Steve Benson

So this is what we looked like in 2012.

The first way I funded the company was by, let me zoom you back to 2012, right?

And maybe some of you are in situations similar to this today where you've got

four people on the team and you're making $50,000 a month or something.

And I guess I was probably making $25,000 a month then.

And it turns out the basic needs of a software company, the food and water that it needs, engineers and sales guys and product managers, they cost more than you can make at first.

So money has to come from somewhere.

And so you either have to have money in your pocket already or...

You know, hopefully your mom's rich or something.

But I was lucky in that I was able to fund the early parts of the business without equity because I had worked at Google early enough.

So I had like a million bucks to just light on fire, basically, and become broke again.

And so that's what I did.

But...

In the course of that, I managed to build a piece of software.

I didn't build it.

The engineers built it.

But I needed to keep paying them.

And so now it's 20.

So I started having it built in 2012.

Now it's 2014, and I'm just super broke.