44. Corey Ferengul & Mike Shannon on Raising Less, Moving Faster, and Building in the AI Era

Speaker A: Welcome to Momentum Mode. Corey here with my better looking and much more talented co host Mike. Did I get that right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Let me just hit the Venmo real quick and uh, send it to you. 20 bucks. Here we go.

Speaker A: So how you doing today, Mike?

Speaker B: I appreciate that. Uh, I'm doing great. How are you doing? It's getting warm in Chicago so I

Speaker A: think finally getting to run outside again, that's a wonderful thing. So, yeah. Uh, so, all right.

Speaker B: Coaching soccer. First game this weekend, the five year old uh, Lightning Lions.

Speaker A: The ball is a magnet. They all just stick to it and run around the field in a little group.

Speaker B: You're going to love this. Who's my co coach? CFO Nick Currier. We go from CEO CFO duo, uh, to uh, now we're coaching a five year old soccer team. So that'll be another episode. I know you want to talk about some things today.

Speaker A: That's a whole nother podcast. Raising kids. That's a whole other story.

Speaker B: Soccer.

Speaker A: All right, so we don't have ah, a guest today, it's just Mike and I. But the reason is that I actually wanted to dig in with Mike on an area we've touched on before and that is Mike is a second time in the middle of founding his second company and getting it off the ground and actually making progress incredibly quickly. Um, and we touched before on a second time founder. What that means from like ah, fundraising and talking to investors and structuring the company. Kind of that high level corporate.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: I'm really curious to dig in on like how do you make different decisions based on what you learned before. How are you, you know, what are the, some of the potholes you're skipping otherwise and like, like starting with like strategy. How do you approach strategy differently second time around?

Speaker B: Oh sure. Um, it's funny what's going through my mind is uh, trying to decipher what is different or impacted because of second time founder wisdom versus this totally different landscape with know, AI on, on the foundation. Right. So probably um, confluence of, of those factors. But you know, when we talked about this last in something I wrote about not long ago, I'll just go back to the guiding mentality right. Of the first time I started a business, 21 year old. Right. It was the mentality that you have the business plan or the concept and you force that into the world. Right. And that was kind of like the ethos back in the day because you'd hear like the Steve Jobs put a dent in the universe or the world or whatever. Um, and not not to say like, hey, don't take a vision of what the future should be and try to, you know, impact the world that way. But I think the second time or third time founders, like my, you know, kind of friend group, it's the wisdom and maybe like battle scars, um, get you more to a perspective of like, try to first understand the world, right? Understand, you know, the ideal customer profile, the hero, the hero's journey that you're serving and then, you know, morph yourself, right? Or your venture to that versus like we have this thing and we're going to, we're going to force it upon the world. So I think the notion of discovering the business versus forcing the business into the world is probably just the starting mentality, uh, shift that I had no concept of as, you know, a first time founder.

Speaker A: And I don't know that that was as in vogue. Right. To your point, like what was business school teaching? It was write your business plan. Um, I was just listening to a book by an entrepreneur and he was talking about how, you know, they sat down and wrote the business plan and this was the way we got it together and you know, we had. And actually if you go back and listen to David Pogue's first 50 years on Apple, um, the only way Apple got its first money was writing the business plan, right? They had. And Jobs actually outsourced it. He had another guy come in and gave him equity in the company to do it. But it was just like, you know, that was the thing. Right, but, but tell me what that, what you're seeing is that what is the discovery thing now, right? So investors invest in a business plan to get you up there, but you're, you're kind of not saying a business plan. What are you picking then? Where do you start with?

Speaker B: Yeah, right. I think you start with relationships, right. And so, um, you know, for me with improve, there was a combination of, you know, the problem types that we were interested in. Um, you know, Danny and I and you know, Jordan Campbell's joined us as a partner and chief data officer. So there's those type of part, type of problems and then it's, you know, the people you want to serve or be around. Right. And so I really love, I know it's a little bit buzzwordy now, but this notion of being forward deployed or having design partners, like I would never, I think at this point start a business any other way than get very tightly embedded, um, with a few starting points that would be, you know, the type of anchor partners that you can build with right? Because then it's not. The old day was go into your closet, have your business plan and then have your product and then see what doors you can bang on to get that in versus start with a relationship. And hey, we bring a certain perspective skill set as the entrepreneurs, um, we'd love to serve uh, your problem, your industry and can we do it together? And this notion of the early design partners with a forward deployed engineering or entrepreneurial team that's such a great mutual value. Cause think about it from the design partner standpoint, right? The company like we serve wealth management firms, right. But it could be any type of client or business that's being served. Think about how tough it is to hire just like really great, highly motivated, highly skilled talent. And so the trade off that you get if there's an opportunity to be a design partner on an early founding team, like yes, the products are typically not fully fleshed out. And for us it's a little different because at this point we're doing custom AI where we're helping firms use the best in class tools versus say like hey, we've built the tool. So um, it's a little different there. Um, but yeah like the opportunity to just have uh, a team of like top engineers, entrepreneurs, uh, try to build exactly what you want like that. Why would I start anywhere else as an entrepreneur? Um, and it still took me a little while to figure that out at the early days of improve, right. Like as you know, um, stepped out of my first company, it was 12 year journey in education tech with Packback. You were on our board. Um, I spent about a year with Danny just kind of noodling on of variety of different uh, ideas. Right. It was like we had a manager coaching idea. Ah we had some things around meeting productivity around note taking. So it was like incubate these ideas. Um, but the first time, you know I came up with business plan number one with Packback, with my co founders, it was like that's the plan. And that first year was spent trying to forge it in, right. Versus like tinker, right? Tinker around. You know, if you can get by without capital, you know, which most entrepreneurs like, the way to do that is just keep another job and you build with these AI tools like you know it's pretty much possible to tinker. Everybody's a vibe coder nowadays, right? Um, so to tinker without capital raised. So yeah, the discovery like early days, uh, process I think that's where entrepreneurs if they get access to capital can inadvertently put themselves in a hole. Um, you know, I had a group of students ask me recently, what would you have done differently? Uh, with the first company? I'm like, well, you know, I would not have spent four years and several million dollars discovering that idea number one wasn't going to work. Right. Um, you can only start with the idea you have. So you have to still start there. I think every good idea is draft four or five of a bad idea, right? So you have to start with what you have, but you don't have to pour lots of money into it to discover it's not working.

Speaker A: It's interesting. One of the things I tell companies all the time is raise as little money as late as possible.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker A: And it's funny because they're talking to me as a venture guy and they're like, oh, hey. And I'm like, no raises little. You know, I actually think you can go further without raising money. And they're like, what don't you want to put money? And I'm like, uh, uh, it's, it's the right thing for you to do. But what I took out of that from a strategy standpoint is you didn't start with, I want to provide X, Y and Z to the market. You're now starting with. Let me find some problem areas, let me find groups of people I like to work with. And I want to think I can, I can help. Let me solve with like what, what could actually fit in the market here and then kind of iterate. But then you're also engaging the prospective customers a lot more than I, I've seen previously. The new iteration. You and others of early stage talk about that. How do you engage the, the prospective customer now? Differently.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, and this is part of another point that I want to make. So there's in the old world, right, the pre, uh, LLMs world, uh, everything you just said of, you know, raise as little as possible as late as possible in discovering this product market. Well, now you have this other factor of, um, it's not only discovering product market fit, right. Or problem fit. You may. And I think in the last two, three years, many entrepreneurs have discovered some kind of product market fit, right. And built the tool. And then along comes Claude, along comes whatever, GPT 5.5 now. And they found product market fit. But then it got wiped out because much of, uh, as our mutual friend Guy Turner at Hyde Park Ventures, um, put it to me when we caught up casually last, much of the value will ultimately accrue to the core models. Claude, uh, has been in the lead in the financial services space that we're in. But then GPT 5.5 comes out and everybody buzzes about what that can do next. And so you not only have the puzzle or the maze of finding product market fit now, now you have, you know, the added factor of do I get wiped out by the core models or not? And I think in the uh, result of that you have this meshing of services and software which obviously, uh, I think we mentioned in our last episode, you know, Sequoia had their write up of services or the new software and there's a thesis out there of, you know, build the services and then maybe turn that into the autopilot with AI. Maybe that happens or not, depending on the space. But the point is, um, if everybody build a product, well now what is the road to be taken as an entrepreneur? And it actually looks a lot like services because the real creature or the real core product is the core model. Right. And we can talk about the niche spaces where it makes sense to train a model, but that's not going to be most entrepreneurial ideas. Right. And so back to like embed with early design partners. Um, hey, these companies are all trying to take advantage of AI, um, and it's not that intuitive how to take it to enterprise grade. Right. It's intuitive how to vibe code, you know, a V1 and get the AI playground spun up at the ground. Swell.

Speaker A: So for those who don't know what vibe coding is. What is vibe coding?

Speaker B: Yeah, just you know, anybody off the old block, you know, picking up uh, Claude, cowork, um, any of the coding tools and saying hey, I want to spin up a uh, tool that summarizes all of my emails and then gives me insights on the next week or whatever. Like you know, you name your wish list. It's just taking what's out of the box and in a matter of five minutes Claude will show me something pretty impressive right now. Um, and that's uh, that's putting a lot of pressure on the old worlds of old world of creating a moat with software tools.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, so one of the things you talk about the, the value disappearing, wasn't it chegg that new uh, capability came out and all this old friend uh, of yours in the industry, the new capability comes out from mlm. Boom. Their market cap, uh, Figma saw a massive impact with a new release of Anthropics of Claude and all of a sudden boom. We saw Figma's market cap after hours go down.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, struggle there. Right. So with that in Mind I think about interview. Uh, I heard another podcast listen to at uh, Lenny's podcast for those that haven't listened is a, it's a good one for softw managers. But he was interviewing a product manager at OpenAI and um, the guy says yeah, you know, you should just not do things you think the model's going to do because the model will eventually do it. So how do you, how do you predict that?

Speaker B: How do you predict what the model's going to do? Right, because a year ago we're all saying there's no way the model can do anything, uh, quantitative. Right. And now you've got Claude running financial models.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So, so that's one challenge. But what you're saying is a way around that is to be a lot more flexible and a lot less rigid on this is my feature set and a lot more of. I'm going to keep filling in the gaps if you will for what the customer needs.

Speaker B: Yeah, here's the audience, um, the ideal customer client profile that I'm going to serve. And look, we're doing a whole range of projects at Improve right now and so I'd say we're still discovering some of that. But I'll give you my story of how we came to at Improve. Uh, we call it AI stewardship where we, we look at it and it's like if you think of a Venn diagram, when we entered this industry on one side there were a thousand vendors with you know, the software widgets. Right. Um, and then on the other side there are all these incumbent consultancies that charge really big ticket prices to do um, strategy work and kind of think about tech, uh, roadmaps and AI roadmaps. And so uh, we saw an opportunity to you know, go deeper while others went wide and you have to be willing to have trade offs there. You probably don't become like a billionaire, um, you know, going deep with a narrow market, um, at least to start. So I've been saying, hey, it's a great time, maybe the best time ever to be an entrepreneur and a problem solver. It's perhaps a terrible time to be hell bent on becoming a billionaire doing so because it's democratized. Right? Like everybody can kind of in theory get into the space, but if you can develop a deep knowledge around how to help, I think a certain um, industry or role type, uh, solve their unique problems either with the existing tools or models that are out there, but perhaps mapped uh, to the nuances of their firm. In our case wealth management firms have A lot of compliance, guardrails. There's all sorts of um, data concerns that have to be taken into account before you make agentic workflows go live. So that's part of the nuance. But there's also I think going to be cases where it makes sense to say, train a model for something unique, such as Harvey for law firms. Um, but yet the willingness to say, hey, look, we'll just serve what need is there rather than be hell bent on, we have to figure out a 100, uh, million ARR path. And so that freed us up to say, okay, you know, great, if, if CLAUDE is the best, you know, core tool, you know, cloud financial services, uh, is the best way to solve xyz. Well, let's just help firms do what they want to do versus when you're a vendor, you're all of a sudden. And Sequoia had a good write up on this. You're in competition with the model. I don't ever look, I could raise $100 million as an entrepreneur. How, uh, much is Anthropic raised? How much does OpenAI raised?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's still just a drop in the bucket if any one of those, the core models decide, hey, we're gonna go deep on something. You don't want to be in competition. You want to be in perhaps collaboration if you can with those core models because they don't necessarily want to build the application layer on everything. Um, but I never want to convince you, like no, Don Claude for that use my widget. It's probably a losing game.

Speaker A: I was talking to a company the other day that they um, they really like. You know, they had this great reporting tool and they had a couple of customer prospects come back and say, look, I can use OpenAI or Claude and I can get 80% of the way there and we're already licensing it. It's no additional cost and 80% is pretty good. Right? And he was just, it was, it was, it was pretty interesting. I will say is, um, as I look out at the portfolio at Apperium, second time founders we find spend less time on hardcore strategy and a lot more time on problem and go to market.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: Like what problem am I solving and how do I get to the customer with that problem? And you're really saying the same thing, right? Get deeper into the head of the customer, understand their issue. But if we move forward, how have you approached people differently? Building a team? You mentioned yourself, right? You mentioned three people. Is that the whole company? Like, like, uh, because at this stage you Guys were a lot more with your last company, a lot more people, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you know, again, it comes down, not that we're making this about the capital equation, right. But that is part of what drives how the people, um, and how the roster forms early stage. Right. Like if all of a sudden, you know, I raised $5 million and you were the VC and you're saying, okay, great, you're getting a 10 million revenue while I'm staffing, you know, the sales team and whatever, there's a spreadsheet that exists somewhere that says, okay, we think one sales rep does X amount of, you know, new deals in a year. And so we need, you know, 15 or 20 of those sales reps. Um, and before long, you know, you're, you're hiring at a pretty fast rate. And even though, you know, we all want to talk about how, hey, it's A plus players only over here, like when you're competing against a financial model, like the reality is you get into those cases where you're like, but we really need like seven seats, um, or seven bodies in these seats. Right. And so I think that impacts it as well when you are growing at your own rate. Right. Which like we wanted to get to cash flow positive as fast as possible with improve. Um, as you know, I spent many years, uh, with a company that was growing but, but still taking a loss. Right. And so that hamster wheel of either constantly raising capital or you're like pushing the boulder up a hill a market. In my experience in education tech, you can't force a market to accept something faster than it's ready to. Right. And that's where you get into the pushing a boulder up the hill. So when we can grow at the rate that we kind of choose, I think that also provides a whole lot of autonomy on really only having the team that you want, you know, to, to build around. Right. And that, you know, the proverbial A plus players only. I think the other thing though is fractional, uh, talent benches are at just a totally different, uh, level and it's a totally different game than 10 years ago in part just because of some of the platforms that make connectivity of those fractional folks possible. But also you can just get some really good, um, A plus talent that maybe doesn't want to work a corporate job. They wanted to run their own thing and they're open to running a services business that's augmented by AI. And okay, maybe instead of building your own in house marketing team, you know, you find a fractional, um, you know Maybe not for like direct sales, but for like email marketing. Right. Like there's all kinds of fractional, uh, folks that would have been the top performer at their company, but instead they want to run their own firm. Well, they're available and they tend to be flexible to, you know, spin up or spin down. I think it's still an open question on how that works on the engineering front. Right. Like there's a big dividend. Um, my CTO Danny or Chief Data Officer Jordan would tell you like the difference between a senior, you know, architect level engineer and you know, a recent college grad even, you know, with the coding tools, like, um, and perhaps even magnified that the difference magnified because the junior, you know, programmer isn't able to catch things and guide, um, you know, the AI harness the way the senior folks are. So I think engineering is still, you know, a little tougher to go fractional.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, in a way. Well, on the engineering front, um, every senior engineer I talk to says, hey, the tools are really helpful, but if you aren't good at engineering and don't know how to review the code, you're not going to be that much more productive. Right. But, but then what I'm also Hearing from other CEOs I talk to is they're more junior engineers. Are they more likely to lean in on the AI tools?

Speaker B: Yeah. The right balance is the person with the foundation who can then be magnified by the AI harness. Yeah. I think, you know, if somebody's become somewhat of a curmudgeon and they, they don't want to use the AI harness, I think, you know, that's, that's not going to be as effective as an engineer.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, well, and you also pointed to, you know, fractional bringing in fractional employees. The gig economy has kind of made that more normalized. Right. While there was always freelancers, it was always like, do you know a freelancer to where now I feel like I can find a lot of people that have skill and just don't want to be tied into a specific company and they're much more willing. So. So you've been much more willing to embrace that as an approach. You've been much, um, more, uh, minimizing people you bring in the door. Not purely just because of funding, because you, you just. Yeah, I just don't need them. I can find other ways to get stuff done. What's different the second time around about how you spend your time?

Speaker B: Oh, interesting. The, the amount of time waste by a, uh, you know, first time founder in my own experience. Right. Um, I think uh, it's funny, I thought this about the, the book writing process as well. The first time doing any marathon level project, I think a big part of it is just learning how to do that thing. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And so it's like, okay, the amount of time spent getting to um, you know, product market fit. Well, how much of that also, you know, or how much of what slows that down is, you know, just learning how to be an effective communicator, how to be, you know, self organized, inefficient, you know, like it. As corny as it might sound like daily habits. Right. Um, you know, uh, can, can you get to mental clarity faster at uh, you know, for me like mid-30s, then early 20s. Like I think so. Right. And so then it's like, well, if you get the mental clarity right now, it's just like everything else is magna. I can magnify the productivity that you have. Um, if you're organized, it's um, more clarity on where do I spend my time. And so I can remember being in the thick of we're probably 75 employees, um, with packback starting to scale and I think sitting down with you, we got coffee and I said okay, here's my CEO okrs. And a lot of it had to do with like, here's even my own learning habits of things I need to learn. Here's how I'm going to organize myself. And so all of that becomes like the old ceiling, uh, becomes the floor. Um, I love that saying. Right? So you kind of are the floor you stand on second time around is the old ceiling of all the like yourself engine. Um, so then like what, uh, guides where you spend your time. You know, everybody has their favorite goal setting frameworks. I'm objectives and key results. And so we set our objectives together as a leadership team. And then it's pretty strict for me of where I allow my time to go that gets outside of the guardrails of the objectives that we set. Now we also do shorter periods of time as you know, you get our updates every eight weeks, um, is a cycle for us. So instead of having four quarters, I like to have six cycles so that we can do a retrospective, we can do a new set of OKR planning. And yes, we still have the guiding North Star of where we know we want to go. Um, but I can pretty much be at peace of mind that I'm narrowly executing and focusing on what we spent a day or a couple of days at the start of a Cycle chewing on and debating between the leadership team where we should focus and then it's just go, um, not to say we don't iterate at all on week five, but it's a short enough and long enough period of time that I feel like I can just plug in and go um, and I do some creative things with calendar, uh, coloring and I have Claude give me a breakdown of my time and stuff. But yeah, it's pretty serious on time management.

Speaker A: But it's also, I mean you're now thinking in terms of chunks m much different chunks of time and your goals are much broader. Right. I mean I remember the goals being a lot of early, early days like can we get this partnership and can we deliver this tech and so on to where now it's like, you know, definitely broader. Um, I would suggest you're spending a lot more time in front of customers or prospective customers or the market so to speak, and sucking in a lot more information. And I think one of the more interesting things of what you're discussing is um, internal communication is so much easier because there's so many fewer people. When you say you have the leadership team. Yeah. You have the whole company there. Right, Right. Everybody knows the goals. Right. There's no like nothing lost in translation moving through a 75, 80 person organization. It's like we all get it. You know, that, that whole nimble concept way, way more present in the, in the second time around.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, and you just learn, I mean, you know, how many companies have you run now? You just learn how to communicate more effectively. You know, I think ego and stuff kind of melts away. I mean you take a group of four or five, you know, 22 year olds in a room and you know, it could be the nicest kids in the world. It's just still um, defining whose role is what and like you know, who's on stage or in the article like that stuff does. Um, if you look back, um, I think there's probably plenty of founder debates that my co, uh, founders on Packback and I would look back when we were 23 or something. It's like, wow, we wasted a lot of time on XYZ and you should debate key decisions, but there's also plenty of decisions that you just um, should just decide who's the owner and keep moving. Right. It's like um, perfect, uh, is the enemy of good enough. That can happen on decision making too. So um, yeah, it's all these little things that add up to just moving faster.

Speaker A: You can't say that enough. The perfect enemy. I see so many people that we got to get it right. And actually many times I'll hear like the board and others pushing them towards that to where especially in the very forgiving environment that AI is actually bringing up for entrepreneurs, like just go, just go. Yeah, so yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. So one of the things, so if I look at a perium, you know, we've got been fortunate to have, you know, quite a few second time founders come through. The number one thing they all say to us is they spend a whole lot more time on go to market channel. How do we actually sell this? How do we build a repeatable sale? Not just how do we build a product everybody wants, but how do we actually build a repeatable sale which is the, you know, go to market encompassing our demand generation and you know, salespeople and so on to where previously it was always that CEO has got to be the best salesperson in the company and they're going to run. Second time founders are like, yeah, I'll do some of the first sales, but I need to get somebody in here as quickly as possible to drive that. Has that been your experience as well?

Speaker B: Well, it probably depends on what, what market. Um, you know, I'm sort of in the quasi services serving the services, right. So um, you know, our space is very relationship driven. And so what I quickly realized was, you know, back to how we focus on each eight week cycle, the impact of doing great work for one important relationship. Right? That might be one notable wealth management firm. Um, they are all connected into different circles and networks. M In this space of wealth management, there are CEO study groups, there are alliances, um, there are uh, capital providers that have portfolios of competing firms. Right. And so I actually keep a drawing of what I call the chessboard in our space, right. And it's the total addressable market of what would be the most obvious sell to X. But then there's the adjacent tam and I have different layers of that. And so if you think about the chessboard, um, as you're entering any given market and back to services and uh, software meshing together, I think many businesses are going to have to figure out this uh, nuanced way of going to market. One impactful, you know, good review or testimonial of somebody notable in a space telling somebody else, hey, this is a good team, they're high integrity, they'll work fast, they'll do it right for you. That can open way more doors faster, you know, than sending your next 10,000 emails. And so, you know, is that unique to my space? You know, I don't know, you're seeing more verticals than me, but that's a big takeaway.

Speaker A: But you're, you're effectively saying you're spending a lot more time mapping that market out. Understanding my routes to market, understand the influencers in the decision making process. Right. Understanding who I have to be a part of. Um, I think before, and it goes to a point you made earlier on, but it was before. It was, I've got a great solution. I'm holding up Simba on top of the mountain. Like everybody come look at it, you know, and you're expecting all of the animals to then bow and say ah, right, right. You've created it. Um, you know, I remember years ago I was at a trade show and a company was launching themselves there. And I knew this because I was sitting like in the morning, you know, getting something to drink, whatever, and, and they were like, are you guys ready to change the world today? And they were high fiving each other and they were like all pumped up and woo. And then I walked by their booth accidentally, hours later and there was nobody there. And they were all standing there looking so dejected. Right. They thought that they just, you know, dropped their press release into the abyss. It was get a, you know, lightning was going to strike and it's just, it just doesn't work that way. And when you know that by the way, you're better off.

Speaker B: Right. Well, it's funny just to keep poking fun, you know, and I'll say at myself and ourselves in the previous kind of world, like think of the verbiage, um, that used to be talked about still is a little bit. But it'd be like, you know, build a moat and build a better mousetrap. And it's like who, who were these dorks at their computers who thought they were being hunted by dragons, that they needed a moat and then were, were chasing mice into inside their castle. You know, it's like we don't, I don't. The mentality has evolved.

Speaker A: To be honest, I still hear that from other venture firms. Not a big enough moat around that company.

Speaker B: Right, right.

Speaker A: So looked at software lately, moats are a lot harder than they used to be.

Speaker B: Right. So to borrow from that, if the moat or if you can't just have a technical moat or mousetrap, which is just like kind of a horrible way to think about the people you serve, uh, putting them in a mousetrap, uh, what is the moat? Well, relationship and trust and credibility, because for what I do, the models will continue to evolve, and the best in class tech will continue to evolve, and perhaps we'll have some things off the shelf for the custom layers of software that, yes, we build because we have great engineers. But the real moat that'll hold us for the long haul is that folks trust that this is the team that'll go on the journey with me. I can trust, will be credible. It isn't going to rip me off. And we'll adapt and keep an eye on how all of this stuff evolves. And so that's where the relationship. Get your first small handful of relationships really tight, uh, pick, you know, and try to, you know, target or make sure it's with very credible folks who can open other doors. And in some industries, like, everybody just competes cutthroat. You know, I'm fortunate. This wealth management space, for whatever reason, everybody shares ideas, they network with each other. Like, it's. It's incredible that we get introduced to somebody's competitor and they'll say, hey, they did great work for us. Like, that's pretty remarkable.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's. You never saw that in education. Um, the, uh.

Speaker B: Well, actually, we did. I do compare it to education that they were. Because they're not businesses. Um, one provost might tell the other, hey, you know, yeah, we love Packback, but the problem is that the adoption, you know, still couldn't really come from the top down in. In higher education. Right. So even if another provost. Oh, great. They're. They're awesome. You know, you still need to get all, you know, whatever. Hundreds of, uh, in our old game, professors that adopt it. So it's like, it was the same, but then also you had, like, the challenge of adoption.

Speaker A: I say it's, uh, it is very different in the digital ad world, um, in, you know, advertising in general. Like, everyone's like, hey, your tech's good. Can I get an exclusive? You know, like, I don't want anybody else to use it because I want to stand out in my advertising. Right. Or can I? Yeah. Category exclusive is a very common thing, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: If I spend enough money to. You can I get a cat with you? Can I get a category exclusive? So, yeah. So, Mike, it's interesting. It's fun to watch Journey, uh, this journey, um, as you go through it, and, uh, we'll keep up with it as we move along. You did well. We'll have you back in the future.

Speaker B: Right. Thanks. Thanks for having me. All right, that's momentum mode. Thanks.

Speaker A: Thanks.