Phil Reynolds

Well, I bootstrapped my last company for quite a while.

And when I learned that process, BrightCore.

And so BrightCore was bootstrapped for quite a few years.

And we really enjoyed that.

We enjoyed growing the company and more lifestyle.

But what I learned at the end of it, by the time I went and raised money was, boy, I could have got a lot done a lot faster had I just gone out and raised money to begin with.

Yeah.

So the last company, we started out doing quoting systems for insurance agents, and we ran that totally bootstrapped for about five years.

Didn't raise capital from anyone.

Got approached by a group of our customers to build a core admin system, and then we did a seed round, which helped and got us to market.

It went in there seven years before we raised to Series A.

And then did a series A and 18 months later did a series B and 18 months later I exited the company.

So we kind of did the standard founder VC led growth path in the last three years of the company's history.

But I did it for 16 years in aggregate.

Yeah.

So before the first dollar of external capital, we were up to about $900,000 a year in ARR.

And then we raised that money, took it to about $5 million, and then went from $5 million to about $20 million and heading into the Series B. And so it accelerated quite a bit quicker after we raised some money, had some more resources.

Yeah, it was a lot of things, a lot of its product market fit in.

So, you know, what I did previously was enterprise software.

What I'm doing now is pretty much enterprise software.