Jason Andrew

It was 2016, we were heading into 2017 and we were growing, but I started getting overly concerned about how we were going to be able to scale and how we were gonna really grow the business.

And so I had brought on, as I said in another slide, a gentleman around kind of late 2018 as an advisor who had sold a company that was in the space that we had started with.

And so I had asked him,

If you were in my seat, what would you do?

How would you grow this business?

How would you go about it?

And he basically wrote me a report and said, look, you're gonna slog away for probably 10 years and maybe if you're successful, you might get to 10 million in revenue, but it's highly unlikely.

That's about the space that you're gonna be able to grow into.

Obviously, I was super concerned after that and I was looking at where the market was.

So I had then looked at our carrier market space where we had this one customer and looked at companies that were in an adjacent space to us.

And I started cold calling some of the executives that had retired after they had gone public.

One of them responded to me, a guy named Pete Espinoza, who had been the head of sales at Guidewire, which is now about a $9 million company.

And I said, do you ever advise and help people?

And he said, sure, if I like them, I do it.

And so Pete, I said, will you come out?

I'll fly you out.

I'd like you to meet with our executive team and tell us all the problems that you had, how you got through it and what you did to build it.

So Pete said, sure, I'll come out.

And I spent a whole day with our team and really told us all the challenges they had, all the difficulties.

He ended up then coming on as an advisor, helped me hire his entire previous enterprise sales team, and then made an introduction to an executive at Ernst & Young who was instrumental in us raising a future round as well as being able to build out the model we shifted to.