David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

And then when it comes to software, the enterprise sales playbook is that playbook.

If you're doing B2B software, SaaS, you will try to find product market fit.

And the second you have it, you will abandon your small and medium-sized accounts to chase the big whales with a huge sales force.

And by then, you're 1,000 people and life sucks.

He bought secondaries.

So this was the funny thing is that when investing have these two dual meanings.

Normally, when people think about investing, they think you're putting in growth capital because you want the business to hire more people, to do more R&D so they can grow bigger.

Bezos didn't do that, actually.

He bought an ownership stake directly from Jason and I, and 100% of the proceeds of that purchase went into my and Jason's bank account.

Personal bank account.

Not a single cent went into the account of the company because we didn't need the money to grow.

What we needed, or what we certainly enjoyed, was to some extent maybe the vote of confidence, but more so...

the security of taking a little bit off the table is that we dare turn down the big bucks from venture capitals.

It was essentially a vaccine against wanting to take a larger check from people who then wanted to take the company to something enormous that we didn't want to go with it.

So Jeff

gave Jason and I just enough money that we were comfortable turning all these people down in a way where if it had turned belly up like six months later, we wouldn't have been kicking ourselves and going, we had something here that was worth millions.

And now we have nothing.

And I have to worry about rent and groceries again.

his private office that runs these investments, who did the calculus on the investment pitch we gave him, which was so ridiculous that Jason and I were laughing our asses off when we were writing down our metrics.

I was like, no one's going to pay this.