 Like, that's the stuff, like that's the effort that gave us the confidence and ended up getting us in, right? And obviously, you can't, for every opportunity, you have to know when to go, that all in for it. But man, when you get an opportunity that can really change things, like, that's the effort, at least from my standpoint, that I think it's required to get some of these breakthroughs. What's up, everybody? And welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. The mantra is we prepared well over 100 hours, probably close to 200 hours for a 10 minute interview. And it's just like, that's the stuff, like that's the effort that gave us the confidence and ended up getting us in, right? And obviously, you can't, for every opportunity, you have to know when to go, that all in for it. But man, when you get an opportunity that can really change things, like, that's the effort that at least from my standpoint, that I think it's required to get some of these breakthroughs. Well, I know many have heard mantras around, you know, build things that scale and automate everything and figure out the quickest way from point A to B. And it sounds like there's just a lot of blood, sweat and tears along the way before you even get your foot in that door, that I just don't hear many people sharing or glorifying. And it does lead people astray when they have their first failure, it doesn't happen as fast as they want, and then they give up. So it's so great to hear that story that you're sitting there manually updating page by page just so that the investor, the donation can register so that end user can feel the connection to the family, share it with their friends, see the impact they're having and really grow in an unscalable way. You can't carry your laptop for 10,000 families and update it by hand. But you can prove it. And then I'll tell one more, this is a really quick story, one more of those examples, when we were actually going through Y Commator, it was just me and my two co-founders, Matthew Marshall and Alexandria Lofsey. And once we got out there, we moved to San Francisco, and I mean, I've never worked so hard in my life for those three months. And we were fortunately now getting new customers or new donors every day, right? And there was a kind of a philosophy that the founder of Y Commator talked about called his name is Paul Graham, and he said, it's better to have a thousand people absolutely love you than a million people kind of like you, right, as customers, right? And it's, you know, somewhat of like a thousand raving fans concept, like similarly. And so, and he was talking about how when you're, when you're just starting off, one of your main advantages is you can do all these things that don't scale to create like real customer love, right? Or real donor love. And so what we would do is at the end of every day, it used to be at like nine o'clock, we'd usually have a glass of wine at this point, like in our little office, we would get out our computer and the three of us would stand shoulder to shoulder. And we would film thank you videos for every donor that day, you know, and it ended up being like probably, you know, 10 or 20 a day and they were short, you know, less than a minute. But man, we did all those videos for at least our first thousand donors and imagine their experience, right? Of I just gave, I get a personal video from the founders. And that's how we got a lot of our first like raving fans. And it's just, it's not rocket science. They don't teach you that at, you know, at Harvard Business School, it's just putting it's being creative, it's being thoughtful and it's being and it's caring. And it's actually just putting in the work. It's caring, but it's also being in love with the mission. You have to be willing to fight for it to go through all of this. When you know that the odds are stacked against you, when you know that there's better competition, when you, when you know that the odds are against you. And it's like, well, I'm still going. I'm still preparing. I still, I'm still putting in a hundred hours for this 10 minutes because I love this mission so much. You will be willing to sit there and make the thank you videos and all of that. And yeah, yeah, I love that. I mean, and for, for us in the, in the work and the fighting that we have done over the last 15 years, I can relate to that so much. And it's a, that's a big ingredient. That's not only loving it, but putting so much meaning behind that Y and with, with your story and your mission. I mean, there are so many different moments of certain people's faces smiling and being able to have a, to create a family around that and to, to lift up their experiences and enhancing their life. I mean, these are all great points. You can hang your hat on any one of them. Now joining Y Combinator, there had to be a sense of self-doubt entering that room. I mean, if the application process is so difficult, they take so few, then you're in and you're looking around at all these other incredible ideas and incredible founders who are talented and have maybe even some wins under the belt where you may not have. Paint us a picture of how you dealt with that self-doubt and maybe even imposter syndrome of being in such an amazing experience. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. By far, that was the most imposter. Like, if you were to level imposter, if you were to measure the level of imposter syndrome, that would be at an all-time high for me, for sure. I think that, you know, my response to that and my team's response to that was, we just really did feel like underdogs. And we felt like we had to put in even more effort, be even more focused, and really make the most of the opportunity. And so I think we just, we did things that, you know, as far as like going above and beyond on building relationships, you know, at YC or outside of YC, and kind of just making the most of every opportunity. And having that underdog mentality. But then what really happened was, we started to get a lot of traction. And like, things really started to work, honestly, even more so than the majority of our batch mates. Because every Tuesday, you kind of come together with, they break you up into groups. And we had a group of probably about 10 or 12 other startups. And they're just, the partners are there, and they're just kind of grilling you under weekly metrics. And like, we were hitting ours, and we were kind of in the top percentile. And so going from holy smokes, we're not supposed to be here. They made a mistake, like, oh my gosh, what did we get into? To feeling like an underdog, putting in the effort, and then starting to see real traction, even more so than the other people that you didn't feel like you were qualified to be with. That builds a lot of confidence, you know, and they gave us this boost that, no, we actually do deserve to be here. And like, you know, entrepreneurship isn't just about, you know, your IQ or your resume. A lot of it is about your grit, your heart. Obviously, you have to be smart in how you're problem solving, but also just like boldness and courage and being willing to do things that others aren't willing to do. And I thought, we can do that. And that was how, and so that was how, you know, I think some of our disadvantages actually became our advantages while we were there. Absolutely. And I know that a big part of Y Combinator is getting you access to all of these incredible mentors and alumni of the program. What is some of the best advice that you receive that maybe is counterintuitive or was really shocking and fascinating for you to learn and then implement in your business? Yeah, one of the ones we've already talked about, so I won't go into detail, but it's very counterintuitive. It's in the beginning, whether it's with starting a company or starting something inside of your own organization, you know, it could be a new initiative. The thinking is the counterintuitive thinking is to do things that don't scale, right? Because you can get so programmed in designing something from scratch that has to perfectly scale, has to be perfectly automated, where if you could just get started on something so that you can learn and you can like make improvements and iterations and like start pushing up that, that boulder up the hill, that's one of them. And anybody has the power to do that listening. So that was one. The other one was Brian Chesky, who was the founder of Airbnb, came and spoke to us one night. And this was like almost six years ago, and I still remember it so vividly. And, you know, he was just talking about how all of the majority of you will undervalue and not invest into culture. You'll know it's like kind of important, you know, you can't forget about it, like, you know, you need to do something about it. But he's like, the ones that actually believe me and like make their culture like the priority, you're going to be the one that builds like an extraordinary brand that recruits the best people. And I believed him. I took him at his word and we've invested so much from the very beginning into our culture and into our team so that would be probably the other one. Yeah. Well, I think that's very important because that puts other people in alignment to want to fight for your mission, your goal, for that idea. Could you speak a bit about that to what things you did in the early days after hearing that to get everybody aligned and to make that happen? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll kind of do high level then I'll zoom in. So I think the first part is, you know, no matter how small of a team you're working on, you know, it could just be your co-founders like it was in the beginning, it could be even if you're not running your own company, but you're running, you're running a team within teams like you, if you're in a leadership role or you want to be one day, like the good news is you have, you have control over the culture, right? And I think what people don't do is they don't believe it's the most important thing. And so what that means is they don't actually invest into it. You know what I mean? Invest, I mean time, and I also mean money, right? And you try to create an excellent culture, or you want an excellent culture, but you're not willing to actually make the investment that's going to generate the return. And so, you know, from the beginning, we would, you know, we always wanted to have like from the beginning just like overpay for benefits. We would overpay for like off-sites that we would do, quarterly off-sites, we still do them, which costs a lot of money and a lot of time, but man, what comes out of it is so amazing. You know, different events that we put on, and yeah, and just like trying to listen to to team members, and you know, if they are really, if we think it'd be a great opportunity to provide, you know, free like mental health classes, like we'll do that, you know? And it's like just not being afraid to to spend money on things because it's going to have a great return. So we've always done that. Yeah, that investment in culture keeps the amazing talent that you attract as well. Oh, yeah. And in your space, you're competing against for-profit companies that probably have bigger benefit packages, bigger things to offer their employees. So culture has to be a focus for you to succeed.