Hey, the Freedom Fighters.

My name is Andrew Warner.

I'm the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.

And joining me is Jesse Poogee, the founder of Gateway X, the venture studio that I partnered with to build, well, a new company called bootstrapped giants, where we support bootstrappers who have this big ambition.

All right, I want to find out how he was thinking about his business and frankly, just chat. Here it goes.

All right. Jesse, we've been working together now for almost a year and our relationship,

I feel, has changed a lot in the last year. I feel before we were working together,

there was a lot of like buddy, buddy text messages and you're killer at that. I I keep trying to do that, and it's not fully me, but I'm getting closer.

Then we were in like building infinite possibility land together, and that was really exciting.

And then it got to this, why the fuck is Andrew not doing this?

And me going, why is Jesse constantly coming up with different ideas all the time?

And it went from buddy, buddy, to world of possibilities to this, I don't know.

I don't, how would you describe where it is right now?

You know, I think every business has, and every relationship. you describe where it is right now?

You know, I think every business has, and every relationship has different arcs and seasons, right?

I think that's where I start with it, which is like that's somewhat, it's not totally abnormal.

I think that it's been interesting from my advantage's point to watch kind of sort of the creative genius version of you versus the businessman version of you.

They're pretty different.

And I think that like, from my vantage point, it was like, oh, there was this creative genius who just like saw something in me.

And part of the reason I wanted to start doing this podcast with you is like we can actually get out and get back to that get back to the things that make us make you great make us great together and versus the you know I think the side of the business stuff is like oh you're running a business and like you want to run the business like I would run the business but that's you're not me so you're not going to do that so it's going to feel weird to you all the time and it's never going to feel

great and like I think a big part of this whole whole thing working well for me with everybody is

is like letting them be the best version of themselves not like a shitty version of me or my methods

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