Steve Pokras

Thank you guys all so much for staying before lunch with me.

I really appreciate it.

I will try to make it worth your while.

That is not me.

That looks more like me.

This presentation was, this was a much longer Sastr presentation before, and we streamlined it down, so it might run a little fast, but I'm gonna try to pack it a lot.

We're here to talk about how to build an A plus talent company with D minus budget.

Um, which is what you do when you're doing with, with bootstrap world.

So I think people think about bootstrapped in a lot of different ways.

The way I think about it is if you're an investor company, you're investing two years in front of where you want to be.

And if you're a bootstrapped company, you're investing what you needed to do two years ago now.

Um,

And so you need to find the right people in order to do that.

And getting those people who are going to drive that is your biggest competitive advantage.

It's probably the thing that I'm most proud of that we've done as a company.

Let me show you.

So this is Verblio's growth rate.

I took over the company from the founders in 2000 at the end of 2016.

So we have been growing at 40 to 50 percent successfully on a bootstrap budget since then.

We are 100 percent bootstrapped until a couple of months ago when Founder Path helped us out with some work in capital.