 All right welcome everyone. We've got about a 40-minute panel. It's on the entrepreneurs perspective. I'm Simon Anderson. I'm CEO of a company called Dreamhost. We're an open-stack public cloud and then I've been a co-founder of a couple of startups in the open-stack ecosystem Ink Tank and most recently Acanda. And we've got a great panel here. Founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, CTOs, you know the folks who are really doing it at the coalface. And what I'd ask in terms of ground rules of all of us is let's keep it real, let's keep it authentic and you know really try and make this a rich panel for all those of you out there who are aspiring to do things in the open-stack ecosystem. Start your company, leave your big company and so on. So on my right is Jesse Proudman and then Chris McGowan, Ken Rugg and Joe Arnold. And I'm actually going to let them each do a little quick introduction so you hear their voice and they can tell you a little bit about their story. Try and keep it to like 45 seconds. So I have Jesse Proudman, founder and CTO of Bluebox. August of this year will be 12 years at Bluebox. I founded it in 2003 from my dorm room in Washington, just out of here. For the first nine years, company grew up as a managed hosting company very similar to Rackspace and competing with Rackspace and then raised Series A in October of 12 to take the platform we call BoxPanel, which is sort of our management, our management infrastructure and use that to springboard into private cloud. So then we raised the $14 million Series B in October and December of last year and I hired Matt Schultz, the CEO of the company. He was at tier three in May of last year and took over the CTO spot. Hi, I'm Christopher McGowan. I'm the co-founder and chief technology officer at Piston. We've been in business since January of 2011. When my co-founders Joshua McKenty and Gretchen and I left our respective companies, them, NASA, and Rackspace, to start Piston. I'm Ken Rugg. I'm the CEO, founder of Tesora. We're the Trove company, so the major contributor and company behind the Trove project for Database as a Service on OpenStack. We actually started doing a little bit of a different thing during Scale Out MySQL and then back in 2011 and then in February of last year of 2014, we jumped on the OpenStack and Trove Bandwagon and never looked back. So that's kind of what's my story. Hi, everyone. My name is Joe Arnold and one of the co-founders of a company called Swiftstack and we work on OpenStack Swift. We started around three and a half years ago building a product around it and bootstrapped for about six months and then we raised our first seed round of $1.5 million. Then we worked on that for another few months and raised our Series A and then closed our Series B last quarter and talked more about that and the process of that in this panel. Great. Thanks, guys. So Joe, actually I'm going to throw to you. I think when people are starting out and they're thinking about doing a venture on their own or with a group, what gave you the courage to just step up and do it? Was it just a timing issue? Was it a group of people that came together? What were the two or three ingredients that all of a sudden they just came together and you said, we're going to do this, I'm going to go ahead and found Swiftstack? Yeah. Okay. So one is I just really wanted to do a startup at some point and there was kind of a building up to that. My background is a programmer. I was an engineer and doing some operations. So that's where I came from. And so I found folks that covered different things that I needed. There was two other technical co-founders and then one other person who was on the business side and then I served as the CEO for the first about three years. This is actually, I think what you've just mentioned though is really critical, but I think a lot of people think of startups as being I'm out there doing it on my own. And like, if you look at the image up there that I grabbed like five minutes before this, but I thought it's pretty typical, you know, you're in your tent, you're on the mountain, you know, I'm going to do this solo, I'm going to do this climb. But like even in mountaineering, it's all about a team, right? But we were just like, we were working out of this like co-working space. And it was, it was not very nice. And I remember even just getting like that first round of funding and we hired our first employee. He came out of Rack Space and they were in this, you know, Rack Space has a fabulous office out in Austin. And when they came in, he was bringing his wife and told me, hey, look at me, I'm joining this new startup. And here we are in this very, very dimly lit, five dudes all gathered around a single table. I mean, she was just like, oh, what am I, what am I in for? So it's kind of a shock for even like bringing on those first few people. It's a different experience when you're especially the really early days. So Jesse, in terms of funding, you know, you were already a preexisting business, and then you, you know, you devise this new business plan, this new strategy, and you went out and got funding for it. I mean, those investors that came in, what were they really looking for? What was sort of your unique value proposition that that hooked them in at that time? Yeah, it's a good question. So ironically, I was a single founder, which I did for for a very long time, and then started to build a team around us as part of building this new product. And so I just want to comment on that. Like that, that's one of the hardest possible things. And so while you can do it, I do a lot of mentorship at the University of Washington. And this is like one of the topics I'm really passionate about. Well, you can be a single founder, and a lot of people think they want to be a single founder, finding that team of people that can all believe in that common vision from from day zero. Man, like if I, if I went back and did it again, I think that's one of the biggest changes I would have done. In terms of fundraising, so I bootstrapped the company for nine years, I literally used like every source of capital you could come up with credit cards, home equity lines of credit, I borrowed money from my girlfriend, who's now my wife, like student loans, like if you can name a source of money, I probably used it. Did you pay it back? I paid it all back. Fortunately, it's probably why we're now married. And through that process as a management company, that was working because we were a services business, we were able to come to his cash filling, right? Every every customer that we got, we were able to cover the general operating expenses, but we realized as time was going on that to really be where we wanted to be, we needed to build a product and to build a product we needed to invest ahead of the the income from the customers. And so the story really was, look, look at this technology platform we've built. This platform allows us to be competitive with the likes of Rackspace, who have thousands more employees than we do. Look at the automation capabilities of this platform. And now look at what we can do with it in the private cloud space. And at that point in time, when we raised that capital, everybody in OpenStack was selling OpenStack as a distribution of software. And there was nobody really approaching, approaching the solution as a service, with the exception of MetaCloud. And so we sort of said we can use this technology and be first to market with delivering OpenStack as a service powered by this underlying tech. And that really resonated for the original investors that we found. And I think this is interesting because I'm with Dreamhost and right around that same time, we were thinking about something similar. But you know, this is just where startups or pivots happen and where you really go after things. We just didn't have the capacity to do it. And you did it, you went out there, you built a great business around it. You know, it's really cool. So one of the interesting things about what they're stating about the fact that everybody current when they started investing in OpenStack is doing products. When Joshua Gretchen and I started Piston, we had come back from six months working for this seismic risk analysis program, thinking we were going to do a geolocation database where you just drop in a rack of servers, go around, take pictures of their, of people's locations and do some transformation and they'd get a 3D model out of it. And we were going to run that on OpenStack. And we came back and the only people who were involved in OpenStack at the time were interested in catering towards service providers. So it's been an interesting, you know, four years, five years, how we started off at the service provider space, went into a very heavy product focused space where people wanted to sell software and then are coming back around into the managed service provider space. That's cool. And Ken, in terms of, you know, sort of following that thread, you're, you know, you're coming into the market, you're really building a business around one of the newer, you know, projects within the OpenStack ecosystem. And so I'm assuming that that's part of your strategic thinking is to get ahead of it, be one of the first companies that really looks to, you know, package it up and turn Trove into a service that's really consumable and so on. Yeah, definitely. That's really the focus for us is, and I think our view is that in the world of OpenStack, I think there's, you're always, I think, going to what you guys said, you're looking for where are the gaps, where are the things that everybody else isn't doing? You know, if everybody's doing a distribution, well, maybe I need to offer it as a service. If everybody's doing, you know, one one stack for all, everything in OpenStack, maybe you'd need to look for specialists. I mean, I look to you guys, you know, and I, you know, I kind of go to you as an inspiration, right, in terms of looking at SwiftStack, a company that was very focused on one project, you know, you have a lot of core expertise. We, we came into this, as I mentioned earlier, with a lot of background in how do you build big database servers? How do you do replication? How do you build, you know, an infrastructure backplane for very scalable database management tools? And, you know, we wanted to bring that kind of very specialized expertise to, and bring that to bear in an ecosystem like OpenStack. And, you know, again, we saw that gap in the market, you know, everybody else on Trove, when we came into the project, they were service providers, right, it was, you know, HP, eBay, within their, within their private cloud, you know, it was, were folks that were operating Trove at scale, but, you know, there wasn't a company that you could go to and say, hey, I want, I want this piece of OpenStack and I want a specialist who can, who can help me succeed. So, looking, looking for that unique, that unique niche or that unique selling proposition, but I mean, come on, let's get real guys, how do you make money from free software? How do you do it? Come on, this is where the authenticity comes in, how do you do it? Well, we're still thinking it out, right, right. Honestly, there's, there's, there's still, I think, a lot of work to do to figure out how do you do that and what's the best way, what's the best model. I think there's, there's a lot, you know, from my perspective. First thing you have to make sure you're delivering the value, you know, make sure that you're doing something people want and can help them get their job done, you know, and I think, you know, the business models, I mean, we, we think of ourselves as kind of more traditional open core model where you take, you know, you take that basic open source bits, you know, be very true to the open source project, you know, and I think that's, you know, we're the number one contributor to Trove, we wanted to give, even though we didn't start the project, you know, we jumped on the project kind of as, as newcomers and, you know, I think it was, you know, we, we were accepted by the community because we were coming with a little bit different DNA. But, you know, again, I think, how do we monetize it? Well, we're still learning that. Yeah, Joe, I mean, your, your business model, you've been going, you've been going for a little while now and you're doing great. Yeah, we've been going for a little while, so the model that we have is, we shipped the open source version and then we contribute to that. But then what we've done is we've gone down not the services path, but we did go down the product path. And that was sort of, that was the way we wanted to do it because we felt like we could best support lots of customers versus going down the professional services route. So it was kind of a choice that we made. But I'd say like early on, it almost doesn't matter that much, right? Particularly on the, when we, there's four or five guys just trying to figure out how to get the business started. You're going around pitching the company, both to investors and prospective customers. We were just trying to get an early customer and an early win. And even when we didn't win a customer, we, because of, we were four guys that were just trying, trying to get something done, we could still take that prospect and bring them and introduce them to an investor. And because it's, it's just as valid. It's like, okay, yeah, here's a pain. I'm talking with these guys. I'm investing in this open source project, which by the way is really cool because they think, oh, hey, I'm just going to build this stuff and roll it out myself. And I'm using these guys to train me up and teach me all about this open source project. That's actually okay. And early on, because it shows that there's a need and that there's a market for what you're doing. And then that can lead to sharing that to people who may invest in your, in your company. So it's, it's still useful, even if in the early days you might not have the revenue stream coming in. You know, I think OpenStack is unique. If you look at open source software in general, they've typically, if we go back in history, they've been smaller probably even like the Linux distribution. It's a single server, a single entity. And so when something fails or a customer has a problem with, with that piece of software, it impacts a much smaller portion of what they're doing versus now with cloud computing with OpenStack, basically saying, look, put everything in your production environment on top of one set of software. And so the failure domain has gone up exponentially. And yes, it's still open source, but because the failure domain has gone up and because the complexity of the software itself is so wide because it's doing so much. I think that creates a huge opportunity for those that, for those companies that are either building a problem that, that solve, solve that operational challenge through productization or delivering it as a service. And that's fundamentally different. So you basically are, you've got product, you've got product opportunities, you've got services opportunities, you've got professional service opportunities. So it's, it's, I mean, it's like any other software industry to a large degree. Can I make, can I like share a mistake that we made earlier on? Absolutely. Okay. So, so one of the things that I thought was going to happen was we could get people to come to the website, see our glorious product and click and sign up and download and get started, right? That was like, oh, that's exactly how we're going to do it. We can run ads and we can show up and, and get visibility. That didn't happen at all, particularly in the early phases, right? We actually had to go out and find where our, our product actually worked for very specific use cases and went out and met the people. And then those people would tell us, well, here's why X, Y and Z reasons why your stuff didn't work. And then we could go back and fix it and go and try, right? It doesn't work just to sit back and let people come to you. You actually have to figure out where the solution plays and go out. So, and before you jump in on that, because I think this is where you're going to go is, you know, with piston being so early in the community, I think this is a really important point around, you know, houses that has the open stack community helped you. I mean, how can folks out there who are thinking about starting their next adventure within open stack, how can they really leverage the community and piston was in early, what did you do in that regard? One of the things that the community did was they provided a lot of pain points and every single pain point that anybody has with open stack, myself, Jesse, Ken and Joe, all of us are all of those pain points are actually opportunities to create a company and fix that pain point because if you're having that problem, everybody else is having that problem. So there's that that benefit to joining the community. There are thousands of pain points in every single one of these projects. The other thing is the community is huge. And there's a lot of marketing and a lot of momentum behind people who join the community. You have very large companies who invest lots and lots of money to bring their employees here to make the community better, to invest in the code that we're building on to throw parties, to co-brand with the parties that we host, right? Piston probably threw the best parties. You've got the track record of the best parties. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Piston. Sorry, we didn't do one this year. Can I counter that a little bit? Which part? The parties or the community or the parties are great. The pain points being an opportunity? Well, no, just don't. I would say use OpenStack. But it's not necessarily to play inside of OpenStack. We've had more success in people who are just trying to solve a storage problem. And you're probably seeing the same thing on the database site where we're showing up and doing genomic sequencing. Where's the compute cluster? No, they're not ready for OpenStack. They're using HPC clusters and or in the media space, right? There's the we're just solving a storage problem with the OpenStack technology. I don't think that that's a counterpoint. I think that's the exact point I'm making. Okay. Keystone right now has a lot of pain points. There is a space for someone to come and be an auth company. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the way the way I think about it is that, you know, OpenStack is my go-to-market strategy. OpenStack is not my value proposition. My value proposition is you want to make it easy for people to provision databases. You want to make it self-service, easy access, managed database. You know, nobody cares about database as a service on OpenStack as a top-level point of view. I mean, they don't want to just fill in the checkboxes for OpenStack. I think this is what you're sort of touching on. And it's definitely been a big topic. You know, I'm on the Foundation Board, and it's been a big topic of conversation around what is OpenStack. And, you know, just for everyone's benefit here in the room, if you haven't heard it already, the board and the technical committee have gone through a process of what's called Defcore, which is defining the core of OpenStack in a way which is actually flexible and can be updated on a regular basis. So that is now done and that process is in place and, you know, it's early days, but it seems to be working fairly well. Now, that's primarily for trademark usage to be able to say you're an OpenStack-powered platform, OpenStack-powered compute or OpenStack-powered storage. And then on the technical committee side, the technical committee is making a pretty big shift where from really what was the integrated release of OpenStack. In other words, you know, this is a packaged product, packaged software, essentially. That was really the mistake, I think, which was that people started to think of OpenStack who weren't familiar with it as packaged software, which is not. And so now it's what's called the big-tent approach, which is it's not so much, you know, is it OpenStack? It is, are you OpenStack? In other words, if you have a project that's open-source or if you're part of the community, are you behaving in a way which fits the open values of software development and collaboration and so on? So with all that, I think, you know, it emphasizes what the panel's saying, which is OpenStack is a tool set. You know, it's a set of projects that you can bring together in different ways and shapes and forms to solve a whole bunch of different cloud computing and storage use cases. But it's, you know, it's not one size fits all by any means. And I think this is what, you know, you'd emphasize, it seems like you guys are definitely seeing the gaps. Are we seeing the opportunities to bring value to the customer over and above what OpenStack natively offers? Yeah, I guess I wouldn't say I'm not focusing on the gaps so much as I'm focusing on the industry that needs a solution and figuring out how to tie that back to the technology. Where is the pain? You're looking for where the pain the customer experiences is. Often never has anything to do with OpenStack at all. Absolutely. Customers say, I need a private cloud. Now, how do I get that? And OpenStack is a way to do that, or Swift is a way to solve the storage problem and there's pain there. Yeah, and I would say like when we started out, it's like, OK, here's the technology and we're focusing on that. But from a use case, we're like, OK, let's see. Where are we going? Like, and we're kind of like learning as and we're feeling around the market trying to figure out who's using us, where the pain points are. But then as we got more mature and we learned more about not the technology but more on the market side, figuring out and that's where things that get narrowed down even further and further and further. And that's where we got more and more success and more and more traction is we got more specific on the use cases that we were and more specific on the industry. So I mean, I think when you start out, you don't necessarily know what those are going to be. But as you mature, you should start looking for those because that's what's going to be needed in order to figure out, OK, what kind of sales guy am I going to hire? So some quick tips on that. What conference is I'm going to go to? Yeah, quick tips on that though. How do the people in the audience and who are going to be watching this, you know, online, like how do they move super fast on getting to those kind of outcomes? You know, what do you guys have tips and tricks? Things that you did? Business development, you know, did you just go and, you know, hit up as many of the, you know, your target audience as you possibly could? What sort of things did you do? Well, we had first we we listened to the inbound and in our in our case, it was we had we categorized the inbounds as they were coming in and we ran it leads from your website or leads from our website what leads from the website? It leads from OpenStack. Right. They really came from across the board and then we started categorizing them and and we look to see, OK, where are we having success? Where are we not having success? And this industry is consuming up a lot of time, but not a lot of a revenues coming from that. So all right, let's turn that off. These ones are are. Wow, when we go into this account, even though we don't know what we're talking about, we find a really smart customer, a really technical person is a visionary in their industry. They can go, oh, I see what you're doing. You're not using my language, but I understand it. So I'm going to piece it together for you. And then we look at that and go, ah, I see. And we can generalize that. We learn about that domain specific stuff and then we can go into the that same category. Cool. So I think to do that, you've got to measure everything. Right. And this is one of our biggest early mistakes was we did not measure nearly enough on a marketing side and a lead gen side. And there's so much valuable data there. And so in the last 18 months, 24 months, we started that process. And again, you start to see those trends and that's exactly the same methodology we're using now, but we wouldn't be able to do it without the data that we're going to. So were you using things like Salesforce? Yeah, now we're using Salesforce. Right. So you're basically looking, you know, who opens the emails who? Yeah, I mean, I guess a little bit less for us because we're less of a it's not about high volume. I mean, sure, we have all those those tools. So, but, you know, it's it's not about developing a marketing automation platform, particularly in the early days. It's just more about really paying attention to where things are coming from and then making calls. Okay, am I going to go invest in industry like the trucking industry conference and show up there and explain how your solution works in their terms? Right. Chris, that's kind of one of the things that I really wish we had done is we when we were raising, so we raised roughly five hundred thousand dollars in seed and then concurrently went and raised a four million dollar a round. And as part of that, we had this story where we were going to build this specific product and we sold it to the VCs. We sold it to the seed investors and by the time we spent six months actually building the actual product that was wasted. We should have taken that six months and actually gone and talked to the people we were convinced were our target customers to find out if they wanted it to begin with or if there was actually use for it. Because what was there was the idea that people were going to have a need for private cloud that didn't even exist at the time when we were actually launching that. So don't do the if you build it, they will come. We sold our very first launch customer. They signed the contract before we had our product. The first line of code committed on the product. Right. One thing I'd say though, asking them what they want and what they need only takes you so far. You have to watch them because I mean we again, we started down the path of saying how do we build and we had the vision of database of service in the beginning to say how do you scale up my SQL to service a very efficient, very address, you know, scalable database of service environment. Lots of people told us they wanted it. Lots of people said, hey, yeah, I need my SQL to scale better. I don't want to go to Mongo and replace strip and replace and whatever. When you actually get to the point of doing it, that's when it really matters. Right. You show them and they try and they, yeah, but it has to do everything. Get it in market. Get it in market. Figure out what the, and we thought of it as a minimal viable product. Right. How do you get something in their hands so they can experience it, not just tell you that they think the thing you told them because what you told them isn't what they heard. Right. What you tell them is not what they heard. They heard whatever it was they wanted. You know, whatever words you used, they heard what they wanted. What do you guys think about competition? I know a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of afraid of competition and so on, but in my own opinion, if there's two or three competitors doing almost exactly the same thing I'm doing, it actually can be a big benefit. You're competing with most of these guys, aren't you Simon? I think so. No, not at all. I'm actually a customer of Simon's, personally. And he came up to me at the booth and said, your network's too slow. It is. Exactly. Sorry. So to go back to the comment about going, talking to your customers or the people you think are your customers, you have to ask them what their problem is, not tell them what their solution is. You can't go to them with this thing because they're going to piece it together. They're seeing one side of the elephant. You're not there. You're seeing the whole thing. And the other thing you do is you ask them for money up front. It sucks. Who in here is an engineer? Who here negotiated their last job offer? That. No. About half. Was that about half? That was less than half. Less than half. That was way less than half. It's hard. Like, looking across the room at someone and saying, pay me is hard when you're an engineer. But that's the only way you're going to get people who are actually committed in the vision you are trying to build. And if you don't do that, it's going to be very hard to scale your business. So I want to save some time for questions because I'm sure people have some good questions. But before we do, I wanted to answer a very important question. If OpenStack today was a vegetable, what would it be and why? And you've got like 20 seconds. This is like fast. OK. Artichoke. And why? Oh, they're delicious. But they're hard to get into. Celery. It's tasteless. Fibrous. It's good for you. It's most. Nobody ever wants it. And they always want it as a vehicle for something that they actually want. Peanut butter. Or Nutella. Ken, do you have something? I'd say potato. Basic substance. OK. Basic what you need. Get going. Cool. Jesse. I'm going to go with asparagus. OK. Grilled, sauteed, fried. Just raw. Just raw. OK, raw asparagus. Cool. OK, so there's a mic here. Anyone want to get up and ask a question of this panel? Big opportunity here. Yeah. Just step up to the mic standing line and far away. And try and keep the questions like tight and focused. And we'll get through a bunch. So myself and some friends have been talking about, what is the importance of the idea versus the execution of the idea? And it kind of goes back to a little bit of what you're talking about of competition in the industry. Like can you iterate better on an idea that somebody already has and be successful at it? Or is it better to have a unique idea and be a forefront of the industry? Everybody has ideas. Like execution is everything. And going back to that competition point, I think getting into a space where there are no competitors probably means there's no business to be made there. So finding an area where there actually is competition that you know you can do it better than everybody else or approach it in a different way than everybody else, I think that's absolutely essential. Yeah, but there's a counterpoint to that, right? Which is if you're doing something and it's already obvious, it's going to be a little bit too late. I would say like there's a lot of sweat in trying to get even the funding grounds, because I felt like the investors we were talking to, it's like, no one's ready for object storage. No one's going to use that stuff. Well, we had that too. Sure, I'm sure you guys did, right? And now, like, oh, there's a market here for this thing. Well, now we're like three years ahead of people who are starting out now, so that's also an advantage. But the counterpoint to that is Uber and Lyft, right? Uber is mostly like the unicorn side, but they're an obvious solution to an obvious problem, which is taxi cabs suck. And then Lyft came along, which was an obvious solution to the Uber's obvious problem, which is that Travis is a dick. Ken, do you have any, who are your, do you have some competitors in your market right now? We are early, we don't have, no one else, we do have competitors that are in the database of the service. So again, how do you think about your competitors? It's a little bit of a problem though, not to have a competitor, right? Oh yeah, so there are competitors delivering database of the service platform in the market now. There are none on delivering it based on Trove. So this gets back to the, our value proposition is what you compete on, because that's what people care about. There are people that are delivering product that offer the same value proposition as us, slightly different, different feature set, different functionality, but not on Trove. So that's our, again, that's our go to market. We're targeting people specifically who are, are focused on OpenStack Clouds. Next question, yeah, good one. Hi, I've got a question regarding selling to Enterprise, specifically with regards to compliance, IT compliant. In your business, have you, is this something you've thought about, like, you know, getting certified in compliance with ISO 27001, HEPA, you know, things like that. Do you think it's important for a startup? And if it is, what state in your life cycle should you take that seriously? I would say, I'll answer that one. I think, because I'm from Australia, and you've got an accent, and yeah. But no, but it is actually, it's an important point, actually, it's a really important point that I think in, you know, in the US, because I've been here 15 years, but in Australia, it was all about certification and compliance and all this stuff. In the US, people just build great product, and then they figure that stuff out later. You know, and I know, look, if you are serving Enterprise, obviously being HIPAA compliant, if you could, you know, or ultimately being HIPAA compliant, but in my experience, selling to Enterprise, Ink Tank actually was like this, you might have found this with Joe with Swiftstack, is we would go in there and it's all about the utility of the software, it's about what you can do with it, and so on, and then, you know, we'll get there, if you need that certification, we'll get there. And a lot of these certifications also go well beyond the software. I mean, it's about your data center, it's about physical access, it's about all these other things. So I think if you spend six months, you know, in figuring out certification, you're kind of going, you're spending money in the wrong area. Yeah, I think that's the wrong customer at the very beginning. Right. So for us, we sort of approached it to find the bare minimum of certification that we could get that would allow us to object customers, and so for us that started out as the SSAE 16, because we're a data center provider, and that's now evolved into a couple of different standards. PCI. Yeah, PCI, but it's about, because you're exactly right. Most of those have nothing to do with the product at all, and it's around policies, policies and procedures and manuals, and ironically, the SSAE 16 policies are SAS 70 now, they're all retrospective, so you actually have to implement this stuff and then wait a year, and then you get tested on that year looking backwards, and so you can't even, you can't start with that to begin with, so sort of find the bare minimum and then work your way up into the enterprise requirements. And ideally, choose an industry or a space that doesn't require you to have the certifications before you go sell to these people. You don't want, your first customers, you don't want the big four banks. I mean, the banks will do a lot of their own certifications for them, they're fine first customers to have. For the right use case. For the right use case, for the right use case, but in terms of like going public with external certifications, I mean, we're, so we're three and a half years in. The first one that we're really going after is like an MPAA transport one that we'll probably get to in six months from now, so just a data point for you. Next question, yeah. It's for everybody, everyone over there. What were your top three priorities when you were starting, and what are your top three priorities right now? And follow up question is like, have they changed, have they not changed? Why? Funding and team, probably the two, and then I think the one that, once you get going, it's really about execution and bringing it all together and operationalizing, that's what I would say. But funding and team. I mean, it's like real estate, location location location, but it's team team team, right? If you've got the right team, if you can build the right stuff, you can find funding, right? I mean, I think one of the things we talked about, team product funding, you know, I'll take team team team, right? Because if you got the right team, you got people who are like-minded, you can deliver great stuff, the rest will come. Especially if they have very high credit limits on their credit cards and they can survive for a while. That you can. No, I mean, and they might marry you at some point. That's great. Revenue was a big priority for them. In B2B, revenue is a proof point that what you're doing is actually valuable to somebody with that. Once you have that team, the next thing you need from our perspective is revenue. If you're bootstrapping, if you're going for venture capital funding, getting revenue early is often detrimental to you. Yeah, I disagree with that, though. I mean, I think in a B2B business, I think in a B2C business where your metric is something else that's users or eyeballs or whatever it is, that's true. But in B2B, it is detrimental in that it gives you a history and a trajectory that you have to explain. It also limits you to the multiple on that revenue. Joe, do you have any on your investor? You know, I think team's important, particularly when you're doing fundraising. I mean, you don't really have anything. So when you go talk to investors, sell yourself, sell the team, because that's who they're going to be investing in. And I think the key thing is to take away is, I mean, there are 6,000 people at this event, right? I think this is one of the most vibrant communities. I'm not even software communities that I think I've ever been a part of. And so using the community here, and I know, look, people do move between different companies and sometimes that scene is a bad thing. I mean, we've had plenty of people who've gone over to other major companies in the ecosystem and so on. But I think if you take a sort of a bigger view on it, people are only going to move if it's sort of right for them, generally. For whatever reason, personal circumstance, something cool they want to work on and so on. So I think getting out, getting social, attending the events here, there's a lot of people that you find here. Look, and I certainly was leaning on lots of other folks what I was starting up, by no means was this stuff easy to figure out. And so I went to people who I respected and asked for their opinion and pulled them in early. So next question. I'm going to grab one more time. What are your top three mistakes? What are your top three mistakes from your study? Thank you. Why don't we just do one mistake? Yeah, so for me, it was team. Like, I had the wrong people. And it took me a while to get the right people. That's why he fired himself. And you know what I mean? You know what I mean? For me, I think our number one mistake was trying to write code before we went and talked and figured out what the problem was. Yeah, it's similar. I mean, we built what we thought people were asking for. It's a bad choice. Joe? I'd say we didn't focus in on specific use cases and specific verticals early enough. Next question. We've got a couple of minutes. So my question is that if you guys were to go and request seed funding again in hindsight, based on all the lessons that you have learned, what are the top three things that you will carry? So actually, I'll answer this real quick, because it's actually relevant between Ink Tank and Acanda. Both companies were sort of formed out of sort of dream host and dream host team members. In the case of Ink Tank, we actually put money in initially. And we did it as a convertible debt. So the reason was a very virtuous reason. We didn't want to value the company. Initially, we wanted someone to come in from the outside. But the problem was is that other investors then came in. And for whatever reason, there were various circumstances where they also put money in in the same form. And we ended up with this sort of debt overhang, as investors call it, that they didn't know what to do with. And even though the money was in the business and everything like that, so in the case of Acanda, we actually just did a $1.6 million seed round. And literally, we just valued the company. And I mean, Acanda, I don't mind being sharing it with everyone. We did it as a $3 million pre-money valuation and a $4.6 million post-money. So the company's notionally worth $4.6 million, which was attractive to investors. But really, I guess it's around certainty. Like you want to remove as many things as possible that create uncertainty or friction later on. Yeah, ideally, if you're going to do a seed round and you're doing it with a convertible note, try to put as many of them together so that they come in as the same group, the same closing. You don't want to have multiple closings because multiple closings can have different terms. And the different terms are really what gets you when you try to convert that at a named valuation or a named round. I would say find somebody you really like to work with as your first investor. Probably more important than valuation, structure of it. Just if you find somebody, a good board member, a good person to invest with. Good advisor. A good advisor. That is like the most important thing. Thank you. Our first seed investor is actually Jonathan, the executive director of the foundation. So unfortunately, we're out of time, 510. And I want to thank Jesse and Chris and Ken and Joe. You guys have been great. Really appreciate you being here and being candid and authentic. That's great. Awesome. Thank you.