Ryan Petersen

And OK, so we had this license, but it was in Houston and we wanted to be in San Francisco after YC.

And in order to transfer it, it's just an administrative process.

But you have to have a business license from the city of San Francisco.

Simple, right?

It's just a business license.

Well, the city of San Francisco had an IT problem and was unable to issue business licenses.

And this was in 2014.

They had not been issuing business licenses for several years.

They could issue a letter that says you have a business license.

but customers wouldn't accept that.

They wanted the license.

And the printer problem, I don't know what the IT problem was, they wouldn't accept a letter on city letterhead saying, yes, this company has a license on file with us.

They wanted to see the actual license.

It was kind of like Kafka S. At some point, we just weren't gonna be able to operate.

I mean, we were like operating remotely in Houston and it just wasn't going to work.

And customs was kind of clear, like you need to, you can only transmit entries physically sitting in Houston.

So I told Ron Conway about this situation and he emailed the late Ed Lee, who was our mayor.

And Ron was like one of his big donors and friends.

And we got the license within six hours.

They, like, went down.