Eugene Levin

Our CEO, he was extremely upset.

This whole chart is kind of my pride and joy.

Yeah, we're public.

So if I share something I'm not supposed to share, you cannot trade our stock.

When I've met founders, 14.

So actually, they didn't take my money.

They just offered me a job.

I pursued them for two years, but they were so profitable, the margin was like 40%.

They didn't know what to do with money.

So I said, why don't we do it this way?

I figure out how to speed up business and use more capital, and you give me shares.

I mean, it's all public, so I...

In total, I own, at the peak, I owned about 2%.

They're all tech engineers by trade.

When they first launched semrush, actually, they used it for other businesses in traffic arbitrage space.

So they needed a research tool to figure out where to buy traffic and whom to sell it to.

And data was just so good that a lot of people started approaching them and asking an access to this.

And that's how they've launched semrush.

But they didn't really know how to properly monetize.

So I think they were giving away just too much of a value.