Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
Crowdfunding Signals, Smarter Capital with Sherwood Neiss
Fundraising doesn’t have to be a black box or a waiting game. We sit down with Woodie, co-founder of Crowdfund Capital Advisors and a key architect behind the JOBS Act crowdfunding rules, to map a founder-first path that fuses data, community, and disciplined execution. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley to Washington, Woodie’s journey reveals why regulation crowdfunding has unlocked billions for startups in thousands of cities—and how the next wave of “influestors” will power growth far beyond traditional venture hubs.
We dig into investor sentiment as a real-time signal of demand: daily check counts, dollars committed, and momentum curves that predict funding velocity and downstream success. Then we get practical about valuations—why sober pricing wins, how to benchmark with a 10,000-offering dataset, and the milestone-driven cadence that earns step-ups. You’ll hear the three signals Woody watches before any meeting, the pitfalls of algorithmic overconfidence, and where human diligence—team, moat, market timing—still decides outcomes.
The conversation flips the script on marketing too. Customers who become investors don’t just write checks; they evangelize, bring sales, and defend your brand in public. We share the playbook for turning a raise into a launch, engaging comment threads as social proof, and structuring cap tables that signal either viral scale (many backers) or strategic conviction (larger checks). Expect candid talk on time costs, legal prep, and the founder mindset required to tune out naysayers while staying responsive and transparent.
If you’re building outside the usual VC corridors or simply want smarter capital, this is your roadmap: calibrate valuation with data, engineer sentiment with story, prove revenue momentum, and let your community carry the signal. Subscribe, share with a builder who needs this, and leave a review with the biggest funding question you want answered next.
Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test of experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operation finance, and people, plus product and leadership to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero plus, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR. Human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone. Today's Skilling with People Podcast. I'm Gwynagree Curry, your host and founder and CEO to Guide to HR. Okay, today on Skilling with People, we're rewiring venture capital with Sherwood Woody Me, co-founder of Crowdfunding Capital Advisors and a key architect behind the Jobs Act, Crowdfunding Rules. And if you don't know about that, you gotta look into that. We might talk a little bit about it. We won't get too technical then. We'll unpack the D3VC, which is a data-driven founder-first model that fuses crowdfunding signals with smart capital, and then flip the trip on growth by turning customers into investments. Yes, we just made up a new word, or maybe Woody did earlier, but there you go. And that will they'll fit and spend and evangelize for you and your growth. And because Woody's Clear Database tracks over 10,000 campaigns, we're ripping out the real playbook, what actually predicts funding, velocity, loyalty, and skill. So you can feel the moves and sprint ahead. I'm super excited to dive into this. Welcome, Woody. So happy to have you on the call. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
SPEAKER_00:So I started my career on Wall Street on the trading floor for Ping Weber. I went to Silicon Valley and went to work for a startup there called PeopleSoft. They were a venture-funded startup, and I learned everything about what VCs are looking for in hyper-growth companies. And I worked for them for a few years before I left and started my own healthcare company called Flavor RX. We flavored medicines for children so they're more compliant. Every time a mother got her child to take the medicine, I would get a phone call and she would say, How do I invest in your company? And I would say, I wish you could, but you can't, because we have these laws that are meant to protect investors. And I always thought, wow, what a missed opportunity. Like if I could turn hundreds or thousands of these mothers into investors, they would be doing it marketing, bringing in sales. It would be, you know, a dream come true for us. Um, but that couldn't be possible. So we ended up growing and selling Flavor X to a private equity group. Um, and after we sold it, I thought, you know, now I'm in Washington, you know, now's the time. You know, we had the financial um in 2008, we had the great uh, what was that? You know, Great Recession. Um, and so I said, you know, Washington's looking for jobs. I know how I created jobs, uh and I probably could have created a lot more if we didn't sell it and we went public. So I said to two friends of mine, let's create a framework like Reg D, which is how typical companies raise capital from investors, um, but allow our friends and family to become involved. So we wrote a framework that would allow startups to raise up to$5 million a year from their friends and family. You don't have to be rich. You can be rich. Um, you have to do it on platforms that are registered with the SEC. You have to have business plans, use of proceeds, all the information that investors need to make an informed decision, your financials, um, your valuation. Um, but then you pitch it like you would, you know, this was like pre-Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Um, and so we were learning from what they were doing right, and like we can do similar campaigns, but for companies. And you do debt and equity instead of donation rewards. And so this law really shifted that type of crowdfunding from donation rewards to debt and equity. And now this industry is huge. You know, it's been around for almost a decade. There's been 8,400 companies that have raised$3 billion in about 2,300 cities across the United States. Women and minorities represent up to 50% of the issuers right now. They're the ones that are most sidelines by venture capital. And it's just been really transformative. So we built a database that collects information on all the companies. Um, we do reporting on all that information, much like Bloomberg does and their analysis. But we also thought since we have all the data, why don't we profit off of it? Um, and so we built an algorithm by partnering with some PhDs, and we get signals of companies that are most likely going to go on for a follow-on round of financing. And we do what VCs do. We diligence those companies and we invest in what we think are the best ones. Um and we've been doing that for a year now, and that's D3VC. So we've got, you know, crowdfund capital advisors, we've got C Claire, which is our data, and we got D3VC, which is our venture fund.
SPEAKER_02:That's awesome. So is this kind of like how is this different than angel investors, or is it kind of the same?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. So it is kind of the same in the sense that you are targeting people that have money to invest in your business. The thing that makes it different is many people probably that are listening to this podcast right now are like, I have a great idea. I've started a business, we're making some money. So I've proven like the hard things. I don't know, rich people, you know, who are these VCs? Who, you know, angel investors, I might, you know, depending on where you live, you could be surrounded by them. But, you know, also most people don't live in Silicon Valley or New York City and they don't have access to these. And so angel investing is, you know, raising capital from people that are accredited, that are wealthy. Um, but it requires that you know them. This changes the dynamics in the sense that you don't have to know any of the rich people. You can have a Rolodex of people that you do know, and you can't crowdfund without a crowd. So I'll I'll tell people right off the bat that don't try and launch a campaign thinking it's a fishing expedition and just people throw you cash. It doesn't work that way. This is a marketing expedition for people that have a close relationship with you and have other friends. Hey, maybe some of those other friends are accredited investors, angel investors, venture capital. That's the that's where we want to go with this. But we are sort of pre-angel. So we are allowing our friends and family to invest in our businesses.
SPEAKER_02:Great. Okay, thank you for that explanation. I thought it would be a little bit different. So uh let's also say in one sentence, what's broken about traditional VC and how does your D3 VC fix it for founders?
SPEAKER_00:So so much has changed in the venture capital world. Um, back in you know the early 2000s, um, it was very different. It was very hard. It's always been very hard to get venture capital money. Only you know one or two percent of companies get it. You've got to be very you know unique in what you do and have a cash flowing business. They can see this huge exit potential. Most companies aren't always going to fit that model. That doesn't mean that they're not invest worthy. Um, and so what we did with D3VC is we saw, you know, venture capital, particularly after the collapse of the financial markets, you know, or the private capital markets, I should say, in 2020 uh 22. Um, Silicon Valley collapsed, you know, we had hyperinflation. VCs went to sidelines. They moved upstream, they're like, we're gonna invest in bigger companies, less risky, created this whole void. So there's been this void in the whole startup ecosystem where people are like, where do I get capital? We solve for that with this law. We solve for it with the whole industry that allows people to access capital. D3 VC layers on top of that saying, listen, we are going to be the stepping stone for you to get that angel or venture capital by being ourselves a venture capital firm. That's the first VC to put money into your business. So the problem with a lot of these companies, really the future unicorns that are out there going, hey, look at me, look at me. Um, they can't get the attention. Okay, you can't send an email to anyone and get a response today. Try picking up a phone call. No one's picking up their phones either. So you need to have the proof. And so what D3VC does is we look at the data. And if you've got a group of people that are backing your offering and we see on a daily basis the number of checks that are being written and the total amount of those checks, PS, that's a huge signal in the private capital markets that never existed before. We call that investor sentiment. It is transformative in how these companies are going to grow because the companies that have a huge following, something's going on. And think of it from the point of view of, you know, influencers coming into these companies. So you've probably seen the laboo-boo doll or the viral Dubai chocolate, you know, and everybody's talking it about social media. There's going to be this evolution in the private capital markets where we operate, where instead of influencers, you're going to have influestors. These are investors in these companies that look like you and me that are on social media saying, I just invested in the coolest company. I know the CEO, the company's doing X, Y, and Z. You guys should check them out. And it's going to transform it. So D3 VC sort of is that conduit to that, you know, the funding that they will need. And we are going to go to the VCs and we're going to tell them, listen, these are the companies we invested in. This is their social proof. This is how much they've raised. By the way, you're not going to get a follow-on round of financing if you don't hit milestones. So we're just going to highlight all the milestones these companies are hitting along the way and be like, here's, you can choose from all of them, or you know, or invest in all of them. Um, but we are going to deliver to VCs. And VCs, I don't think you're going to come back. Like this whole, you know, when markets change and evolve, we don't go back to the way things were. Things change. So venture capital will always be there. They're going to go upstream and work on bigger deals. It's created this opportunity for comp D3 VC come in. We're looking at the data. We're looking at you as, you know, issuers in the space, and we're investing in them.
SPEAKER_02:I love that. And I do agree, like everything continues to evolve and innovate, and it will make there will be changes for sure on how companies are able to get funding and what that looks like for them. So I'd love to know, you're talking a lot about data, and I'm a very data-driven person myself. What are the top three signals you watch before you ever meet a founder? Is it like retention, community velocity, pre-commitment interest? We kind of talked about all of those earlier. Um what is the most predictive in your mind or that you've seen um consistently over time?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we already talked about the investor sentiment, and that's you know the key drivers. Um and then we also look at you know your financials and what's going on with your income growth, your earnings growth, or the earnings growth we don't expect to be the same because startups usually are burning through cash, but we want to see revenue growth, definitely. Um that's one of the key things. And then we sort of want to look at, you know, the um what's happening with the valuation. Valuation is a huge, huge thing that people just do not hit the mark on. Um, you do, you know, there was a time where we all had this um, you know, five million dollars is what you went out with, and you were lucky if you were to price your company that way. And then VC started throwing all this cash at all these startups. And everyone's gone, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that was such a great time, wasn't it? Like$20 for a penny. Right.
SPEAKER_00:I should I should have raised capital then. Um, but you know, it and so there was cash flowing and valuations were crazy and they were super high. We're now going back to what I call this lean startup methodology, which is companies are raising money in smaller rounds, they're doing it at lower valuations that are more realistic, um, and they're hitting milestones and then going out for follow-on around at a higher valuation. You need to make sure that your valuation in your industry at your revenue stages and age of growth match who you are. Um, we built a tool called the offering insight um report that allows people to actually, so when you file with the SEC to raise money for regulation crowdfunding, it's a Form C, it's like a template of you know 50 different data fields. Um, we built an entire system around that and said, fill out a fake Form C. We'll run it through the database with those 10,000 offerings, and we will tell you how much you can expect to raise, what platform is right for you, how many investors you should be targeting for your raise, and what your valuation range should be. Because if your valuation is out of that range, let me tell you one thing. The really smart investors are gonna look at the deal and go pass. They're not even gonna look at the deal. Um, and I'll tell you an example. There's a beverage company that was online and raising money, and they had a$115 million valuation and they rose in our algorithm as a company that had a lot of backers and were raising a good amount of money. And I was like, well, let's totally check them out. And I was and then we went to the revenue and it was a million dollars. And I went, how do you get a hundred and fifteen million dollar valuation on a million dollars in revenue?
SPEAKER_02:For a million dollars.
SPEAKER_00:And so I'll always, you know, we passed on the deal. And I feel bad for those investors that are investing at that because I don't think they understand that the beverage market, as we all know, is just a massively populated marketplace, very competitive. And so the chances of you being acquired in that space, you know, IPOs don't happen really in beverages. But, you know, you know, it's small. So, you know, keep your look at the velocity of people, look at the financials, look at the valuation.
SPEAKER_02:I love that. And I love the tool that you've built because you know, I duly truly do believe that knowledge is power. And if you have this understanding of where you are and where you're trying to go, with this sentiment of all these other use cases that you've you have in your database, it that will really help the founder understand what is achievable and maybe even maybe a little stress-free. And uh not not something so that for failure of like, oh, I'm one million revenue evaluation's gonna be completely because that's not realistic anymore. We're not in the early 20s, late teens of 2000s, right? So um I think that it's such a powerful tool for sure. So let me ask this question. Um blind thoughts. Where does a data first approach get pulled and how do we correct it for it?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. Um, you know, data is what I love about data is it doesn't lie. Um algorithms, when you so we built this machine learning algorithm that is AI driven. Okay, so we've got these LLMs that are looking at the the data. We've got machine learning that learns from the data, but you have to constantly stay on top of it because you have to make sure that it's not sort of hallucinating outside of these parameters that you set. And so that's where you can have all these algorithms that you want, but at the end of the day, the algorithm's only as good as the data that you put into it. And while we have a hundred percent complete data set, what we find is the algorithms tend to really positively score things. Um, and so what we do is that's where we step aside and be like, you know what? The algorithm gave us this list, but now it's time for us to use our human diligence. We need to look at it from our point of view, where our critical thinking comes in. And so we look at these deals and then we step away from the data, believe it or not. We go, okay, who are you as a CEO running this business? What background do you have? Uh, what background in startups do you have? Have you scaled a business before? You know, have you had an exit? Tell me about your experience in this industry. And then we're like, okay, so you got this great product or service. How have you protected it? So we want to go into the IP that you've created. Okay, so the data is great at looking numbers and quantitative, but there's a whole qualitative side of things that really takes a human side. And so the algorithm is great at feeding us the signals that we want to look at for the companies that we think are gonna scale. Then we go and meet with the companies and we do what VCs do. We like to meet the team, find out about the technology, really talk about their total adjustable market. Um, you know, can you scale with the capital you're gonna raise through crowdfunding? You know,$5 million is the maximum you can raise. Most companies don't do that. You know, the median company is raising about$750,000 right now. So if you know you've got some lofty goals, what are you gonna do with$750? Are you gonna fall short if you don't raise more than that? And that's where you have to dig in.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, for sure. Because if you do have those lofty goals, that$750 is gone in the blink of an eye.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, for sure. And I love that you talked about the people side. Like uh, you know, I think when people are investing in companies, it's not just the product, right? They're investing in you, the founder, your leadership team, your team members. So having that soft touch to interact and engage with those people is is pretty precious in my mind for my human resources. I guess you could say, right? But people are super critical in every business that we run. So I'd love to flip the script a little bit. We I kind of teased this new word that you created, investor, uh, investorum. I might be investorum, yeah. Investor. There we go. So define what this means and uh what should and shouldn't it do for a founder?
SPEAKER_00:So investmers are literally customers that have turned investors. Um what we're trying to get across to people is the future of finance is merging the principles of social media with Internet 3.0 with the private capital markets. And you have to look at the people that are engaged in your business, not just as customers, but as potential funders. Um, and you have to go to them with the story like, listen, you bought the product or service, clearly you like what we're doing. If you believe in us as a company and me as an entrepreneur, why don't you become an investor in it? And the reason why you want to turn to your customers as investors is they will have a really dedicated interest in the outcome of your business. When we invest in, you know, the public markets and the you know, Apple or, you know, Disney or whatever, because we love Disney, it's it's a passive investment. When you're investing in these private companies, these people are actively out there talking to their friends about it, saying, bringing in sales. You know, you can VCs are great at giving you big checks and then they'll tell you to do marketing, but that marketing is not the same as mouth-to-mouth type of marketing, viral type of marketing, as we've seen through social media, is the future. So you need to bring these customers in, turn them into agents for your business. They will do the marketing for it and bring it in. And the beauty about this is you are helping yourself raise capital for a business that is going to hopefully create, you know, wealth for your family, but you're sharing that wealth with your community. And that could be the people that live right around you, the community that you've built around your business, you know, where, you know, it's just community in general. Um, and there's something powerful in wealth creation that way. But the other thing that it does is all of these businesses that are located in all these little cities all around the United States are raising money. And you know what they do with that money? They hire people, they buy products or services that they need for the business. Something breaks, they need an AC. Repairmen to come in and fix the AC. All of this pumps money into the local economy. The multiplier effect for the companies that raise money through investment crowdfunding can be as high as 20x, meaning every dollar that's invested in a business multiplies 20 times around a community. So this is great for job creation. I think that's one of the key things. And investmenters is all about that. It's the this book is like my brain on uh on you know the whole industry. It's 400 pages. Um we, you know, we worked at the World Bank. And so I took all of that information and I put it in the book so everyone can see like the economic rationale for it, how you as a business owner can use it to benefit, um, and just the you know, why this is good for society.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. I think when you're talking about like that word of mouth, and social media is such a big player now in it, and we talked about influencers earlier. Like, I think of, and and not to date myself or or even this podcast at some point, but uh if you recall, the guy who was basically holding on to a truck and skateboarding, drinking his ocean cranberry juice, right? And that got so viral that they ended up buying ocean spray ended up buying him a truck and you know, gave him a check and totally changed his life, but it also changed, I think it was probably had a pretty good positive um, you know, difference in their net bottom of uh profitability for them just by someone showcasing how they got to work.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah. I mean, this what I love about this is the private capital markets and venture capital has really kept, you know, wealth within the rich, um, which is fine. You know, I've got nothing against that. Um, you know, they've they're they're the ones making the taking the risks and putting the money into the companies, uh, they get the benefit. We've now flipped the script and allow anyone to become to become an investor. I they're one of these companies, Boxable. Um, they create these prefabricated casitas. They started their first fundraising journey. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Like you could do, like I have these visions of of retiring and just opening like a glam camp uh with 20 of them. Um, but uh they did start their fundraising journey online through regulation crowdfunding at a$24 million valuation. They grow so fast, they're not even doing crowdfunding offerings, they're doing reggae. Um, but their current valuation is about$3.2 billion. So if you had invested$10,000, you know, which would have been a big bet um in it. And so you don't have to do$10,000, but if you did$10,000, that would be worth over$2 million today. And this industry, remember, is not even 10 years old. So I love the fact that this is going to create a lot of millionaires. Um, this is going to democratize access to capital and democratize wealth. Um so people that are listening to this can be like, I can use this to raise money, can I use it to help create wealth for people in my community?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I love like you said, it democratizes it, it makes it so it's a fair game for everybody. And as we know, if you're not, if you in the past haven't been a white male, rich white male person generally speaking, you weren't going to have access to this. So I love that. Let me ask on the flip side, what shouldn't this do? And what red flags um were turning your customer into an investor has backfired if if you have a scenario like that in mind you could share.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so a couple things there, and that's again another really good question. One, this is a very cap, this is a time-intensive exercise. So raising money is never an easy thing. Um, and you need to budget for the fact that if you're going to be doing this, consider this a second full-time job.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, it That's what I have definitely seen for CEOs and CFOs fundraising. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Like this is not, you know, this is not quick. There's no get rich quick. Um, and so you need to budget for the time. You need to have the resources, meaning other people that can help you with the campaign itself, the video you have to put together, the financials you have to put together, you know, the offering documents themselves. You need lawyers. Um, so budget for that. People that don't take that seriously fail because people, everyone's here's the thing. When you're reviewing these offerings, you have all the disclosures, all the different documents I just spoke about. Now, someone might not be sophisticated and be like, okay, I see that they completed it. Good, I'm just gonna invest. There's gonna be a lot of people looking at these deals going, how did you even come up with those numbers? And they're gonna question you as an entrepreneur and how your thought process in that. And it happens on these public pages in the comment section. So you need to be able to defend, you know, and in a very polite way, not offend, um, your what, you know, why you did things. And so people that aren't communicative fail. Because if you put an offering up there and you don't say anything, you know what that means when someone says a question? They're gonna be sitting there going, and by the way, at D3VC for the venture fund, we ask questions. The first thing we do is if we're interested, we go over it, we're like, what's a series of questions do we want to ask? Then we ask the question. If we don't get a response, that to me indicates you as an entrepreneur will not even respond to me when you get my money. So I don't even want to give you a check in the first place. Like kidding. The worst thing you can do is not respond to a question when you're raising capital. Okay, so you know, there's so many things, you know.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe sit that sucker completely, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So I mean, to you know, be be the person that you want people to be for you. So you want people to ask you fair and uh questions, and you want to be timely in your responses to them.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that makes sense. I appreciate that. Um, and another question before we move on here is what is in in this crowdsourcing, you know, you talked about up to five million, typically it's around 750,000. So are we talking about like your next door neighbor giving you a$500 check? Like is there a minimum? Like, what's kind of like the average investment per investor on a crowdsource or crowd crowdfender? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Crowdfunding. Um, yeah. Again, great question. You will be um your community of backers, which we call investors, in your business is going to ring, it's gonna there's gonna be a range. People will be able to, I can support you at$100. So usually see we see a minimum of a hundred, some of the platforms as low as$10. Um but you think about you needed quite a few$10 investors.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Um but quite a few hundred dollar investors.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen over time is the average check what started out in 2016 at about$1,000. And now it's about oh, it's a little over$2,000. So people are writing bigger checks. Um the profile of the companies, by the way, has changed dramatically too. When the industry started, 65% of the companies were startups less than three years old that um were pre-revenue. Now 65% of the companies coming in are over three years old, so they're established, less risky, and they have revenues of over a million dollars. So, you know, you people are putting more money in because it's very hard to put a company out of business that's been around for five years. There's all these data points that talk about this. If you're producing revenue, then you're already doing something right. Um, so people are willing to risk more capital in companies that are older and have more revenue. That's how public markets operate, too, by the way. Um so there's logic that just flows back and forth.
SPEAKER_02:So that's a uh question that I have follow up there. Is is is there if you have a thousand five hundred dollar check versus a similar company that has fifty, ten thousand dollar checks, you've you've made the same amount of money, but does that data say something positive or negative or not for your next fundraise and how your business is growing?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it all depends. If you have raised, you know, that money from a thousand investors, what I would tell, you know, venture angels that are might be interested in this is look, these people see something in us that you don't see yet. So why don't you talk to those thousand people? Um, you know, we can get a subset of them and do some research. This is the way venture works anyway. Um, they're gonna want to talk to the people that invested or go, why did you invest? Um, and then the same is true for the the deal that only raises you know the same amount of money, but from 10 or 20 investors. Clearly, they see something very differently and wrote much bigger checks. So again, it's all about the conversation that you have with those individuals on why did you, what did you see in this company? Why did you write such a big check? Um both both conversations are going to tell you two different things. One is probably gonna tell you what's so intriguing about the company that will get a broader audience. Like I really believe in the company that's raised from a thousand investors because I think I think if you can do it from a thousand investors, those thousand investors can bring in 10,000 customers. So I really like that side. Now the company that raised from 10 or 20 investors, I'm thinking, well, strategically, they're thinking they see some sort of exit here that is really something we should be focused on. So, you know, from my point of view, I'm investing in both.
SPEAKER_02:I love that. I love that. So I there's so many questions I want to ask, but we're getting close to time. But and before we we sign off, you are also a founder. I would love to put you on the hot seat and ask you what's a lesson learned that you would share with the audience so maybe they could sideswipe that lesson and not fail in that area.
SPEAKER_00:Stop listening to the naysayers. It is so uh our brains are conditioned to absorb negativity and uh just to rationalize with, well, that was negative. I should really take that into consider. Oh my god, I gotta believe that. I don't know. Stop it.
SPEAKER_02:It's uh size under feedback, right? Oh, well, we have to grow. We need to have that negative feedback to grow. Well, no, you could have like healthy feedback, constrictive feedback, right?
SPEAKER_00:Right. So don't don't consider what they're doing and then pull out what you need from that to move ahead. But don't let it drive how you feel about yourself, how you feel about your, you know, your business prospects. Um you believe in yourself. And that is the most important thing. You, you know, this you know, all of us as entrepreneurs, we have to be our own champions because we have taken on the biggest challenge, which is building something, and we don't want to let ourselves down. So don't let the world tear you down. Don't let yourself tear you down. Be your own champion. And I know it's so hard. Trust me, I have bad days. I have plenty of them. Um, but at the end of the day, I also know that that bad day gets put in a little box and it goes behind me and it's disappeared. And then I wake up the next morning and I have a new day. It's really important to keep that sort of you know realization there and try and stay your own champion and focused.
SPEAKER_02:I think that's such great uh feedback, especially in regards to when you are fundraising, it can be a lot of naysayers or you get kind of in the wheeze where you feel like you start double guessing or second guessing yourself, and all of a sudden now maybe you're not saying the things that you need to to actually get the restors on your side. So great, great advice. Uh Woody, I appreciate your time. And for our listeners, I hope you got some good answers out of this. We will put Woody's contact information and his book in our description so you can reach out to him if you have additional questions or want to start working with him. Thank you, Woody, so much for your time.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. It was great to be here. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02:All right. See you everyone later on the next podcast. Have a good one until then. That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwynavere Cruy, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.
