Tom Burnside

But the good news, the customer is able to get, because we were able to save money, we were able to push that forward to the customer.

Yeah, we had enough flexibility.

I mean, obviously being in this market for quite a while, what we did is we really used more of our own equity.

So our advance rates are a little bit lower.

So our box was wider so we could test more.

So we were able to go right at the market and test it in the best of ways.

We did most of it on our own balance sheet to start with, just so we could prove the concept and the model worked.

To test the market.

Well, yeah, so what's interesting, the group of team, the team we have here raised about $220 million of friends and family, just really no outside rounds, but friends and family, we raised that over, you know, over about,

probably four or five different tranches that we re-raised it, but we didn't really consider them A rounds, B rounds.

It was our friends and family coming to the table.

We had other deals that we had done together that worked out well.

And so it was relatively easy to raise that.

Our first institutional raise didn't actually happen until 2020.

combination of both.

Some of it was just pure equity.

Some of it was more mezzanine-type structure.

It's a little combination of both, but it allowed us to use that money to leverage to be able to get us access to capital, be able to test our models and make sure that our models were as predictive as we were hoping they were going to be.

They became that

over a short period of time.