Ric Elias

So if we go back to the very beginning, something worked.

You and your team were awesome investors or trend spotters or operators or some combination of those things, probably maybe some luck sprinkled in, which is true for all of us.

How did it start?

What was the origin story?

Look, I think we're more lucky than sprinkle luck.

I've always believed that.

And if I look back in our journey,

Dan and I started this company in January 2000.

Dan and I worked together before this at a company called Sendin CUC.

And we really started with two principles in mind.

One was, let's build a company we will wanna work for.

And Dan and I are not typical.

We're very different in hopefully good ways, but we both are of the same opinion that life is to be lived with enjoyment and that we will wanna work at a place or build a place that we will wanna go work every day so we never have to work.

True definition of being an entrepreneur.

And then the second one, and I think we said it at the time without really understanding it, which was a company that would outlast us.

And even though we would want to do this for a long time, Dan retired about a year ago, a company that would outlive us.

What I have come to realize is it will outlive us through the people that get trained in our platform, not as a company itself.

And then many of the businesses hopefully are here for decades to be.

But that really were our basic principles.

So when you start with that, the business plan was completely flawed.