Brad Jacobs

And I think if the investment community understands what you're doing,

and you're truthful with them, and you tell them, as we were talking about before, the good things and the bad things going on, because it's always both.

And you can't be one of these management teams like, everything is sunny, everything is great, everything you want.

That's baloney.

It's not like that.

If you confide in your shareholders of what's worrying you and what the challenges are, and at the same time, what the opportunities are and what your vision is, and you consistently post up good numbers consistent with what you forecasted, and they should be ambitious ones, then you'll get a following up.

I'm lucky and humbled that I have a pretty big following, but I have no illusions of why that is.

Absolutely.

So sometimes I've raised too much money.

And then I didn't have a use for it right away.

And then it was dilutive.

Sometimes I didn't raise enough money.

I had these fantastic opportunities and I didn't have the capital.

And when you do acquisitions in particular, you didn't have the money.

You can't credibly go to a seller and say, hey, let's sign a deal and I'll go raise the money.

Even if you can raise the money, things change.

Geopolitical events happen, market corrects, all kinds of stuff happen.

And so sellers want to make sure your money goes.

Sometimes they haven't capitalized the business enough.

And I think in my next ventures, I will err on the side of raising more capital rather than less capital.