Wil Schroter has started nine companies. Now he teaches the first step.

At nineteen, Wil Schroter had a rather awkward product to sell: the internet. Before he could persuade a company to buy a website, he sometimes had to explain what a website was for. During one pitch to an automotive association’s board, the young founder was mistaken for an intern. The room waited for the chief executive. The chief executive was already there.

Schroter still tells the story with the timing of someone who knows where the joke belongs. The board’s opening question was, he remembers, “What’s the internet?” It is a useful corrective to the polished mythology of the young technology founder. There was no shortage of ambition. There was, however, a considerable amount of explaining to do before anyone could discuss an invoice.

Three decades later, explaining has become his business. The Columbus-based founder and CEO of Startups.com has built a career around the things a first-time entrepreneur has yet to learn. Business planning, finding customers, raising money, asking someone who has done it before: he has assembled tools for those jobs. He has also acquired a habit of questioning whether the job needs doing quite the way everyone insists.

The student had something to sell

Blue Diesel began in 1994, while Schroter was a student at Ohio State. He was nineteen. In the early web business, youth could be both an advantage and an administrative inconvenience. Being comfortable with the technology did not automatically make a roomful of established executives comfortable with its salesman.

The agency eventually became part of inChord, which was later sold to Ventiv. That sequence matters. The familiar founder biography likes to compress years of deals and corporate combinations into one handsome number. Schroter’s early career is interesting enough without the arithmetic taking a bow. He helped sell a new medium to businesses that had to be taught why it mattered.

Then came more companies. Through Virtucon Ventures, his incubator, Schroter worked on businesses including Swapalease, Go BIG Network, GotCast, Affordit and Unsubscribe. The range is almost cheerfully untidy: car leases, business funding, entertainment casting, purchasing and unwanted email. An orderly career adviser might have requested a theme. Schroter kept finding things to build.

His interest in entertainment preceded the casting business. He has said he originally wanted to become an actor, and his own career inventory includes commercial acting in the early 1990s. The performance experience makes an appealing footnote to those early sales meetings. A founder pitching an unfamiliar invention must explain, persuade and hold a room. Occasionally, he must also convince the audience that he has the right part.

A funding platform meets a bigger problem

Fundable brought his attention back to the beginning of other people’s businesses. The crowdfunding platform launched in 2012, with Schroter and co-founder Eric Corl among its founding team. Its premise was practical: make it easier for entrepreneurs to present their companies and raise capital online.

The customers complicated the premise. As Schroter later explained, founders arriving to raise money often needed help much earlier in the process. They needed a pitch. They needed to understand their customers. They needed to work out what they were building. A fundraising tool could get them to the door, but it could hardly invent the business that was supposed to walk through it.

That discovery helped shape Startups.com. Schroter describes an expansion from a particular funding product toward helping people through the wider work of starting a company. It is a familiar business lesson with an unusually literal application: listen closely to customers and they may hand you a different job description.

He has made the same argument about early revenue. Services and related work can finance a product while revealing what customers actually want. His preference is to get paid while learning, rather than assume the original product idea deserves indefinite protection. There is something reassuringly unromantic about the method. An invoice can be a useful critic.

Why build everything from scratch?

The wider ambition produced a problem of its own. The team needed several products, and developing all of them would take time. Schroter chose acquisitions as a way to assemble the platform. He moved his family to San Francisco and began meeting companies whose work might fit.

He has recalled hundreds of meetings and six acquisitions over roughly eighteen to twenty-four months. A collection of deals makes a tidy sentence. Combining the resulting businesses is a less obliging occupation. Their technology differed, and so did the work of bringing their operations and customers together. Purchasing the pieces was only the beginning of making them useful as a whole.

The Clarity acquisition illustrates the logic. Founded by Dan Martell, Clarity connected people seeking advice with experts who could provide it. When the acquisition was announced in 2015, the platform was operating under the Startups.co name. Clarity joined tools including Fundable, Launchrock, Bizplan and KillerStartups. The pieces addressed distinct points where a new business could get stuck.

Schroter has discussed the purchase as a choice between building an expert network internally and acquiring a service that already existed. The appeal lay in gaining that capability and directing the team’s attention to the next problem. It takes a certain restraint for a serial builder to decide that someone else’s construction will do nicely.

The rescue came with difficult limits

In August 2015, the acquisition strategy entered a far less orderly situation. Zirtual, a virtual assistant company, abruptly stopped operating and laid off more than four hundred employees. Startups.co agreed to buy it and relaunch the service.

The announcement offered a route back for the business, with hard limits for the people involved. Former employees were invited to reapply; there was no promise that everyone would return. Some reacted angrily to the prospect of interviewing for work they had just lost. The service’s survival and the employees’ experience were different parts of the same event. Neither cancels the other.

Schroter later used the purchase to explain his approach to risk. He described concentrating on what could go wrong: departing clients, people leaving and legal problems the buyer might not yet understand. The purpose of that defensive thinking was to keep the company operating long enough to develop it.

It is an instructive detail in a career usually introduced through its count of startups. Launching repeatedly does not mean treating uncertainty casually. In Schroter’s account, making a large bet requires spending serious time with the possibility that it will disappoint. Enthusiasm gets the meeting. Someone still has to check the exits.

A founder with a microphone and a pencil

Schroter’s teaching takes several forms. His book Go BIG or Go HOME appeared in 2006. He writes articles and presents video lessons about startup funding. Since 2019, he has also co-hosted Startup Therapy with Ryan Rutan, Startups.com’s founding partner and chief marketing officer.

The show gives the pair room to examine the decisions that a presentation deck tends to hurry past. How does a company really get bought? What happens when the product seems wrong? What should founders expect from their own progress? Rutan provides another experienced voice, and the occasional disagreement keeps the conversation from becoming a lecture delivered to an empty chair.

Schroter’s conversations with Mixergy founder Andrew Warner show another side of that work. The two have known each other since 2008. They have discussed how frankness changes relationships and how to ask questions that produce something more useful than the customary business answer. Schroter described learning to share more of himself with his team, having once kept a much more guarded manner at work.

That candour helps explain his appeal as a teacher. He is willing to include his own revisions in the lesson. Expertise, here, can arrive with a confession that an earlier version of the expert had rather different ideas.

“I also love teaching people”

Wil Schroter, writing about his carpentry hobby

There is sawdust in the curriculum

Outside the startup business, Schroter builds things that occupy physical space. He describes himself as a hobbyist carpenter, curious about technique and happy to learn from other people’s demonstrations. His writing on the subject addresses measuring, cutting, pre-drilling and glue. The materials have changed; the appetite for understanding how things work is familiar.

The hobby grew ambitious. In a 2021 conversation with Warner, he described designing a house and learning 3D modelling to communicate what he wanted. An architect’s first interpretation had missed the idea. Schroter responded by learning more of the tools needed to show it.

He recalled developing the design down to the placement of a pencil holder on his son’s desk. It is a wonderfully small destination for such a large undertaking. The rendering could encompass a house, yet its creator was still arranging a pencil. Anyone who has spent an afternoon correcting a supposedly finished project will recognise the temptation.

The instruction manual is still being revised

His more recent writing continues to test the assumptions founders inherit. In April 2026, he examined company control, arguing that an ownership percentage alone says little about voting arrangements, decision rights or dependence on fresh cash. The reassuring number on a cap table may conceal a much more complicated conversation.

By May and August, his published topics included one-person startups and the changing role of technical co-founders in an AI-assisted world. These are arguments about how company building might change, rather than guarantees about what comes next. The teacher who once explained the internet is again considering what a new set of tools lets people attempt.

He also makes room for detours. In his writing about side quests, Schroter describes experiments that can become valuable parts of a business, including the podcast itself. Some experiments waste time. Others change the work. He is willing to allow for both outcomes.

That leaves a fitting portrait: a founder still learning, teaching and occasionally disappearing into an absorbing construction project. Startups.com gives his experience a practical outlet. The workshop gives his curiosity another. Somewhere between a business plan and a precisely placed pencil, Schroter keeps finding something else worth figuring out.