What have you learned about growing a company utilizing investors.
Well, first I would say that I don't know what the other experience would be like growing a tech company without utilizing investors. So I'll just talk about the experience with investors. We didn't have investors early on, we self-funded it through my family's roofing business (which basically means through my dad). And so I also don't know the experience of someone who had to go raise money right away immediately. But I will say that the investors have helped add a little bit of accountability beyond myself, which is just someone to kind of answer to. You say you're going to do something. You say you're going to try something. You tell people it's going to work. And then they want to know, "Did it work? Did it not work?" Things that you could just kind of move past. We've been able to maintain control of the business to where we control the board, we control the decisions, and we've never had a situation where investors were trying to make us do things that we didn't want to do or make us run this business in a way that we didn't want to run the business. That was something I was worried about the whole time - getting a boss. I didn't want a boss. I wanted money to help grow the business and not a boss. And it actually worked out quite well that way where we got investors who cared a lot about the business who had good information and advice and feedback but didn't try to get us to run the business a different way than we wanted to.
And so yeah, thinking about what I've learned, really what I would say is that cash flow is the blood of a business (just having money in the bank) and often we raised money to grow the business but also to just have cash available so that we could try things and learn and essentially lower the risk of the business. I know sometimes when you raise money it's about spending just every last penny of it into trying to grow and going for broke. You know, like going big or going home type of a thing. And in our case, we did want to grow aggressively and we wanted to be able to spend more money toward growth than we were bringing in at any given time. But we wanted to do that in a way that was responsible - that if if the business stopped working or if something went haywire in the economy that we wouldn't be sunk, that we would be able to push through that because we had money in the bank.
And so, you know, all in all, I guess I've probably learned a lot. I don't know exactly what if that is from you know just investors vs just running a business. I will say this, I've learned a lot about raising money. And that you know having a good business is a great way to be able to raise money but also remembering the fact that like you have to really believe in your business. And you've gotta, if you're trying to convince yourself that it's a good idea while you're trying to convince investors that it's a good idea, that's tough. Like, come to believe like that it's a great idea. Believe it more than the investors do. I would remind our CFO Tullen when we're fundraising that like "Hey, we believe this more than they do. Like we believe in it more than they don't believe in it," and we can still learn from them and we can still they'll they'll know things that we don't know but we don't.
I'm happy to answer more questions about this. That was my long ramble about what I think I've learned so far.
