Puroon Shahada

And trust me, you know, I am a bootstrapper at heart.

I do want to actually kind of just salute each one of you guys who's doing this.

It's extremely hard to show the discipline.

But one of the things that I realized that you could be a bootstrapper for a fair amount of time and then still get to be venture back so you can actually see the acceleration that your product, your space truly deserves.

So this is a brief background of the company, the trajectory.

I'll walk you through this.

First off, I should say, you know, we started back in 2003.

I've run, you know, the same company throughout.

If you run into a problem that you can solve for the rest of your career, my advice would be to actually play the long ball and stay in it.

uh investors and founders will come and go you could still accurately run this you could still actually take some chips off along the way that's one way to think about it so our first product was an employee collaboration product ensemble off to a fast start it was bootstrapped got onto the inc 500 list

And we were making money.

We were actually, you know, able to take some distributions at the end of the year.

This was, you know, me and my co-founder.

But there was one problem with it.

In 2009, when the financial crisis happened, 8-9 timeframe.

every single one of my customers was either a bank or a credit union which meant we came to a screeching halt when it you know came down to the sales cycles so we had to think about what are we going to do at that point we went from an employee collaboration product to a board meeting management solution which is now the only product i offer meanwhile we continued down the path of

Taking the original product ensemble and making it into a cash cow, which funded the business two, three million dollars every year.

That money was plowed back into growing the onboard business.

Along the way, my founders lost interest.

Stuff happens.