 Hello, thanks for joining us We're gonna start off. This is fame and fortune in OpenStack startup land We're start off with introductions of each of the panelists the names and sort of the 30 30 second overview of your company Okay, I'll start my name is Francesco Paola. Thanks for being here. I'm with a company called Selenia We started Selenia a little over three years ago to help organizations adopt What we call open infrastructure of which OpenStack is one component And now we're slowly helping them to adopt and really deploy applications to the OpenStack infrastructure What about so have you raised money? Let's talk about the company itself and its its history. Sure So we bootstrapped the company back in January 2013 my co-founder Ken Peppels was the CTO of the company and I Using services as a means to fund the company and then we realized that we needed to grow faster We also have a software component to our strategy And we thought that we needed to raise money in order to invest in that part of the business And so last October we raised a series a with VCs and strategic In yeah in October of last year for million dollars I'm Sunit. I'm founder and CEO at App Formix App Formix is a product company. We started about two years ago We've raised seven million so far and what we do is build a cloud optimizer optimization solution for OpenStack and Kubernetes I'm Christopher McGown. I was the founder co-founder and chief technology officer of piston We were a startup that built a distributed state machine Orchestrator that deployed OpenStack We were acquired last June by Cisco and we raised about 21 million dollars You guys raised 21? Yeah Wow I'm Randy Bias. I was the CEO of cloud scaling which was one of the founding companies in the OpenStack movement Well, I'm 45 second limited aren't I? and we raised 16 17 something like that and We might have started the avalanche that resulted in the first set of startups being acquired when we were acquired in October 2014 by EMC and I'm now part of the Borg So I'm Jesse Proudman. I was the CEO of Blue Box So we found a blue box and I found a blue box in 2003 started as a managed hosting company very similar to Rackspace And 20 let's see we raised in total 22 million We I was the most capital efficient You did a good job. All right Boots we bootstrapped the managed hosting business for for sort of the first eight years and then launched our OpenStack product in 2012 We required the last June in fact announced the same day as piston by IBM So I'm now CTO of Blue Box at IBM and Part of the big blue machine Awesome, so what we really wanted to talk about here We've got a great group of people that are either actively involved in their companies or have been through the full cycle of Their companies and so wanted to talk about Sort of that experience in that process and particularly as it relates to the OpenStack space today And so sort of the first question I wanted to talk about with the group is is OpenStack still exciting to the investment community That that ship sailed a long time ago. Actually, otherwise I wouldn't have sold my business I mean we couldn't fund just being honest right because I'm here and it's already done But we couldn't fund we couldn't do the third round and it was because if you talk to any BC's on the hill They're like, yeah, we don't think it's gonna happen. Right. We don't see the traction. You know, we don't see customer Adoption especially products still seems like it's largely DIY. You know, you should have remained a services company ha ha ha and not changed to product And Francesco he used to work for me I'll also tell me the same thing in the hallways that I should have stayed with services, but But you know, that was kind of their attitudes I think it's pretty hard to get funding although Francesco just did it So I don't think it's impossible, but I think that it's more around the edges Like if you're gonna do like a distribution or try to do an appliance or any that kind of stuff I don't I think it would be very hard row to hoe. Yeah, just to follow on on Randy's comments I mean we raised as I mentioned last October, but we started off as an open stack Services company helping enterprise and service providers adopt open stack This was in 2013 and that was a way for us to get our foot in the door It was a way for us to start raising or really getting revenue in the door to invest in the software platform that that we're building today And as I mentioned before we were weren't growing fast enough We needed the funding and the key for us was to maintain the services piece to continue to fund the company And not have to raise an exorbitant amount of money and dilute the value of what we were doing And so we found the right partners and the reason why we found the right partners and why they funded us was was to Randy's point We weren't just about open stack We were about adoption of open infrastructure and what that means is open stack Maybe the kernel of what you're building your your cloud on but ultimately the bulk of the work that we do today And our software platform really focuses on the adoption of applications to the cloud the ability for organizations to adopt containers to really Implement automation into the enterprise to get that agility that is the promise of cloud And so that story resonates a lot better than just I am an open stack provider of tools or platforms or solutions or even services And you need to go beyond that that core component, which is important But it's not everything and a touch on the good partners point Piston never actually had the opportunity to be a services business because one of the found one of the venture funds that we raised money from only invested in enterprise software and so as a They led their initial round. So as a business model that the board was not willing to adopt Oh, we're going to go and be a managed services provider while we build the technology Yeah, I think for from my perspective. I'm move it Francisco here You are you have to think about open stack being a piece of the larger puzzle Not the not really that the whole puzzle in its entirety We as an app for makes when we when we are out raising If the vision is about how do you enable cloud, right? How open stack fits in how communities fit fits in how do you get enterprises to use VMs and containers? With the duty like just that's Francisco is saying so I don't think I mean I don't think there was From my perspective looking back. I don't think so many open stack companies should have been funded to begin with quite frankly as Time goes on the distribution like what comes out of open stack. The community is good enough. It's great in fact so perhaps Too many VCs Invested too much money too quickly But I don't think so many companies should have been invested to begin with So Rainey, I'm curious. So it was also hard for us to raise our series B I actually ended up pitching 40 investors got 40 nose. I fired myself Hired a new CEO and they were able to raise so that that worked out well for us But it was it was a big challenge for our series B But in the last I don't know six or eight months. You've seen a number of new startups enter the space You've got what zero zero stack and platform nine and the star guys And so it's an interesting challenge where sort of that those later rounds are difficult But there's still there still is money flowing in. What do you think the logic is there? Well, there's always money flowing in You know, there's always VCs will invest but you know, if you talk to people who go in and talk to these VCs There's there's sort of a hierarchy, right? I mean Sequoia KP they're kind of tier one, right? And you got the tier twos and tier threes and then you've got What people will refer to as dumb money? Which tends to be sort of like edge smudge smaller funds And some people get very excited and I love the Marantzis guys But you know, how much have they raised now like 200 million or something ridiculous? I mean You know, I'm not gonna call any specific VCs, but like some of the folks participating in the last hundred million I mean, you gotta wonder when that money's coming back. I mean return on 200 million dollars. It's gonna take a long time So there's always money to get but like, you know, when I took money from Trinity, I took it from not Trinity I took it from partner there who I trusted who I thought would be in the long haul for me It was good because then I was able to raise my B round in difficult circumstances and they supported me And I think like part of what you're doing is you're partnering with these guys, right? I mean, it's not just money It's a marriage. It's like, you know, what I get married to this person I mean, you have to ask yourself that question about your wife your co-founders your investors and You know, frankly Knowing what I know now if I was in a position I would hate to be in a position where I had to basically compromise that that that question The integrity of that question and take money from somebody who I didn't trust because I have seen You know the ship like not only go down But in roaring massive flames with huge divisiveness between the investors and the founders And that's more painful than anything else It's like having to divorce not just with the divorce but with the kids and then You can tell I had that problem as a kid, but you know, it's a mess, right? point is is that I'm there's there's money and there's money and you know I would want you to take money from somebody who believes in you and believes in your company and your vision and your mission You know not just any money and and I think that well, I can't speak to these particular investments I I definitely see that the tier one and tier two VCs are staying away from OpenStack for sure and it's a little bit easier to raise an A round because you don't have any traction behind you so you're Funding not the reality, but the potential of what you're building and if what you're building is amazing Or you can describe it in amazing circumstances and like very laudable terms you will get someone behind you And it might not be a great round. It might be an okay round like four and a half on ten or four and a half on five It's when you try to go and get more money that it actually becomes a problem because you've operated for you know A year or two years on this money and what have you done with it? And they don't care about. Oh, we've implemented these 15 features It's how are you owning the space that you're building in what is your technology doing to make you and ultimately them money? so your first year Probably really easy to raise your second year or your second round much much harder to raise because you have to have specific metrics around sales around adoption around Community you have to show growth of people using your technology. Yeah, every that's a great point every single Round has different optics even if it's the same vcs because they've got these patterns in their head You know a you've got technology in a promise be you've got initial customer attraction See you're starting to like really you penetrate the marketplace D You know his growth and so on and so on and it's very templatized in their heads it's either growth or We're coming in and wiping the table and starting over and that one you don't want and that's why we've been acquired by To add to Randy's point It truly is the marriage. So choose your VC wisely is what I'd say It's it's not a it's not Sequoia or Kleiner or a fund. It's a partner in the fund who's making the investment Who'd you take money from? Vivek at August and he's awesome and They and Be prepared to ask the VC the tough questions and be prepared to get the tough questions as well Like every single boat meeting we are in he's like show me the metrics show me the numbers and Sometimes it's tough and you know, he'll be like you're not working hard enough and I'm like hey, Vivek I can't do any more than I'm doing but he's like no you got to work harder. You got to get these things done Right, I mean as you're saying that that that you are looks looks great, but we are the customers, right? So Choose the VC wisely is I mean my biggest lesson True, I mean to circle back to Jesse's original original question Clearly if you have revenue coming in the door whether it's services or product related helps quite a bit because it validates part of your model You're also selling on the promise of how that model is going to evolve And that's what we did right. We had significant revenues coming in from the services side There was a strategy that that that married a software platform to what we built for our customers The VC's understood that message understood the strategy believed in us as a team But also they saw the track record of two and a half years of actual revenue generation and Successful deployments to say these guys actually know what they're doing and likewise From the flip side is you need to trust your your VC's as as these guys have said as well So it is it is a mixed bag I mean in today's environment pure infrastructure plays Talking to some investors earlier outside this room are difficult to fund The the environment is no longer there. It's no longer as frothy So you have to go beyond the infrastructure play if you want to get funded as an in an A round and certainly a B round You need to have a different story than I'm just gonna focus on the infrastructure piece It's it's it's much more diverse than that today and one thing to note Yes dollars coming in or dollars coming in but dollars coming in have different values Services dollars are only worth about twice as much as the dollar you have whereas a product dollar is worth roughly 10 That's why you need the product vision Otherwise, I would never have fun of the company as a pure services play no way Yeah, I think it depends on the on the VC as well though, Francesca I mean Trinity was like was like your VC kind of you just doing pure enterprise software And so it was it was very much you got to shut down your services business and as Francesco I tell you we were doing multi-million dollar contracts at the time that we like turned our back on a walked away from and Took the revenue to zero in order to take the money from the VC Yeah, which is which isn't to say that it was a good decision or bad decision at the moment so much as it was a decision That the VC was comfortable with and they weren't comfortable with us retaining services in retrospect I think it would have been better to retain services because of the realities in the marketplace But these guys are used to seeing lots and lots and lots of deals You're you're gonna found maybe three four or five startups if you're lucky and these guys are gonna find 50 60 70 You know, they're gonna do you know, they're gonna do five at a time seven at a time in some cases You know and they're gonna change several of those every year So they see a very different velocity and think about it in very different terms There perhaps is somewhat like maybe a bridge between this this product and service discussion so When we started our goal was to build the product, I mean it is to build a product is to build the best optimization product out there But you can't build the product in isolation from customers You have to get early customers. You have to turn those early customers into trusted partners. Just like you're marrying the VC Perhaps you're marrying some of your early customers as well. We were lucky to get you know, a customer early on via sat who really trusted us and They You know shared their experience with us. We were able to give them very regular updates, right? It's almost like in the as a service model Our goal was always to get to that that full product, but it took us many steps You know, it's interesting. So at Blue Box, we had that managed hosting business Which for all intents and purposes was a consulting it was a consulting shop And I was generating quite a good chunk of revenue, but we had this debate at the board level all the time Can we can we continue to focus on this portion of the business and build the the product itself and we took the opposite approach? We ended up keeping it as a way to cash flow the rest of the operation into fund a bunch operating expense and I think In retrospect that was a really helpful. It was a really helpful piece because it it provided for two and a half years post Post investment it covered basically the operating costs of the business We're still burning money as we built the new the new product But the operating costs on the day-to-day basis were covered We would have been bankrupt way faster or been a very different company if we hadn't had that and so felt very fortunate to have It's funny because actually when I when we pitched it when I raised the series a I Went back and I looked at the pitch deck, which is the ugliest piece of trash. I've ever seen in my entire life And it doesn't mention open-stack at all. It doesn't say anything about private cloud There's nothing at all in there about it So we raised this money and then after we raised it we figured out we were gonna go build Which which was a funny place to be in our first pitch deck actually said open-stack in only in so far as our Pitch was that we were going to build a transparent router that would sit on your firewall as an on-prem appliance and When you would make a request to a cloud we would Transparently redirect that to a different cloud Of course, this is 2011 and there weren't any Which was a little bit of a mistake on the part of us when we were like really excited about this and we're going to build it And we realized when we had come back and actually went we got the money started We built a prototype and there was no market for it because no one had a private cloud or Or it's even using public cloud Guess what my pitch deck said No No It said we're gonna take open-stack We're gonna make it as compatible with Amazon web services possible and make a production grade and turn it into a turnkey solution that Enterprises can roll out to have an AWS compatible system. I've been very consistent, okay? Tech said it my blog post. He said it Get up and present about it And I did okay on the exit so I can't complain So how compatible was it to AWS? Roughly 87% for the EC2 APIs And speaking of which I'll plug it now the EC2 API project in open-stack is My team members the PTL for and you know if you set your open stack up correctly You can get roughly 80 to 90 percent compatibility using it and we're gonna be expanding it We added the VPC APIs to it and then we'll be doing a lot more as well You can take the AWS command line tool that's in GitHub that Amazon provides and you can point it right at open-stack deployment with that bridge and just works That's awesome Okay, so one of the things I've noticed Now being part of part of IBM sort of nobody gets fired for hiring IBM, right? So at Blue Box, we were talking with a bunch of banks and I was all excited We'd come back from some bits and be like oh, we're gonna land this deal And as soon as the acquisition happened we realized I realized like we never were gonna get any potential business With those guys they just this we're gonna take our time How do you think we got we got this challenge where? the companies who who spend the most money put the most like actually buy the most products in the open-stack ecosystem are largely their enterprise companies and those enterprise companies have hesitance to purchase from younger startups Yet those startups are ones who are driving a lot of the innovation and pushing the edges like how do you think we manage that? duality in this ecosystem and whether it's open-stack or not or you look at Docker or you look at At any or Kubernetes or any of the pieces that are that are coming out like how are we going to manage that challenge over the next? four years I actually didn't have that problem so what I saw is that because of the level of disruption right now that there is a Incredible willingness on the part of enterprises to engage with startups in a way that there hadn't been historically And I and I think that's still true So, you know, we got Walmart we got AT&T, you know, we were having the conversations I was about to land JP Morgan Chase before EMC took us out like we're negotiating paper So, um, so I don't what that was never my problem My problem was that like in the open-stack community people didn't want to buy product Like I couldn't get semantic over the hump instead They hired several hundred engineers and then nine months later when I talked to VJ the architect He was like Randy you were right We had to redo everything that you told me we'd have to do an open-stack And I'm like, okay, so you rebuilt my product with 200 engineers over nine months because you want to listen to me the first time Okay, it's cool. It's a brand. I don't hold against you And you know the same thing happened with work day and sales force and I'd go on and on on But like our number one competitor was DIY and towards the end every once in a while It was Red Hat and Mirantis, but you know, it was pretty easy to put the kibosh on that Yeah, so I've been selling to the enterprise for 20 plus years. So it tells you my age I was selling client server consulting services back in the late 80s early 90s. I was in the E-commerce e-business space in the late 90s early 2000 with the company called side where we Were pioneering e-business platforms to companies like the Chase Manhattan Bank and others And there's a certain way that you have to articulate your value proposition and how you treat Enterprises in order to adopt this new and emerging technologies. The market is there Right, the market is there. The challenge that we found is that Companies that don't understand how to sell the enterprise that don't understand how enterprises actually Incorporate new technologies into their environment piece by piece Being held by the hand and that's a challenge for a lot of startups that they don't understand Especially startups that are isolated in Silicon Valley. We're there But we have customers all over the US and so taking that experience in terms of what we learned in the 90s in the 2000s and selling complex technology and ever-changing technology and today it's changing so much faster You need advisory capabilities within your organizations and you need people that understands how enterprises not only buy These new technologies, but also how they adopt them and how the cultural impact of the new technologies Has an effect on how they make those decisions. And so the markets there. You just have to know what you're doing And you have to not delude yourself into the difficulty of selling into the enterprise our first customer bought before we'd actually really start product and they bought because they had the budget but They also had to spend the budget and they needed what we were providing and a lot of Enterprises a lot of like the banks they start talking to you a year or two years before they're actually ready to buy Because they have to evaluate the entire ecosystem. They have to evaluate the entire problem space And so we had this one sale that took us maybe Three days to close from we had the first conversation. We had breakfast with them We showed them the demo. We got lunch slid the proof-of-concept paper across the table like here We want you to do a proof-of-concept and they're like, no, we want to cut a check and That's not how sales ever ever actually goes And But it was it was really hard. Yeah, it was the first one. I was like, wow, this is gonna be really fucking easy Holy shit, why have I not been in sales this is this far? It turns out. I'm just really easy to delude myself into things that are easy once are always easy I mean what what at least in our case what we've seen is that Selling into this open stack ecosystem is to be prepared for long sale cycles People want to Beat that thing down to the ground before they make a decision We used to joke that our did our sales were either near instantaneous or took forever I think our average was nine months But the reality is they tended to be 12 to 18 months or three months or less And so, you know, that was really funny. I mean, we only did six deals. Just be honest They just were big our average deal size was very very large It was three to five racks, which is probably larger than both the average but You know, we I don't know I wouldn't go well hunting again if I had the choice we Adam and I were joking if we ever do another Starb again, it's gonna be sass nine dollars a month You know, so we can afford to lose customers easily because when one of those guys starts to threaten to walk away You're like, oh, here we go We had about 49 But most of them are really really small because they were small businesses that could get it up and running really quickly And would eventually grow All of the whales that we actually caught demanded to take Investment in us, which is if you're not in the middle of raising kind of hard So it also complicated the sale cycle and also our investment cycle as well. So in Aside from all of this the long sale cycles We just closed rack space and we are going to be now. Yeah. Thank you So we're going to be on all rack space opens that clouds. So good things do happen So we've got a few minutes left. I wanted to open the room up for questions if anybody has any Yeah, go for it So after hearing us talk, how many of you actually want to raise it or do your own startup? All right. I think we had four or five awesome Does anybody have any questions if you do just come up to the mic You should start your own startup. You really should It's like raising a kid somebody else's kid Yes, a kid you can't get rid of I don't I tried to leave like twice the investors had the sit the sit down moment of like Yeah, got a question. What did you guys do in your startups to to main king control? um, we were company eyes with we were going for funding and we had a I we asked for more, uh, I'd per I'd asked for more equity in the company And this is what this is what my investor told me. He said donny He says the next time you get ready to do this You need to prepare me so I can take down my pants and I can lay down on the bed Because you're gonna boop me, right? So, um, what did you do with this is real life? I'm not joking This is exactly what he said to me. I didn't get that additional equity stake. I wanted in my company But uh, I wanted to know what you guys did to keep control So that you didn't get in a situation where you put all this work and love and time and sweat into something Your baby and then at the end of the day Someone else owned it and walked away with it and I just saw that happen with my friend's company this year So, uh, so a couple things life is risk, you know, welcome to, you know Life like you wake up you go outside. There's risk Uh, second is that you lose control at some point if you have wild success by the time you raise cde You're down like it's there's no choice, right? Thirdly one of the key things that we did is we made sure the board was composed of two founders two investors And then there was a fifth spot that was the tiebreaker and then I got in a great guy who was of the stature that the vcs would want But he was a Entrepreneurial operator guy who really was invested in me emotionally and he wanted to see me successful So he would tell me point blank if I was wrong But he would have sided with me in case the investors went the wrong way as well And he was sold all the way through the acquisition So I don't think control has to be equity I guess is what I'm trying to get to and then finally like you have more control than you think because if you built A great team like you and that team can always say we're gonna walk if you do this Uh, I think I just flipped off the open stack summit So So if you if you do that I can just see the pictures on twitter later So if you do that though, you you still have control So I wouldn't get too hung up on the equity like the main thing you should be hung up on the equity Is if you can take care of your team We had a modest exit But my team all did really well and I'm very proud of that because they were so hard for me and like you know I couldn't have made it happen without them So we actually had a similar arrangement, but we never filled that fifth seat and it's kind of interesting how Basically the board never does anything except unanimously unanimously So the lack of a fifth seat meant that decisions that we didn't want to make could not be made Um But that complicated things because who had the right to place that seat though It was mutual like we had to come up with we had to get a mutual Mutually agreed by the the two founders and the the investors And we just never actually filled that seat for the entirety of the company You do have a lot of influence and it's more influence than control Things you don't want to do tend not to get done Because you are the person who has to actually implement them And I think to a large extent the VC community knows that they want to work with founders to make sure that the founders are incentivized to continue working But we didn't actually take any measures to try to keep control. We had common common stock from the very beginning We sold the first we we took a four and a half million dollar a around and basically that sold Roughly 33 of the company. So right off the bat. We were hovering around The ability to be in control. So I think from my experience like the moment you take outside money, you you've given up control And but the reality is the investors that put money in our incentive If it's a founding ceo, they're incentivized to keep that person in in's place unless there's something really egregious going on So for example when we raised we raised the a in october and by july By july we knew we were going to be bankrupt in the following three months Right. So I blew four and a half million bucks in 10 months My bad, right? First time is for everything So at that point it was like well, they could fire me right there But that's not like we're trying to rescue this thing right so to To bump me out at that point in time wasn't gonna gonna help save it So we ended up getting a bridge round from the same investors When we helped kind of turn the ship around but they had the right to fire me like they could have done it at that point in time Was also the point in time where I decided hey, maybe I should go get some help And it was nice because I actually made I made the decision to go hire a ceo. It wasn't the board saying hey It's time And so it was it was nice to actually have I have that piece of control To be able to decide when when the time is right speaking of which how's your maserati? I don't know a maserati Should I how's yours Yeah, no just echoing what what the rest of the panel said I mean You are going to lose control the minute you raise money And the key there is to the original one of the original points that was made earlier You need to pick your the vcs that you know are going to be in there for the long haul with you You believe in them. They believe in you manage the board control the board as much as you can But ultimately you're going to lose control of that as well So it's really how you execute and how how you manage the relationship with the board which is a quite quite a A Full-time job for any any ceo any startup ceo Well, I think so randy made the point that there is there are tier ones here two investors and there's like dumb money Like to some extent there are well intention investors and there are investors that are in it to really screw you So when we were trying to raise our a the year before we actually raised We got a term sheet from an investor and we took it to our attorney and he goes This is literally the worst term sheet I've ever seen Of like 800 term sheets and it was designed to basically be able to Take take control the entire company right off the bat And so you can tell like what what the goal of the investor is Pretty pretty early on and if you can set things up so that you're incentivized in the same way, right? Everybody wants an exit everybody wants to get return on on their their time or on their capital And so if you can ensure that you're all incentivized in similar manner You're all working towards that same goal Anyone else? Which time we got we have five minutes Okay You're demoing the Maserati car configurator So so the three guys that uh, sold their companies. Would you do it again? Would you sell the company again? Would you start another one? Yes And i'm waiting for ever the entire team to be incentivized that it makes sense for us all to leave and do another thing In my case, this is my second startup. So I have sold one to Cisco before and I wasn't married then i've been I was married in between i'm married married for this one I I definitely would do another one after this one too, but my wife would leave me I um I think I would do it again. The circumstances would have to be just right and I think Part of it is where I am in life You know, I spent the last 26 years in the valley and all I've ever done startups The biggest company I worked at besides emcee was 400 people And so, you know, I just been living the startup life, but only twice as a founder And the first time I didn't exit and now I've got a four month old baby I moved out of the bay area because like I wanted to actually afford a house that like, you know, isn't a hovel and um the exit wasn't that big and um And so like, you know trying to operate out of portland and do a startup like I mean people do it But it's not You know, all my connections are in the base I'd have to think about it, but if it was like the right team The right vision, you know, and I had a really great investor I'd I'd probably do it again But I I want the stars to align because you're taking on a ton of risk I mean, I've been through a lot of failed startups And you know, it's not you're rolling the dice, right? It's better than going to buying lottery tickets Right and you can feel good about what you built at the end of the day Even if it didn't see the light of day and even if you know, you didn't have an exit You can feel good about I mean my first startup I was building an orchestration engine around puppet in 2006 nobody knew what the hell it was The entire puppet community was 30 people on IRC Like I'm still proud that I built with the first orchestration engine around puppet I mean when I showed it to Luke Kniece, he was pissed like he was ready to like shoot me Right and because he wanted to do that and I beat him to the punch, right? But so I still feel good about that even though it really never saw the light of day You know, I People have been asking me So every month, are you ready to go do something again? Are you ready to go see something? The thought of starting something new right now just sounds like the most revolting possible thing Basically because 13 it's just 13 years like blue box is a 13 year journey We raised the series A with my daughter was a couple months old. She just turned four Like and so that whole period of her childhood like was a roller coaster and particularly with the with the bankruptcy stuff like Like I was wildly depressed. I wrote a big thing on medium about it About the swings I went through and so like but that's the reality of a startup Like there is there is no startup where everything goes right like it's a constant state of chaos and and The companies that make it are the ones that can keep that chaos as contained and rained in as possible And without having it explode. So I know it'll be like that again if I do it But it's also it's like it's in feels like it's in my blood like I want To do a dude again and also it's part of it's like was that luck Or can I actually do it twice like can I can I make something right? But I had a great friend of mine that sold his company about two years prior to to my exit And he just started another company again About two months ago. And so it's fun to watch him go through the kind of the very beginning And relive all of that and he's like wow I forgot how hard How hard this is like the grind is so hard and he and he just had his first kid Like three weeks ago. So yeah So You know, I think it's it's it's part of who you are and if you like that kind of self torture Then then you'll do it again It's kind of like getting a tattoo right once you get one tattoo right here to go for another one exactly Thank you. There's yeah, there's there's no question. I mean just to add to this point that Um It's in people's DNA If you want to frankly control your own destiny and you find the right team of passionate people like yourselves that believes in the vision And you can build a team around that then you should go for it. You should absolutely do it. It's not easy It's going to be hard You're going to go through ups and downs and you just have to be very very resilient At dealing with all the challenges that you're going to find but ultimately if you believe in what you're doing If you believe in the team that you're working with and and every day It's confirmed that that we have made the right choice in terms of the team that we've built Do it again. Absolutely. That's actually called stock home syndrome So I was just wondering what How do you know when it's the right time to go and look for funding? I mean you mentioned that, you know, it was a number of years. I can't remember exactly how many Uh, and you were sort of rolling on and things were going well I mean does it at some point turn? Against you that you've waited for so long and you've been sort of steady eddy And not growing fast enough. I mean how how how do you gauge that? So we were an anomaly we we broke so there is pattern matching that happens with the venture community and we we were We didn't match any pattern. We weren't in silicon valley the company had been around for eight years We were a service services company. We didn't have a product The founding team didn't have venture experience. Like we we were we shouldn't have been funded I still this day. I don't quite understand how it happened But we knew like we we knew that The only way we were going to actually be able to build a product Was if we could get out of the kind of the cash flow cycle that exists in a bootstrap business and so It sort of became a game of what was the story that we could sell that had enough sizzle That would show that we could leverage the kind of the incumbency that we built To grow faster. We we were fortunate and that the growth rates at that time were sort of 100 year on year Which which helped so it wasn't as stagnant to as it could have been but Do you have three to six months in the bank? I mean, I think then you should be raising now I think I think my answer is a little bit different because the first startup that I tried I I couldn't get funded And I found out the hard way that there's just a set of optics that you know You had there's a checkbox list and the reason I couldn't get funded at the time was it was like Like me and two guys and a dog in a garage basically and they're like, yeah, you don't really have a team I'm like a team. I got a bunch of guys here. Whatever you don't have a team and they mean something very specific by team And so I think you know It's really funny because you'll see some of these vcs have these recommendations about you know, the 10 slide deck You need for a picture is bullshit You need about two slides because if in the first two slides you haven't proven that there's a market You can make money in and that you've got a way to make money in it Like they don't give a shit about the rest of it once they believe in that piece Then they care about have you got a team? Have you got traction? So when those things all line up You know, then it's a lot easier to raise money You're not it's it'll be much less of a grind if you've got you know a big customer or preferably several who will say This is perfect solve this real problem. I have because that's what a startup is It's about solving real problems in the real world And then you've got the team and you can show the market like all those things line up And and you've got a very good shot at getting funding But you still need at least three to six months of runway in the bank because it takes roughly two months to Successfully pitch and close because of due diligence because of you know, it's a six month process. Yes Or or or more on average. It's a six month process Extrap late plus or minus three Yes, are you if you're the ceo you are if you are a ceo and founder you are always worried There's never such a thing as having too much cash in your bank Not just right now and I don't know why All right, I think we're at time. Yeah, so thanks all for joining us appreciate you spending the afternoon with us and