Ryan Urban

Not at all.

And screw VCs, even though I have some great VCs.

uh uh no it's it was like hey we're gonna have to self-fund this thing at the beginning get some traction um don't want to have multiple vcs on a board making decisions just the the fundamental way software companies grew and the ones that grew to billion dollars plus um i just didn't believe in it at all um and all these big companies that were these billion dollar plus companies i'd work with them all before whether it was an analytic solution um like uh like

and other stuff that's Voldemort not to be named.

It was just a really bad experience.

It was a really bad experience in the service side and it wasn't something I would stake my personal reputation on.

A single piece of software that I would go into this new company or my friend who worked in another company where I'd say, hey, this is good.

Go use this.

Their service is great.

The product is great.

It's going to make you money.

Not one.

And when you look at how all these B2B companies grew, it was because they had a fleet of salespeople, a fleet of these SDR sales development reps that are emailing, calling everybody, blogs, white paper, social media, trade shows, spending a ton of money on AdWords, LinkedIn ads, everything.

And and I decided we weren't going to do any of those things.

And still to this day, we almost do none of those things.

Yeah, we're about 150 employees.

Even though it looks like on paper, we've taken on like seven, $8 million.

A lot of that just went to... We're in the New York Times building right now, and the security deposit was $3.5 million.

So we were profitable as a business, but we just needed to pay the security deposit to move because we were growing.

That's the reason why we took on a lot of money.