Godard Abel

13.

13.

Bootstrapped?

It's kind of a long story.

No, it was worse than bootstrapped because we kind of raised a bunch of money, .com, $20 million, wasted it, and then went into bootstraps.

So it's kind of like bootstrapping with investor overhead, which was dumb.

End of 99, beginning of 2000.

And you're probably too young to remember, but it was a dot-com boom.

That's the year I graduated high school.

So I'm older and wiser.

Really beginning of 2014.

It was right after.

And I did partner with an entrepreneur, Max Rudman, who'd been building a product called Quote Quickly, which then became the foundation for what became Steelbrick CPQ.

So he'd been working on the product for a couple years, had some initial customers, and then we said together, hey, let's turn this into the next generation CPQ app.

And so that's what helped accelerate it.

Because there in seven quarters, we achieved $360 million exit to Salesforce.

Really, it was better because we got stock, which has since doubled.

But we kind of got that in seven quarters, which took 13 years the first time.

It was over 200, and I was like, I don't know, 200-something.

And frankly, that then became the basis for negotiation because to our surprise and our investor's surprise, about two months after we raised our Series C, Salesforce, and they invested in it, and they said, oh, you're a great partner.