Sam Jacobs

downshifting the rise of interest rates and the entry of the world that we live in is that our growth really has shrank, right?

And we've moved from a world where we were growing and all through here, all through 2021, we were extremely profitable.

And then what happened at the beginning of 2021 was that I got a call from Elephant Ventures.

And again, effectively, Pavilion has been really a dinner club, a membership organization and association.

Never intended it to be a venture-driven business.

But I got a call, and this was sort of the height of the bubble, right, or the height of peak Zerp, as you might say, peak zero interest rates.

And Elephant Ventures emailed me.

I had just had a conversation with a friend.

We had just gone from one to four million in ARR.

And a friend of mine had said, you're probably worth 1 to 1.2 times revenue.

And I said, I don't really know of any company that grows 4x in a year and is only worth 1 times revenue.

And that was the moment that Elephant Ventures emailed me.

And they said, if you give us a look at your financials, we can tell you what we think the relative valuation is.

I said, well, I just had a fight with my friend.

So I would love to get your read on

the relative valuation.

And I sent them by quarter.

They came back and they said, we think it's worth roughly $80 million.

We're going to put in this amount of money.

Post-money valuation, we think we're going to put in $25 million.