Alan Waxman

It's hard not to like live music when you grow up in Austin, Texas, but great product, great unit economics.

But if you remember in 2016, there were starting to be a lot of commentary about threats from Amazon, Apple.

There was a cloud over the company at that time.

A lot of people don't remember that.

So there's a little bit of volatility in the markets, but more importantly, people were worried about the competitive threats.

When this came in as an opportunity, obviously, we had a number of themes, technology businesses or software businesses that we thought had really good unit economics.

This was one of the tops of the list.

That was at a time when they weren't producing cash flow, so they're still creating cash flow losses.

They need some liquidity.

So our investor group stepped in.

We gave him a billion dollar financing, a convertible instrument, obviously spent time with Daniel.

It takes one second to figure out that guy's generational.

The rest of the team that Daniel had put around him was great.

Barry McCarthy at the time was a CFO, really smart guy.

And then everyone we met on the management team

mission aligned they had values they had a culture it was very clear everyone was on the same page and sometimes in companies you go in and you talk to the cfo what's the vision and that's different than the ceo different than the head of revenue and for them it was just very clear that they were just dialed in they obviously had first mover advantage it ended up being a great investment for us but it was a little bit contrarian when we made the investment

On that one, what they were trying to solve is at the time, they didn't want to raise common equity because of the competitive threat from Amazon and Apple or perceived, I should say, because the market volatility, they didn't want to sell equity because it was going to be at a lower equity than the last round.

So they were looking for more of a whiteboard solution.

literally Barry McCarthy, whiteboard, what are we doing?

He had certain principles and we just tried to solve around those principles.