Summary

Kayvon Touran, co-founder of Zal.ai, shares his journey in the ed tech industry and the development of his company. He discusses the importance of working in an ambiguous environment and the influence it had on his career path. Kayvon explains how Zol.ai aims to enhance learning and development in the workforce by measuring skills and competencies. He also talks about the challenges of finding product-market fit and the unconventional approach they took to funding their startup.

Kayvon Touran bio

Kayvon Touran is a seasoned operator in early-stage tech startups with over a decade of diverse industry experience. Starting his career in sales and business development, he next transitioned into product management, and eventually a GM role. Kayvon eventually found himself immersed in edtech, and spent the past five years at Noodle.com, an edtech company based in New York. At Noodle Kayvon co-created and launched a platform for universities to manage their lifelong learning initiatives online. It was during this that Kayvon, and his then coworker/now cofounder Joe Rousseau, identified a significant gap in the market concerning organizations' ability to effectively contextualize, apply, and measure their Learning and Development spend. This realization inspired him to launch his latest venture, Zal.ai – a technology and services company that combines cutting-edge learning science and generative artificial intelligence to transform learning and development for the workforce.

Links

Keyvon’s current company https://zal.ai/

Please leave us a review: https://www.podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

The book Think Like a Startup Founder (early access): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s site for speaking, podcasting, and ruminating: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Jothy’s non-profit foundation The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on why people with a disability over-achieve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Takeaways

Working in an ambiguous environment can be exciting and impactful, leading to personal and professional growth.

Zol.ai aims to enhance learning and development in the workforce by measuring skills and competencies.

Finding product-market fit is an ongoing process that requires continuous evaluation and adaptation.

Bootstrapping can be a viable option for funding a startup, allowing for autonomy and control over the company's direction.

Sound Bites

"I liked working in a highly ambiguous environment"

"There's a huge opportunity to help better contextualize and measure learning and development"

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

09:39 Delving into edtech

32:31 Bootstrapping and funding

And here is Kayvon Turan. How are you?

Hi there, I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me.

I'm thrilled to have you. I like to start these episodes by asking the person, where are you originally from and where are you now? People love to know that who are listening.

Yeah. So, uh, I was born in the greater Boston area. Um, and, uh, moved to New York city, but actually recently moved kind of back to the area. So now I live in Cambridge, Mass.

Oh, you're right down the street. That's awesome. I didn't know that. And then since we are not strangers, would you tell the listeners how you and I know each other?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. It's actually fitting for our conversation in a way, but, um, so Jothi and I met, uh, way back when, when I was a university student at Northeastern and it was, I believe my second co-op that it was doing. And I, uh, joined BAE systems and specifically a project that, uh, Jothi was, I believe a PI for, and, uh, helped do some market analysis and got to see sort of.

up close and personal, you know, the entrepreneurial vigor that it took to try and spin out a project of that magnitude into something into the private sector. So that was like pretty incredible experience and one that left a mark on me. So, uh, yeah, that's how we know each other.

You had to be extremely tolerant because it was raw than raw. Okay. I mean, it was still a research project, but I love the idea of the co-ops of interns, and especially Northeastern takes it so seriously. There are only a few schools that actually add a fifth year.

and have it be real co-ops where you get paid, you're treated like a real employee, for better or for worse actually. And so tell me about the, you said it sort of had an influence on you, but can you say a little bit more about what it did?

what it made you do, how it influenced you.

Well, I think like one of the most profound things was definitely that I liked working in a highly sort of ambiguous environment when it came to what are we doing, where are we going? That feeling of sort of reaching around in the dark and trying to better understand sort of the right direction. Um, that was something that actually. Attracted me to that kind of work at the time I had been doing work in sales, um, before this experience. And I, there was.

elements of that work that I really love too. Um, I loved some of, you know, sort of like the discipline and the rigor that was involved and feeling like I was accomplishing a milestone and having to build processes to repeat that in a scalable way, all of those things really excited me about working in sales. But when I worked, I think, uh, for you at, at BAE, there is this feeling of, Hey, we've got this really big vision. We're working on something really impactful.

and almost like what's the killer app kind of, you know, expression of this idea in the world. And that was something that was so big and open and it got me really excited in a way that it combined different things that I really valued in my life that I didn't really associate with my professional life, creativity, you know.

research in a way that I, you know, it's funny, like, I'm so used to researching and going deep down the rabbit hole on like my personal interests and hobbies. I hadn't yet had an experience where I did that with a sector. And then within that sector, finding an application and thinking about, oh, that would be really interesting. Let's go deeper and deeper in that. I remember we met so many interesting people in that sort of journey. So yeah, I just I gathered from these little data points of what I really appreciated and what I wanted to get out of my professional life.

And so, uh, that was, that was really meaningful because then I, I sort of took those points and I started charting what I thought was my own kind of dream career path. So.

So it's interesting because I felt like, as raw as it was, the kind of research you were doing is what somebody who's going to be doing product management would do. And it turns out product management is something you've spent a lot of time since then doing. And you must still really love it.

Hehehe

Yeah. I mean, it's so, it's, it's so meaningful. I mean, so that was one of the experiences I had to working at a, at a startup where I think at the time when I was, what I was, you're exactly right. What I was doing at BAE in a lot of ways was product management or an element of product management, maybe like an analyst to a product manager. But I had yet to sort of see that in, uh, like the context of sort of like a tech startup, um, so I went in and I worked at one.

And I, I started seeing product managers and how they would interact as sort of this, uh, like person sort of taking in all this input from internal team members, the market customers, um, and, and sort of bringing that all together and, and processing it and figuring out a way to just create more value for all of those different stakeholders. And that was something that again, I was like, Oh, okay.

talking about what we were just talking about, what are the elements of my work that I really like and I appreciate. And it combined a lot of those in a way that was really meaningful and high impact. So, so yeah, I'm still a total product geek and someone who, who really values that work.

The startups that I've built, you need to build the product. And you're first right out of the gate. And your first, quote, product manager is probably the person that has the initial vision on what is the problem in this market that I know how to solve. And then the next thing.

you need in terms of marketing, because I think of marketing as being there's outbound and there's inbound and inbound is product management and outbound is I call product marketing. And so then the next thing I always need is I need product marketing because we're trying to get the word out about this, hopefully a minimum viable product that we built just with our own knowledge.

But then the thing that's always hard is, OK, well, now I need real product management who's going to tighten up the connection between customers and the product. But there's always this huge tension. The engineering team is saying, we can't build what we already know that we have to build, so we need more engineering. It's a constant battle. Just on the topic of product management.

So actually, why don't you kind of use the product management angle to take us into your delving into ed tech?

Yeah, I mean, it ended up being kind of this series of events where I found myself working at a company that was focused on, essentially the business model was a marketplace and it was interesting at the time I hadn't realized that so many of the startups and applications that I was really used to using were marketplaces, whether it was Uber or DoorDash or

Craigslist or it took me a second to really realize that there are so many of these things that I had grown accustomed to and appreciated and convenience that were marketplaces. So I got really infatuated by that and what it took to build a marketplace and also how challenging it is. And I took that experience and there was an opportunity to work at a tech company that was trying to build a marketplace specifically to help procurement managers.

in a sort of like pre-K through 12, purchase materials for schools more effectively and efficiently. And so it felt like a really, really exciting opportunity to dive into not only a space where I had some experience in terms of that business model and building products within that sort of structure and where it was valuable, but also this exciting new opportunity to apply that in an industry that I was really like not super educated on. I mean, both my parents were teachers.

My brother had an ed tech startup, so I was always around education growing up, but I hadn't really had a chance to dive in head first. And so that was a super exciting opportunity. And yeah, it was kind of pivotal in terms of as a stepping stone in terms of where I was going next.

Can you give examples of ed tech that maybe all of us would have heard of, that are like big things that we would have bumped into or heard of?

Sure, sure, sure. So like one, I'll mention a few. So in university, it's really common to use like an LMS like Blackboard or Canvas, which is how the courses are typically delivered to the learners. And now commonly you're seeing online asynchronous courses that you could find on platforms like Udemy or Coursera or edX. These are large.

at tech providers and also many of them are marketplaces.

And they, I assume they got a real boost in their business during COVID.

Absolutely. And the company that I was working for at the time also experienced a pretty incredible growth spurt during that sort of period of life. Essentially what we were doing was helping universities launch their degree programs online. And so, yeah, that was an, as an industry in a whole, it really swung in a particular direction up when it came to the pandemic. So that was a really incredible experience.

So which company was that?

Yeah, so that was actually the first company I worked for. So I can, I can kind of contextualize that. So that first experience working for that K through 12, a procurement marketplace, that was actually for an incubator called noodle. And it was founded by this guy, John Katzman, who founded the Princeton review, a really common, a popular tutoring company that a lot of people have heard of and another company called to you and essentially he had built this portfolio of different companies solving different problems within.

pre-K through post-secondary. And I found myself sprinkled as a product manager around the whole portfolio. And eventually it culminated into one company. So if you go to Noodle.com, you can learn more about that company and what it does. And really what it does is helps universities in launching online degree programs now along a myriad of other things as it's grown quite large. When I left, it was about 500 employees. So it really grew.

Is that what took you to New York?

You know, I was in New York before that, but it's definitely what made me stay in New York. Um, so I credit that, uh, to Noodle. Yeah.

OK, so then at some point, you went and then started your own thing. What was the impetus? What was the problem you saw?

Yeah. Now it goes back to, I think that product management mindset that you were talking about, and it's interesting that I love the way that you express that idea between product marketing, product management, internal, external, um, essentially I had co-created a lifelong learning platform with John. At the time I was reporting into him and he was the CEO of this company. And, um, the vision was to take online.

Uh, course platforms like Coursera and think of how you could enhance the content without having to necessarily refine the content itself, but through features of the platform. And so we were using some tenants and themes like, how do we make learning more social online? How do we make it more expertly supported? And we came up with some pretty, uh, pretty interesting ideas. And we took that to market and I probably spoke to like, I don't know, 50 to a hundred.

uh, like heads of schools in continuing ed and professional study, the schools that are responsible for the development of non-degree content at a university. And the thing that I kept hearing that I thought was really fascinating was they talked to me about custom ed within the, within workforce development. And they basically said, yeah, companies will come to us. And it's interesting. None of them want anything off the shelf. They all want something custom. And they don't really know.

who needs their training or upskilling the most, and they don't know what they need, and they don't know how to measure it, and it's efficacy. And that struck me as a really fascinating problem. Here we have an industry like workforce development and lifelong learning that's getting hundreds of billions of dollars invested into by companies globally. I think the average US company invests something like $1,500 per employee per year on training. And yet, as an organization,

It's a bit of a black box. It's hard for me to really measure and understand the efficacy of that investment, because especially trying to measure like, how is someone really improving a durable skill, like conflict resolution or negotiation. Those are really hard things to measure. Um, but it, it just sparked something in me and it really made me realize like, wow, there's a huge opportunity here. To work in this industry and help better contextualize and measure learning and development.

Um, and at the time noodle and still is really focused on working with universities. And so, you know, I talked to, I talked to John and said, Hey, we should go after this is really exciting, but realized like, this was really like, this has to be a new thing. This is a different thing entirely. And I, you know, one thing led to another. And we, I sort of made the jump with one of my colleagues actually at, at noodle who was a lead engineer on the project. So, um, yeah, sort of one thing led to another.

So how did John feel like he, because you developed some of it when you worked at Noodle, did he have some, you know, stake in the new company?

You know, it's interesting. I've had a few people ask me about that. I think. Like, so first of all, I didn't really like, we didn't develop technology or product when we were working at noodle. And the emphasis of what we were doing was really geared to like a totally different customer, right? Um, you know, John was definitely had pause when I said I wanted to leave and pursue a new venture. And that I was going to take.

another employee of his with me. But I really credit him and also, I think it's directly aligned with why I worked for him for so long, is because, you know, John's not a CEO, a professional CEO who's been parachuted into a company. He's an entrepreneur who from the ground up has built two public companies, and I have no doubt a third in noodle. So,

I think he probably more than most understands sort of that drive and that itch to go build something new. And I'm super grateful that I had that sort of support and we're still on really good terms. Yeah.

That's great. That is really great. So, all right. So the name of this company is...

zol.ai

This is in its z-a-a-al-f.ai.

AL. Yeah, and actually we just launched and I made an announcement about the company launching today. So probably a bit later for your listeners, but it's a really exciting day for us.

Yeah, this episode will come out a little bit later and you will have worked out all the kinks and everything will be amazing. So okay, so let's just go into the formation. So you've explained the idea. You explained the problem. And then...

Yeah, it's all good.

And what you said in the articulation of the problem is that, well, these are going to be really hard to measure. But clearly, you're very focused on let's measure so that we can talk about improvements. And your goal is to give people a sense of what is their ROI. So now I want to hear about your solution.

and what that's gonna look like. You know, to the extent you can talk about it.

No, totally. And we're an open book. Um, so yeah, it's really interesting. You know, it's funny, we started with this idea of companies lack career path thing, let's help them build career path thing. And I think you can, this will resonate with you, but it's funny how one little idea, as you start pulling that thread, takes you to so many different places and you realize sort of the depth of the problem. I think it's really common when you think about maybe starting a venture.

You're, you're kind of just looking at the tip of the iceberg and then you understand the depth and sort of like why it doesn't exist. Um, so why does something like career pathing not typically exists without a company, uh, typically exists at a company, at least the companies I've worked for. Well, um, a lot of times organizations lack the career architecture to even enable something like career pathing, meaning their job descriptions.

don't successfully categorize the skills and competencies that are requisite with the role. When we can understand the skills and competencies that are requisite with the role, now we can help an individual say, hey, I'm not just a graphic designer, I'm not just being measured by my title, but I'm this individual who's essentially like this bundle of competency and skill. And that can be applied in a really direct way, like the next title within the career path I'm on. Or maybe I have...

an overlap with something like design as a product manager might or, uh, you know, operations or something like that. And so what we realized as we started developing that was that, okay, but in order for us to really measure someone's like demonstration of actually acquiring a skill, we need to be able to measure it. We need to be able to verify that they have that skill. And so we had already built a bunch of software.

through something like 15 pilot partners that we were working with. And what ended up happening is we worked with a gentleman that I met through my experience at Noodle, who's now a co-founder of the business, Dr. Steven Cossland, who was a faculty member at Harvard for about 30 years, ended up becoming a dean there. He was a dean at Stanford. He was the founding dean at Minerva University. And he's a two-time founder himself. And.

Key had developed this really interesting novel way of using large language models for simulation training. And what we realized is by benchmarking individuals, by taking one of these simulation assessments and then having them take some form of training or learning and development, that afterwards we could have them take another assessment and we could really truly measure the efficacy of that learning, not only on a trend line for the individual, but across the organization.

Combined with all the other things we were doing that started building a lot of momentum and excitement and. Yeah. We've been sort of building furiously ever since.

Okay, so that's really cool. So I think I basically understand, I understand a good bit of that. I don't obviously understand how the large language model does that, but that's gonna take a real deep expert in the education area, I think. So I'll say that suffices for me to understand it well enough. But-

So then, of course, you've got to penetrate the market. You had to figure out what's the narrow market segment you're going to target. And then how did that process go? Did you evaluate a bunch of markets and select one? And then did you find a lighthouse customer? What's that part of the process?

Mm-hmm.

process been like.

Yeah. A great question. Yeah. So you're right. It was a lot of research. Um, a lot of like scrappily using whatever resources we had available to us in order to sort of amplify that research. It was also really interesting to do that research with like generative AI available. You know, a chat GPT subscription and what that process looked like and how it was different than when, you know, I was doing research for BAE.

It certainly didn't replace a lot of the things that I was doing, but it's an interesting sort of augmentation to how I did the research, which I thought was really interesting. Um, and then essentially where we landed was like, okay, there's this really interesting opportunity in sort of like the SMB space, like companies cresting over a hundred employees, all of a sudden they need to really get their compliance. Like kind of like under control, like they can't just be a wild west company anymore.

they're at like some decent level of scale. And up until like a thousand employees, they probably still don't have big built out HR and L and D teams. And so let's build something that can sort of power small and mighty L and D and HR teams. So that was kind of like the first cut at like how we filter the market. Then we started thinking about like, which industries and what line of work would find the most value in something like this. And an idea that we sort of

stumbled upon was this idea of like, what about service based work? Right. Where, and specifically going further, like agency or, uh, like hourly based work, where if I can enhance the skill and competency capability of an employee for the organization, of course you benefit from what everyone else benefits from by implementing something like this retention engagement, right. But also

Arguably, you could enhance not only the hourly rate that you could charge for an individual, but also the breadth of work that they could take, which means that you're now cutting into things like capacity and diminishing bench time for an agency. And so that became a really interesting segment that we started honing in on and going after. And you're right, we found a customer, our first customer in that segment that we're going through an implementation process right now, which is really, really exciting. But I have to say,

in our outreach, we've just found a lot of, we found this idea resonating with like a lot of different companies in different segments at different sizes. And, um, you know, we're, we're kind of taking a step back and thinking like, yes, that's like where there's some focus, but there's also so much exciting opportunity around us. Um, and it's, uh, we almost don't want to limit ourselves in terms of who we can impact because we think we have something scalable in the way that we can implement it.

Mm-hmm.

Well, you know, the point of going after, well, Jeffrey Moore says, pick one, very narrowly defined vertical market. He calls it the bowling pin strategy. I've always modified it and said two, because the purpose of going after a very narrow market is that it costs less, it's more efficient.

Hmm.

read the same things, go to the same conferences. And the people who make decisions tend to have the same role and therefore when you've figured out who are the personas that you have to work with to sell into one company, that's pretty much the model for all the other companies if you've defined that market segment narrowly enough. But

because you can't be absolutely sure all your research to find that market is dead nuts on, I say you should pick two. Then you're not spreading yourself too thin like if you pick 10, but you're hedging your bets a little bit. So then my question is, there was actually supposed to be a question in this. My question is,

I like that.

Okay, so it's great to see that there's all these other markets, but don't you kind of want to make sure you've got a solid beachhead in the first one or two that you've been, you know, initially targeting?

Yeah, I mean, you absolutely do. Right. And you want to go through implementations and you want to have real data on the efficacy of what you're doing. And you want that to inform obviously like the product development. And there's definitely like an art to that too, in terms of how you're taking in information, if you're too spread out, there are all kinds of problems that sort of arise from that a hundred percent. Um, so yes. Um, but there's also an element of like, I think, uh,

to the second point that you're making, like, how do you really understand what else is out there? And it's so hard in my opinion, to do that through just research. I mean, we can read all you want. We can, you know, ha even have conversations all you want with someone. I mean, something that's been really profound for me is just the difference in having someone who's really excited. Who's a champion for what you're doing and changing the tone of the conversation to, okay, well, would you pay for this? And then seeing.

the nature of the conversation totally changed. I mean, that's a massive signal, right? And a lot of times to get to that point, you need to be doing a lot of work to even get to that point for them to realistically consider you. Go through the process of championing this up to the decision maker at the organization if you're talking to an end user. And so, in some ways I consider that all just part of the research and it's, I guess it's sort of bled into that in a way.

the overlap of almost picking a market and still kind of being at that research phase.

So do you feel like you've, so obviously if you've got people playing with this, then you've got what you think is a minimum viable product. And then, you know, typically what I see is then there's this iteration as you go from the first one who's, if they're really your lighthouse customer, they're super, super friendly and supportive.

But then when you get to the second and third, you might find out that's actually not yet a minimum viable product. And are you there yet? I mean, I'm kind of looking for have you achieved product market fit.

Mm.

Oh, I mean, I'd humbly say no, I think. And I feel like I could have this conversation with you in a few years and say no. And here's why. Because I feel like.

That's a question where obviously there are measures and, you know, we could talk about what some of those measures are and that I've commonly used when managing, you know, a feature for a product or a product at a different, at a company. But I think as the founder, and like you said, as the starting person with a vision, it's, it's almost like I'm like running away from my own standard of like, what is product market fit? It's like a never ending battle to feel like.

this isn't just something that someone's buying, but is actually creating value. And is that value something that every year for the next five years, when it comes time to resubscribe, they're like, yes, absolutely. So I feel like that's a pretty tall bar to hold oneself to. And that's something that I always struggle with in the definition of product market fit. I'm sure there are classic definitions. So I guess that's my quick answer to that, but.

Yeah. Well, that's good. I mean, it's good to be humble about product market fit. You know, there's a guy at Stanford whose name is Andy Rakleff, and he's got what he calls Rakleff's law, which is, well, first of all, his overriding law is, there has never been a startup that succeeded

that did not have product market fit. So it's a humbling thing to think about in the first place. But then he talks about, it's really all about market. If, and this is why it was great to see you so excited about all the potential markets that it could go into because if the market is fantastic, then you don't even have to have the best product. You don't even have to have the best team.

you can have kind of OK of both and be successful. Of course, almost none of us see markets like that. Google had one. Facebook has one. Amazon, the ones that roll off the tongue. Right. And even dare I say, at one particular point in time, I had one.

We've all heard of.

which was with a group of people. The web was two years old and we had the first load balancing solution for the web. And the web is a pretty big market. But, and that's why we had, you may have forgotten this, but we, on 2 million in revenue, we sold it for 106 million. So that's the definition of a pretty amazing market.

Wow.

I just want to switch gears to, so have you had to raise money?

Not through the classic means. We've been very unconventional there, so I'd be happy to share what our journeys look like when it comes to that.

Yeah.

Well, I think, so I also was lucky because I've had a lot of exposure in working at startups and, uh, and also like with my brother and other people who I'm close with. And I was sort of, I wasn't as enticed by the allure of being able to say we've raised, you know, XYZ, you know, round and we're so excited and there's nothing wrong with that. But.

I really did think that there's an opportunity here to be more scrappy at our stage, frankly. And there's so many resources available to you that I was frankly surprised by. So my co-founder is based in Maine. And we found an amazing group out of Maine called the Maine Technology Institute.

We're able to raise some grants through them. We did a founder residency program in Portland, Maine. We're able to raise some non-dilutive funding through them. We took a second to think about what our skills were between myself and my co-founder, and we feel pretty confident in our ability to build quality software. And so we've taken on a bunch of service contracts, building software for other individuals on a contract basis and essentially reinvesting that money into our long-term vision of building Zoll.

Of course, our vision is to get to a point where Zoll is sustainable in and of itself. We have traction. We have a sense of product market fit. We have a sense of the markets that we're in. And then we can think to ourselves, okay, is this, is this a really big opportunity? Is this a billion dollar opportunity? And should we go raise venture capital? Or is this just a smaller business or something that has a five, 10 year sort of horizon for an exit or acquisition from a bigger company? Um, so. We've tried to be really.

thoughtful around that piece. And honestly, it's just been so much fun. It's been so much fun maintaining the autonomy of being your own boss at this stage still and feeling like we can align ourselves not between investor, customer, and our own sort of like memorials, ethics, et cetera, but really just be honed in on like, how can we satisfy our customers, our users? That's our only, that's the only guiding light for what we're doing. And that's unique to a bootstrap company. So.

That's sort of how we've been at the point.

Is it really about being your own boss or is it really, and maybe you'll say it's the same thing, or is it really about having complete control over your destiny?

Yeah, that's better said. It's, you know, it's funny. It's like, I'm not, um.

I'm not as, I'm not driven by like the idea of being my own boss. I'm driven by this idea of like, I can follow my own sword. And so I think you said it perfectly. It really is that idea of like, the buck stops with us and my co-founding team at this point. And that's really, really exciting. And I...

Mm-hmm.

It's really exciting to think that as the team grows, there's more people who have that sense of autonomy and authority and purpose behind what we're trying to do. And I think that's almost like a feeling that I've tried to run away from at my last companies that I've worked for full-time. All these different experiences culminating, but feeling at the end of the day that if I fail, the show continues kind of thing. I think there's a last,

bit of like, you know, fulfillment as well as like, creation that comes out of someone when they really feel that level of, you know, this is this is down to like, me and the team and the people who are around us and like, this is what's driving like this initial momentum that that's something that really excites me.

So I always want to make sure I talk to people about, because there's no doubt that every single person who's I'm going to talk to on this podcast, because it's about startups, is someone who has grit. Because you don't go into this without grit. The question is, where does your grit come from? You talk about scrappy.

Oh.

Lots of things that are part of the definition of grit. But I've never even asked you this, even though we worked together for a while. And I'd love to know where you think it comes from for you.

Great question. I mean, you know, I've read the Angela Duckworth book and it's funny, I have a funny story working somewhere and someone recommended that book to me. And when you recommend that title to someone, it's kind of a funny thing, cause it's like, are you saying I'm not gritty? But, and aside, you know, I think it's really just through like, you know,

like me mimicking the people who I sort of wanted to be more like, you know, as honestly the answer, I mean, maybe there's something, you know, innate and that you're just like a tenacious person or something and you've got a chip on your shoulder and something to prove kind of thing. But when I think about like that, I think so. I think so. Um, but I think I credit, I guess I'll for myself personally, I'll credit that.

You could be born with it.

less than kind of just seeing the people who I consider to be successful in my life who are doing the kinds of things that I wanted to do and like trying to like think about like what are the characteristics in some ways maybe I didn't realize that I was replicating grittiness but I but I was and then I think honestly a lot of where it came from too is having only really worked at small companies that are living and breathing by the next milestone it's a cultural thing that just sort of

infuse onto you, you realize like this is what you have to do to survive. Um, and then I think the point where it comes at like a personal level is like, and I like that resonates with me. I'm not seeking comfort. So.

One of the things that I remember putting in your evaluation, and you were, I was about to say only a college student, but what I mean is you hadn't yet had these experiences of working in startups. And the word I used was fearless because, and I meant with respect to the research you were doing, I would ask about something, and you would, without even a question, you would say,

I'm pretty sure I could go find out a bunch of stuff about that. And I was always so impressed with that. Because if you don't know how to do something, if you haven't done it before, there can be some fear of, well, I don't know if I know how to do this. And you had none of that.

I so appreciate that you were able to identify that because I've had people super close to me sort of like break that to me. It's funny when like, you know, that happens and you're kind of like oblivious to it. But I think you're right. I think it is a trait of like being an entrepreneur is almost this blind faith and confidence and courageousness that I don't really know where it comes from. Maybe if there's a screw loose.

or maybe I'm just not smart enough to know, you know, sort of like what I'm actually agreeing to. But regardless of what it is, it's just, I guess it's my default to presume that, you know, sort of like, why can't I? And I remember that was kind of a funny thing that we immediately connected on. And I remember actually saying that to you and you were like.

Do you know I own the trademark for who says I can't? I was like, who says we can't do that? Let's go do it. And I was just, it's funny.

Ha ha.

Yep.

Well, we've covered, this has been great because I think you managed to walk us through all the thoughts that you had to go through to figure out what this new company was gonna do. And also how you were thinking about the company itself. Kudos for...

not raising money right away and figuring out a way that you can bootstrap it before you really understand what direction it has to go, how it has to scale. That's really awesome. And also that you're a very self-confident person who doesn't have any arrogance, which I think arrogance hurts companies. So it's good not to have that trait. You have all the right

right things going for you. You're going to continue to do fantastically.

I appreciate that. I've had good mentors and people to replicate. So, but yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks.