Ryan Smith

Yeah, your recollection is as good as good.

Look, when someone rolls into the Valley in 2011...

with a pretty high run rate kicking off that kind of cash, you don't need leverage, right?

I mean, we didn't even really meet when we had seven term sheets and an offer to sell the company.

We're at a different time now, so I think it's hard to compare.

For some people, I think that's a great strategy, but

Ultimately, these are your partners.

I mean, you want to choose people you want to go to battle with and who care about the business as much as you do.

And I really think that's what is missing from a lot of the VC end.

tech company relationships is they just don't treat it as an extension of the team and the partner and get the whole weight of the firm behind it.

And I think if you did that, I think you would have probably a lot more, um, success or a little bit more of a better relationship where, you know, it's not an us versus them.

That's a really weird thing.

You know, you're starting a company to be an entrepreneur.

You're going to write your own story and then you're signing up for a relationship where it's an us versus them.

And basically you do have a boss if you're not structuring it right or actually you want a partner.

And that's when you look back and you say, hey, well, what an amazing ride.

And I feel like I truly have that with my board, my VCs and and.

because of maybe some of the leverage, if you want to call it, or actually just what we were looking for when we started.

Yeah, so if I think about it historically, if you go into an organization, you've got one product, if they're even doing anything to handle their NPS and understand all of their customers and close the loop and mine all the text to say, hey, look, while we're sleeping, we're providing an experience.

Is it going well?