Tyler Tringas

Well, I did everything.

I mean, so we were cold emailing.

We had built an impressive product.

So I had taught myself to code.

I had managed to also get a CTO.

to work for me for a bit.

And so we had built a pretty cool product in a pretty interesting market.

And so it wasn't that hard to get at least a bite on the other end of the hook.

And then what we found was two big problems.

One was that...

Although cleantech was interesting at the time, it was a particularly very bad time to be raising as a cleantech firm.

It was right after Don Dora Kleiner had just lost a humongous amount of money.

Solyndra had just imploded.

Basically, VCs had lost money.

a ton of money in the hard tech stuff that, you know, to be fair, we were arguing, we were transitioning away towards software, but they had just lost so much money that there was a sort of herd mentality that like, yeah, we're not investing in clean tech right now.

And the other problem was that I,

I didn't know about how Power Law worked and how venture really worked.

I was just like, I'm trying to build this great business.

I'm pretty sure I could build a $50 or $100 million business.

There's software here, so let's do a deal.