Jason Andrew

Towards the end of that year, we then got interest from about four inbound folks that we had built relationships over the last several years on the strategic side.

And I had went to the board and said, look, I think that we've got, again, a pretty immature product.

We're going to have to raise a ton more money.

And this is going to take us a long time in the markets, getting more and more competitive.

And so we made the decision.

IT'S A LONGER CONVERSATION SO I WON'T GO INTO NOW BUT MADE THE DECISION AND THE BOARD AGREED AND THEN WE WERE ACQUIRED IN ABOUT EIGHT MONTHS LATER ABOUT AN EIGHT MONTH PROCESS OF GOING THROUGH THAT SO

This was kind of the crossing the chasm when we raised the money.

Again, we had probably four different businesses because of the way that we had built the product.

We were in the broker market, we were in the PEO market, we were in the carrier market, and we had a data business.

So we cut off three or four of those and focused exclusively on just the carrier market.

Um, and it was a really, really scary time.

So, um, over the last minutes, uh, 20 minutes talked about making bets and pivoting early on, just following, uh, where the market is leading.

We didn't know at the time what our product market fit was, and we had to shift that several times.

Um, to me, kind of culture and authenticity is super important.

And so whatever that is for you, we spend a lot of time on building culture and I think it's super important.

Um, it can be cliche, but I think relationships are critical.

Um, in, in terms of for us, it was a relationship at every stage that either helped us get a customer, help us to get funding, helped us to be able to figure out how to build our product.

Um, and then we've got folks that had been on the path we had gone to.

So we went to companies that we wanted to imitate and brought them on either to our board and as advisors ended up often hiring advisors as employees that were super helpful and had the roadmap and how to grow.

Um,