George Arison - Raising $200,000,000+ In Venture Capital & Creating The "Original Uber" Concept

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What's going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have George Arison on the show. George Arison is the founder and CEO of Shift.com, an online peer to peer marketplace for buying and selling used cars. Prior to shift, in 2007, he co founded Taxi Magic, known today as Curb, which is overall the original Uber idea. Long story short, Shift just raised over $200 million and they are absolutely crushing it. So that being said, make sure you check out George Arison and enjoy the episode. What's going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Geor here with us that I'm very excited to talk to. Thanks so much for coming on the show, George.

Thanks for having me and good to talk to you.

Absolutely. So I know as of now you're the CEO of Shift, which is the online peer to peer marketplace for buying and selling used cars. But prior to that, you had a very great company called Taxi Magic, better known as Curb today. And I really wanted to start off by asking you more, so created the original Uber idea. Where did that start and when was that? Walk us through that journey.

Sure thing. Yeah. So we did create what Uber and Lyft really became in some respects. So it started out in 2006, 2007, kind of a few origin parts of that business. I was a BCG consultant and I would constantly take taxis to go to various places and it was a super terrible experience because you'd have to stand outside in the street trying to flag a taxi. One of our co founders, Tom DePasquale, was working at a company named Concur, which is an expense management tool. He had sold his business to them and they would basically hypothesize that roughly 10 to 15% of their expenses had to do with ground transportation. But they were a huge source of fraud because there was no electronic transactions. It was all Paper and cash. And, you know, cab dude would give you a receipt and then you could write whatever amount you wanted into it. At bcg, the joke was, you know, BCG wouldn't reimburse for giving you a BlackBerry, so you have to pay for the BlackBerry yourself. And everyone would always complain about that. And then the joke was, it says three receipts, right? It's like three taxi rides would equal the amount of money you had to pay to get a BlackBerry. So. And it was easy to get a taxi receipt. So that was kind of the world back then. And our thesis was, hey, can you use the existing technology at the cab companies to connect to that technology through mobile software and enable bookings directly into cab dispatch systems? And then that would solve the booking problem and hopefully would solve the payment problem as well, where the customer would feed information that, hey, they've paid for the taxi ride into the dispatch system, which the driver would see and collect the payment that way. The benefit of that was that you then create an electronic receipt which would go directly into your expense management tool so you didn't have to do it manually. And that was going to result in fraud being managed. And we build a system that did all the things that I just described in like a ton of markets. We're about in a peak, like 50 cities across the country. Not every, but probably at least half of the big cap companies were working with us. The dominant cities were definitely like D.C. metro area, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, a few small pockets like North Carolina had a great experience with us as well. But the challenge always was getting the cab companies to work with the customer and us really well. Ultimately, cab drivers were independent contractors could do whatever they wanted, but they were really independent countries, not the way Uber and Lyft claimed to be independent countries. And so oftentimes cab drivers would kind of accept a ride, head to the customer's location on the way, somebody would flag them and they would get another ride. And so they would stop going to the customer, take a different trip. But the system wouldn't tell us that, hey, the driver's not showing up anymore until it was really late, and then we had to dispatch a different car. So it wasn't a perfect system because it was using existing technology to make it work. And the cab companies had very little incentive to work with us because nobody was threatening them. Of course, fast forward 10 years, Uber and Lyft has destroyed the cab industry because we know what happened. But if you look at Asia, for example, and Europe, where Uber and Lyft Came later. The cab comes actually are doing reasonably well. And the reason is because they got together with my taxis of the world, like my taxi or Didi or all these other companies that are trying to mimic what Uber and Lyft do here and there. A huge portion of their ride is actually done for cab companies because cab companies kind of adopted themselves to be able to use the technology that was coming along via Uber and Lyft. But in the US it never happened because the cab companies thought that they didn't have a threat. By the time they realized there was a threat, it was way too late.

Got it. How do you believe the cab, not only cab industry, the Uber and Lyft, how do you believe they're being affected during a time like this?

Coronavirus.

And how will they rebalance?

Yeah, look, I'm a huge Lyft user. I used to use Uber a lot. But then the new agreement that Chase and Lyft have makes Lyft kind of incredibly appealing. If you like points, which I do. I'm a very heavy Lyft user. You know, I commute from Palo Alto to the city for work. And from the kind of getting my work done perspective, being able to be in the back of the car working makes way more sense than driving. So I love the product and the experience. And as somebody who doesn't like to drive and kind of had this idea, you know, a decade ago, seeing it all in action is really, really awesome. But I mean, I think the reality is public transportation is going to suffer dramatically. I think post Covid and Uber and Lyft are going to be in that same vein. Right. I think people are going to feel like, oh, the car is not clean and is not very comfortable. Both from that perspective and I'm afraid and I think a lot more people will want to own cars. Now that's coupled with the fact that we are about to enter a really steep recession. I think people completely miss or those who think that things are going to be great in a quarter, I think misunderstand how bad this recession is going to be. And in that environment, of course, people have a harder time buying a big purchase like a car. So my guess is a lot more people are going to buy cars. This is new. But a lot more people are overall going to try to buy a car to avoid public transportation as much as they can because the risks are going to be great. I think we all wish that this would be like, okay, oh, we're in lockdown and then we're out of lockdown. That's not going to happen. There's going to be a 24 plus month process of like living in a different way because there's not a vaccine for this disease. And so my guess is that, you know, ownership of cars and number of cars in the world is going to increase a lot.

Speaking of that, I'd love to transition and talk about shift, which I know just based on reading some articles, you guys raised over $50 million back in 2015 from Goldman Sachs. What is Shift? Why did you start it? And what was the transition from your original idea, which is now curb to shift?

Yeah, well, we raised a lot more money than $50 million. Fortunately. We raised over $225 million of equity and 75 million debt. So we raised a lot of money. Now granted, like, it's a very expensive business to build. Once you build it and once you have like a scaled company, it's very hard to replicate. The value is massive there. Hence Carmax and Carvana. But getting costs a lot of money. So I left taxi matching or car because my green card was rejected. And I applied for a green card twice actually, and it was rejected twice. Both times because they claimed that the company that was sponsoring me, aka TaxMagic, I own too much equity in the company and that gave me too much control over decisions around hiring. And for that reason the company couldn't sponsor me for a Visa, which is obviously like a crazy thing, but whatever, it's like 10 years ago and said and done. So I needed to actually leave to go to a bigger company. And for me, decision criteria were like, hey, what's going to allow me to come to the west coast from the east coast? Because I knew that I wanted to have a company on the west coast over then on the east coast. Number two is like, where am I going to learn some really useful things I don't know how to do? So kind of bigger tech companies were interesting from that perspective. And then thirdly, who's really good at getting my Visa done or getting my green card done? And so when you combine all those things, not a long list of companies, Google was really high on it and I was very lucky to be able to end up at Google. And I was there for three years, learned a ton of great stuff, became I think a much better person, kind of from the point of view like being a business person and understanding product and technology a lot better. But I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I love starting companies, scratch and executing on that. And so I very much had that itch and then in 2013, I left Google and started Shift, you know, soon thereafter. And we've been at it ever since, really. It kind of came about very organically. Toby and I. Toby is my co founder at TextMagic and also here at Shift. We would talk once a week or so about different ideas that we wanted to go after. And he's the one who kind of put the used car space in my mind and saying, hey, take a look at that. There's a lot of interesting opportunity there. So then I spend a lot of time learning about the auto market and how it works and what the opportunities are, and kind of just over time fell in love with the opportunity more than anything else. Again, I don't drive very much, and so I'm not a car guy at all, if you ask me. Hey, what's your favorite car? I like, I have no idea. Probably Tesla, but I don't even know. But the concept of like transforming a space this big and having such a massive impact on it if you did it right was really interesting to me. And then secondly, you know, I felt it was really cool to solve something that hadn't changed in decades. Even though technology has changed cars themselves massively and technology has changed how people research vehicles, right? So all the research and discovery starts online now rather than offline. The actual purchase process hasn't really changed in decades and decades and decades. Like you go to a dealership and you go to another dealership, and you go to another dealership, you find the car you want and then you have to wait there for three hours to try to get the transaction closed. I'm like, this makes no sense. Software's changed everything else. Why has it not changed this? And there's a lot of inherent reasons why that's the case. And you can talk about that for an hour. But changing that and having an impact on it was really appealing to me. And then lastly, as an entrepreneur, you don't often think of ideas that are very clearly companies that can be public over the long term, right? And this one was one such business because, like, you could do it without really achieving crazy market share. If you achieve a quarter percent market share of the used car market, you're a public company basically in the country. And so that was really appealing as well. And so that's kind of how I got into it. And, you know, we've been at it now six years. It's been a slog way harder than I think anybody thought. But most businesses are, and we're still at it. And, you know, we basically, in some ways now is our time because we spent six years building a product that was almost like designed for the Corona time period specifically that, like, we had this thesis that, hey, people want the test drive brought to them rather than customers coming to a store. Because people are used to that in every other piece of experience. Like, people are used to doing that when they buy groceries or buy clothes or buy from Amazon or whatever. And why can't that happen to a bigger purchase, like a car purchase? And so we designed systems, technology, operations to allow people to experience that. And when we started, we'll be like, you're either crazy or oh, wow. Was always the feedback of, like, we bring the test drive to you. Now, of course, like, everyone needs to have everything brought to them. So our business is very much designed for that. And while CarMax, for example, is closed across the state of California because they can't do delivery, we are very much in operations and actually demand is quite high because what we were talking about earlier, people who need to be getting from point A to point B don't really have an alternative means right now unless they buy a car. Muni, for example, in San Francisco, which is a public transport system, was shut down last week. I don't know if it's still shut down this week, but last week it is off. And so if you're an essential worker, which is a huge percentage of the population, how do you get to work if you don't have a car? Right. There's kind of no choice.

So I want to sort of take a step back to. You said you guys raised over $200 million, is that correct?

Correct.

What's been your experience with raising venture capital and what do you recommend to entrepreneurs looking to do so?

So I've spent an incredible amount of time with venture capital and we've been very lucky in terms of the capital we've been able to raise. And we've had good times and bad times. Obviously, a lot of things that were true five years ago are not true today because the market has fundamentally changed. Some VCs go around and say, oh, we're still open for business. That's BS. 99% of VCs are not open for business right now. Sure, they'll take a look at companies because they always take a look at companies, but they can't make decisions today because they have no idea what's happening. With a portfolio of companies, there's a huge kind of likelihood that a large portion of companies in everybody's portfolio are going to die. Just literally in the next six months because they don't have money or their business has shut down. When the government fiat shuts down the economy, you can't control if your business is still existing or not. And it's just like the reality. And whether that's big companies or small companies, everyone's having this problem. Unless you're like Zoom or a few other businesses that are just very much, like, necessary in this environment, you're in trouble. And so I think right now, most people are just dealing with portfolio management. Obviously, eventually the markets will open up again and there'll be capital, but again, a lot of the rules will no longer apply because I think the market will be much more venture capital friendly and less founder friendly. That said, in a recession, which we are going to be in for a while now, some of the best companies ever usually arise. And so, like, if you look at the last recession, at the tail end of it especially, some great businesses were born. Uber Airbnb being just kind of a couple of examples. Right. I think Airbnb started in 2007 as an example. Right. Like, in the midst of this whole thing. And so opportunity is pretty large to, like, build awesome things in a recession, partly because, you know, talent is critical to building businesses, and talent's much more available in a recession. So if you have capital, you are much better off. Secondly, I think this is when you start seeing great entrepreneurs really take shape. When things are great, everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. When things are tough, only the great entrepreneurs want to be entrepreneurs. So I think it's going to be an interesting time period for the next half a decade where a lot of great businesses actually going to be born and we're going to see some really cool innovation and. And we've had decadence in this country for too long almost, I feel like. And people are too used to things being too good now. It's going to be kind of a very different world, and it's going to be a lot harder. So for me, I believe that fundraising. And this is going to come back to your question, like, what's the advice? Fundraising is ultimately a process of discovery. I don't believe in this idea of, like, an entrepreneur shows up, talks to a VC and convinces the VC that they should invest in somebody's business. Sure, there's a little bit of that, but most of it is like a VC has a thesis on what type of businesses they want to invest in. A thesis is the one type of entrepreneurs they want to back. And meeting an entrepreneur and learning about his or her business is a matter of discovery. Whether does this entrepreneur match my thesis? Does this business match my thesis? And if they do, then they're going to be like, okay, I'm interested. And then you just begin the process of convincing somebody to invest rather than when you show up, just that convincing somebody to invest. So I generally believe that talking to more people makes more sense than less because if you don't talk to enough people, you won't engage in that process of discovery. Some of our best investors, ones where we had not initially thought we'd talk to, whereas some of the people we're like, oh, it makes a lot of sense to talk to them just turn out not to be great investors and didn't turn out to be great people for us to invest in. Secondly, be aware people might say no to you for totally random reasons. Like most VCs will do two, maybe three deals a year, right? And they might have already done two deals and so on the third deal they're going to be like crazy selective or they might not even want to do one or maybe they do one if it's like a total no brainer, but most likely they won't. You might feel like, okay, this guy said no to me. So it's like a terrible thing. But you just never know why a person saying no. Unfortunately most VCs are very bad at giving you feedback. It's not true for everybody. There are some VCs who are amazing at giving feedback. I mean for example, Jeff Jordan Andreessen or Jeff Lewis who has his own fund now called Bedrock, used to be a founders fund. Like when I, when they said no to me, I would get like lengthy emails with lots of interesting information for why they're not investing in the business and or what they might want to see to invest. That's generally uncommon. And you get like much more BSC type of feedback, like oh, I couldn't get there. And you're like, well what does that mean? Right? And that's also really tough because then you feel really depressed about getting that kind of feedback. And so that's just normal and common plan for that. Don't expect to hear a lot of reasons why somebody's not investing. But if you talk to enough people, you'll find somebody who probably will. And that's just kind of reasonable and expected. And then, you know, lastly, I think some people feel like, oh, you know, the way I'm going to figure out how much money I'm going to raise and how much dilution I'm going to have is like, I'm going to convince this VC that my company is worth X million dollars. It's like worth $10 million. That's. Yes. The price of the company is determined based on how much money you're going to raise and how much ownership a VC needs to have. And price is an output of that formula. And so what you want to focus on is like, do you have a clear story for how much money you're raising and why? Don't believe whatever your model says, because most likely it's going to cost you twice as much as you think it's going to cost you. So raise twice as much as you think you need and figure out how to get that capital. And then we see they're gonna have thresholds for what they can, they must have as a minimum threshold. And then what they really wanna have and the truth will be somewhere in between. And those two things will determine what your valuation is. These private valuations don't matter. Especially early stage private valuations are totally made up based on how much you're raising and how much we still need to own. And so don't pay a lot of attention to them. Most companies are binary outcomes. If you're successful, whether you own 30% or 10% doesn't actually matter. Right. Like, don't focus on, oh, I gotta minimize my dilution. No, focus on, I get to raise the capital I need to be successful. And if I have enough money to succeed and I can execute really well on that, then I will have a really good business. And that binary outcome. Now obviously, like over raising money can be a problem as well, both from the perspective of how much you're worth because your valuation could be too high, but also spending money. So if you raise a lot, have really good controls to not spend it. I've made that mistake before where we spend too much money too quickly. It's bad. But in general, I think it's better to have more money in the bank than less money.

Got it. Love that. I want to take a step back because I know, like your origin story of what helped you become an entrepreneur. I know you moved to the United States at the age of 14. Tell me about that transition because that's such a foundational part of your life.

Yeah. So I was born in the Soviet Union, Right. Which is like today, when you talk to kind of younger generations, I have no clue what you're talking about in some ways, but like it was a totally different world. This is pre Internet free mobile phones, communication, like really difficult like, literally, to send a communication to the US From Georgia, you had to find one of two fax machines that was publicly available to send a fax, or one telex machine to send a telex back and forth. Like, it was totally crazy. In 1989, an American couple came to live in Georgia for about six months. That had never happened before. Like, foreigners living in Georgia from the US for that long. Like, total weird, strange thing. They happened to live with my family, and they were my English tutors. And so during that time period, we then discovered kind of or talked about, hey, like, I want to apply to study in the US Et cetera. The thinking was, I'm still really young, but they left me a book of prep schools to apply to. And so then 12 months after they left, I applied. I'm still, like, only 12 at this point. And so the schools are, like, super interesting to have you come, but you're too young, so you have to wait for a year. So I had to wait for a year to be able to go, which actually made a lot of sense. But for these schools, I was, like, a total novelty, right? He is, like a kid from Georgia, speaks fluent English, applied to schools, and, like, has a reference from American teachers who know him, like, personally. So I got into a couple of schools, got full scholarships, and ended up in Maine at a place called Cuban Academy, which was like, a totally different world to go from, like, a big city in the Soviet Union to rural Maine, as 180 degrees apart as you can be, of course. Like, the fact that this was a foreign country on all that. I'm not even talking about that. But it was incredibly lucky for me because Soviet Union was falling apart, civil wars, lots of people died, starvation, etc. And I kind of got to escape most of that and live through a really good time period kind of here learning and developing. And I was very lucky because I spoke English really well. So kind of assimilation for me was really, really easy. So I never had this, like, you know, in prep schools or in colleges. Oftentimes you have, like, cliques of foreigners who all hang out together because they have a hard time assimilating with the rest of the population. I was lucky because I never had that in my prep school. We only had 200 kids, so there was, like, no choice but to assimilate. And then once I showed up in college, like, I had already been living in the dorm for four years. And so it was not in any way, like, a weird thing for me to, like, develop friendships and relationships. And so then I went to Middlebury for college and obviously had an amazing time, and it was the beginning of my story here. I'm very, very lucky to have gone through that journey and to be where I am today. I love that.

I also, I saw it says that you were the first student from the Soviet Union allowed to attend a private US High school without a government sponsor. Sponsorship. How did that happen?

So this is when I applied to these schools on my own. My American friends who had been living with us had been writing me reference letters to these schools. And so, like, I was this kid who, like, spoke plural English, had recommendations from American teachers and was willing to come and so just happened to get in. There was a lot of not. Well, not a lot. There were, like, dozens of kids who were allowed to leave to come to the US Before I did. But usually they were like, US Government sponsored programs where US Organizations would go find kids in the Soviet Union and bring them to the US they live with our host family and spend a year going to US School. This was like, when I showed up at the Foreign Ministry to get my visa, they were like, what the hell are you talking about? Or get my passport, actually, like, what are you talking about? Like, you finally gave me a passport. Then I show up at the US Embassy, and I remember the council officer being, like, completely shocked because, again, I speak Fluent English, I'm 14 years old, and I'm like, yep, I'm about to get on a plane to go to Maine to go to prep school. Here's all my materials. Like, it was a totally random thing, but they let me out and I was very, very lucky to do it. Love that.

So right now you're based in San Francisco, is that correct?

In the Bay Area? Yeah, we live in Palo Alto.

Got it. What's been your. What advice do you give? For example, right now, you see companies like Airbnb, they have these massive valuations, and then months later, they're just evaporating. Right. In terms of what's happening there, what have you seen happen with raising too much capital, having valuations that are too high? And what advice would you give to entrepreneurs?

So we've had a valuation that is too high at shift before, and we had to go through a down round, which is very painful. And, you know, back in the day, you don't want to talk about it, but now you've done it, you're kind of like, okay, so to me, one of the best. So most VCs do not want to do down rounds as new investors coming in. It's pretty difficult. It's hard to get it through the committee and your fund or your partners. It's really hard to force it down the existing investors. But the reality is that 9 out of 10 companies in Silicon Valley are going to have to go for a down round next, you know, couple years. Unless, okay, if the economy comes back really fast, maybe not. But in a world where we are now like flat rounds are going to be viewed as like really successful and most people are going to be living through down rounds. One of the biggest things that we did when we did our down round was we got our insiders to agree to a set of terms that were a down round before we went out to fundraise. So we had an insider term sheet for a down round with a commitment for capital from insiders that was signed and sealed before we went out to new investors. That made things a lot better because basically your insiders did all the work and all the structuring for what they knew world would look like in terms of option, pull their own dilution, how they manage anti dilution stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And that made it a lot easier for new investors to put a price on paper. There was also a down round. So I think that was. And the guy who gave me this advice actually outside of my board was a guy named Simon Rothman. He used to be a partner at Baylock. And I remember meeting with him and he's like, are your insiders committed to investing? I'm like, yeah, they've told me get them to agree to a set of terms and get you a term sheet. And no one had mentioned that, but I was really, really glad that we did because it really made life a lot easier in terms of talking to new investors. It gave you real leverage in terms of negotiations with new investors. And so anyone who has to do a DAM round, I would really strongly recommend that you do that and use whatever tools you need to use. And there's a lot of tools kind of out there in the toolkit from the legal perspective to make that happen. But obviously ideally you kind of work collaboratively with that. I remember that, like sometimes when I would tell the story to people, they'd be like, oh my God, you had a really enlightened board that did that. I'm like, oh yeah. And that's true. And I had one, particularly one, a very enlightened investor who had been through an economic downturn before as an investor. And so that person kind of really drove our discussion in terms of what we need to do, to have a downturn because she had lived through a cycle where this happened. And so I think now that's going to happen a lot more. And it's going to be really critical for founders to know what they need to do and how to do it, because it's really tough. And if you haven't had that experience, it's really difficult. Second thing is cut your cost. As painful as it is, just chop costs left and right. Go as deep as you have to, and it's going to be painful. But the sooner you do it, the better, right? Every month Your burn is 25, 30, 40%. Too high is half a month you lose on the other side. So cut your burn and do it quickly. We did our painful medicine literally the day of the stay at home orders being announced. We implemented changes. And they're very steep. And could they be steeper? Maybe, but for now, they made sense and they're steep. But I think that's really, really critical because you got to buy yourself as much time as possible. Right? I think, like, anyone who doesn't have at least, you know, nine to 12 months of Runway coming into this situation is going to be facing a really tough challenge. And so what I would really urge people is to, like, go get as much Runway as possible and assume a really, really tough environment. If things get better and the economy picks up faster, fine, like, great, and you'll have an easier time. But plan for the worst and hope for the best. Don't plan for the best because it's not going to happen.

Yeah, that makes sense. Regarding shift, how many employees do you guys have right now?

I'm curious. We have, I believe, 356 people right now.

Okay, what have you seen, especially during a time like this? How are you guys maintaining culture when things are so spread out? Stay at home, order. How are you communicating to your team, keeping everyone on track?

It's definitely really tough. And we. I don't think we've found the ideal way to do it, in fairness. Now, granted, like, our team is much more distributed than a lot of companies. Like, a lot of people, you know, are all in one location, and that's a huge part of their culture. For us, that was never the case because we have so many different locations. We have, like, warehouses in LA where we store cars. We have warehouses and Portland where we store cars in South San Francisco. So we are kind of all over the place as it is, and we do use zoom a lot for that. But at least you're in, like, locations now. Everyone's all over the place. Toby and I have been hosting a weekly meeting with a team. We just call it a fireside chat once a week to talk through things. It's optional, people can join, ask questions. We don't come in to it with an agenda, but that's been really helpful. We do lunch and learns, which we used to to do in the past, but now we do them over zoom. So that's been really good. We do have a TGIF that we host for the team where they demo products. We've continued to do that, but we've moved time zone at certain days. And so it's earlier in the day sometimes, which has been helpful for us as well, I think. And then just updates as much as possible. Now some people are still going to like our offices, right, because we have to be able to like repair cars or bring the test drive to you, et cetera. But most people are at home. It's really tough. I think you can handle it for a couple months. But like, I'm not a very big believer in work from home in general. I think that being in the office makes a lot of sense. And so it's a tough environment and is requiring a lot of adjustments. And I think that you just have to be nimble and flexible. Right. Hopefully we can get back to normal in the next couple of months, but most likely it's going to be some sort of a new normal. Right. Like it's different from whatever we're used to in an ordinary situation. Love that.

Two more questions for you, man. Just one being, how is Shift planning on capitalizing on time like this? Because I know with your model it's, you know, bringing cars to people's houses. It's perfect for a time like this. So what do you see the future of Shift knowing that there's so much adaptation?

Yeah, totally. Well, look, I think that. I think that the demand for cars are going to be high, but I think that the desire for people to go into a store is going to be very low. And I don't mean that just for shit store. I think it's for any store, really. Like, people are not going to want to go to a store. And generally when consumers change behavior, they change it for good. And so I think that a lot of people will have to adapt to being able to bring the test drive to the customer and how to do it. We've thought about, hey, how can we enable our technology to help people with that? So when you buy from Amazon, you're buying half the time. You're not buying Amazon products like third party resellers that are selling via Amazon and you don't even know. And I think that that's in our future as well where people sell through shift in our technology and our platform and customers get this experience of shift, but the car actually came from somebody else. So I think it's going to be like we sell our own stuff and we sell third party stuff at the same time. Because I think that's what the future will hold. And in some ways hopefully that'll help the smaller deals that can invest in technology to be able to have a really good product experience for their customers. And so we're definitely thinking about that and how to take advantage of this situation to build that product out and make it available for people. And then for us we will fundraise at some point. We are I think in some ways luckier because we're at a later stage. I think the worst time will be the mid stage companies. I think A's and B's are going to open up sooner than later. Like they kind of ease in. Late stage deals are going to open up as well. The really tough times going to be in between kind of that like CD is going to be really difficult because in the last kind of decade a lot of that has been funded through mutual funds and hedge funds and whatnot. And those are guys that usually one of the first ones to pull back. And there's so much opportunity right now in the public markets for them as well. And so I think it's going to be harder to get those mid stage companies funded. And you know, people mutual funds are going to now say, hey, I want clarity that you're going to IPO in 12 months after I invest. I don't want to invest any more. Wait for five years before you go public. And so that's going to be the really challenging thing. That's where the valuations are going to most collapse I think is going to be at the kind of C and D stage. And I'm assuming that in the next six, nine months the markets open up more for pre IPO rounds like ours and then we'll be able to do it. Good news overall is that we are not in a situation similar to 2008, 2009 when the markets were just completely shut down. You are seeing companies like Airbnb or Slack or Wayfair raising capital. Now two of those are public companies, so it's a different story. But in 2008, at this time of the recession starting, no One was raising capital. And so we are in a better environment from that perspective. So Fed has done a really good job keeping liquidity kind of open and I'm really hoping that the government, federal response from the kind of fiscal policy perspective, right, in terms of spending on the right things will also happen more and more. I don't think we need more money for states and that kind of thing. I think we need actually money for business because business needs to get back into being functional and that'll get states money as well. So I think unfortunately a bunch of people who are like pushing, you know, more money for states are totally off. What we need is more money for businesses who've been shut down with no, like, they didn't do the shutdown. The government forced them to shut down. And you can debate whether it was the right move or wrong move, but it is where we are now and like, got to get the economy moving again.

Love that. Well, last question to wrap it up just with everything happening on with shift, where can people best follow you and the company and learn more about what you guys are doing?

Yeah, well, go to shift.com, right? We always want people going to shift.com to look at car. So go and check that out. We actually have a ton of great inventory and traffic. Interestingly, traffic of the site has been really, really high. So that's been really intriguing in this time period. I'm on LinkedIn. George Anderson on Twitter George Anderson. It's all one word on both of those. So those are kind of probably the places where you can find me most perfect.

Well, George, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on this show and everyone listening. Make sure you go check out George. Make sure you check out Shift.com, i'll make sure to link everything down below. And that being said, thanks so much for coming on.

Awesome. Thank you very much.

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