Made It with Connor Tomkies

[00:00:00] Noah Abelson: Typically, in a co founder relationship, you're going to be in a stressful environment more often than you will, percentage of time, a romantic relationship. In a romantic relationship, you have tools to [00:00:15] blow off steam or build connectivity. Things like, let's cuddle on the couch and watch Netflix. Let's go on vacation together.

[00:00:23] Connor Tomkies: Founder catcher like, hey, we should, you guys should cuddle and watch Netflix, you know? Just like. Right. [00:00:30]

[00:00:30] Narrator: Hey co founders, welcome to Made It with Connor Tompkins. A podcast where we meet with badass entrepreneurs who've successfully exited their companies. Discussing everything from the wins and losses of entrepreneurship to the next steps after the exit.[00:00:45]

To not miss out on these exciting stories, be sure to subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Let's dive in.

[00:00:53] Connor Tomkies: Hey guys, I'm excited to introduce Noah Abelson. On the Made It podcast, he founded ShareRoute and took a company public [00:01:00] and is now a founder coach. He gives a fantastic, candid interview about his experience going to market and navigating life post exit.

We talk about community building, launching international tech companies, and reverse takeovers. I hope you guys enjoy. So you [00:01:15] started and you run a founder journey and you're your founder coach, but what was your founder journey?

[00:01:21] Noah Abelson: I'm anchored in a wanting to make an impact and the importance that that feels at the importance I feel around wanting to make an impact and the [00:01:30] resonance that that has, right?

Really different than having my primary goal be, I need to make a certain amount of money. My founder experience is one in which I, Uh, didn't have full financial, [00:01:45] uh, freedom, right? As a result of it, even though I brought a startup public, et cetera. My family and I didn't achieve full financial freedom. So even though I still do need to pay the bills, et cetera, what feels [00:02:00] most important to me and most alive and most aligned, and not in a temporary standpoint, not like how am I going to feel tomorrow, like through a lot of like deep digging, soul

[00:02:09] Connor Tomkies: searching, is making an impact.

A lot of times you can build a company, it can grow to a big size. [00:02:15] But because of countless different reasons, it doesn't always necessarily mean that you're going to end up post economic after the deal's done. So, yeah, yeah, what led to that and how are you planning on paying it forward or helping other people avoid that [00:02:30] circumstance?

[00:02:30] Noah Abelson: I remember talking to an uncle at, uh, at a wedding and I was telling him, I think my goal at the time was like, I want to be able to not be able to make the decision to not have to work again. And I was talking to him about it [00:02:45] loosely, something along those lines. And he was like, what's your number? I was like, what do you mean?

And he was like, well, what's your number? Like what amount of money do you need to make? In order to be able to retire. And I was like, Oh, interesting. And I hadn't thought of that. And then, [00:03:00] so I came up with a number is probably wrong. It was something like 3 3 million, you know, living a modest life, me and my wife.

And who knows at the time we were dating, but who knows how many kids we'll have. This was like 10 years [00:03:15] ago, eight years ago. And so I had this number in my mind. So when I went out, fast forward to, When I went out to start ShareRoot, my startup, I had this number in my mind. This is what I need to make. So from the, from the [00:03:30] jump, why was I doing ShareRoot?

I was doing it in order to achieve my number. So one thing real fast that I would recommend and do recommend to founders, who I mentor or informally chat with or, [00:03:45] or work with is. If your sole motivation or your primary motivation is a certain number, recognize that at some point that is going to contribute more highly to potential burnout for you than if you [00:04:00] went in with like, I'm going in with a mission or I care about this specific thing.

Do you remember how you were trying to work backwards from that number? Yeah, it was like two to three million, right? So it was two or three million, and I had this idea in my mind. It was like, okay, this is what I need to [00:04:15] hit. This is what I need to achieve. So then I worked backwards from, okay, how much equity will I likely have?

And then what could we exit for? And that number was going to constantly change as it did, because how much equity do you have as you know? Shifts and changes as the [00:04:30] company

[00:04:30] Connor Tomkies: grows. So for you, were you raising money and was that like part of the journey for,

[00:04:35] Noah Abelson: for you? It was about a seven year journey. A little bit more than that.

If you count the months that I was building it before I officially found my co founder and started it, but [00:04:45] we started the company and my co founder's redone garage in Berkeley, California. He was the CTO. I was the CEO. It's like classic Silicon Valley shit. Like really classic. We participated in 500 startups.

We raised, [00:05:00] I don't know, a half a million dollars, a little bit more. We generated some revenue. What we were building was fully platform, single platform dependent. We were building on top of Pinterest. Unfortunately, what happened about two years into it was [00:05:15] Pinterest sort of decimated its entire initial tech partner ecosystem.

So we got into a point where we were like an email away from a cease and desist order from Pinterest. And we had like three to four months of money left in the bank. [00:05:30] No fucking idea what we were going to build. And, uh, you know, I was reading the hard thing about hard things at the time. Team members walked in on a random Tuesday morning and, Hey, we're doing an early all hands.

Why are we doing that? There's [00:05:45] nine people on the team. They sit down. We're like, look, everything we've been doing to this day. We're not doing anymore. Everything we've been selling, we won't be selling anymore. Our revenue is now zero on a monthly basis. We have no idea what we're going to build. We've got about.[00:06:00]

Three, maybe four months of money left in the bank. You're already getting paid less than industry average. We need to half that. We'll give you more equity. But this company probably won't survive. But we're confident that we can [00:06:15] get through it as a group. And by the way, it's the fall of 2014. If you have any plans whatsoever for holidays, You need to, if you choose to stay, you need to promise to cancel every single one of them, including all holiday plans, dah, [00:06:30] dah, dah, through the new year.

How do people respond? We had of the nine, we had one person after that meeting, she just instantly broke down, pulled us aside, me and the co founder and said, I can't do this. We said, we completely get it. And a [00:06:45] part of the meeting was like, this is what we're going to be asking of y'all. You have to be in the office from nine to six 30, Monday through Friday, make up time on the weekends, dah, dah, dah.

The ideas are probably going to come from you. Not us, because there's two of us and there's seven of you, just percentage chance. [00:07:00] And we wanted people to decide, are you in or are you out? And so she broke down and said,

[00:07:04] Connor Tomkies: yeah, I can't do this. So did you read this book in the morning and then you had this conversation, like, immediately after?

Holy smokes. Yeah, are you getting the vibe of it? Yeah, [00:07:15] I, I'm getting like flashbacks slash, uh, like, scar tissue starting to itch a little bit. Like, this is, uh, that's a, that's a hard conversation. So, you got people in the room, you got them bought in, and by the way, that, like, you can only do [00:07:30] that, like, once, maybe twice, like, that's like, you're pulling the only card you have left, which is like, hey, we believe in this thing, let's do this together.

Um, what happened next?

[00:07:40] Noah Abelson: That's all we were saying, we believe in this thing, this team, we have no idea what this thing is [00:07:45] gonna be. And you're completely right. Like, my mind is the type that can go pretty binary on things. So I took the book and I was just like, I'm going to follow this thing. Then I'm going to attach my own, like, flair to it.

[00:07:54] Connor Tomkies: Yeah.

[00:07:55] Noah Abelson: And I was feeling everything that he was describing in the book. So we came [00:08:00] out of it. I'll, I'll really long story short, we, we just started interviewing marketers and saying like, tell us about your day. Like you walk in the office and what do you do first? Like, do you put your laptop down or do you get coffee or like, what do you do?

Um, [00:08:15] and it was wild. The experience was wild. It was the most beautiful leadership experience that I had throughout that entire time, even including, you know, the years we were public. I'm a public company CEO. Hailed in comparison from a leadership [00:08:30] perspective. We did get to a point, which I think is an important topic to bring up, is We got about two and a half months through the pivot or two months through the pivot, and I had gotten to the point with my co founder, his name is Mark and we called him [00:08:45] Macro, who I love to this day, to this moment.

He is, he's a beautiful human being. I got to a point where I concluded through so many experiences that There was no way I would move forward with this company if he stayed [00:09:00] as CTO coming out of the pivot. I had felt my experience was I was constantly trying to lift the team up and charge us forward through this nearly impossible goal that we had of figuring out what we were going to build and then raise money on it and da da dun.

[00:09:15] Three months? Three to four months? And I felt like he was constantly undercutting the effort. Not, not intentionally, but just based on how

[00:09:22] Connor Tomkies: he looks at things. Did he feel like you weren't being realistic or that you weren't facing the challenges that the same [00:09:30] as he was or versus seeing it more as like optimistic and I'm leading the team?

It was 10 years ago

[00:09:34] Noah Abelson: now, so my memory probably won't serve the truth on this. The story I tell myself is that I don't think he knew the impact that I was perceiving he [00:09:45] was having. Or couldn't get out of his own way in the style that he, he constantly questions things and he's not a natural [00:10:00] born risk

[00:10:00] Connor Tomkies: taker.

Yeah, it's uncomfortable, right? Probably for him and probably for people around whoever that leader might be. I had a company that didn't work out and I remember being like optimistic to [00:10:15] like the very last day. Yeah, I understand. This is where we're going, right? Like Right. Right. And, uh, if I'm not going to be optimistic, who's going to be optimistic?

Right. Right? Yep. And, um, there are some people that felt like I wasn't being realistic about the challenges, but in reality I'm [00:10:30] going home and I'm like in the back of my head or, or in the shower and I'm just thinking these thoughts of like, what am I going to do? How am I going to pivot this? Yeah, right.

Yeah. It's, uh, it's kind of those things. And so I, I think I had like a learning from that experience, which is that it's good to be optimistic. It's [00:10:45] good to be like, we're going in this direction. But then I always had to kind of have that, like, uh, that realistic candor kind of, of saying like, this is concerning to me, like this is what we're going through.

So how did you navigate that partnership split?

[00:10:59] Noah Abelson: Yeah. [00:11:00] And by the way, I want to clarify, I don't believe in just like blanket optimism. I think that's fake and people will see right through it. I think it's, you need to bring a balance of both. And one other thing that I did experience that's now coming to mind is we would come up with like protocols for [00:11:15] like, this is how we're all going to stay unified.

And this is how we're going to all push towards the same efforts. And I think my experience was that he would go off and tinker with other things or go off on ideas that we hadn't all agreed upon. And like that just didn't feel like it could work, because we were [00:11:30] asking everyone to stay aligned, and if we couldn't

[00:11:31] Connor Tomkies: stay aligned, it wasn't going to work.

Yeah, it's do or die time. You have to be focused, like, buy in on something like that, and then you feel like they go off and do another tangent.

[00:11:39] Noah Abelson: Yeah. So how did I navigate it? I, uh, two [00:11:45] months, two and a half months into it, here's the picture, here's what happened. I called a meeting with, with Macro and I, and then had our head of sales come into the room also, just so there was a third person, kind of witness it, and I [00:12:00] said to Macro, We're both emotional, we're tearing up, and I said to him, I'm calling this because, I'm calling this meeting because I need you to promise that if we get through this pivot, you'll step down as CTO.

And if you don't promise [00:12:15] that, I'm walking away now, today. Tears flowing, etc. He agreed to it. We got out of the pivot, and I never pushed the issue. So you have this huge, festering issue from [00:12:30] so many different directions that I never addressed. Which, by the way, connects to a part of the work that I do as co founder coaching.

As you said, we're changing all the time. And there's so many other reasons why co founder relationships are really [00:12:45] important to support. Over 60%, so just take the stats, over 65 percent of startups and scale ups. So we're not just talking startups, like macro and I idea and that, like we're [00:13:00] talking hundreds of team members fail due to co founder relationships.

To me, the most common relationship or the most similar relationship to a co founder relationship is a romantic relationship. I agree. And [00:13:15] a romantic relationship, what are the differences, right? And romantic relationships are hard and they take immense, immense work and we have couples counseling and we have these tools.

What's the difference? Well the difference is, typically in a co founder relationship, [00:13:30] you're going to be in a stressful environment more often than you will, percentage of time. A romantic relationship more often. Also, typically, in a romantic relationship, you have tools [00:13:45] to blow off steam or build connectivity.

Things like, let's cuddle on the couch and watch Netflix. Let's go on vacation together. Hey, we

[00:13:53] Connor Tomkies: should, you guys should cuddle and watch Netflix, you know?

[00:13:56] Noah Abelson: Just like Right! Good for you. Right. [00:14:00] It typically doesn't happen in work for co founders, so you don't have those tools.

[00:14:08] Connor Tomkies: Your relationship might outlast your business.

How you nurture that relationship is so key. Um, [00:14:15] I'm super grateful for the business relationships I've had in the past. Right. So, I love that you're focusing on that piece. You're right. There's not enough. Right? Emphasis on that. It's pretty remarkable that you went from like the all hands conversation of, yeah, we need to build a boat to, [00:14:30] uh, Hey, we, we built a boat and we were taking it to IPO.

Um, so I would say that you, you probably found the right market. Um, it's crazy because you're seeing so many companies take advantage of like, um, uh, private data. And then you [00:14:45] went with the counter motion of how do you protect that data? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and that's what you built your company off of. So how did you identify that niche?

[00:14:53] Noah Abelson: Let me give some caveats on this to clarify. Before I say we identified a niche that like [00:15:00] was wildly successful and drove a bunch of revenue because it didn't. A light shone and gave you the guided way. I should, I should clarify and state that we did well was. We listened to marketers when we interviewed [00:15:15] them.

We identified that there was a gap in one of their processes around user generated content. Essentially what was happening was big brands were, again, we're talking 2014, 2015, [00:15:30] big brands were like going on Instagram, going on Facebook, wherever. And Twitter, once in a while. And if, like, you and I were buddies and we posted a photo of us hanging out in a Costco, Costco would just go and, like, take that photo and then repost it themselves.

Well, Costco doesn't [00:15:45] wanna get in legal issues, and there were a bunch of lawsuits that were starting to pop up around this. You can't just go and, like, grab Connor's photo and post it, Costco, like, you gotta get his approval. Yeah, they're worth, like, a 1.

[00:15:57] Connor Tomkies: 45 hot dog and,

[00:15:59] Noah Abelson: you know, [00:16:00] yeah. Like, fun shit, right?

Like, like, right? Yeah. Or we've eaten, like, a whole pizza and then you're onto the hot dog type of thing. And that's what people want to see, right? Like, of course. So, we provided, we created a tech platform that made it, like, two clicks [00:16:15] for a brand to request access to somebody's photo. And then that person to like two clicks away, legal licensing agreement done, sign, they hand it over to the brand.

And what you found was a lot of people wanted to do this and they never got any money back or anything in exchange. [00:16:30] So we created this platform. We had a bunch of brands who were really interested in beta testing it, which was great. The, all those things went well. I identified through an advisor.

Another theme, by the way, is. As a founder and an entrepreneur, [00:16:45] you gotta surround yourself with people who have kind of been there, done that before. Because you can't get there to where you're trying to go without the wisdom of others. Because there's so much unknown. And so I had an advisor who was like, Hey, I know that you're looking for creative [00:17:00] ways to fundraise, because I was keeping our advisors close through the whole pivot.

He was like, have you thought about going public internationally? I was like, I don't know anything about that, but I'm going to look into it because I'm a little nuts. So I started looking into it. Long story short [00:17:15] is on the Australian stock exchange on their primary board there, um, decent sized stock exchange.

They have these openings in time, similar to other stock [00:17:30] exchanges, but, but, um, Really big swings where hot industries can come and go public on, uh, on their stock exchange, hot industries that are international and they can go public at an early stage. So I saw a window for that, [00:17:45] for early stage tech companies that are internationally based on the Australian stock exchange.

Fast forward nine months. It's a whole long process, of course, a long process of going, it was fucking nuts. [00:18:00] We ended up going public in a reverse takeover, which now in the U. S. is known as a SPAC, right? But you, you come into a company that's already sitting on the stock exchange as a shell entity, essentially, and then you turn that shell entity into [00:18:15] yours, it saves some money, it saves some time, and that's what we, we did.

So we went public on the Australian Stock Exchange. At the time, we raised something like 10 million. Essentially see it as like an alternative to a series A at the time.

[00:18:29] Narrator: Yeah.

[00:18:29] Noah Abelson: And that's what [00:18:30] we did. So all that was successful. We found the big brands. We get them on the beta. We get funding. We go public.

What wasn't successful was the execution from there on that platform that we did. We ended up acquiring two businesses along [00:18:45] the way, two different agencies, one of which took over a year to acquire. It was wild. That went moderate at best, I would say, which often happens with acquisition. We pivoted into the data and privacy world, which is [00:19:00] what you had seen, weren't able to make it work from building a business around it since, like, just, we weren't able to build a successful business around it.

I ended up fundraising for ShareRoot [00:19:15] over 10 times throughout the journey of looking towards going public and running the company as a public company CEO. So for. In four years, we've fundraised over 10 times. So I'm flying all around, [00:19:30] going to Australia, going to Hong Kong, going to Singapore, not acquiring two businesses, not spending time leading the team, both around making sure that we have like a sustainable business and also, also just leading people to be who they [00:19:45] want to be and working well together.

[00:19:47] Connor Tomkies: Yeah. It's hard to run a business and raise money at the same time. It's, uh, like. Two jobs. It really is. Um, you're looking at two different places, right? You're, you're looking internally, you're looking externally at the market, [00:20:00] maybe three places. You're also talking to investors, right? Um, did you raise too much money?

No. No, we did not

[00:20:07] Noah Abelson: raise too much. If, if anything, we were actually crippled by. Our stock price started spiraling downward [00:20:15] aggressively. Like we got to a point where like, um, let's just say right now today, my equity macros equity, he touched his, I haven't touched my equity, um, [00:20:30] is worth like 1 percent of what it was when we were in public.

And we were locked up, so you can't, you know, take the equity out until after two years. But the problem was as our stock price was swirling downward, we could never [00:20:45] raise enough. So we were constantly creating more primary shares, more new shares, more new shares. Instead of doing another 10 million raise or 7 million raise, we do 1.

5. We do two. We do 500k. And so it just kind of nips at you, [00:21:00] right? You have a bunch of different pieces taken away. And then what are you doing? You're waiting two months and then you're out fundraising again. I want to make this point, which is an important one for folks is, and it comes up a lot in, in coaching is when you fundraise, [00:21:15] you are fully taking on another job, this is not like, Oh yeah, I'm going to carve out 10 percent of my working time to fundraise or even 80%.

No, no, you have a full nother job that is going to exhaust the shit out of [00:21:30] you. It's going to beat you down constantly. Anybody who tells you they like fundraising, it's bullshit. Why are they lying? What are they lying about? That's really the question. Fundraising is hard as hell. No matter [00:21:45] how good you're doing, you have to recognize that you're basically taking a step away from the business.

Like 90 percent of what you were doing, you're taking a step away from it. So

[00:21:54] Connor Tomkies: plan accordingly. So, we, we know about what happened, what are some things that get you excited about [00:22:00] what comes next? Whenever you're coaching folks, are there any ideas that you find that are, are really fascinating or really grab at you?

[00:22:05] Noah Abelson: Yeah.

[00:22:06] Connor Tomkies: Hell yeah. So

[00:22:07] Noah Abelson: I'm going to start by saying, yes, I have that thing and I'm spending 40 percent of my working time on that starting last [00:22:15] week. I upped it from 15 to 20 percent to now 40. So I'm going to say that we can come back to it. I'm now going to dovetail and say, it took me 10 years. I always had this itch in the back of my mind.

That was, do I want to make an impact in [00:22:30] the world? Is that when I'm driven by, is that where I want to spend my professional time and hours? And I want to note that my live, my, my real life hero, I got to be around for about 10 years, his name's [00:22:45] Knut Dybie. This is his medal of honor from Yad Vashem. This will all make sense in a second.

Say a bunch of words that sound funny. Uh, he's a righteous Gentile, and a righteous Gentile is a non Jew who saved [00:23:00] Jews in the Holocaust. He was a part of the Danish Resistance. He was 19 years old at the time. He fully risked his life. The Nazis occupied, uh, Denmark at the time. And the Danes saved like 95 percent of their Jews.

So I got to know Knud [00:23:15] after my bar mitzvah, and he and I developed a really deep relationship. I have no idea what I would have done if a Holocaust didn't happen. Happened around me today or, or back then if I was living, but what I know really resonates for me is the moments in my life where I've taken things [00:23:30] that are hard for me and then turn them into trying to reduce the pain for other people in that same realm has always made me feel really good.

So I'm going to connect that back to what I was just saying, which is in the back of my mind, I've always thought [00:23:45] that makes me feel really good helping other people. When I have a negative experience in my life, I created a buddy program in high school. Two years after I had left my first day of high school crying, [00:24:00] saying, I'm never going back to high school because I knew the challenge of going to this really unique high school that was super diverse from a bunch of different ways and was really intimidating.

And I created a buddy program for all these incoming freshmen. And [00:24:15] that was an amazing experience, right? So again, the back of my mind, I've always thought, what do I want to do with my professional time? As I start ShareRoot, my startup, so this was a long time ago. Still in the back of my mind, what do I want to do?

What do I want to do? [00:24:30] So I start ideating around this and it took me 10 years to figure out. Question number one, do I want to make an impact in the world? If yes, what is that impact going to be? Again, we'll get there. But to your point about entrepreneurs, I [00:24:45] think that post exit founders, this is a bit bias and will sell sound like self aggrandizing, but I believe that this population of people.

DAO can make a significant impact in the world, and there's a lot of impact we need to [00:25:00] make, and it's because they've built things before, so they have the battle scars like you talked about. Some of them have significant financial resources to put towards things. Most of them have an extensive network, like you [00:25:15] mentioned, and they're good at seeing problems and building around and fixing them.

So I believe we have a need. To provide the tools to help post exit founders figure out whether they want to make an impact and then what the [00:25:30] hell Impact resonates for them so that they can go out there and get after it and make that

[00:25:35] Connor Tomkies: impact What are some things that get you excited about this particular group of people or what are the different themes that you're seeing?

And then how do you think that you can help them? [00:25:45] Like execute on those ideas. I left at the beginning

[00:25:48] Noah Abelson: of 2019. So we're Five years off from that. And I think I'm still experiencing my thought patterns and the way I look at the world, I think are really common with a lot of post exit founders who, let's say, [00:26:00] even if they exited three to six months ago, to me, it's like, you come out of it, you feel like you're, you know, the king of the mountain.

And then you quickly realize like, Whoa, hold on. I feel lonely. [00:26:15] Yeah, I made a bunch of money, but that only felt good for like, the first week or two, if you did make a bunch of money. Everybody around me thinks my life should be the most amazing thing. I'm not feeling that, so you've got this cognitive dissonance.

I thought it was gonna feel amazing. I'm not feeling that. [00:26:30] I don't really have anyone I can talk to, cause like, hardly anyone around me is a post exit founder that's pretty fucking specific.

[00:26:37] Connor Tomkies: You see a very large rate of, like, depression, and, um, in some cases, suicide with founders, even post exit. [00:26:45] Um, and there's a little bit of a deficit from going from, like, I'm responsible for these issues and these people and these problems, to I'm not responsible for anything but myself.

And how important is it to be

[00:26:57] Noah Abelson: responsible for [00:27:00] ten people's livelihood, a hundred people's livelihood, a thousand people's livelihood, and then that's completely stripped away? And not that it's all roses and beautiful while you're doing that, but like, the shift of responsibility and purpose

[00:27:14] Connor Tomkies: is [00:27:15] massive.

Yeah. And then it's like, what's next? Are you going to focus on being a father, on, uh, a lot of people get into health, like, uh, figuring out, Oh, what is it? Like, how do I live forever?

[00:27:27] Noah Abelson: It's why it really, it's so interesting to see, and [00:27:30] you see these patterns, right? Like you, I think you put founders in a room while they're actively founders and you see a bunch of commonalities and patterns.

I feel like I'm an imposter. I feel like I don't have enough time. All these things that we experience. Same thing, post exit, right? I felt like I was going to [00:27:45] be on top of the world. I'm not. I'm feeling depressed. I don't have purpose. And my belief system, even though I'm not spending time on this right now, is that if you give post exit founders the tools to identify whether they want to make an impact, a chunk of them will [00:28:00] spend a lot of their time doing that.

Right, like your post exit founder, If they have the means, right? Let's say they have financial freedom. They're going to need to spend some time managing their money. Whether they are post exit with means or not, [00:28:15] some of them are going to dive into the next startup, irrelevant of whether they have the means or not.

And what I believe is, if you give that entire population the tools to figure out whether they want to make an impact, A [00:28:30] large chunk of them will go ahead and spend their time actually doing that instead of building the next advertising tech company, as an example. So, I'm passionate about that, I don't have the bandwidth to do it right now.

Why do I not have the bandwidth to do it [00:28:45] right now? So, a chunk of my time is spent coaching founders and co founders. It is fulfilling, but it's not Let's call it like a seven and a half, eight out of 10 for me. Okay. That's pretty solid.

[00:28:59] Connor Tomkies: That's [00:29:00] not,

[00:29:00] Noah Abelson: that's not too bad. It's really not bad, but I, I strive to get to a nine, 9.

5 and that's important to me. It isn't important to everybody and no judgment for folks that it isn't important to. Again, it took me 10 years to figure out that this was really important to me. [00:29:15] So a 7. 5 and eight is good, but it's not going to cut it long term for me. This is my own personal journey. Is to reduce the pain for folks.

Who experienced strained family of origin relationships. Can you explain what that is? Um, [00:29:30] yeah, a lot of people struggle with trying to figure out how to be in relationship and what kind of relationship they want to have with their, uh, with members of their family of origin. And it's really fucking painful and [00:29:45] it's really isolating.

There aren't many tools out there. Most trained professionals are quite biased or unable to be supportive. So for instance, like. Clergy have their bias. Coaches aren't going to be able to go deep on a topic like [00:30:00] this often. And even a lot of therapists have a lot of work to do on getting more educated on strained family of origin relationships.

Meanwhile, in the media, everything is, you know, like, when are you going home for the holidays? And, you know, you've [00:30:15] got like the Coca Cola commercial and everybody's having a great time indoors and snowing outside. You know, most, Friends don't really know how to talk about strained family of origin

[00:30:24] Connor Tomkies: relationships.

So, when you say strained family of origin, does this mean your family is in another country? Or do you just mean that you have like a [00:30:30] nuclear family unit, right? And they're decentralized? The

[00:30:34] Noah Abelson: truth of the matter is, roughly one third of all Americans are fully estranged, fully cut off from a member of their family of origin.[00:30:45]

So like, I won't talk to you type of thing. DAO. These states, if you're curious, these stages are actually pretty fluid. They're like, I won't talk to you. And then now I will type of thing, but to get one third of the American population to get to [00:31:00] a place where they feel psychologically, physically, emotionally, not comfortable enough to be in communication with a member of their family of origin.

These are the most important relationships we have or most formative [00:31:15] relationships. It's important to correct that most formative relationships. We have in our life are from our family of origin. And so one third of that population doesn't feel comfortable with being in close contact. And we don't have the tools to [00:31:30] support that population.

[00:31:31] Connor Tomkies: That's really hard. We have some family that is estranged from other parts of the family and it kind of takes that like matriarch or patriarch, uh, like figure to kind of like say like to navigate that or to be that person that [00:31:45] puts them in a room together or helps navigate. Um, kind of those feelings, and we don't, not everyone has that person, right?

And I'm not sure, it doesn't always have to be an older person, it can be a younger person, but [00:32:00] it's less common, like, normally it would be like the grandmother being like, oh no, you guys need to sort it out, like, you guys are my children and you guys love each other, you're like getting around and hash it out, right?

Um, so maybe it's a generational thing, but also maybe it's a distance thing.

[00:32:14] Noah Abelson: [00:32:15] Right. Yeah, and it's way easier to like, well, yeah, to your point, to like, live elsewhere and not near each other in the same town. And just to clarify, are you saying that in your family, or your extended family, you've seen this happen, where a matriarch or a patriarch brought [00:32:30] folks together?

[00:32:31] Connor Tomkies: Yeah, I've seen it happen and I've seen it not happen, right? Like, I've seen it, like, video two different sides of the family. Um, I think it's normal for the parent to be like, Hey, you kids, um, like [00:32:45] you guys can work through this. Right. That's normally an, an age thing. Right. You're not going to have like the younger nephew or the younger cousin be the one be like, Hey, come together.

Um, and so it's just like an observation in that normally it's [00:33:00] generational. Normally there's like an age element of, of like healing family differences. And I think there's also a distance bias towards. That's a little hard to overcome if you're far away.

[00:33:10] Noah Abelson: I think what I've found through the research that I've done is in sometimes bringing folks [00:33:15] together in sort of a mediation context, whether through a professional or someone like a patriarch or matriarch of the family, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't to the goal of, which it sounds like is what you're talking about, to the goal of like, [00:33:30] Hey, let's get everyone back in communication because sometimes, you know, both, both parties may not feel comfortable about doing so.

So to me, me the right answer is, the answer [00:33:45] that is genuinely within each of us. So in other words, if you and I were cousins, and you genuinely, deep down, once you had the time to process through it and think through it, felt like. You know, it just doesn't feel comfortable or [00:34:00] safe for me to be in contact with NOAA.

I think that's the right answer.

[00:34:05] Connor Tomkies: Yeah. Is this going to be, uh, like a business idea or is this going to be, how, how does it, how are you going to tie it in?

[00:34:11] Noah Abelson: I'm not completely sure, right? Like is it going to be a B Corp? Is it going to be a non [00:34:15] profit? I'm not completely sure. Um, it will be the thing that I spend all of my time doing, professionally, yes.

And, my goal is to have as much of an impact as possible. Because, [00:34:30] just like I had mentioned about like the impacts in the world that we need to make, there's a lot of work to be done on this one. We've got higher suicidality rates, higher mental and physical health issues amongst this population. 90 million [00:34:45] people in the U.

S. alone,

[00:34:45] Connor Tomkies: so we got a lot of work to do. I pulled up a graph on this other screen and it was a graph in an article that I think a lot about and it was talking about your time spent with your parents and your immediate family and how it almost immediately falls off a cliff after [00:35:00] college. Yeah, wow. It's very stark.

It's very like daunting and it makes you think about like how can you bring people together? How can you cherish this time? Um, and that's a big priority for me is how do you build a community around, you know, [00:35:15] Your life as far as like family and friends. I think that's super important. I'm a little curious about what that counter movement is going to be.

Are we all going to be setting up our own communes? Are we going to have like shared chickens and, uh, uh, shared childcare? Like, [00:35:30] how are we going to have a counter movement or a little bit more around, uh, immediate family and community and stuff like that? I love what you're saying.

[00:35:38] Noah Abelson: I'm interested to hear more about your interest there.

From the research, a little bit of [00:35:45] research that my wife and partner Liza and I have done is it seems like there are more intentional communities popping up that are like doing kind of like what you were saying, right? Like communes and in ways, and there's some interesting ones [00:36:00] that are also popping up that are bridging like the age gap.

So they're bringing like younger, you know, like teens and twenties into the same space as older folks, uh, who are like retirement. Um, so that there can be wisdom [00:36:15] sharing passing through. There can be like the energy and capability from these younger folks passing up to the older generations who are often kind of siloed in our society and like, go, go into this old age home.

Um, yeah, so there's interesting [00:36:30] stuff. And the other thing I want to mention is I recently listened to a podcast interview, I forget his name, he was on Dr. Becky's podcast. Um, And he's talking about the issue with just technology and how it's [00:36:45] pulled us away from each other. Like, to your point, there's, we can live these siloed lives, lives physically, but the amount that we've siloed ourselves into just this action is massive.

[00:36:57] Connor Tomkies: If we're talking about, uh, [00:37:00] shared living structures, like how do you buy land, subdivide, and build, or Ooh. If you go to other countries, right? And you'll see old people everywhere. Like they're still living with immediate family. They're going to the grocery store. If you go to the United [00:37:15] States, you don't see any of that.

Um, because they're all in dedicated spaces for them. And so to your point, if we can start looking at like, um, shared living with multiple different generations, it changes the economics of the country. And that, like, instead of that money going [00:37:30] to retirement homes and to hospice care, it's actually kept inside the family.

I mean Hell yeah. Has cultural implications too, so Um, it's interesting to see. Um, Noah, where should people go to find you? We're [00:37:45] at the, we're at time for the pod. My

[00:37:47] Noah Abelson: LinkedIn or my website, and I assume you can post both in there, but my website is foundersjourney. io. Foundersjourney. io. All right,

[00:37:58] Connor Tomkies: Noah, thank you so much.

I appreciate it. [00:38:00] Connor, thanks brother.

[00:38:01] Narrator: That wraps up today's episode. For more inspiring stories and valuable lessons from successful entrepreneurs, be sure to listen and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep pushing [00:38:15] boundaries and writing your next chapter.