Prune Shada

That market was actually really 10 to 15x sort of multiples.

It was a good market.

And then we got ensemble sort of packaged and off-to-end contracts also in the same timeframe.

And now we are seeing actually really sort of, you know, first year anniversary of raising money and doing these transactions, all of that come through.

We're seeing our growth rates sort of justify all of that.

While the valuations were, you know, crazy in the Valley.

Remember, I was in the Midwest, you know, still raising money from there.

And I was conscious of finding the right partner, not the one who's giving us the highest multiple, but the one who had the best chance of getting us to,

Sort of where I think would be the right spot for this business.

Oh, it was actually really some angels, but it was bootstrapped.

Yeah, largely bootstrapped.

No, I think the employees actually, they all rolled.

they were the core group and actually really sort of in a deeper L1, L2s were vested and they got a chance to roll here.

And some of them cashed out because they've been invested for a long time.

I really like these transactions, especially when I think about

Being somebody who started a bootstrap business too, you can only hold on to all of that for 5, 10, 15 years while everybody else around you is actually either working for big tech where they're making big dollars every year or they're seeing these short-run startup cycles.

This is a great chance to stay in the same business, stay on the same mission while you get to take some chips off.

So we saw a little bit of that in this transaction as well.

There was not a very simple rule, unfortunately, and I'm trying to form my own framework around this, but a good rule of thumb is you take half off, and then in the new combined entity, you are back on the schedule to get some more options, so you are actually back on the resting schedule.

Now, what people quickly see, especially a year into this, they clearly see is that the next decision