Vlad Tenev

And then our app launched to the public in March of 2015.

Walk me through that three years.

So the first step was once we figured out, hey, this is a really big opportunity, we should go after it.

Then we had to figure out, okay, how do we reconcile this with having an existing business that's very, very different with enterprise customers that we have to support?

How can we do that and also do this new thing?

And we basically figured out that we should raise some capital to do this.

And at that time, you know, raising capital from VCs, it had kind of a negative connotation to it.

All of the people that I knew

basically discourage me from it.

They said, VCs are going to take your company and they're just going to install professional management and they're just going to stab you in the back.

So we raised some capital from angel investors, a very small amount.

I think the initial tranche was maybe a few hundred thousand dollars.

And that was kind of enough for us to get going and make some initial hires to get it all set up.

Building a broker isn't like building a technology startup.

At that time, there was this book that was going around called The Lean Startup.

It was sort of like this playbook for how to start a company in this new age of cloud and mobile.

What it created, what they put into the public was this notion of a minimal viable product.

Like the first product has to be a complete solution for a fairly narrow product that you spend as little resources as possible to validate.

So actually, if you could validate it without building it,

it's the best idea.