The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding

Yeah. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here and chat chat and disagree.

I think that our past is what kind of creates the people that we are today. And what I spend a lot of my time I’m 41. What I spend a lot of my time trying to do is actually notice it and not run from it. Like a lot of my past, like, life and shadows and triggers and stuff, like, come up constantly. I mean, I share with you that I grew up without a father, so the fear of abandonment is, like, really really runs really deep to me.

And whereas in the past, I’ve, like, run from those emotions and run from my past. My work now is to kinda just sit there and take it and to notice and allow and feel the feelings in my body and then let them let them be.

Yep.

Yeah. So on the positive side, it certainly drove me. Like, I I was very driven to accomplish, and I think deep down that was to, like, make my father come back, which was never gonna happen. On the negative side, relationship, I have a really hard time advocating for myself, like with my wife or with my friends because I’m worried that they’ll leave me. I’ve oftentimes been made fun of by my friends where I’m like, guys, don’t leave. And they’re like, we’re not gonna leave you. Like, don’t worry.

You’re fine. And in my professional life, yes, I think I can tend to be overly generous and overly accommodating because of this fear that, like, people are just gonna go. And that’s something that I’ve had to work hard on through the past sixteen years of CEO ing.

I’ve spent a lot of time leading people, and I’ve seen a lot of people come and go, whether we had to fire them or whether they left on their own volition. And one of the things that I’ve really focused on in this business is to make sure or to try to make sure that any person who comes into the company, when they leave, they’re like, wow. That was the best career decision I made. And if I can say that, if I if I look at them and I’m like, oh, yeah.

We hate to see her go, but now she’s gonna run data and analytics somewhere else. Like, people aren’t designed to work at a company forever. Kinda like noticing the fear of abandonment, but then also just like not letting it hijack my day to day.

Happens all the time. I mean, there’s kinda two ways of looking at that. On one is like, can they get there? You need to help them through something, you need to grow them in a certain way, and sometimes it’s just you pick the wrong person. And in that case, you just need to be open with them and part ways. And it’s

I have this this analogy of a useful life meter. Your job as the as the leader is to figure out when people’s like old parking meters. Like, when their parking meter is down in the red, you wanna throw another 0.25 in it. And that doesn’t mean that you, like, pay them more. But oftentimes, you see people who fizzle out. They did great, and then they are fizzling out, or they’re not able to to go into the job that you want them to. So there is a huge opportunity to move people around, but you really wanna make sure that you’re dealing with the right parking meter.

Oftentimes, we try to move people just to avoid having a hard conversation. Having a hard conversation is hard for people to have. If you end up just hiding that by moving somebody to a different department, you’re not doing yourself the service of being able to, you know, grow by having the hard conversation, and you’re not doing them a service either. Like, nobody wants to be a poor performer that everyone knows and just move to a different part of the organization.

Oh, man. Well, the biggest one that comes to mind is, this is really early. This is, like, really early custom made. We hired this guy. He was a sales guy. He didn’t do any work. We’re told by a restaurant, like, nearby that he stole a sandwich. They they made a sandwich and he, like, took it and didn’t pay for it. And so anyway, we’re, like, basically, like, hey, man, you’re not really doing any work. Like, might be time to replace you. And he’s, like, yeah, that’s fine.

But when you do, I’m gonna let everyone know that you hired a level three sex offender. And we’re I I like typing in level three sex offender, like, what does that even mean? I don’t even know what that means. And, you know, it turned He out

It turns out that when you hire people, it’s a really good practice to run a background check on them.

First of all, nobody nobody understands their equity and negotiates for it. In in my career, I’ve had so few people actually read the document. I I’ve probably had, like, a dozen questions, and usually it’s on page two of a 75 page document. Right? So, like, nobody reads it. And I think if you are getting a big comp package and part of the compensation is equity, you should understand what you’re actually getting because people don’t. I’ll just leave that at that. In terms of red flags, the other one for people who are hiring is I find that sometimes people anchor around, like, money.

So if somebody really wants a $100, don’t come in at 95 just because, like, you wanna make it like, oh, we only had 95 budgeted. Like, pay them a $100 because they have that level in their head. I don’t wanna lose someone over salary. That’s the big mistake to make. Where I’ve seen the biggest red flag the biggest red flag for me would be on title where, you know, you’re pretty clear on what you want, and they’re like, well, I I need to report to the CEO.

And it’s like, well, that’s not available. Like, you’re not reporting to me. I’m sorry. Like, I I’m interested in this work, but, like, you’re not gonna report to me. So title reporting, I would say, are the two the two red flags that we watch out for.

Here’s the deal. There’s a lot of different ways to be an entrepreneur. Tons of opportunity and tons of ways to make money and build a business. What I find most people do is they spend a whole bunch of time on like the idea, like the business plan. Like, oh, here’s how we’re gonna make money. This is what it is. I can’t leave my job until I’ve like actually like, I’ve I’ve figured out all these things. And usually, you can’t really foresee what the future looks like.

So oftentimes, people get into a business, and then they realize like, oh, this is there’s no business here. Like, we’re gonna pivot it, and we’re gonna do something else. Or the business that you start looks nothing like the business that you end up with. Okay. Why spend so much time figuring out the the market and doing all this stuff when, like, you haven’t even decided what you want this business to look like? One of the lies of entrepreneurship is that you need to raise money. People think I need to raise money, and therefore I need a business plan, and therefore I do all this stuff.

And what I try to encourage people to do is to try to take a moment. I generally say it’s a three year vision. So you look three years in the future, and it’s like, what does your life look like? What time are you going to work? Are you going to work? What does your office look like? Like, who are you talking to? What what are the core functions you’re doing on a daily basis? Did you get two workouts in? Are you hanging out with your family?

Like, a day. Like, think about a day. And what you find is like a lot of people are chasing a lifestyle. They’re not chasing a business. Now that’s not true for everything. We’re we’re not talking about launching chat GPT or putting a rocket into space. We’re talking about like entrepreneurship. And the person who owns the dog poop cleanup company is doing quite well for themselves and has a pretty sweet lifestyle. What I try to say is, like, obviously, a business plan is important, and it’s especially important if you’re gonna go raise venture.

But oftentimes, like, what you start with is or what you intended to start with is not where you end up. So you really wanna get straight on, like, what you’re looking for and then how this business can drive you to the future.

I will respond with the story of writing that for ButcherBox. Okay. So my plan for ButcherBox, when I started ButcherBox in 2015, my vision was that I was in Argentina, the Tim Ferriss four hour work week. Right? I’m Argentina. I open up my laptop. I check-in with a few people. This is what the the structure looks like. We have a thousand subscribers. I make $20 a month off them. Covers my nut, and I’m, like, working on other projects. And there was a lot of detail in there, but that was, like, essentially the point.

It was a hobby business. Right? Three years after I started ButcherBox, we were, like, north of a $100,000,000. I had 50 employees. I mean, we we were, like, humming. And I had failed at my vision, you know, like, activating my vision did not happen. I did not create a hobby business. Although I could argue, if you looked at the vision, you looked at what I had, you’d be like, yeah, what’s the point of doing this? When you look at the details though, there’s all of these things, all of these threads that were dead on accurate.

Like, the way in which I prioritize my family instead of traveling. The way in which I prioritize giving to my community or like what ButcherBox was gonna represent or like how we we outsourced everything, which we can talk about. But one of the big keys to bootstrapping is you need to be able to outsource key functions like distribution centers. If you’re building a business for a hobby, you’re gonna make different decisions than you do if you’re building a business to go raise venture capital. The fact that I had like a vision session and came up with like, this is gonna be a hobby.

I’m gonna be in Argentina and not really paying attention. Sure. That didn’t come true, but also it helped me on a path. And you never know, like, where the path is gonna go. You’re totally right. Man plans, God laughs. Right? Like, who knows what’s gonna happen in three years?

No. I mean, if you look at our perform so we’re in the box subscription company, ButcherBox, we ship a box of meat to your doorstep. We started in 2015. In 2015, box subscription companies were humming. It was like Blue Apron, Plated, HelloFred, like all of them. Right? They all had similar models. They had raised tons of money, hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases, built out their own, like, stuff. Like, we need to do distribution, and we need to, like, in Blue Apron’s case, like, we need to figure out the machine that cuts the vegetables, and, like, everything has to be ours.

And because I wanted a hobby business, I didn’t wanna do that, and I started by partnering with people. And the difference with partnering with people, like a distribution center, we work with a company that’s been in business for a hundred and ten years. I think it takes a special kind of entrepreneur to think that you can get into distribution and do it better than somebody who’s been in business for a hundred and ten years, like, right out of the gate. That’s not gonna happen. So we partner with everybody.

The more the merrier. We’re actually moving this year. We’re moving to Shopify, and I’m thrilled because, like, I think even that it needs to be like, you find the best partners, you work with them, you find the best apps to attach to it in the ecosystem, you work with them. We don’t own our backbone. So we don’t own the farms, we don’t own the slaughterhouses, we don’t own the cutting facilities, we don’t own the distribution centers, we don’t own last mile shipping, we don’t own customer service.

All of those people in a very kind of like Toyota model are running our program, and we’re doing quarterly business reviews, and we’re holding their feet to the fire, and we’re telling them all the things that they need to improve on, and we’re getting them real time information about what they’re messing up on, but we don’t own it. Does that not

I mean, certainly, if you look at other food companies, that is the way that they do margin expansion. And we have definitely asked the question over the past year of, like, okay. Well, especially before this year with, you know, Trump’s tax code where you just get a ton of depreciation if you if you take on assets. We actually, two years ago, started a dry ice factory. We now have two. That was one, a margin play, but two, it was like this critical component that if we don’t have dry ice, we don’t ship, and we wanted to, like, control that.

There is definitely the ability to improve or increase margins by owning bigger pieces of the stack, and that does improve EBITDA because your amortization is below that.

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Well, I wouldn’t just dismiss that you can improve margin in meat. One of the places where if you are a bootstrapped company, you have to focus on is driving margin in everything. And so, like, for meat, there’s, like, yields. Right? So you cut a larger hunk of meat into rib eye steaks. There’s a yield percentage. There’s a yield of rib eye steaks that you get. So you might lose 7% of it, and and, like, that gets thrown into a different bucket. The difference between 76% or 74% are massive numbers.

I mean, right now, I’m looking at, like, we ship chicken, three pound pack of chicken. One of our problems is that unlike a retailer who has a price per pound multiplied by the package size and just charges you, the customer, that that’s not the case for us. Right? We sell you a custom box, and then you add three pounds of chicken to it. So if the three pounds of chicken is actually 3.3 pounds, well, now my chicken cost just went up 10%. And if you’re able to reduce that, it’s literally like 50 bps of of margin to the bottom line.

And it’s just like literally being like, hey, we’ve now decided we’re gonna weigh this stuff and you’re off by 10%. Please fix it. Or let’s sell it as 3.3 pounds, but at least like, let’s not just say it’s three pounds and have it be 3.3 pounds. Right? So when you start for us, we were constrained at the beginning by not raising money. So we had to be what I loved about the business was it’s very right brain, left brain. The right brain side is like, how do we market?

How do we do that differently? Like, how do we market cheaply? And then on the left brain side is like, how do you squeeze every bit of operational waste out of this thing? And it’s not all like, even that case, it’s probably a bad example because the customer does benefit by getting 10% more. But, like, let’s negotiate the price of the tape that goes on the box. Why? Because when you’re shipping millions of of linear feet of tape, it it turns out it matters what price you get.

You know, let’s not run half filled trucks. There’s all sorts of ways in which companies waste. And if you’re overfunded or if, frankly, if growth is, like, big, big, big, you don’t actually have the time to look at that stuff, and there’s a ton of money to be made in the details of eliminate waste, relentless improvement, get better, get better, get better.

I think if you are hopping on the VC train, you need to understand that the train that you’re hopping on is not one that you can get off of. It’s not one that you can then build lifestyle design into. So, no, if a VC who’s responsible for taking other people’s money and driving a return, if that VC is like, you need to quit your job and do this full time, I agree with that. Like, if I was gonna give someone a million bucks, I’d want them to quit my job too.

also doesn’t mean that you can’t, like, build a company on the side, figure it out, get to a point where you’re like, okay. I’ve figured this out and this out. I need this machine or I need this thing. Now is the time to raise. Sure. Just make sure you’re not doing it because, like, everyone else raises, so why don’t we? I mean, that was what my first company, that’s what we did. All TechCrunch wrote about was, like, people raising money. So we’re like, oh, to be a good entrepreneur, you need to raise money.

Then we just got on the VC train, and that train don’t stop.

Well, this entire business, like a subscription model, really arguably any D2C, but let’s just talk about a subscription model. It’s customer acquisition cost, and then there’s what’s called lifetime value, but really is gross profit dollars over time. How much money do you make off the person that you acquired? And so, yeah, a lot of VCs are like, don’t worry about negotiating the tape. You need to worry about getting more people in the door. Right? But the reality is what you need is actually a good ratio.

You need to make a return on that customer. You need to make it as fast as possible, and you need to watch those cohorts go up over time. Tape is a bad example because it’s really not that big of a mover, but, like, the price of a box. The price of a box can be $10. Right? If they’re getting eight boxes a year and you can shave $2 out of that thing, well, that’s $16 that you can actually redeploy into your CPA and keep the same ratio.

Right? So all of these savings, actually, you can dump back into marketing and get more confidence spending more marketing dollars because that’s what’s gonna happen. Because what happens is you get through your first cohort of people, and then your CPAs rise, especially with all the iOS changes and an election happening, and, like, CPAs are through the roof. And the only way that you can handle that is if you are making incremental progress on, one, keeping the customer and delighting them with the product that you have, but two, actually removing some of this waste so you can improve your gross margin without just, like, charging the customer more.

Because they that that doesn’t work. You can’t just be like, well, we’ll charge them more. It’s like, no. It doesn’t work that way. You need to find the the money in your operational inefficiencies.

Yeah. So your early cohort of people, the early adopters, those are gonna be your most loyal people and the cheapest to get. And then you’re moving into other spheres of people and other buckets of people. And so, like, for us, we started ButcherBox with claims based meat, grass fed beef was our thing. And there was a huge market of people in The US who already were predisposed to buying grass fed beef but didn’t know where to buy it. And so we used an influencer strategy and an interesting strategy to, like, go get all of those people.

But once you’ve gotten those people and by the way, it’s like 2% of The United States are predisposed to eat grass fed beef. If you wanna keep growing, what do you do? You have to actually, like, create a market. And so then that becomes like, it’s not just like, oh, they’re searching for grass fed beef and you put up a Google ad and you get them to your site and you sign them up, and it costs $30. It’s like, oh, we need to run like a brand campaign around like all the benefits of grass fed beef, and that just costs a lot more money.

And so over time, you see these businesses, CPA goes up and up and up and up. We have one of the challenges of a subscription business is you get into this paradigm where you have so many subscribers. And even if you focus on churn, like a pack of hungry dogs, even if you focus on churn, you’re going to churn people. And so you get into this scenario where you’re losing so many people, it’s hard to add them, and the CPAs are rising. So your business over time just gets worse and worse and worse.

I think that the easiest way, which is like low lift, is to take all of your marketing expenses for the month. So when you see your p and l, and it’s like we spent this on Facebook, and this on Google, and this on whatever, take all of those costs and divide by the number of people you signed up. Some places, some PE shops want you to then load in your marketing spend as well. Now that doesn’t help you decide to deploy more dollars towards Facebook versus, like, Google.

Right? But it does help you understand in the aggregate what happens. Because what happens is, like, somebody’s on Instagram and they see a thing, and then they, like, decide to search for it, and then they forget about it, and then they go directly to it. And, like, a truly functioning attribution model is really, really hard to build.

Right. Instead of going down the road of like, oh, we need somebody to measure this day in and day out. No. Just divide by the number of people that you signed up, and that’s your number.

So I have an analogy of wildcatting for oil. Probably not how wildcatting for oil works, but when you go out wildcatting for oil, you have a small cheap shovel and you just dig some holes. Right? You think this is gonna be a fertile ground and you dig some holes. You wanna make the hole small. You wanna make the holes cheap. You wanna make the holes rapid. When you start seeing oil bubble up through that hole, time to build the rig. But don’t build a huge rig.

Don’t, like, get the, you know, the massive rig. Get a small rig. Maybe you hire one person, and that person is gonna be for extracting the oil out of there. Then it’s like, wow. We think there’s a lot of oil here. It’s like, cool. Build a bigger rig. You you basically build and build a build. At a certain point, you bring in the fracking technology, and you’re trying to extract all the oil possible from the thing. But you, as the founder, don’t really want to go wildcatting until you make sure that that rig is is being manned, that somebody is on that rig, that they’re actually working harder on it than than you can before you move.

So for us, our first thing was influencers. We started with a Kickstarter campaign where we raised $215,000 in preorders. We reached out to all these, like, anyone who had ever mentioned grass fed beef on Twitter, and we were like, hey, we’re launching this company. And one guy, this paleo doctor from California, during our Kickstarter campaign was like, this sounds like a cool idea, and tweeted it out to his audience. And we just saw a flurry of people sign up for the Kickstarter campaign as a result of that.

Really, we still do it today, but over the next two years, we focused on influencers and anybody who had written about paleo diet, the importance of grass fed, the importance of treating animals right for, like, your own personal health, reach out to all of them, sign them all up as, like, affiliates where they would send an email to their audience and then get a commission every time that person’s box came to their door. And we didn’t even move to really anything else for two years because it was so fertile and such a big market.

And frankly, we didn’t have a lot of money. So we also paid people on a residual. It wasn’t upfront. So it was a really great cash conservation technique for us.

Right. Instead of paying somebody like, hey, we’ll give you $10,000 sponsor your email. We would say, hey, send an email to your audience, have them click on this link, which is like your unique URL. We’ll do a special offer for your audience, and anyone who signs up will give you like, call it $15 or $20 a month. Every time they get a box, you get $20. You know, again, this is like one of those, like, what are the core decisions we made as a company and, like, how did it end up?

Because we didn’t raise money, we didn’t have $5,000 to pay this person to send an email. So we’re like, yeah, sorry, we can’t do that. We can do this. And what happened was we kinda stumbled into this really interesting moat where other competitors have come along, and the people who talk about ButcherBox don’t really wanna write about anybody else because they’d be messing up their income stream. And so we just built this community of people who were early on grass fed. They were the ones really pushing that, and we were able to sign them all up in a very short order, which was like really the 0 to 100,000,000 was influencers.

We went, like, Kickstarter in a little bit. So we did, like, $300 the first year, 5,000,000 the second year, 33, and then 105. In between the 33 and a 105 is when we did Facebook.

If you’re not funded, it’s hard to do things that don’t work. You gotta start with small budgets, figure out what’s working, be open and honest with, like, is this working? Is it not working? When we started, certainly for the first year, maybe two, we wanted to be what we called the box one profitable, which means, like, we’re gonna ship a box and we’re gonna make a margin on it, call it $20.20 dollars or $25. We need to acquire that customer for cheaper than that box, but then the margin.

Because otherwise, you’re upside down, you you can’t make any money. So you start with that constraint, which is a lot harder to do these days. Like, if I was starting a company now, it would be hard to do box one profitable. I’m sure it’s out there, but it’s hard. It’s changed the types of people who can start a company like this. You know, the influencer market has changed. The social media market has changed. Like, there’s a lot of change that’s happened. You run box one profitable, then you can shy into box two.

If you put it on a credit card, you don’t have to pay the credit card for thirty days. So you can actually pay for that customer after they’ve got two boxes, and we know the percentage of customers who are gonna get two boxes. And so we did not have the luxury of having things not work because we had to make sure that our CPA was under box one.

The way that we talk about the business is actually what we call dollars per box. And I learned this from the head of operations of Omaha Steaks who helped me start the company, and he’s like, you should just be worried about dollars per box. What does that mean? A box that leaves your distribution center, how many dollars are you making off the box? The gross margin percentage doesn’t matter nearly as much. It obviously drives your dollars per box, but I think the most important thing for people who are starting these companies is to think about dollars per box.

You know, I invest in a lot of these companies. I advise a lot of companies, kind of box subscription companies or D2C companies. I don’t think you can make a go of it if your dollars per box are under $30 per shipment. Wow. So that’s $30 you make per shipment? Yes. And that’s in a subscription business. Because right now, it can cost a 140 to a $150 to acquire a customer. That’s a five month payback. Yes, higher margins absolutely helps. And in our space, in the meat space, you know, you’re competing against grocery stores who they’re not large margin businesses.

We started at $20 a box is what we were trying to make. Every shipment we were shipping out of one facility in Wisconsin. Every shipment that went to the West Coast, I think we were losing money on because it was like a five day ship with 35 pounds of dry ice. We could only ship on Mondays, and it would get there on the next Friday. But we knew we were gonna open a West Coast facility. It was just a matter of getting enough volume to get the attention of somebody on the West Coast.

And so as soon as we made that change, maybe our our average went from 20 to $25, just like that change alone. And then you just march up that number.

Well, your LTV doesn’t matter as much if you say we need be box one. Well, it doesn’t matter at all if you’re we need to be box one profitable. It doesn’t matter as much if you’re like, hey. Buy box one or two or three. We’re profitable. Right? It’s a hundred day payback period or whatever that is. Then your LTV doesn’t matter that much. Right? Because you’re taking a bet that after three months, which in subscription businesses is debt generally, like, where you lose a lot of people, you’re taking a bet that, like, you’ll keep some of them and they’ll keep paying.

So the way to look at it is really, like, how fast can you pay back your customer acquisition cost? Oftentimes, people get into trouble with customer acquisition costs are going up. It’s like, yeah, but we need to do this. We need to dominate the market. And it’s like, yeah, but it’s unsustainable. Like, it doesn’t work. Like, you’re not gonna make any money doing this. What were your paybacks at the beginning? The day that they purchased, we’d made money on them. Are you box one

You get over that because by that point, you’ve seen enough game tape to know, like, how your cohorts are doing. So what do they look like after a year or maybe you’re starting to see after two years, and you start to see the return profile, then it makes all the sense in the world to invest. In our business, so we we’re profitable. So if I don’t deploy a dollar and it drops to the bottom line, which obviously we want a healthy amount of profit for a whole host of reasons.

But if I don’t deploy that dollar and it ends up as profit, Joe Biden’s gonna take 50% of it, 50¢ on the dollar. Okay. That gives you even more motivation to, like, redeploy it into marketing where at least I can see a return, a two x return, a three x return. Like, you see this return. And if you think about it, this is what I love about subscription businesses, it’s like such an interesting securitized investment. Right? Because it’s it’s over hundreds of thousands of people or tens of thousands of people that you’re signing up.

Profile. You know the things that you’re gonna do to improve the return profile by negotiating the price of tape or whatever else you’re gonna do. And so it just becomes like a a really interesting investment.

The first three months are the most important. It’s where you can build a habit. We ship meat in the mail frozen, and generally that meat goes into your freezer. One of the challenges we have is people, at least in The US, they think about their freezer as like a savings account and their refrigerator as a checking account. So because of the defrosting issue, we actually have a customer who, like, needs to get into a pattern. So for us, the first thirty days is big churn thirty days, gets a little smaller, gets a little smaller.

If you get them through that first ninety day hump, you have a customer who will stay with you for a very long time. And so we do a lot of work trying to empower our customers and our members to cook awesome meals at home. Interestingly, we actually see a huge amount of churn right after people purchase. So there’s a whole cohort of people, like, who don’t want a subscription, and so they sign up and then they cancel. They literally cancel right after signing up, and they get that one box, but they don’t wanna have a subscription.

Blue Apron used to force people to receive the box before they cancel. It’s like, oh, you can’t do that yet. You have to, like, wait until you’ve received the box to cancel to, like, kinda make it a little more hard to do. We don’t do that. We just allow people to cancel. The next big hump is when they receive that first box. If anything goes wrong or if they just don’t like it or they’re like, this isn’t worth it, then they cancel. And then the next big hump is on day 27 when we send you an email saying, hey.

We’re gonna bill your card in a couple days. Make sure to add these different specials and whatnot. That’s the next big hump of

we didn’t to start with. The problem is that you get an influx of customer service complaints because people are like, I didn’t remember I was on a subscription. Please don’t send me this box. I’m gonna do a charge off of my credit card. So you really, like, piss people off. And if you have a product that is actually providing value to the customer like, we talk about margin, but really margin is just a measure of, how much value you’re providing to the customer. If you provide something that the customer likes, you shouldn’t have to be scared about letting them know that you’re gonna send them another box.

We believe you should be open and honest about that, especially because you’re just gonna get a bunch charge offs and a bunch of customer service nightmares that you could avoid by sending an email.

wise, for a long time, we were about 1% churn per week. And that we thought was really good. So that means every week, you know, if you have a 100,000 subscribers, a thousand of them are leaving, and it means you’ve eroded in the course of a year 50% of your revenue.

yeah. Well, yeah. No. Enterprise software is totally different than that. Totally different. You’re looking at something a lot smaller than 1% a week. The enterprise software model, which is similar to the model of box subscription or any direct to consumer, you want to march them up in terms of how much additional stuff they’re putting into their box. Right? So over time, you satisfy some of your churn or you change some of your churn by your really good customers adding more to their box, which just and getting boxes more often and whatnot.

Right? Churn dynamics in enterprise sound way better than the churn dynamics in direct to consumer.

Yeah. What’s great is what’s worked is also very much in alignment with what our customer is looking for, and that is super well priced deals above and beyond your box. So you get your custom box from us. You get your six cuts of meat in it. We have, like, a whole member deals and a whole catalog, and those things are priced to beat retail. So we want you to go in there and be like, oh, I’ll pick up one of those and one of those and one of those.

That has worked really well for AOV. And oftentimes, the retailer is doubling the price that they buy for wholesale. The general rule, if they buy, like, you know, chicken breast for $33.99, they’re gonna sell it in the store for $8.99. We find that we can provide a better value to the customer than they can get at the grocery store.

It changes a lot.

So meat is all about efficiency. So somebody who’s cutting, like, a pallet of rib eye steaks is gonna charge you one price versus somebody who’s cutting a whole truckload of rib eye steaks. Not to mention if you have distribution centers and you need to take those rib eyes across the country, it costs the same to run a truck half empty as it does to run it fully full. It’s the same price. And so where you get a lot of efficiencies is your runs are bigger, you’re moving trucks around better, and logistics is a massive number, just moving stuff around.

Not to mention your pick pack ship operation should be cheaper. The boxes that you’re purchasing should be cheaper with scale.

Yeah. We brought in a meat guy a year and a half into the business, and we’re like, here’s what we’re doing. And he’s like, the price that we are paying for a pound of organic chicken, I can get three pounds for the same price. You wanna do that? We’re like, yeah. We should do that. I mean, we were paying way too much. People were definitely taking advantage of us until we found, this guy, Mike, who who came on board and really helped me become a meat buyer.

It’s amazing what people who know what they’re doing can actually, you know, do to the business.

Yeah, that’s a great question. To be honest, I think that we don’t do a good job at this as a company. Because you haven’t raised VC money.

exactly. I mean, if we had some VCs in here, we’d know how to do things.

We tend to look at things in the aggregate, and it’s a mistake. Oh, we signed up x number of people this month or, like, this many people canceled per week. And we’re not thinking like, hey, this is like a stream of our best best people. Like, they should be treated this way, or we should be doing this for this cohort. We’re pretty behind in that area. We know that the best cohorts that we can get are referral cohorts.

And in terms of like where we wanna go as a company and in terms of where we wanna focus as a company, in terms of how do you get value out of these things, you hit this point with subscription businesses where it’s really tough, which is where we are. I think referral is your way out. Use our members to help bring in other members.

Yeah. So referral customers tend to perform really well. Think it’s like an additional box in year one, and they stay for longer. The only customer that’s better than that is like a paleo keto influencer related customer.

Boy, it’s looking that way. You look at these businesses, even the ones that, like, are the darlings of, you know, like, I I don’t know, like, Warby Parker or Allbirds.

Do it real time. It’s gonna be a number.

Probably 300,000,000 or something.

Okay. And then go to Crunchbase, and what do they raise? How much do you think? $2.50? I could be wrong. I don’t know. $20.02. And and if you look at their financials, I don’t think they make any money. I don’t think they’ve ever made money.

No idea. What are they trading at?

Wow.

Last I looked, they were, like, at $3.50, but that was a couple weeks ago. Let’s say $2.75.

Oh, wow. Way off. Yeah. Jeez. They must have done something different. The biggest problem is the no brainer acquisition channels have really dried up, and I do think they’re out there. It’s actually more creator slash influencer related than it’s ever been before. Those are the people that can, like, really build something big fast. You know, look at mister beast or

Exactly.

names is gone. It’s gone because they’ve actually same thing with these nutritionists and influencers that we used. Then they were like, wait a minute. I can just launch my own protein powder or I can just launch my own vitamin set, and it’s dried up.

That’s amazing. I love that. Don’t mean to cash shade on what you just said because I think that’s really awesome and creative. But just for your listeners who are thinking about, like, raising venture capital, what you just said, Harry, is, like, actually totally on the table for a board meeting. Like, you say you’re in there. You’re like, here are all the things we’re dealing with. Your VC comes in. Maybe they’ve looked at the deck, maybe not. And they’re like, you should do this. And you’re like, great.

Let me write that down. Let me get back to you. Was was

think you’re right. We actually sponsored a crit bicycle team because we’re like, we can’t just do what we’re doing anymore. We’re too big. So we’ll do about $600,000,000 in revenue this year. Like, the old tactics, like, we’re just gonna blanket Facebook and do influencer, it doesn’t work anymore. Like, we need a new oil field, so to speak. How do you think about

Last year, we spent $8,500,000 on brand marketing. And anytime I asked the question of, like, well, how do we measure this? Like, how do we know if we’re doing well? Like, well, there’s like a lift, and it’s like, well, how does that equal dollars back to us? And what happened was that $8,500,000, $8,500,000, a lot of money, you basically just destroy your customer acquisition to lifetime value. Oh, there’s no payback. And for a highly measured, let’s go negotiate the price of tape kind of person, very hard for me to be okay with that.

And so we now look at

Yes. I totally agree with that. And I think there is absolutely something there in terms of media. We need to jump from what we’re doing into a larger dialogue, and that really is my job to go figure that out.

That’s amazing. That’s a good idea.

Yeah. Shit. What else you got?

I mean, the story I heard about Blue Apron when they opened their New Jersey facility and they insisted that, like, all the software that runs, like, all the machines is custom. Like, we’re gonna build it ourselves. It’s like, you know, the sales guy’s like, okay. But, like, this works in thousands of factories across world. It’s like, no. It’s not good enough. We need it better. And, the story I heard is that there was a time where boxes were piling up on a conveyor belt that was 40 feet up in the air because of some sort of like, oh, it’s gonna be a lot more efficient.

Problem was they couldn’t even get the boxes like, were piling up. They couldn’t even get the boxes down because they were 40 feet up. They didn’t know how to get up there. So their orders are not going out. Big freaking mess, and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this facility. I see that a lot both in on that scale as well as on smaller scales where it’s like, in order to do this well, we need to do it ourselves. That to me, if I were an investor, would be a big red flag because there is oftentimes a company that yes.

Are you giving away a little bit of margin? Sure. But you don’t have to worry about that as, like, something that you’re worried about. A lot of founders try to boil the ocean really fast by worrying about everything at the same time, and that just is not conducive, in my opinion, to one, having any sort of life outside of the company, and two, to actually building something that people wanna support. It seems like that D2C model of, like, we need to own it all ourselves and insource it, like, it doesn’t work.

I mean, brand is up there.

Well, kinda what happened was, certainly in the p and l, was cut to zero, but who knows what’s happening, like, in the in the acquisition bucket now. Right? Because everyone knows that Mike cares about brand spend. So, like, sometimes people can massage the numbers a little bit to hide some of the stuff that’s happening. What we’ve tried to do is to make sure that the marketing dollars that we’re deploying are defensible, that they have, like, a ready line to some sort of money. And it can’t just be like, oh, yeah.

We’re gonna hope for the best. It’s really like, how does this turn into something better?

The at home being like billboards and bus wraps and that type of stuff. I think you could argue though that we didn’t give that a fair shot, but that would be the worst performing thing that we’ve seen.

Well, you actually have all the time in the world because there’s no one breathing down your neck so you grow faster. If you’re willing to take some time

But interestingly, if you think about the dynamics we were talking about with marketing, every marketing dollar you don’t spend generally for these companies is profit. Right? So you’ve got your gross margin, and then you’ve got your cost to do business, and then you’ve got what’s left over marketing and profit. So if I’m like, I don’t I can’t deploy dollars fast enough in a certain area, generally, those equal profit. So you can you can go slower, and oftentimes, you have to. Like, I did the number of people who have told me that we would be growing faster if I took venture over the past, like, five or six years, Although, I’ve just been a broken record of, like, not interested, not interested.

Thank you very much. Not interested. Which is a whole thing, you know, going back to, like, what was I running from? I mean, one of the things I was running from is I had a pretty bad experience raising money at my first company. It was pretty, like, traumatizing, and I didn’t want that experience again. I wanted something different.

it’s very different until you don’t hit your numbers, and then it’s the same story.

Yes. We are a buyer. We would love to find distressed subscription, ideally perishable shipment businesses. We are looking for them. The big thing that happened was again, we started in 2015. At that time, Blue Apron had raised, like, a $2,000,000,000 valuation round. It was the toast of the town. And then in mid two thousand seventeen, they went public in, like, July ’17. And by December ’17, they had gone from, like, a $140 to, like, $40. And all the money for box subscription companies dried up overnight.

And so some people are like, oh, don’t don’t you wish you raised money? And, like, actually, I think we’d be out of business if we raised money. Because we would have raised money in 2015 when it was hot with big valuations, we probably would have raised again. And then when all the money would not had had to build a profitable business, and then all the money dried up and everyone sold and the market was empty for a few years. For us, that was amazing because Blue Apron stopped advertising, the 150 Blue Apron look alight start stopped advertising.

That’s when we ramped up Facebook and kind of were were able to capture more people.

We find that our buyer is actually very different than, like, the Blue Apron buyer. Blue Apron buyer tends to want, like, all of the ingredients prepackaged, and we just send you the meat. And so what we find is somebody who’s, like, a little bit more confident in the kitchen or wants to get confident in the kitchen and wants to follow their own recipe rather than have the recipe sent to them. But generally, for example, in an election year, everything’s starting to get fired up about the election.

That is a time when CPAs go way up. Yes. You have to have, like, a different strategy. You have to be thinking differently. It’s a really tough time to be running D2C right now between Apple’s changes, making iOS changes, where Facebook performance, like, really went down quite a bit. You know, TikTok’s interesting, but, like, I don’t know anybody who’s doing well on TikTok who’s like, holy shit. TikTok is like where it’s at. I see a lot of people, like, hopeful because there’s a lot of volume, but I haven’t seen people, like, really crush it.

So there’s not really, like, a new, exciting thing. I think it’s just having your ear to the ground, and when it comes, it comes, and then exploiting it when you see it.

Yes. Then there’s Omaha Steaks, a direct to consumer. It’s been around for a hundred years. Direct to consumer, generally a gift giving and holiday business. They might be bigger than us. The last I had heard, they were around 600,000,000 as well, but maybe during the pandemic, they went way up.

A 3,000,000,000. Yeah. I don’t think so. I’m not sure it’s a VC backable model. For every consumer VC, please shed a tear at

Yeah. Certainly don’t don’t don’t find anyone who’s trying to compete with us. That would be nice. Did

any secondary along the way there? No. Why not? Well, I we we can talk as deep as you want to about this. But the minute you sell secondary to an external investor, now I’ve got someone breathing down my neck telling me what to do. Now there’s a difference between me selling secondary and people in my company selling secondary. So what we did, which is probably crazy, but it’s how I started the company. We create this company, and again, we didn’t raise money, but my early people I gave away equity like candy.

Everyone gets equity. Today, like, virtually everyone has equity. And so we have these people who started out, and my first thing I said, and this was a mistake as well, I said, company’s only worth $750,000. So it’s like, oh, you’re gonna help me stand up the meat things, like a $75,000 engagement? Like, cool. Cool. I’ll give you 10% of the company. Because this isn’t gonna be anything. It’s just gonna be a hobby. Big mistake. Basically, what we’ve done since 2018 is we’ve run a tender every year, where we do evaluation, a a $40.09 a valuation.

We get a price, a share price, and the company says, hey, we’ll repurchase people shares. We also allow people to purchase shares, but really it’s more people trying to sell their shares. And so we deploy some of our profits into share buybacks essentially. We’ve done that over the past, like I said, four years. We’re actually not doing one this year because, you know, when the tide goes out a little bit, it’s like, we should stop just, like, throwing money on the street and keep it in our bank account because we want it for a rainy day.

But we have not done the go raise outside capital. And I think part of that has to do with, like, my whole philosophy here, which is I’m not focused on the exit. Like, I’m not trying to sell the company. I’m not trying to go public. If you look at companies or brands in food, the ones that have become really big, they kinda have a similar makeup, which is they’re closely held, family controlled, and, like, hundred year plus holds. At least in this country, you look at, like, the General Mills and the Campbell’s and the Tysons and the Purdue’s and, like, the Hershey’s, the Mars, like, they’re they’re kinda all similar.

And I don’t know if that is if we’ll be lucky enough to actually be able to operate a company for that long or whether, frankly, I will be able to keep my attention on this because I don’t wanna operate this thing for a hundred years. But where we stand today, I’m really excited about that. Like, what is twenty five years of this look like? Like, where are we in twenty five years? And, you know How

North of 70.

No.

Yeah. So this is the problem I always have is like There’s not a there’s not a letter on my desk right now. So I can be on this podcast and be like, yeah. No. Hell no. But there’s not a letter on my desk. Right? If there’s a letter on my desk, obviously, at a billion dollars, I would be thinking long and hard about what I wanted. But the question is, like, okay. Great. You go bank $700,000,000. You can do whatever you want for the rest of your life.

Cool. What are you gonna do? I’m gonna, like, literally erase my whiteboard and be like, what’s next? And and what? Chase this? This has grown and has grown me in all of these ways, and I feel like I have the ability to impact a totally broken industry, which is meat. You sell the thing at the very moment where it’s starting to deliver the things that you always dreamed of for what?

I do a lot of investing and advising in companies that are not perishable, but are some sort of subscription, and turns out I can be pretty helpful. So I do think it’s somewhat transferable for sure. And I do believe that the D2C economy is kind of falling apart right now. It already has or is about to. And what we’re seeing is more and more distressed companies that raised right after COVID, you know, had their twenty four months of runway, are trying to tighten their belts, but really there’s not a lot of excitement, and they’re generally smaller than they were at the tail end of COVID.

We’re seeing a lot of banks pick up stuff, and it just it seems like a good time for us to put our hands up and say, like, hey. If you got something and you’re interested in coming to work with us, like, we we could maybe make something work.

Not not well. I would argue that the people who are our members have already been part of somewhat of a recession. The the only thing we have to look at is, like, 2007, 2000 In general, when there is a recession, people in terms of the meat quality that they’re looking for, they’re willing to take a step down in the quality of meat. So if you’re like, I only buy organic, it’s like, oh, I lost my job. Like, organic, I’ll do free range. Right? So people will trade down on the claims, how their meat is raised, how their food is raised.

It’s it’s true for, like, organic blueberries. It’s true for everything. We are seeing that data as it relates to the overall food spend in this country, but we are not seeing, like, a run for the the doors at ButcherBox. If anything, I think post COVID, people really wanted to focus on their health and wanted to focus on having great, like, restaurant quality food at home. And now what we’ve seen is a lot of our customers are like, well, I save money by not spending $75 on a steak at a steakhouse.

I just cook this steak here for a lot cheaper and better for you.

Yeah. What I like to say, we agree with vegetarians and vegans. I agree. The main complaint is that the meat industry is broken, that there’s a ton of suffering for the animals, that there’s a ton of suffering for the environment, that there’s a ton of suffering for the farmers, and I agree with that. Where we differ is I believe that animal based protein is part of a healthy diet, and very few people can actually live a healthy diet on a vegan diet or a vegetarian diet.

And so for us, it’s like if you’re going to eat meat, which by the way, most people do, if you’re going to eat meat, how do we transform an industry that is totally broken? And how do we make a product that people don’t have to feel guilty about eating? Because in this country, for most of the meat that you are eating on a day to day basis, if you only knew, there would be a lot of guilt associated with the type of product you’re eating. Yes.

Like, there is still a obviously, like, animals, even in our program are killed, so they have, like, one bad day. But what we want our brand to stand for, I call it, like, the Patagonia of meat. Like, we want you, when you buy from ButcherBox, to know that we obsessed over every detail possible for that piece of meat to make sure I had the best life, the farmer was treated the best, the environment was treated the best, the workers in the supply train, we’ve actually thought about it.

We’ve tried to move it forward. And this going back to, like, holding this company for a while, the industry is, like, so in need of disruption that oftentimes, like, you need a super long time horizon. I’ll give you an example. It turns out in this country, if I wanted to go and figure out the food safety protocols of, like, a slaughterhouse, of, like, a harvest facility, like, how do they handle food safety? Super easy. I could have someone there today. It’s, like, no problem. There’s a whole bunch of people.

Like, they’ll come in with their checklist, and they’ll figure it out. If I wanted to do the same thing, the same audit at the same facility, I didn’t care about food safety, what I cared about was worker welfare. How are you treating your workers? How many have gotten injured? Is there any child labor here, undocumented labor? Like, really, what’s going on here? There’s nobody. There’s nobody in this country that I can hire to go in and third party audit these facilities. It’s crazy. I mean, if if I was creating t shirts in Bangladesh, I could have fair trade in there, like, in a very short amount of time.

Why? Well, because nobody wants to open that door and see what’s behind it. I just feel

more, like

I mean, I think it’s one part customer is actually giving a shit. You think they don’t give a shit? No. They don’t. The customer the customer, what they care about is themselves, far and away, then the animal, then the environment. Animal environment kinda go back and forth, and then way down here is the farmer and not even like, the workers in the supply chain are, like, not even a consideration for most. They don’t care. And we believe that, you know, in order for meat to actually continue, people need to care.

Like, we need to put our dollars towards, like, actually changing the system because there’s too much suffering. It’s too bad. You know, people cared for a hot minute during COVID when people were, like, unfortunately dying in processing facilities, but that attention is long gone. People are like, whatever. The average American spends thirteen seconds in front of the meat case. Thirteen seconds. They don’t have time to figure out what’s what. And then it’s something like forty percent of people don’t even touch their meat. They, like, open the bag and they’re just like, ugh.

And I use that as like an analogy of like, how many people actually know what’s happening. And it’s very few and very few people care.

Yep.

Yeah. No. What happens in the freezing process, especially with grass fed beef so grass fed beef tends to be, like, a little bit more tough. There’s less fat in grass fed beef. So what happens in the freezing process is you can actually, like, break down some of those cellular walls and make a more tender product, which is what a lot of people associate with health. So if you’re talking about beef or even pork and chicken, freezing is actually helping the quality of the product rather than hurting The other thing that’s amazing is from a food waste perspective, there’s not a lot of food waste in your freezer.

You can you can have meat in your freezer for years. I mean, we recommend you cook it tonight so that we can send you another box, but you can have your meat in the freezer for a very long time and not degradate quality. You heard it here first.

You’re not working hard enough if you’re not working three hundred sixty five days twenty four seven. Alright. We’ll leave that for another episode because I think you’re wrong.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. We, well, we went out to Greylock to, convince them to invest in CustomMade, which they said they would if we moved out California and worked for the CEO that they were gonna place into the business. Part of that was a was a phone call with, Reed Hoffman, who is a general partner at Greylock. And, he asked us, like, so I don’t understand what are the network effects here. I mean, the story is that we had no network effects, but we we did our best to cobble together some sort of, like, yeah, this is how it all fits together.

And he’s like, uh-huh. And that was pretty much the end of it. And they ended up not investing, but we were able to raise money Boston, frankly, by people who were a little pissed off that Silicon Valley was trying to take two entrepreneurs and put them over in California. What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? How to eat better. I’ve really embraced fasting as a way of life, and that has changed dramatically in the past twelve months. See you shaking your head.

talking about longer fasting than intermittent Oh god. How long are you fasting for? Well, in October, did a seven day fast. That was pretty fun. I typically do a thirty six hour fast once a week, longer than like just intermittent.

I am.

the second.

This year have really as as we talked about at the beginning, like, I’ve held a lot of, like, fear of abandonment my whole life. And I’ve actually come to grips with that quite a bit. And it’s been a huge lesson of the year that I’ve been happy to go through, where I’ve I’ve had to, in some circumstances, stare down what it would be like to be abandoned. And I’ve been like, I’ll be fine.

Yes. Yes to all that. Yeah. Which one worked? MDMA journey worked tremendously well for abandonment.

Probably. Do you think so? The problem is, who is he gonna run against? I guess, Joe Biden. Right? We all have to

I don’t think DeSantis I mean, what would have to happen is the Republican party would have to have a backbone and be like, no. But what they want is somebody who’s electable, and they know that Trump is electable. And despite all of the drama and all the issues with Trump, he progressed a whole bunch of conservative initiatives that people are willing to hold their nose and vote for the guide. I do think he he has a very high chance, certainly a high chance of getting the nomination.

And then if it’s like Joe Biden, like, shit, I think I think he could beat him this year.

Some of Trump’s policies, certainly on the tax side, were very helpful I think Trump in general, not helpful for the business. A huge distraction, a huge amount of, like, social unrest and concern. But from, like, a, hey, were we able to depreciate the dry ice machine super fast and, like, offset our taxes? Like, yes, we were. But honestly, I don’t think the other side is much better.

I like the word onward. From a tombstone perspective, I’m really, you know, fascinated by what’s behind dying in this body. Where does my spirit go from there? I don’t know. That might be a tough word for my kids to see every time they go to my site. Like, alright. Well, onward, you know, get on Maybe with love would be a better one, but onward is what came to mind first. Tell me,

I no. Like, I look. I so ILP in in funds. Like, I think VC as an asset class is interesting, a great way to expose people who are interested in, like, getting small company exposure. Like, I I think VC and honestly, for the VCs, I mean, between the fees and the carry, it’s like a great business to be in. Super low overhead, super high margins, a great business. If I could change one thing about VC, I think it would would be that I don’t think most founders think before they start raising money.

They think that they have to raise money in order to build a successful business. I just wish they didn’t. I wish we could like, and I know some VCs are like, don’t raise from us if you’re not into, you know, getting on the VC train. But I think that It provides security. If you

Safety. Totally. And, you know, I recognize that that’s really important to some people. And I think there are ways to, for example, get fired and collect unemployment for that year and, like, take a reduced salary and, like, figure it out. And I I think there are things that you can do. But if it’s like, oh, I need the safety. I have got a young family at home. I’ve got a mortgage to pay. Like, I need the safety. Like, okay. That’s fine. First of all, don’t come and say you think this is the last round you’re ever gonna do because that’s not how it works.

Like, you’re gonna be on the VC train, and the VC train runs fast and, like, you’re on that train. Also, the great thing about VCs is that they can provide a lot of external knowledge. Because when you’re running these things, you’re tend to be doing it alone, and it’s really nice. Like, I have a board, not because I need one, but because, like, I really miss the days of VC where people would come in and beat the crap out of me, and I’d have to defend myself and then be like, oh, you’re pretty smart.

Like, cool. Who’s

Yeah. Right? Who did you choose? The most interesting character on my board is this guy named Gary Loveman, who is a Harvard Business School professor. He also was the CEO of, Caesars Palace. Caesars brought him in at first as a consultant to help them figure out how to basically use loyalty as a way of getting people into the casino. Then he became the COO, and then he became the CEO. And so Gary’s claim to fame, he was the architect of using, like, loyalty cards in a casino for the first time.

And if you think about a casino, like, when you’re losing money at blackjack and a waitress comes by and asks you what you want to drink, and then you order, and then it takes a really long time. So by that time, you’ve, like, added a couple more $100 into your giving it to the dealer and started to lose that money too, it’s not by chance. They have architected an experience from end to end using data and using behavior to keep you playing. I like to think that our our mission of getting people to be more successful in the kitchen and eat healthier is a little more noble than getting people to gamble.

In the mix, it’s like the same thing. Right? It’s how do you delight people? How do you use data to suggest, like, that perfect moment where you wanna do something? Or we we talk about building the Caesar’s Palace of Meat here. Very lucky to have him on my board.

I would say Arnold Schwarzenegger because, you know, he kinda came out as like, oh, I’m eating more plant, but definitely eats meat. The quality of the meat is really important. Everybody in The United States knows him. And if he was to say that ButcherBox was his choice for a high quality meat that he could trust, I think it would be amazing.

I mean, I really wanna go on the Mike Tyson podcast. Like, that’s a dream of mine for the year is to be on hotboxing. So if anyone knows how to do that.

Both. So I’m really enamored with this idea of running this to a billion dollars in revenue. Also, I think, like, at a certain point, I’m probably not gonna be the guy running this on a day to day basis. I don’t know if that’s happened in five years. I think we’ll be north of a billion in five years, but I’m not sure I’ll be like, okay, I’m done. I wanna go work on something else. We’ll see. Does it get easier over time? It gets different. It doesn’t get easier.

You know, as soon as you have like product market fit, which is really hard to get, and my first company, we didn’t we never got there. You just have new challenges. Right? The challenges don’t end. And I think, like, in it becomes a journey of self discovery. You’re showing up and what is driving me to, like, not sell tomorrow and to be like, I wanna keep going. You start to realize how your decisions have much deeper, especially if you don’t if you haven’t raised money and you’re kinda like nobody’s telling you what to do.

For me, it just gets very different, like the conversations or the things I’m working on. And we’re 215 people, and that is also not something to mess around with either. I I I miss the days of, like, a dozen people who I could just wag my finger at and and, you know, is systems

revenue per head, though. 3,000,000.

This was the most enjoyable podcast preparation and research that I’ve been on. And I, you know, I was on How I Built This. I was on some other podcasts. And and then I was amazed that, like, what are we on? Like, podcast 2,697? This is content. It’s a long game. I mean, shit, man. That is incredible. Yeah. You’ve almost got that ten thousand hours of, like, I’m sure with everything in you. You know, you can tell when someone cares about telling your story or, like, asking you questions to help you tell your story versus just like, alright.

I didn’t really read anything, and let’s get going.