Patrick Campbell

I think there's some founders, that's how they think is like...

great, I'm going to optimize this in two years.

I'm going to do that.

For me and Fakou and Peter, that's just not how we thought.

I do think we then, it was one of those things where I was saying this before, all of a sudden we were three weeks in and we're like, oh my God, we're in a process.

I didn't realize it, but we're in a process.

And so I think that's a lesson for some folks.

I think you should always be ready

to run a process.

And that means even if you're bootstrapped, have a deck, have an overview memo or a deck or whatever it is.

Have some of your financials or a data room.

You don't have to have an actual data room, but have something you can provide that's data room-esque.

Those types of things you should just have for basic hygiene.

So for the past number of years, we had a slide in our board deck of like, here are the potential acquirers.

And then basically, where is the stage of conversations with them?

And in some of them, it's like nothing, right?

Who are the other ones in the board deck?

We had, I think we had about 15 people.

The obvious ones were like Stripe, Chargebee, Zora.

Shopify was one of them.