Kevin Tawil

He was introduced to us by Bill Azir.

Bill was a professor at Stanford.

He's one of the three people I worked for as a case writer when I finished my MBA there, and a dear friend.

Turns out he and Brett were close.

They had a relationship, I think it was through his son-in-law.

Brett had graduated from Stanford a few years before me.

And we reached out to our investor base, our network, looking for people who filled this profile.

And

Bill connected us and we hit it off right away.

Brett's background was West Point.

He did five years after West Point in the Army.

He did not finish top of his class.

He finished number two at West Point, a point which I continually give him a hard time about.

He had a couple of really senior leadership positions.

I think he was the chief operating officer at Risk Management Solutions.

And then he was the CEO of another small software startup that had just recently been acquired by Excited Home, if you remember that company from the Wayback Machine.

We just caught each other at the right time and he came on board.

We were looking, as I said, for a COO, we were never going to get him with that title.

So Jim and I were super flexible on titles and he took the CEO title.

I had already had the chairman title and that was really the beginning of another amazing partnership of mine.