Blake Smith

Welcome to the Midwest of entrepreneurship.

That's really good.

Yeah, the Midwest is literally in tranches of a half million or 300,000 at a time, unfortunately.

We actually just moved out to Mountain View, California.

And so we're trying to kind of enter into a new stage where we're trying to raise in larger tranches rather than kind of stringing it along.

Uh, no, I started actually with three other founders.

So I have one, one founder remaining.

Uh, my good friend, Chris Merchick is the head of the fashion side of the business.

That was not my expertise.

Yeah, I'd say with one of my co-founders, my closest co-founder, Tim Brunk, who's still actually a close friend and he served on the board, we just realized that we both were made to lead companies and you can't really have two head leaders in a company.

So I think we kind of realized like, Hey, I didn't sign up to work for you.

You didn't sign up to work for me.

And so we left on really good terms.

And actually he and I, we talk multiple times a week now, so we're still good friends.

And then the other was just an early on one where it was, it was our head of technology and he just got snagged by a great company.

Yeah, we've always done investing schedules.

um honestly it just seemed like the thing to do when you started like i feel like everybody kind of had the entrepreneurship bug and so it seemed like everybody was raising capital and so sadly that was as much thought as went into it at the time um if i could do it over again i would have started bootstrapping when was it uh was the 1.8 all in one round was it a seed round and was it a note

No, it was in chunks of like, we started with 300,000 friends and family and then a half million.

And then I did another half million.

Yeah, there was the first one was the friends and family.