Why Bootstrapping Is No Longer a Dirty Word in 2023

8:15PM Sep 20, 2023

Speakers:

Alex Wilhelm

Dom Davis

Erica Jain

Hussein Yahfoufi

Keywords:

bootstrapping

company

raise

investors

money

founder

years

build

part

capital

customers

question

team

business

hire

long term

funds

pay

put

bootstrap

Thank you very much. Welcome back from lunch, everybody. I hope you are excited and well, this time as well. A couple of quick notes. If you haven't been here on the builder stage so far today, we're doing live q&a. There are microphones there and there. So if you have a question in the next panel, write it down, we'll get to you and you can ask it live to the panelists and salts. And if you're not into taking notes, I want to look up from your laptop screen while we are running otter. So we have transcriptions of all the different panels so you can just go back and read whatever you missed or just want to see again, also the speakers from this panel will be in the TechCrunch plus lounge when they're done. And that brings me to what we're talking about next. So a couple of years back, raising venture capital was comparatively easy, and also that bootstrapping as a general concept was looked down upon because people thought it was how you made a lifestyle business. Well, venture capital went away and that bootstrapping is no longer a dirty word. So we're going to learn more about how startups are taking advantage of that and what we should all know about it. So please welcome to the stage. Dominic Davis, your moderator Erica from healthy and Hussein from auto finance.

Hello, hello, thank you, everyone for being here today. So you know, bootstrapping has always been viable, but now it might actually be preferable. Eric and Hussein are here to break that down for us. So starting with Erica and then Hussein, why didn't at first you take venture capital funding.

So I'll go ahead and just start a bit up at the beginning and just tell a little bit about our story. I'm Erika Jayne, co founder and CEO at healthy. We have an HR scheduling and engagement platform for virtual first healthcare. We started in 2016, so about eight years ago, and we actually did take venture funding at the outset and I'll explain, we went through an accelerator program TechStars raised a small seed round thereafter, and then operated profitably for five years. Before taking on another round of funding last year. And so a large part of our story and the key theme that I think is important for today's topic is that bootstrapping isn't necessarily an all or nothing. decision that you make and it's evolving journey over time. And so for us, and I'm happy to get much more into this as we talk today. It's about really thinking through the long term of your business and being in control and being in the driver's seat, as to how you think about the capital journey of your business.

So for me, when I launched money banks, one of the things that was critical for what I was trying to do was to really focus on the product that I was building and build the product where I had the control to come up with what direction I wanted to take it in and which way I wanted to build it. And so, I did end up raising an angel round in which we can talk about the differences of bootstrapping and raising versus not but the goal was to always build a business first and and eventually expand from there.

Yes, and I wanted to follow up with you Erica, so you had you had a pre seed round, and then you went five years without venture capital funding. What was that transition kind of like in terms of not seeking another round?

That is a beautiful period of early company building. Those five years are critical and if I look at so many success stories in, in company building, it's like the 12 year overnight success story that we often read about or hear about, but those early years are when you're talking to customers, you're building your product. I always look at the mind body example of being really really pivotal for us because they waited four years between their seed and Series A, and that's a lot longer than most companies take today. But if you think about it, those are the years where they went in and they understood what the difference is between a yoga studio and a karate studio and they were really able to shape their product to become best in class of what they were doing. And so when I think about it for us, operating profitably is a beautiful thing because you're aligning your incentives with your customers. Customers are keeping the lights on and customers are what and who you are building for. And that means that you are building the best in class products because that is what your survival hinges on. And that is what is so incorporated into our company DNA even as we've scaled substantially over the past few years. And it really comes down to that long term mindset of making sure that you're setting up your business, your team, your processes. your culture, your DNA, and your decision making for the long term. So that you are around for many, many years to come. Did you face

any, like peer pressure during that time to to go back and get another round of VC funding?

I mean, perhaps it's naivete a lot of the times of not really paying attention to the noise of just being so focused on building and wanting to be there for our customers that I've never really been the type of person to care about our look at those vanity metrics, like how much capital someone has raised or from who or what tier or brand of investors because we're just so focused on what we're doing. And we are really working with our seed stage investors as well, because we brought on people and investors that are also those long term thinkers that weren't putting pressure on us to make those types of decisions.

And he said you mentioned that about a difference between bootstrapping and angel investing. So I just want you to talk a little bit more about what that difference is. Sure.

So you know, there's a little bit of misconception out there where people think when you say, I'm a bootstrapper. That means you don't have funding, you don't have any money. You don't have the resources to do what you want to do. And the reality is, bootstrapping just means you have a different kind of funding. Some people go down the credit card path, some people go down to grants angel investments, so for money Max, I had angel investors, but from the get go, we were on the same page on setting expectations of where this company is headed and what our goals are. So you can still raise funding as a bootstrapper. As long as you know, everybody's on the same page on what you're going to do with those funds and what what the future of the company is.

And just to talk about the title of our panel, really quick, why was bootstrapping a dirty word? Like why was there such a stigma around it?

You know, I think it's because there's this idea of, oh, you're bootstrapping because you can't raise funding or you bootstrapping because you don't have the skills to take the company to scale or to profitability or anything like that. And maybe that's where the stigma comes from. But you know, even before the companies that I'm working with now, the company that I worked for, which was called E capital, they were very successful company and the 10s of millions of dollars in revenue. But it was all bootstrapped. Anything to add?

Yeah, I go back to the fundamental premise of, for healthy in particular, we can only make an impact in healthcare if we are alive. And that's a long term forever game. And when I think about terms like bootstrapping, or raising venture, or all of these things, I really just goes back to how do I make sure that our company is going to deliver on its mission and be around in 10 years, and that comes with a long term mindset around capital raise and capital allocation. So when I think about, you know how to raise capital, there's so many different types of capital to raise, how much who to raise from and, and the who you raise from is actually the most important part of this equation. A lot of that requires time, time to build the right relationships with the right investors that are actually going to be on your journey for years and years and years. Time to build out product time to build out your team time to build out and evolve your company's mission. And that takes a long term mentality. So when I think about the short term or early stages of a company, and I'm happy to go into that, and you know some of the challenges that we face, a lot of it comes back to I need to find the right people who are going to believe in our company long term and be there in the trenches with us, so that we are around in five to 10 years in order to deliver on our mission on a bigger scale.

So somewhat on that note, given the current market environment and economic climate for many people, what looks a financing options are best for startup founders looking to have or have capital these days.

Look, it depends on your goals and what you're trying to do. So if you are a company who might be in healthcare, who is able to get some kind of grant from the government, right, those are always great because it's, it doesn't come with any dilution. They don't take any equity in your company and you just get the funds. There are requirements obviously, but that's one option for others. You know, when I raised for my company, the angel investors I chose they were on the same page on you know, I'm not sure if this is going to ever get to a venture scale. We might keep it as a private company and just grow it from there and eventually you can pay dividends. So there's there's multiple options. There's the stories of you know, you're not a founder if you didn't put your whole company payroll on a credit card like that's probably not a good idea. Right. But there's there's good options out there.

I think the number one thing is what you see is options. And I we talked to founders so often and the number one piece of advice is to put yourself in the driver's seat such that you have every option possible and so much of this depends on things like life circumstance, your background and also the company goals. But even if you think about traditional sources of funding, you want to preserve optionality at every stage in the journey, especially the early days because you don't want to end up in a situation later where you are forced to make decisions. That you don't want to make as a founder in the best interest of your customers and your employees.

And that's one thing, bootstrapping does give you right as options as soon as you start going down the VC route, which is also a really good option for most people. You start having less and less options because now you've got the VC pressure with you.

Well, I think that's the real piece of it is we are on the venture track. But we chose to go on the venture track. And that's again going back to optionality of we were in a position when we raised our Series A last year to say okay, great. We've learned from the first six years of our company's history, we are ready and we know the implications of what it means to take on another round of financing and we are ready for the implications of what that means for growth first spend for strategy and still pitch long term mindset investors who are patient investors

and why did you decide to go back to venture funding after five years?

You know, it's possible to decide to go back, have horses, not participate. It's much more about I am here to build a big business. We are here to build a big business and make an impact in healthcare and that is what motivates our team every single day to wake up and work as hard as we can to deliver for our customers. And capital allocation is an important part of that because it allows us to make the hires to make the right investments to make the right platform and infrastructure. decisions that we need to make for scale. But it becomes less of a conversation around like when to reenter or how much to raise or from whom, because we're operating with that genuine long term mindset and we are here for our customers and we're here to make a positive impact in the industry. And what I've also learned is that enterprise grade software, it takes years to build and be the best at no matter how much money you raise. And that's not something that you can build overnight if you you know, raise $100 million and go out and have the best product that still takes years and years and years and years. And that's what we become really good at. And the related point is for our customers, I need to be able to tell them and look them in the eye and say, Look, I am not dependent on my next round of financing to keep the lights on because we offer health care critical business critical software

Yeah, I was actually going to ask when you did decide to go back to VC funding and even in the beginning, when you got your pre seed round, how did you kind of negotiate how much equity you were going to give away in your company?

I think this goes back to being in the driver's seat and being in a position where we were profitable when we raised our Series A and I hadn't been in market in a long time. And when I when we went out to raise, it was very much with the genuine belief of hey, we're gonna go out to market we're gonna see what happens. But if we do not find the right partner that we get along with, if we do not think that the packages or the arrangements or the deals make sense for our company, our customers and our team, then we hold ultimate walkaway power. And I think it was that confidence in that conviction. That ended up being putting making our situation such that we had multiple term sheets we had multiple offers on the table, but it was because we genuinely knew and had that ultimate walkaway power. And I urge every founder in the room to really think about how you can make that a reality and of course, so much of this depends on your exact business, your exact vision for your company, what you want for it, and what your co founders want and what your team wants, but Miss timing that or not having those conversations upfront. can have really negative consequences on your business.

And I want to talk a bit about family and friend rounds because what is the script that you use to approach a family member or friend to say Hey, can you invest in my company, especially if someone might not be familiar with the world of like VC and investment like what is the script that you use? So

you go I've got this idea. It's gonna make you brilliant, right? Look, I think it comes back to again, just being on the same page on this is what I'm building. This is why I'm building it. Here's the problem that I'm seeing out there. Here's why I'm gonna solve this problem. Even though it's family and friends. treat it just like a VC round, right? Like explain what you're doing, why you're doing it, why you're going to solve it and how you're going to make money and then get on the same page on are you ever gonna pay me back right or is this like rich on call and you're never seeing your money again? Or is it you know, I might end up paying dividends at the end of the month. So just as we become profitable, we'll start sending money to everybody that's invested in us, or is it truly we're going to try to end up in a VC world afterwards. So just get on the same page.

And when it comes to those early days of bootstrapping, where people might still be working their nine to five while also building this on the side. How would you like this is a personal finance question, but how much of like their paychecks or, you know, extra capital that they have that you would recommend them putting into the company versus you know, towards life expenses.

So I don't know that there's a percentage, it kind of depends on your hobbies, your family situations. Do you have kids, you not have kids? Are you married those kinds of things? For me, it was I put in the money that I knew that yes, they might impact my retirement plan but it's not going to impact my day to day for me and my kids and my wife, right? So it was money that maybe for somebody else they would die. I don't know if some kind of toy like an ATV or something right? We live in San Diego everybody has an ATV for some reason. But is it something like that where as you grow, just invest the money that you can invest and know that if you lose it, you're not going to lose your house too.

So for us, we started the company as students so my co founder was 18 years old freshman year of college and I was in my mid 20s We did not have a lot of you know, savings or investments that we could have picked, but we had the advantage of being students and that gave us those first crucial four months on campus where this became our extracurricular this became our class project. This became every single day, every single minute of our lives real fast. And my co founder Kevin, he built v one of our platform over Christmas break, and we launched in January of 2016. And very quickly, we realized that there are two types of companies. There are companies that are going to make money day one and there are companies that are not going to make money for years aka like the Facebook and then figure out how to monetize later we realized that we were the day one gonna make money and as a result, hence began our our day of fiscal responsibility and we were like, You know what money and bringing money into the industry. The door is a symbol that we are providing value to our customers because they are willing to pay for our product. And so during those early days, it was very much about you know, dollars was small. I think our first check was $7. And we were like so thrilled about $7 of MRR, but it was the right philosophy and DNA to say we're going to build this we are going to make money from day one and we're going to figure out how to keep the lights on through through revenue.

How did you manage your burn rate in those early days?

So we applied to a lot of on campus grants and rejected from like all of them I think that I got the feedback from like the business school competitions that our decks were way too consultancy because that was my background and they were totally right. And we I you know I didn't pitch very well in those early days especially. So we got rejected. We got like a couple $1,000 from one grant on campus. And that was enough to keep going for the first few months, first couple of months and then we got doorman funds. And so that was the biggest check we had seen to date ever. That gave us the ability to build the MVP. And so those were like the early days of that and this goes back to like the capital intensity of your business. And what you can do that's like very different than a hardware business that just requires a much larger upfront investment.

You know, for me, a lot of what I tried to do is when we needed tools, for example, like marketing automation, we couldn't just go by Salesforce, right or anything big like that, or HubSpot or any of those and what I started doing was going through trying to find deals on like, pay for lifetime licenses, which are usually newer startups. And then we also started applying for things like the AWS startup program, the Microsoft Store, they're like all of the ones that I could apply to, just to get credit so that we can have stripe for free, AWS for free. You know, Azure for free those kinds of things. And so the thinking was, how do I still use the same tools some of the bigger companies were using, but not necessarily have the same price tag. So that was one side of it. And then when it came to engineering costs. For me, it was all about like I had to hire engineers outside of the US that were just cheaper hourly rates.

Yeah, we spoke a little bit about this in our prep call about the responsible ways to use credit cards to build a company so I wanted to kind of talk to you about that. And if you had any advice from experiences in terms of how to properly use lines of credit to scale a company in the early days.

When you tap into a line of credit, you kind of have to remember you're gonna have to pay it back. And when you're a bootstrap company and you're new and nobody knows who you are, you're most likely putting your personal credit on the line too, right? So it's one of these things where you have to approach with caution and think of anything that you pull out of a credit card or a line of credit. That's a loan, you have to pick the payback and it's an investment right? So if I'm pulling 10k How am I going to get this 10k back so I can pay it back? It's not it's not funds are just going to disappear into the ether and you can't file bankruptcy and then not worry about it. Your personal credit is going to get impacted

at that point and both of you look to hire a CFO for your companies.

We have an incredible VP of Finance today. That came in six years into our company. So I think it comes down to but ultimately that timeline is irrelevant for any other company except for our own because it depends on the nature of your business. For daily financially complex companies, you may need a CFO day one and that may be a critical hire for you as part of your path. But for healthy our finances were very well relatively simple and straightforward. Up until we raised our Series A and we just realized there was a level of sophistication that you know, warranted

so for me, I actually exited money banks to our to finance two years into the journey. And so I never got into a full time CFO but I used CFO as a service that handled the financing. Handled accounting, taxes, all those kinds of things. So I can really just focus on the product and my users and not think about, you know, making sure I don't mess up GAAP rules or anything like

that. And Eric, I kind of want to talk to you a little bit more about maybe where you didn't have like any VC funding because what were some what were some more of the perks that you had, without having you know, investors always I don't know to have your back.

The way I view this is that we had a great group of investors that were actually there to help us strategically. They had been around the block had built companies of their own and had seen the common pitfalls and winds of what companies do well, and what companies don't do well. So we were able to leverage their expertise expertise of the networks that we were building amongst other founders. And really just focus on the building part. And that part is so special and fun and hard and challenging and easy and we made so many mistakes along the way. But never once was it a pressure I put enough pressure on myself to succeed. I don't need more pressure. What I need is time the ability to work with my team and the ability to learn from my customers and build for my customers. And that's the value of this term bootstrapping and what you know, I think the term bootstrapping is fine, but it really just comes down to long term mindset and long term thinking. And I'll tell you, we do well today and we have an incredible product because we've been building for so many years swatching our customer so closely listening to them and really making sure that we were delivering value because if we don't deliver value, they don't pay they turn and that's how you continuously get better and better and better.

And what was the relationship or how was the relationship different, I guess for you and your angel investors versus traditional VCs? Yeah.

So with the angel investors, you know, from the beginning, we had the conversations of I wasn't sure if this company was going to end up becoming venture backed, right? And if I'm going to pivot into that direction, or if I'm going to keep it as a private business, and so we had a very good understanding of what am I trying to do, what am I trying to build? What's the future of this company? We did have with? I had two different groups of angel investors and I would we'd meet with them once a month. Tell them exactly what was going on, where we're heading, what the plans are, etc. So even though we didn't have a formal board, and they weren't technically they didn't have any voting rights or anything like that, I kind of made them feel as they're part of the business part of the you know, who's working on building this company. And so, I, you know, I feel like we were on the same page from day one. When you go down the VC route, it does become a little bit more formal, right where you have board meetings you have expectations, they grill you on your goals, they grill you on what you're saying you're going to do and not do they tell you what you should do and those kinds of things. So it's a very different dynamic.

But that depends on the investors

depends on the investor. Sure. Yeah.

And aside from the family and friends, how did you go about initially meeting your angel investors?

So one of them was after I got actually coverage on TechCrunch with Marianne Yurok Marianne, I know she's not here and fintech team at TechCrunch. But once I got the coverage here, it was inbound from him, where he said, I saw your TechCrunch you know, can we need, I'm interested in what you're doing. And then the other one was through a networking group. It was a co founder group on Facebook, and I was posting on what I was doing and we had a meeting so it's very, you know, inbound, is how it happened.

Oh, wow. And when you decided to jump back into the VC game, how did you go about doing due diligence on the investors that you really wanted to work with?

Okay, that's a great question. Going back to you want to be in the driver's seat. One of the most important decisions you're going to make is who you end up taking capital from, especially if it's going to be your lead investors. And I think gone are the heydays of 2021. Or maybe they're coming back or maybe they're still there. It's not a one time mine and then no more. This is a long term relationship with an individual or a fund or a group of investors that you want to make sure you are getting to know very genuinely. And so for us, it was the same mentality of hustle, but it's talking to other founders. It's hearing about their reputation. It's doing the back channel references and asking them the really hard questions. One of our investors literally said, Here's my portfolio. Here are two companies I want you to speak with who have done really well and more part of my portfolio, and here are two references with whom the company didn't work out. But we're still friends because I want you to know how our fund reacts and how we approach it when times are not good. And I think the fact in itself that that investor said hey, here are two companies of which, you know, they didn't didn't do well, but you know, we were there in our portfolio is a indicative of who they are as people are not trying to hide things and be indicative that they were going to be good partners to us in good times and bad, because no journey is up into the right all the time. And that's just the reality of business. So the diligence piece is so so important, and I cannot stress enough how important it is to find the right investors for your business.

You know, I think everything you're saying is spot on. And just remember that when you get a check whether it's an angel, a friend and family or even a VC, it comes with requirements right? The end just be careful of just taking in any money you can because it used to be in the patent in the old days. They used to say if you're getting VC who wants to invest in human electric any paycheck, you can take and just cash it and don't do that right like just be careful of which investor you're you're bringing on and what they're expecting of you for that.

And thinking of people who are bootstrapping. Is there any is there a city where it's best to bootstrap and think because the cost of living is really really high in some places? Is it better to like Bootstrap in the middle of Georgia than it is in I don't know SF than New York, San Diego, people

go to San Diego. I think it's I don't know if it's necessarily the city. It's more than lifestyle. Right. So, I mean, I was in a position where I bootstrapped to where I was an executive at a FinTech in San Diego. So I was pretty privileged in that I could afford to put in money that I wasn't going to spend elsewhere and things like that. But I would say it's about your cost of living and your priority. So if you're younger, you know, maybe having roommates maybe you know, not having a car or things like that, like those ways where you can lower your cost of living to be able to to pull it off. Being even though San Diego is not the center, it's not like up here. There's a lot of founders, there's a lot of people working on startups working on tech, so you kind of need that community. So being in the middle of nowhere in trying to do your startup might be a little bit hard.

We started the company in Philadelphia, we moved to New York during our TechStars program, and we're headquartered in New York. We still are. That being said we're remote first and we have employees in over a dozen states today. And that to me goes back to in a remote first environment. It's all about your culture. It's all about how you think about making decisions. It's all about how you think about onboarding and training your team. And it's remote first. So geography is independent of that. But that's why a lot of us it's just like the operating principles by which you start day one and evolve and make sure that you evolve carefully over time as you scale.

Yes. And I also just wanna remind people that we are doing audience q&a. So if you want to line up by the microphones for any questions you might have, I will take them Okay, so now that's it away. What is the biggest what is like a financial the biggest financial lesson you've learned throughout running and operating your businesses? And I'm talking about like, like a financial failure that taught you a lesson.

I mean, in our seed, round, we probably wasted most of our seed money. We made so many mistakes. We hired the wrong people. We spent so much money on like Google ads and Facebook ads and we thought, you know, we were doing all of the right things. I look back on that period and say, wow, we really messed up. And we were given the benefit of being able to rebuild from that experience. By going back to no journey is always up into the right. We are in a really lucky and incredible position today. But that has not always been the case. And we have blundered money. But given the benefit of being able to learn and that's the part where, you know, you only learn this through experience. No amount of business school is going to teach you the importance of fiscal independence and responsibility. But we wasted so much money early on and you just learn those lessons over time and I think that's really a testament to the fact that we've learned from our mistakes. We try not to make the same mistake twice. And our team today knows and operates with fiscal responsibility even as we're scaling very quickly, because of what we've learned over the seven and a half years of our company's existence.

For me, I would say you know, as a product builder, it's very easy to just do the fun things, which is keep building add new features, fix that little bug and things like that, and it's launching too late, right? So I think, financially. I could have launched a lot earlier even though when I launched I said this is not ready for primetime, but I'm gonna do it anyways. Just remember that once you launch, that's when the journey begins. And that's when you start getting real feedback from real users and hopefully paying members. And so just launch, do it and you'll be you'll be good.

on that. Note that is totally correct. If you're building in tech, your MVP is actually the easiest build you were ever go through. It's all the stuff that comes after that. It's the platform, the data infrastructure, the DevOps, the tooling, it's the V one of features are easy, it's easy to get to 85% but going from 85% to 99%. That takes years that takes refinement that takes money that takes strategy that takes hiring the best designers and the best product people in the world to become the best. That's when the real fun part but that's not easy

and we have some audience questions.

Yes. Well, I'm just about to race I run a legal tech platform called graphic and I'm a bootstrapper as well. And well thank you for your insight are really really good because I feel so related to it. One of the questions that I have is you're bootstrapping company. And so if you decided to go and ask for money for funding, raise funds, what are the things that you consider for for asking the money like? I have this question in my mind that what will be the valuation of the company and what are the parts of that you rely on your insight or in your mind to consider putting in the money like, like, I don't know, like those side effects that will bring to have this external money? You're a company?

I think that's a great question. And it goes back to this fundamental premise of bootstrapping does not mean you're not going to raise external capital. I really view this as the concept of really thinking long term and having control over the capital allocation of your company over time and being in the driver's seat of when and how and from whom you are going to raise capital. So when you think about, you know, going out to raise capital you are doing so from a genuine position of strength. And that has really good implications for you as a founder and for your team. And when you think about going out to market, you can be very, very genuine and open and say, Look, this is my genuine vision for the company. We believe in this we're doing this and we are looking for really good people who are going to be good partners to us long term. Take the time to develop those relationships. I think gone are the days of this 24 hour term sheet and start to think about who's going to be your strategic partner as you go upon this mission. And things like valuation, all of that will sort itself out over time. Because I think you were actually looking for good operating partners that can help you as you're going about your journey.

You know, the only thing I would add is if you once you're raising if you're trying to figure out okay, I bring in this money and where this money is going to be allocated you should know that answer ahead of time have, I'm going to raise 750k Because I'm going to do ABC with this money, right and that's part of your own planning on knowing what are you doing and why. And VCs are going to ask you this question, right? They're gonna want to know what what are you doing with those funds? I would just add that

exactly and be truthful. And your answer is because once you take on capital, you want to know how you're going to deploy that capital. Otherwise, you're just sitting there with really expensive dilution on your balance sheet. And there's no need for that. Thank you.

Okay, both of your stories are extremely inspirational for a bootstrap founder. So my question is particularly to do with attracting early talent when you're bootstrapping. How did you guys manage to hire the first two guys in your team?

We I one of the stats that I'm most proud of is how many of our earliest team members are still with us today. We have team members that are have been unhealthy for seven years, seven years, seven years, six years, five years five years, right? And a lot of that just is so aggressive against the grain of traditional careers and job hopping. And a part of it is luck in meeting the right people during those earliest stages of the company. And I think a large part of that comes down to culture of how you build and how you think about treating other people and I think about giving people personal and professional opportunities that they are really excited about finding people that are really aligned with the mission and vision of what you're building and setting them up for long term success. So there's no clear cut answer. And I know that, you know, if you're bootstrapping, you don't have revenue. You're like every dollar counts. It's really, really hard to find those people. But I think that's part of the magic of the earliest days.

The only thing to add is when I initially started I actually focused on contractors because I couldn't afford full time employees from the site. And it was very quick, right? I mean, you you'll hear the term you hire slow and fire fast. And so these were contractors and the ones that stuck with me the longest were basically they were the leaders of the pack. Right. Thank you.

I think thank you for the conversation today. Actually, my question relates to the gentleman question. What do you think about nearshoring hiring? That is something we practice in my company, if we had a very good experience, but I wanted to hear your ideas, that the advantages the disadvantages of doing so.

Is and disadvantages of near

shore shore nearshoring so I can speak to this one a little bit. It's so the question is about hiring engineers usually, that are near shore. So most likely Latin America. I think it's a great idea, right? Especially now with a remote first company like the one you have where everybody's dispersed anyways. So they don't have to be here. But I would say to another thing Eric, mentioned in the beginning, culture becomes really important, right? If you're trying to build a business, you want to make sure as you're bringing on these employees, even if they're in Brazil or Argentina or anywhere like that. They have to be on the same page. They have to follow your culture. They have to join your company and be part of the group versus just some engineer that's pulling linear bugs and working on them right.

Hi, all my name is Jess, I'm a MBA student at Stanford right now and looking to found a company I really glad, Erica, that you talked about the student founders journey. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how best to take advantage of that time and that personal runway you have while you're still a student.

Absolutely. Being a student and starting a company It's actually amazing because you have time. And you actually also have no fear because you kind of know that you can find a job if you need to. And you can just always do recruiting and it's going to be okay. And so that fearlessness is actually part of what I think it takes to dive in and start something because it's a highly irrational thing to start a company. I did not start the company thinking I was going to be a founder I actually was just like walking into a business area realize that nutritional care and coaching was just highly overlooked in health care. And that was the ripple effect to say well, okay, how can more nutritional care and coaching gets delivered in health care to solve chronic disease and diabetes? Okay, wait, you talk to these based professionals and then you realize that they don't have technology that they need to even deliver the care that they needed. So then began the the days of building out the platform, and then began the days of, okay, great. I know nothing about starting and running a company, I gotta become an expert in this, you're not going to learn that in business school, you're gonna learn that by doing it. And being on campus gives you that ability to just learn really, really fast and remember, you know, looking at the simple stuff and be like, Well, how do I incorporate a company and that became a thing or how do I think about all the early day stuff? But being a student, you're just kind of fearless about it candidly. And so that coupled with we got rejected from a ton of these grants and that was discouraging, but like whatever, you know, you keep on going. You never let that stop you to just figuring it out. Talk to as many people as you can talk to anyone that will talk to you back and just start building. And again, I think that the fundamental premise is is figuring out the revenue. I call it a day one question of are you going to make money day one, are you not going to make money day one and if you are gonna make money day one, just start figuring out how to make a few dollars and that's your, that's your snowball that really sets things up.

You know, one key thing is this talk to anybody you can. I've been out of school for almost 1520 years now. So it's been a long time but every now and then I'll get emails from people in San Diego that either went to SDSU, UCSD, USD things like that. And it's one of my favorite emails to get to is to help a student out right with advice or a Connection or anything like that. So don't be afraid to reach out to people. Especially if they're within your, whatever your school is. Thank you.

And that is all we have time for. But I know there's some people stopped the mic. We will be going to the CC plus lounge to continue this discussion. But otherwise, thank you so much, and thank you everyone for coming. Thank you