Kathryn Minshew

Anytime you're talking about equity, it's not something I would do for fun ever.

But at the same time, you know, we both we both came to it with we want to work together.

We want to make this happen.

We want to get somewhere that feels safe.

fair to both of us, and it was never going to feel perfect to both of us, right?

But it needs to feel tolerable to both of us.

And so it's close to being even, but there was small differences based on, again, how much risk, how long each of us had been sort of without another full-time job, because we left our roles at different times.

And I think we got to a place that we felt pretty good about.

Yeah.

So we raised, gosh, we raised about 100K in January of 2012.

Plus we got into Y Combinator.

So that came with about $170,000.

That was our first seed funding.

It was very hard won.

We ended up over the last couple of years raising over $28 million.

So we've had a little better luck with fundraising.

But the sort of first three and a half years of the Muse's life were

were pretty lean.

It was seed funding, bootstrapping, making revenue here and there, our product we've charged for for employers from the very beginning, because we didn't feel like we had a choice to go with a freemium model.

That said, we always wanted it to be free to individual users, so that was really important to us.