Henry Shapiro

We raised about a half million on safes, and then we raised another million in safes about six months after that.

Yeah, that was essentially our pre-seed round.

And the safe route was nice because it sort of kept the process pretty light.

Well, I mean, first of all, we needed to be able to, you know, hire our first, Patrick's a Java engineer.

I work a bit on the design and operations side of things, but neither of us was a full stack developer.

And we knew that a big part of this was going to rely on, you know, the front end user experience.

And so we brought on our first engineer.

with that money and our first couple full-stack engineers with that money.

Other kinds of normal things, it's nice to have healthcare.

It's nice not to be super, super stressed about the change in pace.

We did.

I mean, we weren't paying ourselves very, very good money.

I mean, I would say we were definitely in the sort of ramen salary category for a good long time.

We did leave New Relic, I think, with a healthy enough nest egg to take the plunge.

But obviously, that also has its own stressors associated with it.

Honestly, I think our biggest calculation was like, look, we really want investors at the table here who believe in what we're doing and who believe in the vision of what we're going toward.

At the time, we didn't have a product and we didn't have users and we didn't have proof that the thesis would work.

A big part of what we were trying to do was bring

a group of people we had worked with in the past, people that believed in us as product and growth people.

They approached us after we had actually started building.