Ryan Petersen

He started it before that.

And we were, um,

Tech company, but we didn't call ourselves that.

And we wrote all of our own software to do kind of like, it was pre Shopify, right?

So e-comm checkout, inventory management, billing, all this stuff.

Like if we'd have been smart, like Toby was, we'd have sold subscriptions to our little platform and maybe could have been Shopify.

But instead we just like bought motorcycles and sold them on eBay motors and whatever.

Well, I was very curious about the world and like.

I had lived in South America.

I speak Spanish and Portuguese.

I was like, you know, we were making money, not a lot of money, but we're making money in China.

Didn't have anyone.

We had one employee actually in China, but we weren't like really deep in China.

And I, it was very clear in 2002 that China was like just on a tear and that it would be.

maybe the future.

It was like really obvious to me.

So I moved there thinking, okay, if anyone could learn Chinese, I already learned Spanish and Portuguese.

I could probably learn Chinese.

Let's go for it.

Uh, so I moved there, kept my work basically of like doing supply chain logistics, e-comm development, web development, uh, customer services, jack of all trades for the startup that we had.