Larry Talley

Hotels, and if you ever stayed at a Hilton and you get a text message, I invented that over 15 years ago, mainly to drive upsells and show that I can use real phone numbers and a bot to replace humans, and it worked.

and became highly successful.

And during that time, I felt like, man, we solved all these problems around customer service and around payment transactions.

Well, to me, this looked like, well, what if Stripe and Twilio had a baby?

I like to think that everywhere is born based on the mindset of applying a text message conversation to a payment transaction to ultimately help companies collect faster.

And throughout COVID, the company really accelerated.

In the early stage, when you really, I would say, have the mindset of hiring folks, it's about being in the right place at the right time.

So back then, I actually moved the company to Austin, Texas from Florida.

And the big reason that I moved the company is really because perception.

When you're building a company, you want to have the best perception as possible.

So if you're in Boca Raton, Florida, right away, when you're trying to raise money, it was about,

old people or people that were traveling there or not enough talent.

And that would be about zero seconds going through a VC's head or somebody's head that really didn't know much about Florida.

They were in San Francisco, perhaps even in New York.

But putting yourself in the right place

where opportunity exists and that perception is perceived differently.

To me, that was Austin, Texas.

So I moved my family there.

And ever since then, everything really started clicking and it really accelerated.

And you can really see that because back in 2018, we barely broke a million.