Why raise $123M after bootstrapping to $10M?

today we have Lloyd Lobo founder of boast AI a fintech platform that provides funding based on research and development tax credits we talk about how we raised 123 million in equity and debt and actually selling a portion of his company and position his company after bootstrapping the company to 10 million in annual revenue he shares his career Journey why they bootstrapped and how he structured his Capital raise but let's go ahead and jump right into Lloyd's story hey everyone welcome back to fundraising demystified today we have with us Lloyd Lobo from bose.ai welcome to destroyed Lloyd excited to be here Jason thank you for hosting me now we're excited to share your story you've had a lot of success raising a substantial amount of capital 23 million dollar series a and 100 million dollar debt Warehouse to go along with it it'd just be great for you to give the audience a little bit of background on your entrepreneurial Journey your story and kind of what ultimately LED you to starting boast definitely so my co-founder and I had been best friends since University okay uh and well Partners in every project we studied engineering together fast forward today what 20 plus years he's my daughter's Godfather I'm his daughter's Godfather anyway after engineering we studied engineering Canada he got her to Johnson and Johnson's engineering leadership program the big tuber country and I moved right away into startups I had asked an entrepreneur hey what's the best skill I could have and then if I wanted to do a company someday and this person said sales so I started applying for sales jobs nobody gave me a sales job so I took an entry-level cold calling job in a small startup right and my parents they're from India and as you know with our cultures like it's an engineer or a doctor maybe a lawyer um and they were losing it you have a degree in software engineering and you're cold calling what the hell like this guy's son and This Guy's daughter is like at Microsoft and at Google like what are you doing fast forward today it's the skill that served me the most because everything from figuring out what to build to getting early customers to convincing investors to evangelizing the media to employees is everything is selling right that's that's the key core skill anyway so I I went on to do that and then only worked at startups after startup after startup and I was at a startup in Philly and running GTM there and uh the CEO was like felt like everyone had to be on all the time you know this the whole hustle porn culture work 80 hours a week yeah and I used to be in the office till 9 10. my wife was in residency at Drexel at the time so she was always working 100 hours so I got a call I started going home one week at like 6 pm and uh I got him email saying hey I still like it when you're in the office till 9 10 your wife's a resident working 100 hours a week what's causing you to go home my parents were visiting me and I hadn't seen them in a year and I go home and I'm like man and then what Alex called me and he's like listen I I think we should do this and what had happened his journey was he was at Johnson and Johnson's engineering leadership program then he did a startup it failed he felt he lacked the accounting and finance skills so he studied accounting and finance and that unique combo of accounting and finance took him in the world of tax credits because applying for these already tax credits is part finance and part engineering and he started working in big four accounting firms writing these applications for tax credits and then figuring out talking to the ctOS of companies to figure out what work they did in r d and mulling through their documentation writing reports and then if the government audits them defending him the audit and he called me and he's like man this process is so broken let's just build something for the space and I'm like bro I don't care what we build if I could build a company I want to work for I'm in right and through that Journey Alex and I worked on a number of things together we worked on boast of course we worked on another product called automatically which was 2013 it was a chat bot built on top of zendesk and it didn't work and that's when people didn't even know what chat Bots were intercom was in prevalent and that failed then um I was a founding team of a company that was incubated by Bessemer Ventures and it was a AI sales assistant and I was pretty much getting early customers validating the market figuring out what to build doing everything and uh six million bucks had been raised in the company on an idea and uh that also failed and and we had both also going so boast was a consulting firm that's how we started right and so a big believer in bootstrapping like the best best best absolute best way in my view to bootstrap a company to millions in revenue is the seller service and people people get shocked what seller service especially the VC world right oh logo gross margins a labor intensive unscalable but you know what uipath one of the largest IPOs in the last couple years started as a Services Company base camp right like tens of millions in profits with no VC funding right the competitors have thousands of employees and hundreds of millions in funding and Basecamp has what 80 employees working 40 hours a week and have more profits they both started the services right so this is this is like super underrated but what what services does is it helps you one get really good at acquiring customers because customers want an outcome they don't want software no customer no outcome no no customer kind of thing it makes you good at customer success because You Can't Hide between buttons and widgets and uh and you you'll know exactly what to build right and then over time you'll automate it once you understand the process and you'll have maximum control of your company with the minimal dilution right so that was that was the journey that's how we started and so after those two failures we're like listen we're looking for all these sexy things in in Ai and this and that but here we're sitting on a massive industry with hundreds of billions of dollars given in government incentives to fund businesses broken application process prone to frustrating audits takes a long time to get the money why don't we just automate this we have clients who've been doing it manually for we know exactly what to build because we know the process then we built like that first MVP using stitching together zapier with Zoho creator and and then and then we moved um to actual building software but that's like literally we got to 10 million in Revenue doing those things get and in parallel we built a large community because we knew that our ICP is CEOs of tech companies and we're like CEOs why do they want these tax incentives to fund their business why do they want to fund their business to grow their company so why don't we bring them growth knowledge and this was a time where they weren't a podcast weren't very prevalent LinkedIn content wasn't very prevalent things like saster wasn't exploding at the seams and so we started building a community around our ICP hosting small meetups and pizza nights and just say hey we're going to bring a Founder CEO header sales from XYZ company who's gone from like zero to 100 million and uh they're going to talk tactically talk about how to get your first X and Y right first X first 100 customers the first billion for sales team build your first marketing op very very tactical and so our Outreach jump from saying hey buy my stuff and imagine this you're asking people for their research and development data when you call email and say buy my stuff they're going to be like who the hell are you why don't I work with big4 accounting firms they're gonna say get lost right and so we started then shifted gears to saying hey we're hosting an event where we're inviting the CEO of X successful company who's going to talk about these wide topics we only have 10 spots and people started showing up to those meetups like 10 me 10 people started showing up 20 we did it with cadence and eventually one day 200 people showed up to the co-working space and they're like folks guys this is not a pizza night this is a full-bone conference that evolved into our community which is called traction and it's today it has about 120 000 subscribers we have a podcast we have a big conference uh every major CEO from Uber to the president of atlassian has come spoken in advance but you know it's funny is we had this chart before the 23 million round that showed our journey towards 10 and the number of events we did directly correlated we spent we had no marketing team at end route to 10. like the marketing team of zero wow that is quite the journey that you went on and I want to kind of unpack a couple of pieces of it and specifically the choice to to bootstrap as we're in a market where there's just so much well we're coming out of a market it was all about you know growth at all costs burn burn burn raise as much money as possible if you can't raise money you're not successful and so on but you bring out some good examples of massive companies that are bootstrapped and you give some great advice you know basically build a profitable business to allow you to then fund you know the the infrastructure or the development of a product and that's given you this place to you know kind of then eventually choose who you want to raise capital from so let's let's talk a little bit about the the series a raise and in this case your series a raise is not traditional and you know you already got to 10 million dollars in ARR by that time you know what was your strategy when you guys decided to go out for Capital what were your goals and what ended up happening you know it's funny I wrote a post the other day which which got um a lot of love I think it had like uh uh like almost a thousand likes and hundreds of thousands of views on it which said this is the absolute best way to raise money and I literally talk about our journey bootstrapping while building a community so we weren't thinking of raising seriously um my co-founder Alex he has been very anti-race given past background um and and what we've seen right you give up a lot of control and you do somebody else's zero-sum game you feed into somebody's uh somebody else's definition of success and he was against that now I'm Alex is based in Vancouver Canada I'm based in San Francisco um my view is is very different but nonetheless I've only worked at failed startups or been a part of failed startups and my wife's a physician and when I talked to her about raising she's like if you're gonna raise money now that the company is bootstrap and doing well and you build somebody else's zero-sum game and you fail I cannot keep supporting the family you're gonna have to get a job at like Salesforce Oracle of Google and and like this is it this is this is like this is like 10 plus years of only either working as an uh working as an exec at startups or like being on founding teams and like nothing's ever worked out and like the thing is you don't even get a proper salary that's even worse so I gotta pay the bills so that fear was there right and then what had happened was we hosted an event when there was a window of opening during the pandemic so we were to do the big conference attraction conference in 2020 and uh the pandemic hit obviously and we had to cancel now I can't sit through hours and hours of content so I I didn't have the heart to produce a two-day virtual Summit so I reached out to all the speakers and I'm like listen could you would you be willing to hop on a one-hour AMA with our audience so these were like these podcast recordings but live with an audience and so we started doing them weekly gave us like two live webinars a week which we turned the video into YouTube the audio and a podcast and I started doing well we like on average we get like eight to ten thousand views on YouTube but anyway we started doing well and then there was a window our audience started growing and we funneled used that window of opening to host cinemat now one of the investors from our from our our VC one of the Partners came to this event and they reached out saying wanted to know who runs this event because they were very impressed with the quality of Founders and everything there and so I got on the phone and and they're like hey would you be willing to join our Venture partner Network and we'll give you carry and this and that I'm like guys I don't have the time for this I'm just like doing these events because it's funnels like leads to the business and drives our brand but I really don't have to have time to be a scout for for a venture capital fund and uh and they're like oh what does your business do so I explained that they're like what you're selling a hundred dollar bills for twenty dollars you're literally saying will get you give me your data we'll give you money from the government and when you get the money we'll take a percentage and they're like oh what are your gross margins and what are you what is the growth rate and how are you funded I was acceptable you're like we'd love to invest in the company and I'm like listen we don't want to investor money we're good and they're like we're not traditional investors I'm like then what are you like debt lenders and they're like listen we're growth Equity I'm like what is that and they explain like you know so there's the VC which is invest and put everything in growth and you're either boom or you're bust there's Boomer bust but there's also an in-between which is happening right now right a lot of founders with small growths or like just they experienced huge growth only because of the pandemic artificial digital transformation time zone but they couldn't sustain that growth and now they're zombies so like VCS who fund companies that end up being like slow growth or bus leader force them to shut down or they don't give them attention so there's that VC which is like I want to see you like triple triple double double double and there is a PE or an exit which is a buyer company right they're like we're in between if you're like 5 million plus in Revenue at 80 gross margin seeing decent growth and clean Capital profitable will invest in the company but it's more like we'll invest from 30 to you know 70 percent of the company and will liquidate the founders so you do risk yourself you can take money off the table and you can also play the long game by being involved in the company and that like perked up my ears I'm like what seriously I'm like my jaws are up I'm like are you kidding me like this is this is this is an asset class this is what people do they're like yeah so then I started back channeling it I brought it up to Alex I had another meeting with with the guys because it was open man one of the partners was in San Francisco the guys are radiant Capital out of New York really good guys uh a lot of the partners happen to be in San Francisco so I met with him seemed really good back channeled a few conversations Alex also looked them up and they're like hey it's good so that was honestly the redecision was you're in the middle of a pandemic you can feel it although the VC world didn't want you to feel it that this growth that is happening that this boom is a function of everyone needing to transact online and it's not going to last forever and that's exactly what happened right all the VCS knew it was a gamble if you needed to be if you if if you can't transact in person you need to go online if you go online you need Zoom Shopify snowflake twilio maybe a whole bunch of different tools right and and that's the reality of the situation and so everybody needed to transact online and uh the growth you experienced in 2020 and 2021 you can't sustain obviously and so at the turn of 2022 interest rates went up because they couldn't keep the interest rate slow forever and a market falling always follows an interest rate hike a recession always follows an interest rate hike you can you know look at every recession and this this was a one-two punch because the markets the companies couldn't sustain the growth they had in 2020 and 2021 so started missing projections in 2022 coupled with hey the interest rates are up so now what happened valuations markdowns customers are not buying missing projections not growing a lot of zombie companies the Unicorn porn the Unicorn porn that was proliferated in 20 20 21 is like shattered right and so I think it was a it was a good bet that we played for us personally and also good for the company because you're on a path to grow sustainably right and if you look at it especially in SAS especially when you have recurring customers recurring Revenue um even if you're going slow after 10 million you're gonna have to shoot somebody in the face to take it to zero right and so why try to build some zero-sum game and try to aim for like go from 10 to 30 million in one year and hire more people like more die of indigestion than starvation Why Try to choke the system and and ruin something good and so I think I think we made the right decision because had we raised a lot of money and put it just on the balance sheet and try to gone from 10 to 30 I don't know if it would have played out like that I think we would have destroyed the company and uh basically right yes we had a repeatable scalable Channel we you know it was community that we built that had been growing coupled with a sales team and our sales team had great social proof because there was a lot of going to events going to our events hosting our events partnered events and uh you know shaking hands kissing babies like a lot of that and so when you called email or call they're social proof there associated but now if you like enough it's never linear like that right oh you got 10 sales people let's add 50 and you know five extra Revenue it never works like that right because you gotta add like sdrs you gotta add SDR managers you gotta operations you got there's a lot of in-between stuff that goes on like piping and tooling and process and it breaks I mean like I've seen this with a lot of friends so I think we made the right decision for like sustainable growth and uh do you risk the founders who had been burning their soul for the last several years well being able to have the option to find a Capital Partner well I guess you didn't they found you uh more serendiply but what you had done to lead up to something like that as you built a great business an attractable you know attractive business that was profitable that served you and your your partner but uh you know to be presented an opportunity and be in the position to accept that opportunity is you know basically what you built up to uh to that point and you know to take a little bit of money off the top and you know allow the company to kind of grow more organically and also like you said it would have been a gamble because the 3x the company which would be the expectation in 2020 and 2021. um you wouldn't those channels might break and or you'd have to add new channels that are unproven and throw a bunch of money at them and you'd be expected to grow at all cost and potentially you know like you said the losing the company or losing more control or taking more dilution in future rounds and you know this created a very positive outcome for you and I think um more Founders need to listen to stories like this so focusing on building a great business that gives you options and not being solely dependent on raising venture capital and ironically enough like more richer company more visual Capital comes your way if you build a business like you did uh you know they you get sought out and create more opportunities that way and and you know that that was the thing right so like the four steps we did to bootstrap like I said on the ICP talk to your customers offer a service manually figure out um the manual workflow and then you know exactly what do I automate eliminate delegate meaning if you're manually collecting data there's apis pull it automatically then normalize that data then apply workflow but in parallel to doing those things build a community around your audience like you know you may have a very Niche ICP or whatever your ICP is honing on that and bring them together when people are buying your product or listening to what you have to say you have an audience right when you bring that audience together it becomes a community when that Community comes together to create some impact like base camp did with Ruby on Rails or like gitlab does or even Harley-Davidson's Community I look at every major Community when they come together to do social good or to create some some impact it becomes a movement and when that movement has undying faith and its purpose it becomes a cult or a religion right from Christianity to CrossFit that is the Journey of going from obscure to iconic but the point I'm trying to make there is if you don't bring build a community around your icpe in parallel then you you are relying on I guess happen stands for people to hear about you you got to engineer your own network right and so when you do that people will hear and see you word of mouth will spread and that becomes a very low cost effective Channel like VCS will come to your events we see you will engage with your community and so on yeah and being able to do that is you know something that I feel stands out as unique and credible to what you guys have done and creates this opportunity for you and kind of something that we didn't get a chance to dive into just yeah because you you raise that round it's presented as like a traditional series a but you know it was uh kind of like a secondary for you guys you guys get some money off the table coming to get some you know balance sheet Capital to go grow and do what it's got to do but you also raise a substantial debt Warehouse of 100 million dollars you know what was the strategy behind that um was it the same investors kind of walk us through how that came about as an opportunity and and you know how did you go about getting it incidentally we met the debt provider also through our community right so this is this is the thing this is the value when you you know this is a framework I want to own or talk about and maybe there is some some learning here when you figure out an underserved Niche and identify their pain points you figure out where they eat breed drink sleep what are the aspirations and goals when you understand the problem right they always say fall in love with the problem not the solution you're offering if you keep falling if you fall in love with the problem of your customer your vision becomes a lot bigger so our vision wasn't automate tax filters our vision was to enable innovators to change the world why because every dollar spent in Innovation returns 20 to the universe vaccines robots clean drinking water is a function of innovation yet in the last 20 years more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have evaporated because they can't innovate and so our goal was bring you the funding and the know-how to innovate faster so r d Innovation right funding the r d starts with r d credits but it takes a long time to get that money so how do I front load you the cash so you're not waiting for that money and then the next product we're like we're collecting your interesting R data and we also have your financial data because we're lending you money now I can pull interesting insights and tell you what projects you should invest in who you should hire Etc so basically AI driven engineering productivity and Engineering Investments right so I think I think following the Journey of the customer outcome right customers want an outcome they don't want software they're looking for r d money to drive some business outcome if you follow that Pro that outcome they're looking for I I think you can come up with good product Solutions so that's that's what it was it's like customers like taking a long time to get the money from the government how can we give you the money now through our processes and the technology customers like the applications we're putting on uh putting in were like 99 accuracy so it's basically a government-backed security so getting money to lend against that was an easy thing and then we met a friend through the distraction Community became good friends and she's like hey we'll put together a warehouse facility and um and lentil this help you learn to these companies so it became a win-win because a good outcome for the customer they're not waiting long and it's a good outcome for us because it gives us a little uh more spread right improves our nrr and now overall though it's good for us and the customer because before we were collecting R data and payroll data and and some bookkeeping data because whatever we need uh to learn about the businesses r d money spent on contractors supplies and payroll but now we're like hey I gotta underwrite you so I also need to know if you're financially stable so I have your banking data and I have all your books not just what do you spend on R D so now I know what Financial outcome your r d is driving right traditionally r d has been considered a black box like sales does something you know the outcome so now how do you tie r d to outcomes uh is a conversation in board meetings that we can we can break with the next set of products that that boast will build so come back in now so when looking at this this credit you know for businesses I guess you know for businesses listening how do they take advantage of this credit what should they look for and is this cash in their pocket if they're not profitable is the government giving them basically free money for investing into r d yeah definitely no it's r d is a broad term it's basically product development are you developing new products or improving existing products in the United States you're getting up to twenty percent of your product development dollars as a cash back if you are less than uh five years of Revenue right in the business it's it's a cash back if you're not then it's a tax credit basically and in Canada it's 64 of your r d spend as a cashback so anywhere from like you know every country offers like UK Australia France New Zealand every like Commonwealth country US Canada uh aside and Canada is hot as high as 64 percent of your r d spend as a cashback you know how insane that is you don't even need to raise 100 that's insane that is absolutely absurd yes for every dollar you're basically doubling you're not fully doubling but you know you spend a dollar and get 64 cents back you can spend a lot more on R D exactly well we'll definitely leave that in the show notes for people to learn and reach out to to see if they qualify and how they can take advantage of that um so once you raise the the 100 million dollar Deb facility which you know came shortly after raising the a um what has it done for the growth of the business and the opportunity for the business and um yeah what were some of the key learnings from that experience definitely I think I think one of the key things is startups are building phases right phase one is validation get 10 customers to pay you to try it out phase two is product Market fit what are you optimizing for increase your customer base to femi from 10 to 50 you're optimizing for higher retention if you have like 100 nrr your product Market fit in my view but what is the leading indicator of retention it's engagement if people are not using your product they're not going to retain even if they bought annual contracts then the next phase is product Channel fit you figure out a scalable repeatable channel to get creep and grow customers this is a journey of mostly bootstrap companies by the way you can't you don't have the energy to do 10 things at once and then you get to a point of scale where you know you may be like five six million in Revenue like four to five six million in Revenue you have one customer coming through one channel getting one value and then you put 75 percent of your energy on stoking the fire like you put fuel on fire and you spend 25 of your energy on trying new things new channels new products new markets and so that's that's what we effectively did like you know um added new products right and the already analytics one which we have coming out we expanded the r d lending like we could invest heavily in that as well we went into some new markets and exploring new markets and new channels I think that's that's how we look to spend the money it gave us basically Wings right but we didn't ignore the 75 fuel on fire because the 25 is a test phase and provided you've gone through validation product Market fit product Channel fit with that 25 then you can throw fuel on fire as well so it gave us more more like stability and and credibility to to to go longer and faster kind of thing no that's great and um yeah as we kind of you know wrap up here this has been a great story for you to share and uh you know communicate with uh with everyone um you know something that I want to kind of tap into a little bit is you know once you've got a left you took some money off the table you still have some upside in the business um but what are you doing now like what's something that you're you're working on now what do you focus on now yeah definitely so I'm working on a book right now on community-led growth basically um appropriate for your experience definitely so I as I look back and reflected on my journey after leaving the day-to-day operations of the company I was president and co-founder and um basically head of community and as I reflected on my journey from bootstrapping both to being a refugee of the Gulf War where the country was evacuated I was in I was like eight or nine years old Community helped the country to safety to you know um everything I am in my in my life even the investors came to the community as a function of of that and you know we sit in 2023 here right where marketing is literally taking a bloodbath you see cpms are up it costs twice as much to generate the same Roi from the same channels generative AI has made it worse I feel because you're seeing the same kind of content like you know now somebody is like chat GPT copy pasting even in your LinkedIn comments right and consumers retirements clickbait spam pop-ups giving personal data to access crappy white papers and as you look at it it's going to get worse and worse the old marketing is build your company's brand the new marketing is Rise of micro influencers and personal Brands like people buy from people and actually if you look at some of the most iconic companies nothing really has changed um right like the best the most iconic companies were built on communities like if you look at Harley-Davidson almost bankrupt in the 80s rebuild on the ethos of community community wasn't a marketing strategy it was a company strategy okay employees went out and started writer's clubs writers became employees employees became writers oversight from the president it's an iconic company today or apple right Apple sells the outcome not the feature right huge communities become a better creative HubSpot perfect example iPod at a billion today it's worth 20 billion HubSpot had a inbound Community before they even had a product as an engineer everything I learned about marketing was from hubspot's inbound Community before they even had software so I truly believe that yesterday's Innovation always becomes today's option and tomorrow's commodity look at the GPS it was uh it was hard to get a hold of then it became an option in the car today as a commodity it's a car play but if you build a community you won't become a commodity because you're constantly focused on the customer and you're it's that Community is giving you the feedback and the voice to keep Reinventing yourself and so this book is about that Journeys from Harley-Davidson the HubSpot Nike and Red Bull atlassian as well as startup communities like saster and startup grind and communities big and small really on how to Leverage The Power of people to accelerate your growth in the most cost efficient way possible and so that's that's the book I talked to thousands of people hundreds of businesses asked the same questions over and over again compared notes with our own Journey bootstrapping both and came up with distilled it to 13 rules to build and scale community-led businesses oh well that sounds like an amazing book that I'm sure our audience would be interested in learning more about where could they learn more about you the book and both.ai definitely so I'm on LinkedIn Lloyd Lobo that's the place I'm most active my name has an e in it double l o y e d Lobo and I was bullied as a kid because there was an Ian Lloyd and I I asked my mom why did you do this to me why I butcher my name like this and she would always say I always envisioned that you'd be an entrepreneur someday and you'd want to if you wanted to ever brand name or like you know trademark your name you wouldn't be able to with a generic name like Lloyd so I threw an e in there that's so funny sometimes sometimes you will it into I I kid you not I asked this every time to her as a kid growing up like why why why and she said sometimes you will it into existence a law of attraction and uh the book will be on from Grassroots to greatness.com it's from Grassroots to Greatness 13 rules to build iconic brands with community that growth Jason lemkin of saster did the Ford on that book and I'm very grateful he's been he's been a long-standing mentor giving us free boots when we started boast and always there with his advice so eternally grateful to him and um boast is both start Ai and if you want to tune into our attraction Community just go to attractioncoff.io or search traction podcast on YouTube or uh on Spotify awesome a light with an E it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today uh and sharing your story and sharing an alternative Journey that I think most Founders are not aware of and as we go into this new market where things are not as clear as they once were or not as you know hot or kind of you said the Unicorn porn uh it's it's wise for entrepreneurs to consider their options and see what's out there uh and and kind of play but primarily focus on building a great company that built you know generates profits and I think that's ultimately what you did and that created opportunities in Windows for for new choices for you to choose um but really appreciate you being on the show today Lloyd uh look forward for our audience getting to dive into this and you know take advantage of your book and other opportunities definitely you know as I close out I want to share that um a special thing told to me by an entrepreneur um you know don't build somebody else's definition of success focus on building your own definition of success and there were three questions he gave me a very crucial uh his name is Jafar owanadi founder of lupio which also had a big growth equity the exit and uh and now barley and he said what is your personal definition of success how much money do you want in your bank account is there a version of the company you don't want to work for um how long do you see yourself running the company and what is the argument for raising versus not now and those things are very important because as Founders we don't write this down right but if you think about it when a founder and VC goes into a first conversation mentally we're always misaligned anyway a VC is looking to make X return in y years our founder is not thinking that way especially the seeds seed round they think they're going to run the company and a Founder should be very deliberate ultimately you're doing this for personal financial Freedom yes you want to create impact but if you don't care to take care of yourself and your family you'll never be able to create impact on the world so you gotta ask like what is my personal definition of success and how much money do I want in the bank account and play that and and if raising VC money is not going to optimize that for you then you know find the right route for you or like gore definition of personal definition of success maybe it is you want to you know not work 100 hours a week or you want to work from somewhere you don't want to be answerable if your values are not aligned don't go in that relationship because it's always going to be pain that's that's my closing advice thank you so much Jason love this absolutely love your questions thank you so much well thanks for being on the show Lord appreciate it awesome