that has canceled a contract. So, thank you. 

[34:30] And I want to talk about how you define success, though, because one of the things that you said so beautifully was that you feel like this has been the most successful chapter of your career, and that’s not measured by an 8 billion dollar outcome. It’s not measured by the volume of users that were acquired on the platform. But it sounds like you’re measuring that based on the impact on people’s lives. And I don’t want to reframe failure in a way that just makes us feel better, but it’s fair to say that how we define success ultimately determines whether or not we feel like it was a failure or not. So how do you define this as your most successful moment in your career?

Steve Arntz: [35:20] I got to know one of the founders of Instructure really well and talked to him a lot about this, and the people most impacted by a startup are that core initial team or that core team that takes it to whatever point it gets to. Their lives are changed more than anyone’s lives, and then their families, and then out and out and out in those circles. If you get to the level of, let’s say, Apple, you actually get to a place where it’s hard to determine whether or not your impact on the world is net negative or net positive. So then at that point, you really have to go back into those inner circles to find the impact of the company on the lives of the people who are closest to it, because you ask any parent—so let’s say that we put a little button here in between us, and that button would cause all of the iPhones in the world to disappear in this moment; all of the smartphones. They would all disappear. How many people would press that button right now? It’s a lot of people. And yet we have a trillion-dollar success story in Apple. We just have to be really careful with how we measure success. Gab Wireless is now on a mission to eradicate some of the damage caused by these little drug boxes in our pocket. But it’s one of the most commercially successful products ever and potentially one of the more destructive pieces of technology, depending on which way you look at it. And we all have a responsibility to use it for good or ill and all that sort of thing. 

[37:16] But it’s really hard. If you want to base it on commercial success, I’d say that’s a little foolhardy. If you want to base it on impact of your technology on other humans, I think if it ever gets big enough, it will have both a positive and a negative impact. We go to Instructure. There are so many kids who hate Canvas. “I hate Canvas,” you’ll hear your kids say. And you as a parent might even say it. “It’s making your life worse, harder. I wish somebody would replace this piece of technology.” 

[37:46] And so you have to really go to—for me, company building is about creating a space for people to be able to do the best work of their lives with the best people they’ve ever been with. And if you can do that, then that’s a massive success, and if you can do that for a long time, then even more so. And at least 70 people have received some form of check and payment from Campfire, and almost all of them would say that it’s some of the best work they’ve been able to do in their career: impacting other humans and building something meaningful and working together and collaboratively in a way that they haven’t experienced before. And so, for me, that’s what it’s about.

Joe Grover: [38:33] It’s one of the few platforms that I’ve used that, every single day, a principle that was taught in a Campfire session—when I was running an executive at a tech company, I used those principles. I think about those Campfire sessions. And so I can attest to that, Steve. 

[38:53] What are the biggest learnings? If you were counseling an entrepreneur who is facing the potential failure of something that they have started, or an entrepreneur’s thinking about starting something, what are the biggest lessons in your career around entrepreneurship—in particular, the difficulty of entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurs can cope with the roller coaster?

Steve Arntz: [39:22] Yeah, so, first off, the big lesson of entrepreneurship for me was taught by Horowitz in a book that I mostly hated: The Hard Thing About Hard Things. 

Joe Grover: [39:31] It’s a book I gave all my employees once, as I was shutting it down. 

Steve Arntz: [39:33] So you loved it. 

Joe Grover: [39:37] I think there’s some interesting principles and stories in there.

Steve Arntz: [39:40] The only thing that I remember from it now—other than just a lot of really fun stories about, big, hard problems—is the the part where Horowitz says, “I’ve talked to tons of CEOs, and there’s something I’ve learned talking to CEOs: The less good ones, the mediocre CEOs, will talk about their successes in terms of all of the things that they did to engineer that success. And the really truly great CEOs all say the same thing: My success is because I just didn’t quit.” And when I read that in the first year of starting Campfire, I thought, “I’m going to see this to the end. No matter what, I won’t quit.” And then I started to learn about what causes founders to quit. And founders stick longer when they are two things: The first, are you coachable? And number two, do you have a coach? 

[40:51] And so I hired a coach. So Nathan Tanner, who was at DoorDash and then Neighbor, he became my coach. And for three and a half years, he would coach me at least twice a month, and I’d have him on text and blow up his phone with just like, “This is hard, this is hard, this is hard. “Help me, help me, help me.” So finding that support system, because if you’re going to make it, you’re going to have to learn how to not quit. And you’re going to want to quit a lot. The first year, I wanted to quit daily to weekly. Second year, weekly to monthly. Third year, monthly to quarterly. In year four, it was just a couple times—two or three times, I thought. And so far this year, I’ve thought about quitting once. 

Joe Grover: [41:45] Wow. So, success is not quitting.

Steve Arntz: [41:51] Success is not quitting. That’s one thing, yeah. And in order to do that, like you said, coping: You’ve got to take care of your mental health. You’ve got to take care of your family. If you start to have family challenges, there’s nothing that’ll blow up your ability to actually focus on what you’re trying to build quicker than “I’ve ruined my marriage” or these important relationships that you have in your life start to dissipate and dissolve and you’re going to screw up your startup. And so taking care of your family, taking care of your mental health, there is a for-sure valid reason to quit, and that is if you cannot mentally and physically continue to sustain. It is so much better to quit your startup than to quit.

Joe Grover: [42:44] Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ve been there. Might have been healthier for me to quit, but I drove it all the way to the end, and that was a lot of lessons along the way.

Steve Arntz: [42:54] And whether your coping mechanism—so it goes coping, self-care—this is something I wanted to share: Coping. Self-care. Purpose. What is your purpose? Why do you exist? Authenticity to that purpose. And then finding harmony between the elements of your life that are most important to you. And so for me to get back to what is success, I have a purpose. I exist to—and it’s two sentences—the mission I’m on, this is where I am going, and I will not stop till I get there. And so I have a professional mission that I’ve written. It’s two sentences. And everything else is a vehicle towards that mission. And if the vehicle burns up on the side of the road, I’m going to go find another one, and it’s going from New York to San Francisco. I will make it to San Francisco.

Joe Grover: [43:55] That’s amazing. I’m going to go home tonight, and I’m going to write my purpose and my mission again and probably print it and tape it to my mirror, which my wife will probably take down, and I’ll probably have to have a little card in my bag to remind me. I love that. I love that recommendation and the idea of a support system. I think having people, a coach, whatever that looks like: a coach, a therapist, a friend that you can really lean on when things are tough, because sometimes the entrepreneurial journey is lonely. If you surround yourself with great support and other leaders, it doesn’t have to be. And so I love that recommendation as well. 

[44:35] Steve, this has been so open and authentic and insightful. I’ve loved the conversation, the insights, and perspectives that you’ve shared. Thank you so much for being here. 

Steve Arntz: [44:51] Thanks for having me, Joe.

Steve Arntz: [44:52] I’m Steve Arntz, and I failed a lot in my career, but I’ve never quit.

Joe Grover: [44:57] Thanks for tuning in to The Real F Word. The real F word is failure, and remember that failure is a stepping stone; it’s not just a stumbling block. Join us next time as we continue to explore the journey of resilience and growth, without ignoring the true costs personally, professionally, and financially that comes with failure. Keep learning, keep growing, and keep embracing the real stories of entrepreneurship. See you next time.