Madison Wickham

And meanwhile, trying to grow it as fast as we possibly could.

But for the first three and a half years, we...

uh, ran the business profitably.

Um, I mean, we were riding the line constantly and trying to push our, you know, any excess process, uh, profits back into the company, um, to, to continue growing.

Uh, but we ended up building a relationship with a guy named Jim Schneider, who's a former CFO of Dell and, um, is a very active angel investor here in Austin, uh,

This was probably about three years in.

We met him through... He was the dad of a friend's friend.

And he was...

But what we were doing, he's done both the big corporate exec thing as CFO of Dell.

He's also started a bank, which the parallels are interesting.

It's interesting how many parallels there are between anybody starting any kind of business, no matter how unrelated the substance of the businesses.

It's, it's the same kind of stuff.

So, you know, he's, he's gone from like a, I think that when they started, they acquired a bank that had like $4 million assets.

And now they've got like, I don't know, like close to a billion in assets, like crazy growth in a short amount of time.

So he's got, he's got a lot of, uh,

lots of great insights and he's just like a really cool dude.

Uh, but he, he's obviously like as financially competent as, as it gets.

So he was able to really help me understand a lot about finance and the idea of, um, of, of, uh,

And basically, we started talking to him about the idea of raising money to amp up our team because we were at a point where there was so much going on.

We had so few people on the team that we were spending the majority of our time managing all of the existing stuff.