Chris Savage

Basically, we started hitting on this idea of what if we were to raise debt?

We took future profits and brought them now and we were to create a tender offer for our investors.

I talked to an entrepreneur who had done something similar and the idea got in there and I thought, this is a very interesting idea because it was the same terms to everybody.

We decided not to sell in June of 2017, hit on this idea of doing debt in probably July, and by October we had terms.

We worked with Accel KKR to fund the debt, and they were willing to write debt against a company that was not profitable.

We said we're going to be profitable, but they have a growth fund side of their business, so they looked at the unit economics of Wistia.

They were taking a bet that

They understood our unit economics.

We understood them and they could see a path to profitability.

And we had a range of debt that we would raise from them.

And so what was that range?

It was like 15 million to 20 million.

They were comfortable underwriting that.

So then we went back to our investors, but we also went to the team because the team had options.

And especially early people, they've been taking a huge risk and making incredibly small amount of cash in return for equity.

So if we're not going to sell the business, we have to take care of them too.

Um, and so we basically went to everybody and give them the exact same terms.

It's just like, here's evaluation.

You can decide how much you want to sell and write in how much you want to sell.

Um, but for the investors, what we told them is like, Brett and I are gonna run this business for the longterm.