Fred Shilmover

No, quite frankly, you know, we wanted to get off to a running start and build a team.

And I have fantastic co-founders that I started the business with.

How many?

So it was three of us.

So two other co-founders and, you know,

quite frankly, they had fantastic opportunities that they were in and families to feed.

So, you know, we needed to raise money out of the gate.

Yeah, so I think two things.

One, there's a trade-off you have to make in terms of growth so that if you raise money, you're able to build a team more quickly and grow more quickly.

It also depends on individuals' personal means.

So it's fantastic for those guys to have gotten that far without raising money.

Certainly amazing from them from an individual dilution perspective and puts them in a real position of strength when you have substantial revenue and you go to raise your first institutional capital.

It depends on, I think, individuals' personal situations and the team that we had and what we wanted to build.

So that wasn't an option for it.

On the flip side, you mentioned being bootstrapped for 10 years.

So part of the trade-off of not raising venture capital is you're not able to make these big investments.

We made a pretty big investment in R&D for the first number of years of Insight Squared that fundamentally we wouldn't be able to do if we were bootstrapping.

Um, it's hard to convince the 10 person engineering team to, to come join and, and, and work for work for sweat equity alone.

Yeah.

So the company is, we're around 135 people, uh, based here in, in, in Copley square.