Godard Abel

And so eventually, I hope we can ring the bell.

But we still have a ways to go.

And my first company, Big Machines, as I mentioned, I started this in 2000, dot-com era.

I was a 27-year-old cocky kid.

At the time, investors liked that.

because it was .com, and frankly, we were completely clueless, but I recruited four smart kids from MIT, Stanford, and we started out.

We were able to raise $20 million the first year, just based on hype and the internet, and back then, VCs were not so critical.

There were no metrics, there was nothing.

You just kind of had hype and a vision.

But the vision was really inspired also by my father.

My father was an entrepreneur, but in a very different industry.

He made pumps, industrial pumps.

I was born in Germany, and it was a good

kind of small, they call Mittelstand, a small German pump manufacturing company.

And he was making these pumps.

You can see a picture of a blue little Abel pump there.

But they're piston membrane pumps, pumps for complex applications.

And what really inspired my first company, I went home to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He moved us from the Pittsburgh of Germany, Essen, which is, if any of you are soccer fans, is right next to Dortmund, Borussia Dortmund.

But the kind of northwest industrial part of Germany, we moved to Pittsburgh because he wanted to start a U.S.