74. David Friend: From Synth Legend to Cloud Storage King

Jonathan: Welcome to the Difference Engine, the show for tech founders, investors and innovators. Today's IT industry owes a lot to other areas of human activity. Inspired by the punch cards that control ARD Textile looms, the father of the computer mathematician. Charles Babbage worked on the basics of the Difference Engine after which this podcast is named, and he did it without electricity using that power source.

Eventually, the HP company's first products were for the Disney movie, Fantasia. And the AI chips we use today as enterprise it, were originally used to power video games, so it's perhaps no surprise that the world of entertainment and it cross-pollinate so beautifully. Today's guest is living proof of the link between mathematics, music, and electronic. Paul: David Friend is the man who founded arp.

He sold newfangled synthesizers to notable locals, including David Bowie, George Harrison, Jimmy Page, and Pete Townsend Arp even provided the legendary five note communication in close encounters of the third kind and Star Wars droid. R 2D two's voice. David's music industry days are now behind him, but that does not mean this five time founder is taking it easy. Oh, no.

Today he proudly sits atop and orchestrates Wasabi, the fourth largest data storage company in the world, outscored or perhaps outsource only by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google David Friend. Welcome to the different engine. Jonathan: So David, can you take us back to your younger days at Yale where all of this story started? David: Sure.

Uh, well I was a, a double major in music and engineering. Um, I went to college during the Vietnam War and uh, nobody was really thinking about careers at that time When you got out of college. In 1969 like I did, your choices were Vietnam, Canada, or jail. Paul: I'll take Canada please.

David: So, uh, but I, I, so I, I had, uh, would, would love to have been a professional musician, but I didn't have the talent. But I, so I kept my engineering work going and I had always been a science nerds in the, but I ended up, uh, with a. Uh, that paid for my gas and, uh, I built the electronic music studio at Yale. So I was designing equipment that the composers were using and that I was using myself for my own, uh, sort of avant-garde electronic music.

And this, uh, you know, eventually led to the founding of, uh, of the synthesizer company arc. That became such a big deal in the 1970s. And are still being sold today in music stores around the world. Jonathan: The early ops were not, um, particularly portable machines.

They, they, they were, you know, big and chunky and expensive, but even then, um, the music industry got to hear about what you were doing and, and beat a path to your door. Um, and some. Names that some of our listeners would be very familiar with went and found David Frank, can you tell us a little bit about that? David: Back in the early days of synthesizers and, and, uh, when we entered the market in 1970, uh, uh, another company called Moog had already, uh.

Been in the market and these things were basically used to create avant garde music. And, and in fact, my first customer when, uh, when we were five engineers sitting around building the first synthesizer and we get the first one built, and then we all looked at each other and says, who's gonna sell it? And, uh, I was the, I was the least unpresentable. Of the five.

So I was, I was elected to do that. And of course I went back to Yale, and Yale turned out to be, uh, you know, I think our first or second customer after, uh, a year or so rock bands with, uh, a lot of resources like the WHO and, and Led Zeppelin and so forth, uh, started to appear, um, and they started using our synthesizers. Uh, on their recordings and, uh, I remember one of the first things I did to Market ARP was, was take this big. 30,000 pound synthesizer.

I brought it to the Audio Engineering Society meeting in New York City and uh, turn around and there's George Harrison looking over my shoulder asking, what the heck is this thing? And how do you use it? That proceeded for a year or so, uh, until. Studios and rock bands, uh, became actually bigger part of our business than, uh, university Electronic music studios.

And that's when I had the sort of the insight where I said, if we could make these things cheap enough. Simple enough, they could be sold through retail music stores and every high school rock band would go out and buy them. And, and that led to the development of the ARP 2,600, which was probably the first major synthesizer design specifically for stage use. Jonathan: That was you and the mini mo really, um, out there on stage and, and just about every famous artist you could possibly name.

Started using you or the Moog or both? Uh, and music changed forever. And you know, we, we, we had the evolution of the, the, the German, uh, electronic bands and disco and funk and progressive rock. Everybody was using your machines.

So you'd sort of hit gold by that time. David: Yeah. And it changed my life because I quickly morphed from being an engineer. To being a, basically a sales guy, which is what a CEO does.

You know, you sell your customers, you sell your employees, you sell your investors, and, and my days during the 1970s. Of going to some recording studio and waiting for some band to show up so I could put an endorsement contract in front of them before the manager showed up. During the seventies, there was a lot of drugs and money in the rock and roll business, and frequently the band would show up and they'd be too stoned to even see where the signature line was on the contract or, or they wouldn't show up at all.

You know, I'd, I'd get up at three in the afternoon, head off to some recording studio in New York City. Wait for the band to come in. They'd stagger in at two in the morning or something like that. So that, but you know, we had over a hundred major bands as official arses by about 1974.

Jonathan: I was counting my CD collection the other day, and. And, and just trying to work out which of the CDs had had, had arc technology on it. And, and there was definitely more that had it than didn't, um, probably, probably says a lot about my musical taste, but, but certainly you've in influenced the whole generation and, and it's true that even today the ARP sound is available on the current generation of synthesizers. Yeah.

Paul: Corg modules, right? David: Yeah. Well, Corg, uh, came to me, I don't know, six or seven years ago maybe. Maybe a little more 10 years ago and said that, uh, there was demand for these, uh, old arc synthesizers in the market, uh, that everybody wanted that old analog synthesizer sound.

Yeah. Nice. And they wanted to rerelease all these old arcs. And they asked me if I would consult on that project to help them with some of the technical details.

And, uh, you know, they've re rereleased, uh, 2,600 and the Art Odyssey and Yeah. And they're selling better today Yeah. Than they did in the seventies. Paul: How validating.

Man, that's just brilliant. I love it. It's like you've created like the, the Les Paul of synthesizers there. David, you've described yourself, and I love this 'cause Jono and I, um, started all as, uh, spent a lot of time in, in pr.

So you describe yourself as a one man publicity machine, which again is part of your. Your conduct orchestrator of companies this point. Um, and you mentioned how you, um, you of getting featured in. Uh, helped.

David: Getting yourself known is always the biggest problem. And, um, I would write columns for, uh, magazines in the music industry. And there was a magazine called Keyboard, I don't know if it still exists, but it was magazine dedicated to keyboard players. And, you know, I raised my hand and said, how'd you like to have a, a monthly column on synthesizers?

And, uh, and then, you know, I just, you, you just show up. Places where people who influence the music industry are gonna be. And so, uh, it was hard on my family because you're away a lot. You spend your days hanging out at a recording session or something of that nature.

Um, but, uh, you know, you, you do what you have to do. And I don't view it as. The wool over anybody's eyes. I mean, the thing that always got me going and still gets me going is the fact that I, I really love the idea of being a composer and starting a company is like you take a blank sheet of paper, you start filling in the notes, and after a while you have a composition.

And I get that same sense of satisfaction from starting companies and wasabi. My see on my shirt here is number six. Uh, for me since getting outta college, Jonathan: one of the things, you know, you talk about orchestration and you know, you, you being, being the least umbrella of that, the least unpresentable, one of the crews. So you basically ended up running the firm, you know, this one man publicity machine, getting that stuff sold and there came a point where you thought.

Maybe we should get some external in investment in, in this. David: Well, the challenge in, in, in ARP was, you know, finding bands to endorse your products before they got so famous that, uh, you know, you couldn't afford to get their endorsements anymore. And so, you know, I would sit there pouring over record sales and airplay statistics and things like that. And when the Apple two computer came along, I taught myself how to program and I designed a.

A program for the Apple two computer called Trends I called trendspotter. And basically, uh, you know, I had my assistant fill in all this data and then it allowed me to use data visualization. To figure out, figure, you know, who was likely to be, you know, the next, the next band that people are gonna be listening to. And, uh, one day I had a, a venture capitalist in my office to try to raise some money for arp and he wasn't interested in that, but he was very interested in this piece of software that I had developed for the Apple II computer because at that time there weren't very many CEOs around who had a PC on their desk.

And I showed him what I could do. I showed him how I could compare record sales for, you know, a hundred top bands in California versus a hundred top bands in New York City and uh, and that sort of thing. And he said, look, why don't you get out of this? Synthesize your business.

I'll give you a million dollars to seed a company to commercialize that software. And, you know, I dismissed it at first, but the long story short is, uh, six months later we sold ARP to CBS musical instruments and uh, and I launched a company called Computer Pictures with that guy's, uh, million dollars. Paul: I have to say that is what VCs. A, you know, historically allegedly think that they do, like, you know, they see something that other people don't.

You don't hear stories like that very often. You don't hear them much anymore, I have to say. David: So that was the beginning of my software career. Uh, been there ever since, and, and thankful for it, in fact, because the music industry was fun when I was in my twenties.

But, uh, I certainly wouldn't wanna be doing it today. Jonathan: So there you were, data visualization became your thing. Um, and that was the new thread in your career. And can you talk us through the next couple of companies that were essentially based on this expertise and data visualization?

David: The first company, computer pictures, uh, got bought by a, a larger software company less than two years after we founded it. And that was the first time we were able to put some money in our pockets. Um, and, uh, and then we, and I mean me and, uh, my longtime technical genius co-founder Jeff Flowers, uh, we founded a company called Pilot Software, which, uh, developed the same basic kind of software but designed for larger companies with much larger data sets. So, uh, that company sold to.

JC and big chains of department stores and, uh, you know, mostly companies, multiple outlets, visualization to figure out which stores underperforming and why underperforming. And, uh, that company was very successful. It, it grew and then we sold it about eight or nine years later to, uh, dun and Bradstreet. Jonathan: They use it to crunch their ac Nelson data.

I mean, it's a very interesting acquisition. They had a particular application. They wanted to use it for David: e exactly. So, you know, the same thing where they have, you know, hundreds of, uh, or thousands of television outlets around the country all doing advertising.

And that was, uh, third company Paul: At this point. The music's almost a distant memory. You are, you're pretty much all in on data and a couple of the threads there, like a technical co-founder. This is all the classic advice that people get when they start up these days.

But I guess you're just doing it. On the fly. You were like into data super early before anybody else, right before everyone else woke up to it. David: Well, as a CEO you realize very quickly how much your business depends on having data.

And uh, you know, so I got, as, when I was running arp, I just got very frustrated with, you know, having to sit there with pages of paper and, you know, trying to take numbers off of a, you know, a magazine and put them on, on a graph paper or something like that. I mean, it was just unbelievably tedious. That's what sort of led me to develop this software myself. When I saw this Apple computer, I said, wow, this has got graphics capability.

You know, I, this is just what I need. Jonathan: But you also moved it onto the PC because you, you'd realized that the PC was gonna be the corporate standard, I guess, by that time. David: And then I also realized, you know, back in 1980, well, I forget what it was now, the date, but we, we were one pilot software was one of the very first, so-called client server. Applications where the data resided on a mainframe, but all of the presentation of the data was done on a PC that was talking to the mainframe.

So, you know, most of the, at that time, people had mainframes and they had done terminals. And, uh, you know, we unplugged the dumb terminal and plugged in the PC and said, you know, now we can do a lot more at the desktop Jonathan: you've never been afraid of, of getting out there on the road. And, and we saw that in art, but you were doing it with, with pilots as well, and you used to basically ask. The, the, the prospects to give, give you a chunk of their data under NDA and then you'd show them what you could do with it.

David: Frequently people were very surprised with what they would see in their own data. So if we were gonna go out and do a sales pitch, uh, we'd ask the company to give us, you know, uh, a sample data set. That we could then look at. We were actually at, uh, the offices of Alia, the, the Italian airline, and, uh, we had all the senior execs in the conference room, including the CEO, and I get started with my presentation.

And putting up, uh, showing how alia's performance was going in various markets and cost structures and things like that, and the, the executives start arguing among them, pointing at the screen and arguing among themselves about, about the data in Italian, which I didn't understand. The argument got more and more heated with more and more Gesta, gesticulation and, and finally the, the, they all get up from the table and they, and they march out of the room yelling at each other, going down the corridor.

I could hear them the, you know, the yelling disappearing into the end, and we're sitting there in the conference room all by ourselves. Paul: Wow. David: Finally, we just. Packed up and left.

Paul: Wow. Jonathan: Perhaps it was, it was better in the end that you, you, you did give that, uh, that company away to, to Dun and Bradstreet. But we, we often, we often wonder when we're talking to, to, you know, great serial entrepreneurs like yourself. You know, where'd you get?

Your ideas from, and I think your next, um, company, um, came, came from an insight you got by having a, a daughter who perhaps wasn't doing what she should have been doing with her computer. David: Well, this was the e early days of the internet. And, uh, at that time, you know, e everybody had. Laptops and PCs, and they were typically backing them up if they did back them up at all.

They were typically backing them up by buying backup software like Symantec or, or others, uh, McAfee and backing them up to an external hard drive. And, uh, you know, the truth of the matter is that's what I did. But, you know, I didn't do it every day. In fact, I didn't do it very often at all.

Neither did my daughter, apparently she was in college in New York and she calls me up one day and says, dad, my, the hard drive in my, in my computer crashed. And I have a term paper that I've been working on all semester, and it's due on Friday. You know? So I get in the car, I drive down to New York City, we take the hard drive out, bring it over to one of these labs.

Supposedly can recover data from dead hard drives. And they charged me $1,300 and, and they couldn't get the data back. And, and then, so I get back to Boston and I'm having lunch with my, with my, uh, founder, uh, partner, Jeff Flowers. And he said, yeah, he said, my, somebody just broke into my wife's car and stole her laptop and she lost two years of baby pictures.

That, uh, she hadn't backed up. And, and then we sat there and looked at each other and just says, you know, everybody's sitting here connected to the internet. Why can't, why can't this everything you're doing on your PC just sort of float up to the cloud in the background? Without having to do anything.

You know, when you're, when you're connected to the internet, it's just working in the background. You never have to think about it again until something happens to your computer. And that was the beginning of Carbonite, which became the largest, uh, endpoint backup, uh, product in the us And it was the first backup, uh, product to, uh, integrate the data storage with the, the software on the pc. So we had to build.

Enough storage in the background to back up, uh, 2 million or 3 million PCs every night, you know? So it was massive amount of data and we had a big data center, uh, you know, where we stored all this, all, all these backups, all this information. Jonathan: The weird thing about that is that so often in innovation, the thing which stimulates more innovation isn't the thing you would think it was. So you came up with this great application, you had a.

Big title addressable market. It was a clear problem to be solved, but you are tinkering in the background on storage. David: Yeah, so we got very good at, uh, storage because consumer market is very competitive and you always have to be, you know, low cost and, and high performance. Um, you don't want your phone ringing with customer.

Calls and customer complaints because when you're only charging, you know, $50 a year or something like that for a subscription, one phone call to customer support eats up the entire profit from that customer. One day Jeff comes to me, uh, while I was still CEO of, of Carbonite, and he said he and our chief architect had an idea for a new storage architecture that if they could make it work, would be much cheaper and much higher performance than what Amazon and, and, uh, Microsoft and Google had introduced.

Uh, with their cloud services. So I said, yeah, you know, go see if you can make it work. And uh, they basically camped out at Jeff's house, uh, north of Boston in Marblehead for a year. And, uh, finally they came back and said, it's working.

You know, we've got it working and we think this can scale up to exabytes. And, and uh, I looked at the numbers and I said, holy cow, Jeff, you know, we could sell cloud storage. That's a quarter of the price of Amazon's. It's faster and we can still make good margins.

And when I thought of that, then I thought about how big is the storage market? You know, what's the potential for this? I just said, whoa. And so I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite.

Uh, and left to found Wasabi with Jeff. Paul: Well, that's so interesting because like, you know, like we've skipped across there seamlessly. 'cause you're just looking at the numbers three alleged categories. You know, you've got the backup category, that was a thing.

Then you've got the online storage, and now we're talking about cloud storage. It's, it's as if the ideas that you have like float across existing categories, and that's. I guess that's sort of the way your mind works, right? David: One thing leads to another, but it's also, I I still always, you know, if you look at sort of what I do as opposed to necessarily what I say, uh, what, what I do is I'm always looking for that blank sheet of paper where I can start filling in the notes.

And, uh, you know, as a, I'm, I'm, I'm good. As a CEO at this point in my career, I've made all the mistakes and, you know, I, everything looks familiar to me now, but what I still love, what still makes me, gets me excited and cranked up is something new. You know, putting together, oh, here's this technology over here. Here's a user need over here.

Let's put the two things together and create a market. And, uh, you know, so that's kind of what gets me going. Jonathan: So, so here you are, you're in forced place, as in, in terms of the amount of, of data storage providers behind the obvious big three. You've, you've come into the, the market at a time when the nature of what is being stored and why it's being stored has changed.

And, and can you talk us through that and how that has affected how you think about what it is you provide? David: You know, what's happened in the last couple years is, uh, AI. Has reared its head as one of the biggest, if not the biggest consumer of storage we've noticed. Yeah.

Really. And because when we started, uh, most of the data that people were sending us were backups. So, you know, it was that sort of logical step from Carbonite, my old company. Um, and then, you know, kind of out of the blue a couple years ago, people started showing up with data lakes.

And, uh, we'd, we'd ask them, well, what is all this data? Well, this is 14 million hours of video that we're using to train an AI to, you know, recognize, uh, cars or logos or, or whatever, you know, and, uh, and then so that's kind of like taken over a big part of our business. And what we realized pretty quickly. Was that, uh, the AI industry requires some different kinds of storage from what we were offering.

Our, we, we, we love this idea of a, sort of a one size fits all, uh, storage, which is what we had been marketing up to last year. Uh, but we recognized that there was. A need for faster storage that was more expensive and also slower storage that was much cheaper. So we, we introduced, uh, late last year, we introduced our first all flash based storage region in San Jose, aimed specifically at the AI industry.

It works exactly the same as, uh, our, you know, our regular wasabi storage, but it's much, much faster. Paul: Is is that because of the difference between training and inference, um, stages of the ai? David: Yes, uh, exactly. Because, uh, and, and also as a, as a C for when you're doing training, so you know, if you're gonna train a model, you, you move a chunk of data out of a slower tier of storage into faster storage because you don't want those.

Expensive Nvidia chips sitting idle while they're waiting for data to be read out of memory. So it, it's both those, uh, use cases, but then there's also, okay, I've got all this old data. It, a lot of it is 10 years old, but I still need, I still might need it again to train a model. We need to put that somewhere.

It's. You know, the cheapest kind of storage. Safe. Paul: Yeah, David: but the cheapest.

I Paul: want it, but not right away. David: I'm not willing to pay to keep it, you know? Uh, milliseconds. Uh, away from a, in a response standpoint.

So we'll be, you'll be seeing from Wasabi fairly soon, uh, announcement of a new tier of storage, which will be much less expensive. And, uh, competing with Amazon Glacier. Paul: The people you play with always seem to change, right? So you were obviously dealing with a, the guys rolling at two o'clock in the morning, maybe with leather trousers, and now you've got, uh, Jensen and his leather jacket that you need to play nice with.

It must be fascinating. All of these different. Types of folks that you constantly have to, I guess the industry term for it is partner with these days. David: We have hundreds of, of partnerships and, uh, partnerships are where it's at in the, in, in our business because, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not able to predict who the winners are gonna be in the AI industry, but we're selling the picks and shovels.

No matter what you're doing with ai, you still need data. And I'm, people say, well, isn't that a boring business to be in storage? And, and I'm like, yeah, it it, I love boring. Paul: I love it David: because it, it's, it's predictable.

It's a real business. I don't care who wins in the AI industry. If, if I can sell storage to all of them, you know, what difference does it make to me? And so at this stage in my career, you know, um, I, I'm very happy to be at, at that foundational level, uh, selling to everybody who's really trying to figure it out at the, at the top end.

You know, we're not gonna be developing. The next chat gt. Paul: Yeah. But then you didn't, you did it right.

The music, you, you gave the guys the instrument. So there's a massive read across here. David: Exactly. Paul: And you said to us at the start here that you think of yourself as an orchestra conductor, which I find amazing.

Um, could you, like a lot of people who listen to this pod are trying to, you know, create that number one hit, they're application. What lessons can. Tomorrow's category builders, you know, based off, you know, your amazing career so far. David: You know, being a CEO is, uh, doesn't require that you, you need to do everybody's jobs.

Um, and you have to think about, you know, as a, as a CEO, what is it that you uniquely can do and focus on that because, you know, unless everybody is, is adding their own unique skills. To the picture, you're not gonna be successful. And I see a lot of young CEOs who are kind of micromanagers and you know, they wanna write the code, they wanna design the marketing, they wanna do this, they wanna do that. And you have to be ready to delegate and you know, and at this point, I'm perfectly happy to delegate everything I can possibly delegate, which leaves me.

As the spokesperson for the company, it leaves me as the, uh, the person who sets sort of company culture. And those things may not sound like a lot of work. And there's certainly a lot less work than going out and doing sales calls all day long, but you're like an orchestra conductor because you don't have to be the best violinist. You don't have to know how to play the bassoon.

You don't know how to, you don't know how to play the harp or the tuba or anything else. Your, your job is to make it all function together and to make sure engineering is building the products that the customers want, and let the marketing people understand the message that they need to. Transmit to the customer so you can spend your time putting yourself in the shoes of the person who's gonna be buying your product. Why the heck would I wanna buy this product?

Paul: I love that. Yeah. David: The one lesson you learn in business is nobody cares whether you're successful or not. So it's, it's up to you to make it happen.

Jonathan: Just to extend this analogy, uh, a little bit more, David, um, yeah. The conductor and composer relationship. Now, if, if you are the conductor. Been you a longtime collaborator, Jeff is sort of the composer, and clearly your relationship has been absolutely vital.

Um, can you talk a little bit about. You mentioned earlier, earlier, Jeff had been away and started to develop a new storage architecture. How does it work between you and him? I mean, you know, there's a great phrase, you know, build it and they will come.

And often in tech, uh, you can build something very, very. You know, apparently brilliant, but nobody will buy it because it, it doesn't have the market characteristics it should have. Can you talk us about the dynamic between you two? Sort of who comes up with the ideas, who shapes them, and does that vary?

David: It's an interactive process with Jeff and me and it, you know, it usually starts. Sitting over a cup of coffee in his dining room or, you know, going out to lunch and just shooting the shit, you know, and, and thinking about, you know, what, what's going on in the industry. And, uh, you know, we always seem to have a, a long list of ideas. That, you know, someday if we get around to it, we'll, we'll explore.

Uh, but I, you know, I think the, the Jeff is, is phenomenal at seeing kind of where technology is going and proposing a whole bunch of ways that that might, might benefit customers that, you know, customers aren't doing yet. And I think where, where I come in is, I'm kind of the, the guy that says. I, I, I can't see anybody buying that or Wow. You know, if we could actually do that.

I could see a lot of people buying that. One of the jobs of A CEO is selling people, and when, when young people ask me, what should I do to get ready for a business career, I say, learn how to sell. You know, learn how to carry a bag because you've gotta sell investors on your dream. You have to sell employees on leaving their well-paying jobs.

To come to work for a startup with no resources. You have to sell customers on the idea that it's safe to buy a product from a company with five employees and no resources. You know, Paul: and, and of course, partners, right these days. Partner, partner, partner David: partners, and, and so, you know, you're always selling and, and, uh, and you, and you can do it.

Well be, if you're excited about what you're actually doing, you know, it's, it doesn't come off as salesmanship. It comes off as, as. A sincere belief that what you're doing is beneficial to the customer. Paul: The name was.

It fascinates me, and I know you could tell us a little story about, uh, how that came about. David: Company names are really important and it always amazes me how so many, so many company names in the tech industry are either impossible to pronounce or, or Im impossible to spell If you hear them, why should you make somebody have to sit around and search on the web for 15 minutes trying to find. Find the name of the company that you just heard because, because the name has got some weird spelling.

So we had a list of like 200 possible names that we were considering. My, uh, CMO, uh, Mike Welt. And when we saw Wasabi, we said, wow, that's a word. If you hear it, you can spell it.

If you see it, you can pronounce it. It doesn't mean something obscene in some foreign language. Um, and nobody's using the URL, so it, it fit all the, checked all the boxes for me and we're selling hot storage and you know, obviously anybody who's had a mouthful of wasabi knows what that means. So, uh, unfortunately the, the name was, uh, owned by one of these, uh, website brokers, and it was a UK company actually you guys will appreciate.

And he, he wanted a half a million dollars for the URL. And at that time we only had $2 million to our name. Uh. And so, uh, I, we did a trick that I learned at Carbonite, which was, uh, a similar situation.

We went out and we bought wasabi, de wasabi it, wasabi es wasabi, uh, JP and so forth. And then a few months, and then we paid like $10 for each of those. And then we went back to the guy, uh, and we said, look, anybody who's gonna spend a half a million dollars on a.com is gonna want it de sb, et cetera.

And guess what? We own them all. And, uh, so we were able to talk the guy down substantially, uh, and, and acquire the wasabi com name. The only one we couldn't get.

Was Wasabi co uk because I'm sure you guys have seen that chain of, of low-end sushi bars that are in Paddington station and, and we, we couldn't get that one. But every week we do get a few emails from customers complaining about the service. Or the, the, the tuna was, uh, was smelly. Uh, Jonathan: thank you for listening.

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