Brendan Candon

So, like it's kind of said in the bio, 5.12 makes it easy for athletes to buy, sell, and trade sports gear.

We started the company, I played sports in college, kind of played every sport growing up, and after college I had to buy some equipment, and a lacrosse stick that I had to buy was like $250.

And instead of buying it at a retail store, I bought it for like $50 from a friend offline.

And that led to a conversation about, you know, this should be easier to do.

eBay is kind of focused on power sellers, retailers.

I grew up with some great experience with some of the offline options.

I started to just like close and decline.

And so that's kind of why we got started.

We launched an early version of the site in 2012.

We kind of did it as a side project for a while.

I went full-time on it last year.

Yeah, I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

But it was like a nice weekend thing, grinded it out.

But kept getting people to sign up, built a bit of a social following, and then eventually got enough to raise an angel round to raise about $120,000 at the beginning of 2015, rebuilt the site, and launched a new version in June of 2015.

And that's kind of when things started to take off.

And we quit our jobs and went full-time in early 2015.

Uh, yes.

It was a note.

It was a friends and family round.

Yep.