Ric Elias

It's in the revenue budget.

So there's a lot more leverage.

And we literally said, let's go try to figure that out.

over the first couple of years, build a core tech where we can map a couple million toll-free numbers to an online experience and give you a phone experience that was quasi-personalized by how you navigated online.

So we could go to any brand and say,

We can out-convert whatever you're doing in this notion of take your agency, take your call center, take your internal operations.

We can out-convert it by 30%.

If that's not true, don't pay us.

But if it's true, give us a piece of the upside.

Don't pay us as an agency or a service provider.

And that became kind of the first unlock in call it 2006 to 2010.

And from there, there's a cemetery full of skeletons of bad ideas.

And we went our way through it.

And lo and behold, come from 2010 to now, and this is where we are.

What was the first thing you ever bought?

What business was the first business you ever just bought outright?

First meaningful thing we bought where we literally broke the bank, we had a pristine balance sheet, was Bankrate.

Bankrate at the time was $1.4 billion and it wasn't worth that.

Before we bought Bankrate, we bought an asset in financial services that it was a tiny asset where we said, let's go and prove that we can actually use that asset

in Google and paid search and SEO and really start doing what we did in telecommunications using someone else's brand, using our own brand in financial services.