 Welcome back to the Career Hacking Village. Many of us think, do I really want to go work for somebody else? Do I want to report into an employer? Maybe I really want to start off on my own. So we're very happy that one of our own who has done a phenomenal job starting his own company wanted to share with us sort of the back end of what it's all about. So Bryson, share with us what it is about starting your own company. Welcome to Entrepreneurial Adventures, starting your own company. Kathleen, I'm going to correct you on one thing you said. Done a phenomenal job. All I can say is I've been doing this for eight years and I've started three different companies. I gave a keynote at a college a few years ago and we were talking about entrepreneurialism and somebody asked me, well, what's the metric of success? Like how do you know you're successful? And I was like, I have no idea how to measure that. Every day that we get to continue to make payroll and the company stays alive is how I see success. So I don't know if it's been phenomenal, but I do appreciate the opportunity to continue to pursue the ideas and the passion with all of the great folks that I work with and the fact that our companies have done so much for the community. All right, so I got a tweet that I wanted to include from Mark and it was a great quote. An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off of a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down. I guess the definition of success here is you don't crash. So who am I? I'm the guy who dresses up like a unicorn. So I founded Grimm eight years ago while serving a large client. They gave the initial spark for the idea that became Scythe, spun Scythe out and that's now my full-time job. I co-founded the non-profit, the ICS Village and I'm a senior fellow at the R Street Institute as well as the National Security Institute for National Security and Cybersecurity. So I've experienced with the non-profit, a services company and a product company. All right, this is me. I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. I'm not even one of the best entrepreneurs out there. I just want to really highlight this one. So besides my two dogs, that golden couch there is where I sat on day one, eight years ago when I started gramming, went, okay, so I've gone the big adventure, now what? That's where it all began. So starting with, why do you want to do this to yourself? Asterix. The reason we have so many people here on the screen is that it takes more than you to start a company. Your friends, your family, all of them are going to be a part of this journey for better or worse. And so when you're thinking about that question of, why do I want to start this company, you need to think through, why do we want to start this? The startup curve. When you actually finally take that leap, it's the honeymoon period. It's jumping into the great unknown and it is so great and it is wonderful for as long as it lasts. In my experience, it took about three to six months before that reality sets in and then you're down in the, okay, what have I really gotten myself into? For the first two to three years of a company, you will find yourself every single month being confronted with some insurmountable challenge, some existential threat to your ability to continue to go and you'll make your way through it. And at some point, you'll hit that point where things start to click, things start to work. Those crises don't keep happening. And at some point then, people start to know who you are and they start to come to you for that solution and it takes off. So to be an entrepreneur, I believe requires only two primary skills. Passion and tolerance for bullshit. You don't need to be the smartest. Look at me. What you do need is a passion for an idea that each day that you're not doing that idea, it hurts you. It's just like, there's an itch that this idea needs to get out there into the world. And when you're in charge, you are in charge. You are the CEO and you're the janitor. Nobody else is going to clean up. Nobody else is gonna pick up everything. The buck literally stops with you. And so that tolerance for bullshit is you need that patience and the wherewithal that each day you're getting up, you're going at it and you're doing whatever needs to be done which are gonna be some really glamorous things of the high points and some not so glamorous administrative, HR, state registration, all of the litany of things that need to be done because nobody else is there to do them. That's your job. So you don't need to be the smartest. You do need to have something that you believe in. Do not do this for the money because that's one of the big jokes is starting your own company is one of the fastest ways to lose money. So what is the idea? The ideation phase, all right. First of all, if you've got an idea, talk to people. Then talk to some more people. Have them introduce you to even more people and talk to those people. And by talking, I mean, listen. So a lot of folks get so afraid to share their idea. They're like, hey, I don't want somebody else to steal my idea. Personally, if somebody else can do what I'm doing better than me, I am happy for them to do it because I shouldn't be doing it. But people are afraid. People are scared that if I give somebody something they're going to take it away from me. You have to kind of get out of that because you're going to find that if your idea is really that good, most people can't execute it. There's a great phrase. And I think it's usually attributed to Ben Franklin even though he probably didn't say it, which is that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. The execution, the follow through, the day in, the day out of doing that makes the difference. And then again, you, the entrepreneur, it's your network. It's who you talk to. It's them being willing to help you. And I can speak for personal experience. When I first started my own company, I came out of a very small, closeted world in the intelligence community. I didn't have really a lot of contacts in the civilian world. And it took me a while to figure out how important that was. And as I started building those relationships by asking and asking for help, people want to help you, let them. The best technology doesn't win. So the idea here is that we're looking for this concept of a value proposition. By talking to lots of folks, we figure out how to explain our idea, how to shape the idea. And more importantly, why would someone buy this idea? That's the value proposition. It's a very short, this is what we do, that makes us money. And then the expression of that idea that comes into code, into practice, that is the minimum level of features that somebody would buy it is the minimum viable product. So products versus services. This is important because we need to understand the economic model of what's underpinning our idea. If we're a services organization, we're gonna grow organically. We're going to have people one hour of a person's effort equals one hour of pay. Products have the allure of one hour of effort is worth whatever somebody's willing to pay for that. That multiple is why you see those kinds of acquisitions that seem very exciting where people pay a lot of money for a product. You don't get those same kinds of multiples on services because people don't scale. When I started Grim, I had folks in the private equity and VC community coming to me and they would be like, well, what's your business model? And I would explain, well, we hire the best team of hackers. And I emphasize that the team because hacking really is a team sport these days. You can't just have the single prima donna who can make everything happen. It needs to be the best team. And they're like, all right, well, that sounds great. How are you gonna grow that? I was like, well, as much as we can continue to find the best team that we can fit that with. I'm like, well, that doesn't scale. No, it doesn't. Unless you're going to give up on that idea and try to figure out some other way of like commodity people which is really the pyramid of I have some expensive people and then I just hire lots of cheap labor. And even then you're still scaling by person and the money that they're making is still one hour of work for one hour of pay. So you wanna do this. First thing, incorporate. You need to establish a legal structure. So the different kinds of structures are limited liability corporation and S corporation or a C corporation. To start with the simplest one is a limited liability corporation which is just providing you the legal protections so that you as an individual have legal protection and coverage for doing work. Check the name availability. The IRS and States have the ability for you to look up the names that already exist. There are also ways that you can use names that don't necessarily have collision. Like I used an acronym to start Grim, SMFS to keep this PG rated. I will not share what that stands for but use your imagination. And then we use Grim as the doing business as. So that's the trade name that actually ties to our logo and what we're doing just like Scythe. With the IRS then you need to go and register for an employee identification number. So you go to the IRS website you request an employee identification number. They come back to you. That's basically the social security number for you. Why does the IRS want it? Because they want their taxes. They want you to pay the money. When you make money, they want it. Then at the state level you need to create a local registration for each state that you're doing business in. If you have an employee in that state you have to register in that state. If you sell in that state you'll have to register in that state. I'm not gonna go into the light of the details but the clever states to register in are one of the most well-known which is Delaware and they are the paragon for the ease of use and simple business friendly laws. A couple of others that are variations of that that are also well-known are Nevada and Wyoming. As always, I'm not a lawyer. So make your own choice. And then a lot of places you also need to register down at the county government. While you're doing this, I also recommend that you register with the US government for procurement purposes. So this is not the US government. This is not the side of the US government that wants to take money. This is the side of the US government that helps you get money. And so the two ways to do that are with the SAM system. I think that's just SAM.gov. Register for a cage code and then done in Bradstreet will give you same thing. Register and you'll get a DUNS number. They're free, doesn't cost anything. It's actually fairly easy to do. And that just sets you up in place that if you ever need to do any kind of that stuff and there are a lot of commercial companies that also will sometimes request a cage or a DUNS number, you're already set up and you don't have to worry about it again. So starting with your best friend forever. This is of course a common challenge. Business never goes as planned and you can destroy a lot of relationships and friendships by doing that. So starting with be clear on what are the roles? What are the expectations? One common mistake that a lot of people make is they immediately set the percentages of equity at the start. You don't necessarily have to do that. So for example, you might decide, hey, we're gonna start this business and after the end of a year, we're gonna look and see what's happened and then maybe that's when we'll assign what the equity percentages should be. And the advantage for doing that is that you can actually make it fair. Maybe somebody started off and then for whatever reason, decided to go do something else. You're not now still tied to that person with them owning a percentage of the company because it's not even a financial question. It can also be a question of control. Equity decides who gets to make the decisions in the company. So what if things change? What does success look like? That's something where that question where I got asked at the college keynote, what does your success look like? And I was just like, well, I keep going. I don't have some measure success for what I'm doing for any of these companies other than particularly with Scythe. I just have a particular idea that I think really can help the industry and I wanna see that get out there. Now that's not to say that money is not important. Money is the lifeblood of a company, especially if you have employees. Employees, you don't put food on the plate with ideas. You put food on the plate with money. And so making sure that with your friend you both have those ideas of expectations, who does what, what's the compensation gonna be? And then what are you trying to accomplish and what does that success look like? To raise or not to raise, that is the question. So let's start with the easy one. Starting a services company, probably not. You're growing by people as you make more money, you hire more people and you grow organically. Very little reason and very few investors that will invest in a services company. As with everything, there are no absolutes, but just as a general, probably not a good idea. Products, you probably are going to look to raise at some point because there's going to be some element of speed to market to expertise. So my own personal example, I had a consultancy Grim. Grim generates a good amount of cash. We used that money to invest in incubating the idea of Scythe for a couple of years and doing R&D with the Fortune 50 client that we were working with. And then I realized, okay, I want to take this software to market. I know absolutely nothing about commercial software and how to go to market. And so it wasn't the money that was important to me for the investors, but it was finding the right investors who could help provide me that expertise and experience so that I didn't learn some costly lessons that might kill the idea and successfully bring it together. So you're not just looking at it from a money perspective, you're also looking at it, what do they bring to the table? I wanted to call out Harounmir had a great video on Bootstrapping Ego and really looking at that perspective. Again, where we talked earlier on the BFF slide about control with equity, you're constantly in this balance because as you bring other people in, and of course they bring and buy their money in, what they're buying is part of the company. That equity in that company represents control. And so there's this balance of how much control do I want to give up for other folks, balancing that with the potential that that capital can be used to really grow us. So I highly recommend checking out this video by Harounm to go in more detail. So the types of investors, all investors are not created equal. So the venture capital types are, there's funds and there's private equity. So these are the big institutions. And the biggest thing that I would say is if you are looking at raising, it takes some time to start to learn what the different types are. And particularly at the seed round, they're not a lot of investors who actually invest small amounts at that level. Because it's a different time commitment for them. It's a different amount of risk. And they typically have very large funds where them writing a $500,000 check is almost a waste of time for them because they need to write really big checks to get the funds that are sitting there out. Save yourself the time and ask up front what they do. What kinds of check sizes do they write? What rounds do they typically come in? Because you're going to find that there are a lot of later stage investors who want to chew up your time early and you don't, they're not going to give you money. Angels are smaller investors. They typically are writing check sizes of 25K to $100,000. Sometimes more, sometimes less, that's just a range. These are typically folks who have been successful. Typically they were entrepreneurs. They want to continue to keep their hands in supporting other entrepreneurs in the industry. They're going to be very friendly and supportive. There's always friends and family. Friends and family are a good way to get started. Then there's this other sort of side concept called incubators, where what they'll do is it's typically a program that provides you office space. Pre-COVID office space used to be a thing. Now that it's not a thing anymore, I don't know what incubators do other than perhaps they connect you to online seminars where they'll introduce you to different executives that might be in an industry that's a potential buyer. They'll introduce you to other VCs and investors and they'll introduce you to other entrepreneurs. And then finally, again, the government has a small business innovation fund called CIVR, the link is here. And different elements of government will put out different proposals. So if your technology or your idea matches one of those potential areas of interest, this is free money. They don't take equity with this. It comes in phases. So phase one is typically, I think like 150 to 150,000, excuse me, phase two can be 150 to 250,000 and then phase three where they're trying to help push and scale into the government as well as commercialization. You're looking at a good half a million, $750,000. And so again, that's like free money. So just something worth considering. All right, so you decided after all this thinking you've got this idea, you're passionate, you wanna do it, you fleshed it out. So you're going to raise, you need a pitch deck. There are five core elements to the pitch deck. One page, what's the problem? One page, how does your solution help with it? You could use a few more pages after that, but if you can't condense in one slide how your solution works, you probably don't have it refined yet. Proof, do you have beta customers? Do you have examples? Tell me what you've got other than that sounds like the greatest thing since sliced bread that tells me that somebody else thinks about it. This is how investors are trying to fit. Is this just a great idea in somebody's, in the proverbial engineer's garage? Or is this something that other people are gonna believe in? Funding, how much do you want? This took me a while to get around that, was like, well, wait a second, I'm supposed to actually say how much money I want to actually do this. I just got so carried up in the selling, I forgot I needed to actually say how much money do I want from you? And then what am I going to do with that? And then your vision, what does that look like? The schedule, the milestones, when will we get to a minimum viable product? What does that look like? Now, a lot of people get caught up on this part because investors might ask for, hey, tell me the potential addressable market, which we'll talk about shortly. They might say, hey, how am I supposed to know how much money we're making in two years? They're not looking for you to tell them a correct number. What they are looking for is your thinking. How did you get there? Does that make sense? Is it logical? So they're really just trying to get a better understanding of going inside your head. At the end of this presentation, I have numerous lists of wisdom from different entrepreneurs. This part includes Rangula as well and a link to more details on how to put together your pitch deck. And again, don't be afraid to share your pitch deck. I've had numerous folks send me examples of their pitch decks. I have shared my pitch deck, which I have spent two years refining through different versions as I've continued to learn what the hell I've built and what the hell our team has built. And I don't know if that, whenever it goes away, if you ever figure out exactly what you've built in completion, maybe once you're Apple, you have to get that out. Even then, it seems like they're still coming up with new things. So the process. All right, so first caveat. Everything SysHat white male founders tell you probably will not work if you're not in that group. I am a SysHat white male founder. So the point here, and my good friend Katie provided this quote here is the raise process is a very insular community. I can speak as to one bias that I personally experienced, which is the West Coast bias. A lot of VCs, a large portion of the money are on the West Coast. Now that has been shifting and there have been numerous centers of additional innovation and investment outside of it, but it is the main draw. And numerous West Coast investors that I talked to, the first question they would ask me because I'm on the East Coast is, so when are you moving to the Valley? I'm like, well, I'm not moving to the Valley. I'm going to stay at the East Coast. And that was a non-starter. Then there's a challenge which we see in infosecond IT in general, which is the tech pros. The, hey, I'm in tech, I'm a guy and there's an inherent bias about anybody who doesn't fit in a certain way that they look. And then of course the challenge here is because the community is so insular with the investments, it is based on relationships, but you're stuck in this chicken and this egg of how do you build those relationships? And so this is an area where again, having built that network can help you crack it, but Katie sums it up really well. This is a very insular community and you're going to hear a lot of advice from the Ted style talks of like, well, this is how you do it. And a lot of it won't apply because that privilege doesn't automatically just confer. So capital, all right. Taking capital, getting an investment is like getting married. You can have the prenuptial, which is a convertible note or straight equity. So there's really two different ways that we're doing this. One convertible note is almost like a loan under set circumstances that once a round is finalized at some point in the future, the money that they invested converts into that equity in that future. And then of course, there's just the straight equity, which is I'm buying this amount, I'm giving this amount, I get this amount. I think it is an apt metaphor to talk about this like marriage. Whoever you're jumping into bed with as a part of your company, they're going to be there for a long time. And if it goes poorly, it's going to be very, very messy. So think very carefully, do not get caught up so much in the money assigned to a name and really think through who and why you wanna work with the various folks that you're bringing into your idea. Some of these folks who are the major investors are probably gonna want to have formal influence through your board. And there's really two formal roles there. One is a director, which means that they get a formal vote as a part of board assigned to the amount of their control, which we've talked about. And then observers where they don't have a formal vote, but they are allowed to be and to talk at the board meetings. And then there could be other kinds of folks on the board, like some people bring in independence, some people bring in folks that represent that are independent that represent different potential customer types for the industry. But that board is going to be the captaincy that provides the advice for execution. So this is probably the biggest thing that I've seen a lot of founders and CEOs struggle with is in most places, you do not work for the board. The board works for and with you. They're there at the end of the day, they have their meeting, they say their things. It's the CEO who's responsible for going and executing that and making sure that that actually happens. And yes, they're accountable to the board, but don't get lost in the fact that the board is there to help you, not just tell you what to do. So addressable market. Addressable market is really, really, really, really, really, really hard to do. Like I said, it's more around the thinking. The best way to do an addressable market buildup is saying, okay, I think there are these kinds of customers. So I have a blue unicorn, a red unicorn, and a purple unicorn who represent different kinds of customers. And they're willing to pay roughly this amount or this amount and this amount. And I think there's this many of them. This is the preferred way to try to build up an addressable market as opposed to vulnerability management, it's a $4 billion market. I think I can get 10% of it. Therefore, my addressable market is $400 million. And that's not going to cut it. They want to see you understanding, hey, I think that I can charge this kind of customer this amount, and I think there are this many of them, this many of them, and this many of them. And then put that together and now you can show all of your thinking. Like I said, they're not looking for the correct answer because they don't know. This isn't a test, you're not being graded. It's really how believable is it and does it make sense? Is that something that somebody could see playing out as you execute? That's how you get your overall addressable market. So economics, a person does not cost a person. Most people think of what a person costs or in this case, a unicorn. I love my unicorn references. And it's not just the salary that makes up what a person costs, whoop, going the wrong way. So hourly salary is the base cost. And then on top of that, you have multiple elements. Fringe, general administration, and overhead. So fringe is benefits. Health insurance, holidays, paid time off. What are the different kinds of benefits that are 401k match that are offered to an employee? Then you have the back office element. So there's two elements of back office. General and administration is like headquarters. What does it cost to administer the overall company? Overhead are specific project costs. So in a product company, you're probably not gonna have specific project costs, but in a consulting company or a services-based consulting company, you might have specific client costs that you need to have, and those roll up, and that gives you this multiple. So on average, you're gonna see a multiple of an employee costing anywhere from about 1.3 times their salary, up to the low to mid two. So up to about 2.5 for a very high-end expensive company. Hiring, hey, you know people, right? And that's typically where you start, is in the very beginning, when you're looking for those first hires, you're probably gonna be looking at friends in your network. One of the challenges that come with hiring, and when a company is small, is the mistake that folks make around rank. Chances are the person that you hire to be in charge of sales, or engineering, or business partnership. They're probably not going to be the same person that's in that role, if you do become very successful. The difference between running a company in sales for a company that's small and 10 people, that job changes when it's 500 people. Their ability to grow with that becomes challenging, and that rank can make it difficult for them to grow into that. So that's something where in the very beginning, try to punt that as much as possible. The real big part on this, of course, is incentive. What are the different kinds of incentives that I can offer for this? I remember when I first started Graham, and we were three people, and I was looking to hire engineers, and one of them was just like, well, how much of the company I'm getting? I was like, I mean, we've been in business now for a year and a half, or a year, or whatever it was, and you're not bringing anything to the table. You have a salary and all of the benefits. You've put no blood, sweat, and tears in this, and fundamentally you're not gonna help grow the company. Equity really wants to be tied to serious growth. Now what I've done is so I want everybody to feel like they're a part of it is, hey, maybe you're not getting significant equity, but we are going to align everybody by giving out, all employees are gonna have options in the company, which ties to equity. So what an option is, is a way to be a non-taxable event, again, not an accountant, not a lawyer, but the phrasing here is important, because if I give you direct equity, which is worth something of value, that's a taxable event immediately. If I give you options, which are essentially saying, hey, today's price for what we're valuing this at, the company's gonna grow, you get to benefit off of that delta, that's what an option does for you, so that as the company grows in value, you have an option to take advantage of that growth. And then finally, of course, is the bonus, which you wanna make sure is clear on that. Keeping in mind, particularly as a young company, bonuses can be very challenging, because you need that cash in the beginning to grow, because cash is king, cash is king or queen, cash is royalty, we're gonna be correct. So we talked about benefits. One thing that I'll throw out there to help make your life easier, I'm not necessarily advocating for it, I've never used them, is the PEO, the professional employer organization. So there are companies out there that what they do is effectively you and your employees become an employee of their company. And you benefit from the scale of all of those employees to provide savings back that you're paying for. So they provide all of the benefits and the health insurance and the 401k, they'll do the HR stuff, and you pay for that, but it costs you less than it would to go and get it on your own, is the theory. So just another option on how to do benefits easily. Otherwise, like we talked about earlier with tolerance for bullshit, you will have to go and learn all of this yourself. I personally went and I learned more about health insurance and I ever thought I would know in my entire life. And that's the way it goes, if that's what you wanna do. Back office, other considerations for back office, support for contracts. Most folks are not experts in reading through terms and conditions. You are going to get lots of terms and conditions because any customer is going to have a formal element there. Legal, you need to get counsel. We talked before, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. You will want counsel to help with some of these elements. As you grow, human resources will become more important because in the very beginning, everything's very simple. You don't really even need policies probably. At some point, I promise you, somebody will do something dumb, you will get to that scale. That's where you really need to preempt those with having human resources and policy to get ahead of that. Payroll, people need to be paid regularly. You cannot screw that up. Somebody should be doing your payroll. Accounting, accounting is critical because this is the system of record. If money is the lifeblood of the company, accounting is what tracks where all of that money is going and keeps you out of hot water when the IRS comes knocking and saying, hey, we think you paid this amount. You owe us this much. And then finally, business insurance. You are going to need to have various kinds of business insurance. Anything from general liability to errors and omissions if you're doing professional consulting, different kinds of property insurance. What I would recommend is that first contract that you get from a customer is going to stipulate exactly what amounts of insurance you need to have. You will have enough time between getting that first copy and having to sign it and execute it to go and get insurance from somebody specifically to those amounts. So just me providing like a little cheat there. They'll tell you what to get. Go get it when you need to get it. You don't have to pay for it in advance. The actual office itself. So now that COVID completely is a thing and nobody knows what an office is anymore, the remote work from home element is much more common. Really pay attention to the culture and the scale to do that. In the old days, getting space was something a lot of people rushed out to go do. Like I need a place to hang my shingle because I don't feel like a real business until I do that. I think that the pandemic has helped make folks don't feel obligated to do that anymore, but it is a consideration if you want. And of course, we talked about incubators as an option, but there's also dedicated, of course, now shared workspaces, depending on what you wanna do. And then on top of that, of course, is where do you wanna put your equipment? What are you doing for storage and tracking different assets? Intellectual property. So intellectual property is how you formalize what's valuable inside your company. Most obvious that everybody knows about are patents. A patent is where you go and with a lawyer, file for disclosing what the idea is and there's different kinds of patents. I won't go into the details there. And then there's this concept of trade secrets, which are, hey, I'm doing something that's proprietary to me and by not disclosing it, it's essentially my own IP, not as well protected though as a patent where you formally identify that. And then two other elements, which are trademarks and copyright. Trademarks are, I have a particular image like the Scythe logo is trademarked. So that somebody can't come and work off of that. And then a copyright is anything, any written work that you publish is yours. Somebody can't take it and just do whatever with it, claim it as their own. Talk to the lawyer, they're usually not this good looking. How to get clients? So we are running out of time, so I'm gonna try to speed through these. Go-to-market is this concept of, once I've built an idea, how do I take it and scale that across being able to sell it? Acquisition though is what we're just looking at, like how do we go and get those clients? And again, this is where your network comes in handy. They will introduce you to potential clients. They will introduce you to prospects. We're like, hey, yeah, I'm willing to try that out. One of the most interesting things I didn't really understand until I became a software vendor because everybody picks on the vendors, right? Oh, vendors are like this and vendors are like that. At least they have good swag. And I love the free booze at the parties. Like that's all vendors good for. Is there a lot of folks who understand, particularly in the Infosec community? We in Infosec don't really solve problems, right? We solve pieces of it, which clients then build out to a defense in depth measure. And there are a lot of clients who understand that they need to invest or they want to invest and being early adopters on what's the next technology because they believe that it can help make everything better for everybody else. We talked about contracts. The tissue paper of contracts is what's called the non-disclosure agreement. This should be a very simple document. The good news is when you're starting out, most of your clients will already have all of this paperwork for you. And so you can just follow along with that. The contract for the work itself, being very explicit with expectations, the period of performance. And then of course, how and when do you get paid? One of the things that was the hardest part around doing a business is I thought that getting the work was the hard part. Doing the work was easy because we're an expert. We know what we're doing. I didn't realize the hardest part is getting paid. Clients do not pay on time. Clients, you have to chase them. You have to focus on getting paid. A lot harder than it sounds. In conclusion, every month, you will face a random existential crisis that no amount of planning can prepare you for. You'll get past it. You will survive. And at some point, they stop happening. And you're not alone in doing it. Wanted to throw out some resources here. There's a security founders slack. There's a future founders channel for those who are interested in getting started but aren't quite there. Some recommendations that I have that for ones that have done well for me. Gusto providing all the payroll and benefits administration. Pilot is easy and cheap accounting. The challenge there is it doesn't handle a lot of complexity. They only show up monthly. I liked Brex because that was a credit card that I could find that was not tied to my personal credit. Since then, additional credit cards have come out that also do this. So I'll just throw out a handout. I think Stripe also does that now. And I think there's two others. And then any entrepreneur that you know will be happy to help as best as possible. I like to think of being an entrepreneur is like joining an exclusive club where the other requirement is the desire to join because every member will help you. And then I have numerous entrepreneurs here who have provided their advice. So all of that will be available in the slides. And I'm ready to take questions I think. And questions will be in Discord and other venues when we share them with the community. Bryson, this is great. Absolutely wonderful. We might not be able to get to the remainder slides in the YouTube recordings. Yeah, I don't expect that. I'm just gonna make sure that the slides are shared so that everybody can go through them on their own. So where should people find those slides? I will post that in Discord when I figure it out next week when this airs. Sounds great. Just wanna make sure we had a solution provided before we do it. Well, great. That was just absolutely wonderful. I thought you were very methodical about laying it out because there's so many people as we know in the community have a really great idea and they wanna charge out and do it and don't understand that infrastructure and passion and your tolerance for bullshit are really key things that need to happen. Bryson, I know you're really busy. Thanks for all you do for the community and thanks for being part of DEF CON. Take care. Thanks for having me.