Chris Marientis

But that was when, if you remember, we were just about to launch our platform to customers.

And we knew we needed to grow our sales force to start to amp up the velocity a little bit of our platform sales.

And it was really done with a venture bank.

So it's fairly good terms and pretty low cost for what we did.

And you could see we got a little bit of a spike in bookings when we did that.

Today, we have 11.5 million in debt, and that was done in a couple of tranches.

The first big tranche of about four and a half million was done in 2019 when we launched the second version of our platform.

And I knew we had to make a big bet on new leadership and I needed to get the money to do that or we would still just keep growing 20, 25% a year.

We're growing now about 75, 80% a year.

So that's when we started the Austin office.

Now our company has more people in Austin than our headquarters up in the DC metro market.

So the key lesson I'd share with you is you don't want to bet the ranch with debt capital unless you're using that money to grow.

To give you a sense is we...

I 5X'd the value of my company.

So some people said, you're taking that venture debt, it's going to be really expensive for you, right?

I mean, you're paying sometimes all in 16, 17%.

But when you think about the valuation in three years of my company and what we've done, it really was super efficient way to do it.

The other thing we were able to invest in, you know, we broke things like the last speaker was talking about from Pendo.

So we Forexed our sales in really months, four or five months.

And you can imagine when you do that and you have a customer success team that's not used to that velocity, you could break a lot of things.