 Let's talk about the acquisition. So are there many people coming to you? Are you thinking of selling or are people approaching you about buying your company? What was that like? Yeah, so got to the point in like, I mean, late 2017, 2018, when my co-founder and I were thinking about, you know, okay, what does the future look like for us? You're six, seven years in, the seven-year reach is here. Yeah, actually, you know, from ideal lab point, when we started full-time, we're about five years in at that point. And we were thinking, okay, so this space is getting more competitive. We have, you know, the landscape looks way different than when we started. We have more competitors doing this. We are either going to need to raise money, seriously raise money. To stay competitive, to become a player or to plant your flag. Yeah. Yeah. To really scale and take this to the next level or join a strategic partner that we can add more value as one would be even more valuable. So we're kind of looking at both. This is why people say one plus one equals three sometimes. This is exactly that. Yeah. So we were thinking about what to do and right around that time, we did have some inbound interest. Okay. And were your investors helping with this or is it? Not the investor so much as the board. Okay. Although we did, so we did have one, let's see where did Armando come on. Armando is one of our angel investors who was also a successful entrepreneur. He sold his company at Espresso to Hootsuite. And awesome. When he was looking at my monthly or quarterly investor updates, he saw very similar trend to where at Espresso was his company was like two years prior. Kudos to Armando for actually looking at investor updates. Yeah. That's so appreciated. So many people don't familiar. And I think I can help these guys because he was basically in charge of their growth engine. Okay. And so he reached out and we started talking about this side note here, but we started talking about him coming on as an advisor, almost like a super advisor, almost a part-time COO that level. Not just everybody talks about advisors and they never hear from him again. This was like, we're going to meet twice a week. He lives in San Francisco. So we're going to jump on a Google Hangout or something twice a week, go through our financials, go through our strategy and like it's going to work with us to help us grow. So that actually happened. That was one of the English syndicates too. So he did a syndicate, he raised some money, he came on as an advisor and he helped us out a ton. Now he's kind of packaged this up and it's helping some other companies too. Yeah. So he helped a ton in sort of with this strategy as well as our board. And Mike and I realized and thought about it and said, okay, well, we raise VC money now. We're basically committing to at least another five years to grow the company to the size that the return would be good enough for the VC. The VC is probably five years. Maybe at least three. So if we want to do that, we're starting to see more and more competition. We're seeing companies that we partner with traditionally have partnered with Shopify now launch their own Amazon and eBay integration. So they become friend of me almost like, are they competing? Are they not? We still do very well and have a great partnership with Shopify. That's fascinating. So they're starting to see more and more of that like other writings on the wall, consolidation in the market. Yeah. This is becoming not a nice to have anymore. It's becoming a must have. Right. For the big players to stay competitive. Yeah. And so it makes perfect sense. Like joining forces with a bigger company makes more sense than trying to go at this alone. And so rather than pursuing investment, we looked at that and it's right at that same time. We had go daddy reach out to us and say, hey, most people know us for domains and hosting because that's what we've done. Yeah. But we are now in a position where we're launching tools to help everyday entrepreneurs be successful online. And we launched this website builder and it has online store products. So you can launch and set up your online store super quickly. We have all these other tools to like scheduling if you're a hairdresser or something like that, or we can sell digital goods. We can sell not even sell, but you can spin up a website really quickly. You can do bookkeeping like we have all these tools for for entrepreneurs. And we see that the major gap is this marketplace integration. And you guys do it better than anybody else for small businesses. And so we would love to have you build a white label solution for us where you are powering it. Oh, interesting. Okay, online store. So we said, okay. And we've never done that before, but we started going down that path and working on the deal with them. And is this taking away all your tech resources? Not all of them now, but majority table some of the priorities that we had. Yeah, we thought this was going to be big. We thought this could, I mean, we're at that point, we weren't necessarily even taking acquisition. We were just like strategic class growth engine for us where we can just have a huge leaf on all of many customers. But pretty quickly, their corp dev team came forward and said, Hey, you know, we see these kinds of heavy technical partnerships work better for one company. How far into the integration did they ask me and started building it. Okay. So it's pretty early on. Still working through some of the contracts. And what we weren't ready to sell yet. Mike and I in this 2017. So he said, we held him off and said, you know what, let's just focus on the partnership for now. They said, great. Well, if you ever want to have the discussion again, let us know. So the partnership we signed the deal that took months to get legal. Absolutely. Yeah, signed the deal started working on the actual technical integration in 2000, early 2018. And it took us about six months. So late 2018, we were ready to launch. And at that point, we started getting some other interest about interest coming in. And so we reached out to go daddy again and said, Hey, we're interested in having that conversation again, took that, you know, that went on for a while. In the meantime, we had launched the white label integration and it did really well. We got thousands of go daddy sellers. But you were you knew, right? You knew that you had to you had to make it pop. You're like, you had to get it right. They're interested. Of course. And of course, you know, they want to, when we came back, they're like, well, let's, let's see how the integration does first. Yeah. And you're like, no problem. And meanwhile, you're getting other inbound hits. What a perfect, that's amazing. It wasn't like super aggressive at the time, but we had some interest and but when it started heating up, we had the discussions with go daddy and a few others. And ultimately, and were you pretty candid with them? We were, we didn't, you know, we didn't, you know, you wouldn't say the name totally with the amounts for anything, but we were getting other poppers. Yeah. But ultimately, you know, for us, Mike and I, the culture of who we were going to join was super important. How they were going to treat our employees was super important. The great thing is that we had just got to spend a year plus working with go daddy, both on the dev side, people who would be end up being my boss, the technical side. And we love our engineers said, you know, of all the partners we've worked with and the best. And we just really love the opportunity on go at go daddy because they have this 19 million customers already from the domains and hosting side. Yeah. And it's huge. You know, there's still one of the biggest domain providers in the world. And so most people when they, when you're an entrepreneur, and you come up with an idea, the first thing you do is name it and go by a domain name. Most people kind of go daddy. That's true. So it's a huge lead gen for them, huge massive competitive advantage over their competitors. Yeah. And this, you know, their whole, what was called go central at the time, which is now this websites plus marketing suite that they have email marketing and all kinds of other stuff was really exciting to be in mind to be a part of that growth kind of felt start up. They're really scrappy getting this thing going. So when you signed the paperwork to throw a big party, tell your whole team what was the, yeah, that was fun. That was super stressful actually because, you know, taking care of your employees is actually very difficult in an acquisition. And I think a lot of people don't, there's been, there's a lot of horror stories that don't get told enough, but sometimes the employees are put on, I would say like a four year golden handcuff or sometimes a three year golden handcuff. But then they're fired in year two. And so they never get the payout. And this is never told to anybody, but this happens all the time. And then what ends up happening is it goes an HR from the buying company will pay these people, not what they were supposed to get, but a percentage of it just to keep quiet and not effectively get negative press. But it sounds like not the case for you, which is wonderful. And that will not happen here. GoDaddy acquires a lot of companies. We were the 24th company in the last five years I think that they've acquired. And we were able to speak to a lot of founders from prior acquisitions before signing with them all for great things. And you know, it's kind of like for them, that's great. The reputation is important, right? It's almost like a VC. VCs don't sign NDAs, you know, famously don't sign NDAs and people are worried that VCs are going to steal their idea. It's like that's not going to happen because they'll never do another deal ever. Right. If they know if their integrity is large. I've seen VCs defend the worst of CEOs to my face because that's their party. It's almost like talking to a politician and they'll just say, we stand behind all of our founders. We believe they're always doing the right thing. And we'll always do that. And if any stock becomes available in the company, we'll gobble it up because we're, you know, we believe big time these people will succeed. And I'm always like, wow, that is not true at all. But I love the commitment to the cause because they know the reputation is so huge. And then in GoDaddy's case, they want to continue to acquire companies. And so they know if they have over a bunch of former founders, that word is going to get out and we'll never acquire a company again. Right. So you have a big party? They want it. I mean, they're good people. So they won't do that anyway, but it's nice to hear. But there is, you know, there is a incentive for them not to do that as well because we're in their business. So we retained all our employees. Everybody did well, you know, every employee had stock options. I know and CEO of the year. That's so nice. No, I'm seeing it like, you know, what's important, we retained everybody. That was very big for us. This is a very uncommon story. You're not going to lay off anybody. Yeah. So if you need to have that, including the meditation, including the meditation coach, the hardest part though was, you know, GoDaddy is a public company. So you have to keep it very quiet during the due diligence period leading up to it, even from our employees. So our employees did not know until the day of the week over. Did they send a team in to do any IT type of network security stuff? Yes, a little bit. Like a training. I mean, they came in, fortunately, we had the partnership. So they were coming in for the part, like the business leaders were coming in for the partnership side of things and even the tech leaders. But during due diligence, which was six or seven weeks before closing out for that full time, which was one of the most stressful things I've ever gone through in my life, we did have one point where we had to tell a couple of our technical leads about the acquisition because they had to do a technical due diligence. Yes. And Mike and I could not So Mike, you and Mike are not technical. You know, I started my career as a software engineer. So I consider myself technical like a product guy, but I am no longer writing code. I cannot walk you through our code and tell you what to do. So we needed somebody very technical to do that. So we did have to near the end let a few people know, but most of the team did not know and we had planned a big party. It was actually really fun because I believe super stressful. So we closed it on a Wednesday, I believe in April 10th. It was a Wednesday. And even up until like that last weekend, we were negotiating little fine points of the deal. And but we still need to leave enough time for all of our investors to sign off on this. Right. I mean, it's a massive packet of paper. How many signatures did you need? In total. He needed about 15 or so. Yeah, maybe more, something like that. So we had to give our investors a heads up of like, Hey, this is coming. So be ready. And then we send it out on a Sunday. It has to be back by Tuesday. So we could close on Wednesday. I mean, it was just like tracking down everybody. They're all across the country, the world, like somewhere on vacation. It was gnarly. And we planned a big party. So we had the whole, this whole event space, we had like 20 people from GoDaddy come down in secret hiding throughout the day because we made the announcement to the team after the markets closed because GoDaddy is public. Totally, which is nice to be on the West Coast. Yeah. Yeah. But we did a little, even a little bit later, we did like three o'clock because we just wanted to give the rest of the day to go parking. Do you make the announcement? Are you on the microphone? Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. We were secretly recorded it. So we had swag, GoDaddy swag. We had all kinds of stuff set up a whole party with champagne at a bar nearby with champagne and food and a bunch of... Not your landlord's, but a different bar. Totally, yeah. A landlord's bar is a fun sports bar, but working with the PR team at GoDaddy was really cool because they had like, they call it a TikTok right down to the minute of we are going to tell the team at three o'clock at 3.05, the press release is going to go out at 3.10. This is going to happen at 3.11. This is going to happen. And it's like, boom, when we rehearsed it, it was fun. And is your phone going nuts at some point? It did after that, yeah. But it was fun telling the team because we have monthly... That's so cool. All hands meetings where town halls, we call them right, where we just kind of like review what's going on with the company. And so we set it up like that. Mike and I set it up like monthly town hall for April. And we started going through some of the metrics and celebrating. We had hit revenue milestone actually just before that. So we're kind of celebrating that. It's pretty amazing all of this coming together. Yeah. And talking through how we got to that revenue milestone. And then we kind of said, well, we got to that. And everybody already knew about the partnership that we had with Daddy. So we said, we got to that revenue milestone without even considering the revenue that's going to come from the partnership. And this is how cool that partnership is. These are some of the commercials that GoDaddy has been doing for this online store and we played some really cool video spots that GoDaddy produced and getting everybody kind of hyped up. It's like fast paced music on these videos and everything. And then I said, wouldn't it be really cool if we all were working? I forgot exactly. Something to the effect of like if we're all, if we join this company and we're all working. If you were one. And then it was like quiet. And then we announced that we've been acquired. And it was people were like, it took a moment. People were shocked, super happy. A couple of people were crying like in happiness. Of course. And we were coached very well to say, you know, the first thing you mean to make sure you say after that is don't worry, you all have new jobs. Yeah. It's getting fired. Yeah. Because that's what people are waiting for. And they're not going to hear anything else until they hear that. What's tomorrow look like. Yep. Yeah. And so we said that and reiterated the same office. Everything's good. Higher pay. By the way, we have 20 go daddy people waiting to party with you. So let's go back up.