Sam Jacobs

let's focus on what we're good at.

For us, we're a community business.

We're effectively an events business.

We're good at content.

You know what we're not good at?

Building software.

We're actually not very good at building software.

I didn't start this as a software company.

I'm non-technical.

And all of the people that said you need your own software in order to build a big business, those people I don't agree with, actually.

And I realized when we were looking at our balance sheet and we were looking at our P&L and our income statement

that the size of the product and engineering organization almost exactly matched our monthly burn.

And I also realized that the stuff that we were building was actually pretty commoditized.

We use a platform called Hivebright, which is an insight venture partners company, to launch our member hub.

We were building our own member hub internally.

It was taking two years, and it was about $2.5 million a year to spend on the product engineering team.

and it was going to be about 1,100th as effective, interesting, or exciting as the member hub that we launched two months ago in January.

If you're a software company, that doesn't mean stop building software, but that means you might not be a community business, you might not be an events business, and you've got to focus in a world of profitable, efficient growth on what are the things that you are truly differentiated at, what are the things that you're truly exceptional at,

and tripling down on those things, and then stop doing the things that you're not going to be great at.

What good is it for Pavilion to build its own software when there's commodity software off the shelf that is 10 times better, that has a mobile app, that has all kinds of data and analytics?