Puroon Shahada

It is actually important for you to have a top class revenue team, a real solid data team and all the other teams that you are thinking about.

Being able to build that capital helps.

Certainly, I think you'll realize when you bootstrap, your goal is to break even at a higher and higher number every year.

That's essentially what you're doing.

by taking institutional capital when you look at that business which is fundamentally very solid and you pour in some fuel on it you'll just see the acceleration happen and i wanted to see that happen so the first check was accurately only five million dollars on the balance sheet i did take some uh you know secondary off just to really kind of just ease the pain and i'll talk about that a little bit uh because it's been a long journey

And there were a lot of employees and myself, we were actually doing this for a fair amount of time.

It allowed us to invest in the product innovation cycle.

So ideas that were actually truly risky and out there, they often don't get funded in a bootstrap mode.

Being able to take some of those bets which actually naturally have the best returns,

That was a key part of it.

So for me, actually doing all of that, the first round of, you know, capital came from 5M's Kansas based group, amazing group to work with.

It allowed us to get to this stage.

What you see here is, you know, focused on different verticals.

getting a bunch of customers, different clusters of customers in different verticals, really allows you to be thinking about world-class delivery, being the best platform.

And once you've proven this model by taking on some capital, it gives you a chance to really kind of just do other things.

For example, analytics on all these sectors, benchmarking, applying AI to all of this.

These things are just not possible in bootstrap mode.

The goal of being bootstrapped should be to accurately make sure that you have a model that works really well, but you should also keep an eye on when you've outlived that cycle, because that can happen.

We wanted to do not just board meeting, but also other board-related workflows, the annual cycle, assessments and such, you know, skills matrix, you know, ESG matrix and things like that.

That required us to raise money.