Brett Hurt

And Bizarre Voice is over a billion-dollar IPO and one of the top five IPOs of 2012.

So it was good liquidity from Coremetrics, but then Bizarre Voice was really the entrepreneurial dream come true.

I think it was around 30 million ARR at that point.

Yeah, actually, I left with Brant Barden, who became my co-founder.

And it was a little bit of an awkward scenario because Brant approached me at Coremetrics and said, hey, I'm going to go start another company at some point, and I'm wondering if you'd be on my board of directors.

And Brant was absolutely amazing on our client services team.

He led really

One of the most difficult parts of the SaaS model, which is to make sure that you're doing a great job of servicing your customers.

I always say you have to constantly be re-earning their trust as a SaaS company because it's a recurring revenue business.

So you've got to stress that last S software as a service and really make sure you're providing great service.

So anyways, I was fascinated with how

um great brant was at his job and when he first said this to me i thought well gee i don't want to lose him but then i thought i'm a real hypocrite if i don't meet with him about this and then when i met with him he said hey would you like to brainstorm with me too i could really use a brainstorming partner and we brainstormed and we came up with bizarre voice

And then I realized or I really felt deep in my bones that the market timing for that was so compelling and that it was such a big vision and it could be a bigger company than Coremetrics that I thought to myself, I've got to do this.

But trust me, I would not have left Coremetrics had it not been in a good state.

And the reason I say that is Coremetrics had gone through a lot of trauma.

We launched in 1999.

You know what happened next.

We had 100 dot-com customers.

We were ringing the bell all the time, winning new customers.

And 97 of our customers went out of business in the dot-com crash.