Ric Elias

We did really well.

And we're like, okay, let's put all our chips in the middle of the table.

And Bankrate was our first big acquisition at the time, you know, on creditcards.com, the points guy, Bankrate, and

a bunch of other miscellaneous assets.

And it was our first, okay, we're in the big leagues now and we have a lot of debt.

There's quite a lot of glossing over going from $2 million paying back your investors to a billion and a half dollar acquisition.

This is a decade.

But I'd love to dig into some degree.

What would you credit your early operating success with?

Obviously, you got to that scale early.

on an unusual way with not a lot of outside backing and control of your own destiny and permanent capital and all these things.

So if you think back on that specific chapter, what was going on?

What were the things you were doing or the way you were doing those things that made it possible?

It's a strange story.

Survival, to some extent.

When you spend the first four years, two little kids, both of us, not taking any money home, humility, understanding that this could change easily.

Early on, we would meet with our 80 employees, call it 2007 and 8, and we were now making money.

millions of dollars of profit.

And I will say, oh, I enjoy this.

These are the good old days.