Atlanta’s Entrepreneurial Revival - David Cummings - Atlanta Ventures - Episode #68

The college campus experience for entrepreneurs. That's the vision.

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys.

Today's guest is one of the most influential entrepreneurs and investors in the Southeast. David Cummings is a serial founder who has started 10 companies, including Pardot, which he grew into a leading marketing automation platform and sold to Exact Target for nearly $100 million. He's also the founder of Atlanta Tech Village, the fourth largest tech hub in the United States. An amazing space and community that I've spent a lot of time in over the years. And through his venture firm, Atlanta Ventures, he he's backed some of the city's most iconic startups, including Calendly Sales, Loft, Green Z In Town, Golf, and many more. His investments and mentorship have helped shape Atlanta into one of the fastest growing startup ecosystems in the country. David's vision now extends beyond technology. He's redeveloping a large section of south downtown Atlanta into a startup district, creating the infrastructure for the next generation of founders and businesses to thrive. Please welcome David Cummings.

David, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

I'm very excited to be doing this. I feel like it's like 15, 20 years in the making.

We met a long time ago. It's probably what, probably a solid 15 years ago.

I think it was 15. I think it could have been 20. I think we're pretty old.

Yeah, yeah. Somewhere in the. Yeah.

Well, I'm really excited. Let me. I'm going to start with the first question I ask everyone. What is the one thing that you did at Pardot, big or small, that's had the biggest. That had the biggest impact, and you do again if you're CEO of another company in the future.

So at Pardot, we had so many mistakes, so many lessons learned. One of the things that we did get right after lots of trial and error was a combination of the culture, the people side, defining the core values, defining, you know, what we look for in a. In a fellow Kardashian, a fellow teammate, and then really on the product side, really having an opinionated vision for the future. And the way we codified it within the business is we repeated these two statements over and over again. Statement one, number one, we want Pardot to be the number one best place to work. And so we would just constantly say that, and so then people would challenge us on it. Oh, you want to be the best place to work, then, well, you got to treat your team well. You got to take care of the basics. Well, you got to do the, you know, the special things well, whether it's honoring employees or it's a great onboarding process, or it's, you know, figuring out ways to really drive home the values. So we had the two overarching ideas. Number one, be the best place to work, and then number two, the best place to be a customer. And so the best place to be a customer, you know, there's some balance there. It doesn't always mean that the customer is always right, but it does mean that we have a really strong opinion for the product. We make sure that the customers know what our opinion is for the product. So there's lots of customer requests, as we all know, that don't always get into the product, or they might be, you know, further off into the future. But then combination of that opinionated product and sharing the opinion, but then also having great customer service, great customer success, and really just trying to be, you know, the type of place that we would want to be a customer ourselves. And so those two overarching mantras, be the best place to work and the best place to be a customer, we just repeated them over and over again and worked really hard to drive it home within the business.

There's so much. It feels like just those two statements. Any company, I'm saying in a good way, any company could just. If you said those two things and.

Made those things true, it'd be pretty special, right?

You would be a pretty special company.

You know, I don't think it's. It's not rocket science. I think it's just a lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs, you know, they. They like to gravitate towards the things that are easy to them. So, man, if I love developing software, I'm going to gravitate towards the product management side. I'm going to be in the weeds of the code and the DevOps and just everything related to the product. You know, from myself as an entrepreneur, that's where I like to gravitate. And so it took a long time to realize and talk to others and read books and all the things to realize that I needed to focus in on the people side and then the strategy side, not like the general strategy side, but the strategy of how my personality relates to our business. And so for my personality, it was a lot of focusing on what processes can I put in place. Not because I like process. I don't. I like starting things And I like having other people finish those things. But what lightweight processes can I put in place as a CEO, as a leader, so that the system runs and I can focus most of my time on the things that I care about, but then I still spend 20% of my time on the CEO side of the equation. Obviously that sounds crazy. People are like, oh, you're the CEO, you should spend a hundred percent of time on the, the CEO stuff. And the CEO stuff would be, you know, getting the right people on the bus, making sure there's enough money in the bank, having the alignment of the team. And so I would do those things, of course. But my goal was to set up a process from regular meetings and regular documents and regular check ins and regular metrics so that I could compartmentalize the CEO side of things. Again, call it 20% of the time. And then I could spend 80% of my time on whatever I thought was the most important project or projects at the time to move the business forward. And so going from a doer to then a manager to then a leader was a real challenge for myself. And it's a challenge for a lot of other CEOs and entrepreneurs. And it didn't happen overnight. Took lots of years of trial and error. I wouldn't say I'm perfect at it, but I would say we got good enough at it that we could build a, a really high functioning business that grew super fast and had a great outcome. And we did it all in a relatively short amount of time. Five and a half years from cold start to a quality exit and doing it out of a market that's not generally viewed as a, you know, a startup center. And so obviously after that experience that led into some ideas for helping Atlanta become more of a, you know, a startup city. And so that's just part of the journey.

When you, you, when you mentioned, first of all, I, I remember, I remember distinctly being at these best places to work events in Atlanta during those years when I was building vocalocity and, and, and I remember going to them and the pardot table, always, I remember. And you guys would win what? Always, you know, like whatever. The best places to work.

Yeah, four years in a row. We had a nice showing. Number one, best place to work.

I remember very well. When we talk about the, the opinion on the product, actually people haven't talked about that enough in my opinion on this podcast of all the guests. And I think that is, it's actually a lesson I wish I kept with me over all the years. And I know for You, I remember our conversations, you had such an opinion about Pardot because it was a, back then that was a very crowd. Marketing automation was a very crowded market. You had a very strong opinion and.

It evolved over time. But our opinion more or less was we wanted to provide the most bang for the buck.

At a price point that a mid level marketing manager could put the product on his or her credit card without having to get sign off from finance. And so at the time, this is a few years ago now, at the time that was about a thousand dollars a month. And so we use that constraint, that thousand dollar a month constraint and we designed all the elements of the business and the product functionality around that. And so if you think about the customer acquisition process, you think it had to be inside sales. We couldn't have a bunch of field sales reps, we couldn't have four deployed engineers at $1,000 a month. There just wasn't enough meat on the bone. And then obviously on the service side of it as well, whether it's the trouble ticket system or the customer success process or the, you know, the check in the showing the value to the customer, everything was designed around that thousand dollar a month price point, but it also informed the opinion of the product. Right. So we would go head to head against Marketo, we would compete against HubSpot, we would compete against Eloqua. Now there's a thousand of these types of products out there and we, you know, we would weave and bob a little bit within our market. But it was, it was the high end of the small business segment and it was the low end of the middle market. And occasionally we would get a little bigger customer or occasionally we would sell to an emerging business, somebody that was small today, that wanted to be bigger, but that low end of the middle market, thousand dollars a month price point and then everything around the product to service that customer. And as you can imagine, you've gotten a million product requests from prospects and from customers and partners over the years. You know, it's really, really hard to figure out where you're going to prioritize your time. And so for us it was exceptionally hard. We were competing against really heavily funded competitors. Again, our main arch enemy at the time was Marketo. And then HubSpot was on the rise. They were still mostly search engine optimization and content management at the time. They were just getting into marketing automation well before they got into CRM. And then at the high end, occasionally we would compete with Eloqua, but with those three main competitors, they had all raised over A hundred million dollars of venture capital, if not hundreds of millions of dollars each. And so we were bootstrapped. You know, sitting in Atlanta, trying to do our best, trying to deliver a great experience, trying to have a great culture and environment, we really had to be opinionated because we couldn't just throw more money at the problem. We couldn't throw more engineers at the, you know, the development side of things. And so having that opinion that we were gonna focus on the lower middle market or the high end of the small business segment and we were going to deliver a great, great bang for the buck product, but we were not going to chase Marketo as they moved up market. We weren't going to chase Eloqub who was already at the high end. And HubSpot at the time was more low end. They were inching their way up, but they weren't that competitive just yet.

Yeah, I mean, I remember, you know, we moved from Marketo to Pardot. We were one of the first customers on Marketo and I think we were one of the early customers on Pardot. And when we moved over, I remember having the conversation that you don't have this feature, this feature, this thing. And I remember you saying, but do you need them? Like, is that what you're. Is that what you're using? Is that? And that and that you're. You're not going to build those? And that, that even to me, that sticks with me because to your point, a lot of, at least for me, someone's asking me at Vocalize, can you build call center functionality? And me like an idiot, it's like, yes, we're going to spend nine months building call center functionality for this one prospect that it just completely not in our market. And I think that's, that's a important lesson for people to hear that you actually say, no.

Yes. And it's so painful. You know, as an entrepreneur, you want to keep the lights on, you want to keep the growth rate up. And having to say no to prospects, boy, that is, that is a hard one. So I am a fan of selling in advance of the roadmap, which is code for saying this thing is coming, but only selling in advance of the roadmap when you're actually going to do it, because it does catch up with you after a while. There are some large companies that we won't name names that love to promise all kinds of features, and the majority of the time they're half baked or they just don't even go to market. And whatever the next shiny object Is. Is what is focused on. And that's, you know, that's a different strategy. And I've seen it work, and I've seen it not work. But for us, we were really opinionated about the product and we really wanted to make sure that we did everything we could to be the best place for our customers, to be a customer of us. And so that's how we wanted to be treated.

You mentioned that you bootstrapped the company and everyone else was fundraising and it was a hot market and a lot of money from customers flowing into that market. Why did you bootstrap?

So it's interesting at first, you know, we took a couple years, built the product, got the first couple hundred customers, got that million dollars of annual recurring revenue, which again, back then was a big deal, much bigger deal than it is even today. And we went out. I personally went out. I pitched tons of famous VCs. The most famous VCs at Battery Ventures, the most famous VCs at Benchmark Capital. I personally pitched a half dozen VCs over several years at Sequoia Capital. And then the list goes on and on. And it's really fascinating. You know, it's easy to put the VCs up on the pedestal and say that, oh, they're the omniscient ones that are predicting the future. By and large, in the first rounds of pitching lots of famous VCs, at the time, the message repeatedly back was, there's never been a big exit in the marketing technology world. So at the time, there were no big Martech exits at all. Zero. And so they're like, we've never seen a marketing product do well. We've seen it. We've seen products do well on the engineering side and obviously the CRM side and plenty of other harder engineering problems in the tech world at the time. This is again in a B2B context, but they had never seen a marketing product have a venture scale outcome. And so they were like, we're just, we're gonna pass. You know, we just, we just don't see how marketing spend on technology. We see how marketing spend on advertising and trade shows and direct response ads and everything else. We see that there's a lot of money flowing there. But that message is what I heard over and over again. We just don't think that marketing spending money on technology is worth our time. And so, of course, I was in the trenches. I was trying to do my best to help Pardot. And I was like, but these marketers, they love this software, right? And they would say things to us that we had never, you know, I had never heard before as an entrepreneur. They would say things like, David, I don't know how I did my job before using the Pardot software because you can imagine you're doing some email marketing in one tool. You're doing some forms management, CRM integration, another tool. You're doing your web analytics in Google Analytics, which is very much a B2C tool. And then you're not getting any visibility at the individual lead. What they're doing on your website, what they're clicking on in emails, you're not getting all that information fed directly to your sales team. So they can see, oh, Johnny came back to the website and clicked on these six pages and spent this much time. And so marketers, before using Pardot or a system like Pardot, they were really flying blind. They had some macro data, they knew their open rates on their emails, they knew their traffic volumes and sources on their website that they were flying blind. They didn't know what Johnny actually did when he, if he even clicked the link on the email and then what he did on the website, then how many times he came back to the website and then making sure that information's actionable to the sales team and on and on. And then having campaign management, being able to track budgets, track roi, where you have a complex sales process and so say you have a six to 12 month sales process, it's all managed in the CRM. But how do you tie that back into your marketing spend? They weren't able to do any of those things at the time. And so for us obviously on the front line trying to make our customers successful, we knew that this was really special and I would try my best. Obviously it didn't work very well, but I try my best to sell the VCs on. Well, if you look at each function in a business, so the accounting department, it has QuickBooks as the de facto standard or NetSuite or Oracle Financials. At the higher end you look at CRM, it's got salesforce.com or the predecessor, the on Prem Siebel Systems as the de facto standard. And I might go down the list and I would say, okay, you go to the marketing department, they spend lots of money, they have lots of people. What is the de facto standard for the marketing department to run their department off of from a software technology point of view? Crickets. There was no answer at the time. Again it was Google Analytics, but that was some website traffic and constant contact or mailchimp. But that Was, you know, email sends and deliverability. But there was no system to run the marketing department. But all the other departments in your business, if it was customer support, you had Zendesk. And again, the list goes on and on, but you go to marketing. At the time, there was no system to run the marketing department, at least from an execution and campaign point of view. And so I made that argument over and over again. It fell flat. I did get some VCs that were interested, that were more regional. And so the first term sheet that we got, again, we were about three years old, a little over a million of recurring revenue, growing 200% year over year. So small base, but still growing fast. And seven figures of recurring. And the very first term sheet that I received was for $500,000 at two times our current run rate, pre money. So we were, we were at 1.2 million of pre money, at 1.2 million of recurring revenue, and we were offered a term sheet of $500,000 on a $2.5 million pre money, so a $3 million post money. And so, you know, being a nerd, I plugged the numbers into a Google sheet and I, you know, I just looked at our growth rate and we were bootstrapping and how things were going and, and I was like, it just doesn't make sense to raise money at 2x run rate when the business is doing great. And so we, we shopped it around some more and you know, I didn't do a great job of creating an auction around it, but we shopped it around some more and we got another VC to offer us $5 million on a 7 million pre.

So 12 million post just, you know, to sell basically 40% of the company. And again, I plugged in the math and I said, okay, if we sell 40% of the business and you know, helps us grow faster because having $5 million of primary capital in the business and again, you know, did a little spreadsheet jockeying and I was like, it just, it doesn't make Sense to sell 40% of the company at this time. So after that process of flying to California a bunch of times and flying to Boston several times, I said, you know what, we're just going to keep bootstrapping and keep plugging along. And so, you know, one of my takeaways from that is, boy, when entrepreneurs get to sell, you know, 10% of their company to a VC or maybe even 15% and to do it at a, you know, 10 times run rate pre money valuation, or if it's a crazy AI deal or something white hot and they get 50 or 100x on their run rate. I'm like, man, that is amazing. And it's, it's a wonderful time to be an entrepreneur. And so having gone through that experience myself, I also, you know, it's good to reflect and know that it wasn't always that way. And so it's great that the world is a lot more entrepreneur friendly nowadays than what it used to be.

But that, that ended up working out very well for you because you had complete decision making. Like if someone, if Exact Target came and offered you a hundred million, you can take it. Whereas if you had raised money and raised another round and you may not have been able to do that.

Yes, that's right. That's right. And so the Exact Target deal, again, this is a bunch of years ago. The way it happened is that Exact Target had partnered with Marketo at the beginning of the year. So Exact Target was mid market and higher end B2C email marketing and they were looking for a complimentary B2B products. So if they go and sell into Home Depot, which is one of their big customers, they sell them the product for the B2C side of home Depot, which is what we think of as consumers walking into the store. But Home Depot has a huge B2B side for all the contractors and all the subs that use Home Depot, where they're basically the warehouse for the, the business deals. And so they wanted a B2B product for part of Home Depot and they already had the relationship for the B2C side of things. And so at the beginning of the year, Marketo and Exact Target announced a big partnership. They were getting in bed together and they were going to go sell a bunch of stuff together and cross sell and everything.

And us knowing a little bit about Exact Target and knowing a whole lot about Marketo at the time, we were like, well, Marketo is super aggressive, sharp elbows, west coast. They are just going to, you know, do whatever it takes to capture market share and build a huge business at all costs. And we also knew Exact Target, they called their culture Orange, they're based in Indianapolis. We knew that they were the solid midwestern values and very similar to us. They want to treat their customer well, they want to provide a solid product. And we didn't think it was going to work out. But Exact Target was publicly traded at the time and growing super fast. And Marketo had raised a boatload of money. So we understood why they tried to do their thing together. And so that was in January of the year, and then come, you know, May of that year, maybe June of that year, Exact Target reached out to us, and they said, hey, you know, we'd love to talk about a partnership. And so, of course, you know, thinking highly of Exact Target, knowing they were in the B2C, I took the call and, and talked to one of their executives, and he said, you know, the marketo relationship hasn't been working out so great, just a different style. We've stepped on each other's toes. And he presented it very, very nicely. But I. I could read between the lines what he was getting at. And so he said, we want to, you know, Pardot's got a great brand and growing fast and serving the, you know, the mid market just like we do. And he said, you know, would you guys be interested in talking about a partnership? And so I said, of course, you know, and so started sharing some information on the business. And then a couple phone calls later, he's like, well, you know, we really love what you're hearing. We want to see if you guys would be interesting, interested in getting acquired, you know, are interested in selling. And so a friend of mine, a YPO friend of mine, had always given me this advice over the years that if anybody ever asks you.

Are you for sale? The stock answer, the default answer that every entrepreneur should be, should give is.

No, we're not for sale, but what are you offering? That should be the default answer, no, we're not for sale, but what are you offering? And so I gave that answer to Exact Target, like I was. We're growing super fast. We're bootstrapped, many millions of revenue, you know, more than 10 million of revenue at the time. Again, just growing fast with a huge market ahead of us. And so they said, oh, we. Before we can give you an offer, you need to come on site and spend a day with our management team. And and so said, sure. And so I had a. I had a. My a YPO retreat that week. And so as part of that retreat, we were up at the Greenbrier in West Virginia, and I had my wife and my kids, and my wife's sister had come with us, and we were spending the week in West Virginia with a bunch of other YPOers. And it was the first meeting. And so I went to my wife and I said, honey, I got to go to a day trip in Indianapolis. And so I'm sitting in West Virginia. There's no easy way to go from rural West Virginia to Indianapolis. And so I leave her at the Greenbrier with the kids and the family and the Ypoers and you know, drive to the airport, fly to Atlanta and then fly from Atlanta to Indianapolis, spend all day with Exact Target and then fly back to Atlanta and then back to West Virginia and then drive to the, to the Greenbrier and was gone for about 36 hours. But needless to say, it was a great meeting. Spent all day with the Exact Target team. Adam and I did, we hit it off. We, you know, they had several of their VCs in the room during the day long discussion and it was clear that the values were aligned. It was clear that they had a great business in B2C. We had a great business in B2B. The huge, huge difference is that they were publicly traded. They had already gone public earlier that year. And so they had a lot more process and things that they had to figure out as being a publicly traded company. And so went back home and they said, oh, we love it. We love Pardot. We love everything about this. Give us two or three weeks and we'll get back to you and we'll, you know, if we can do a deal, we'll give you a price. And so a couple weeks later, they came back and they offered us $60 million, half in stock, half in cash. And so we said, oh man, at the time we were about 13, 14 million of recurring revenue growing 100% year over year. And we're like, you know, the business is just doing too well. We know that it would be a great partnership, but we're going to pass. And they said, no, no, no, don't pass. Just give us a counteroffer so we can go back to the board. And so he said, okay, okay, we'll counter at $130 million. So at least we were playing ball. We all, we countered at 10 times our run rate. And so we said 1:30. And they said, oh, that's way too expensive. And then they came back 48 hours later and they said, we can't do 1:30, but we can do 80. And I was like, wow, they went from 60 to 80 just like that. And I was like, that's interesting. And so I said, no, no, no, we can't do 80. Look at the growth rate, look at the math. We just keep doing what we're doing and we'll just come back to you in a year and you can give us that same multiple, you know, 80 million on a 13 run rate. We'll come back to you here and you just give us that same multiple. And we'll get to 100 million. And they said, no, no, no, no, we want to do a deal now. So I said, okay, you pay us next year's multiple now. And so I countered and said, we'll do a hundred million. And they said, no, we can't do that, but we could do 90 million. And I was like, wow, we're, we're really darn close. And they had gone from 60 to 90 at that point. And so then I said, no, no, no, can't do 90. I said, you know, again, look at this math. Look how we're growing. You know, the best we can do is a hundred and we're just going to sit firm. We're not going to budge. There was a lot of ego involved. I wanted to have $100 million exit, you know, having a nine figure exit. And they came back and they said, you know, David, we would love to pay 100 million for the business. We do think it's worth 100 million.

They said, because we had gone public six, seven months earlier, they had already filed for a secondary offering. They were going to raise more capital from the public markets. And so I don't know if this is true or not, but they said, david, the most we can pay for the business is $95 million because there's some SEC threshold of percent of assets and yada, yada, yada, and we'd have to withdraw our registration for the secondary. And we need that capital to keep growing fast. And they said, if, if we're gonna, if you're gonna, if we're gonna buy the business now, the only way we can buy it right now is the maximum amount we can pay is $95 million. And so I said, okay, twist my arm. We'll do $95 million, but you got to do at least $5 million of retention bonuses for the team. And again, in today's standards, $5 million isn't that much in the context, but back then it was a big number. And so they agreed. And so we sold it for $95 million and, you know, $5 million of retention bonuses. So a collective a hundred million dollars. But the retention bonuses weren't tied to performance. It was purely tied to the team, the management team, specifically hanging around for two years. So as long as they were employed two years later, there was a $5 million bonus separate from any other compensation and everything else that would be normally applied to the executive team in that window.

I want to know in those three weeks where you're waiting for the offer, were you freaking out or were you just kind of business as usual, you know, like.

No, no, I was, I was. Oh yeah. Going crazy. Yeah. You know, people talk about entrepreneurship as being risky and they're like, oh, entrepreneurs love to take risk and do these crazy things. And from my perspective, the reason I love being an entrepreneur is because of control. I like knowing that I get to make the decision, obviously with the team's input and all the facts and data that I can gather. But it's on me whether I make a good decision or not. And so I like the control element of it. It's risky in that it might not work out, but the control element of doing my best and finding great people and finding customers that really want the product that we're offering. And so having this thing where I was potentially going to sell the business and somebody else was going to take over my baby and the employees would go to the acquirer. And I, I hated it because I was not in control. And so, yeah, it was very, very stressful. From the time the conversations got hot and heavy to a couple weeks of not hearing anything, to then a couple weeks of active negotiation. And then you know that you know the drill after the couple weeks of active negotiation and you sign the, you know, the documents and then you got six weeks of due diligence and now you're pulling your hair out trying to get a thousand thousands of pages of documents. And it is a really, really stressful process.

You have been part now of even bigger acquisitions, you know, significantly bigger billions of dollars and some of the most successful SAS companies in the world, not just in the country or in Atlanta.

What is your view, you know, you've talked about, when we've talked about like these liquidity kind of windows and kind of opportunities. Because sometimes I think a lot of people when they get into, when they're first time founder, they read stuff they see on LinkedIn, they think everyone's just cash is just flowing into everyone's bank accounts, you know, not the company bank out personal bank accounts. And I think everyone's making billions of dollars and, but when you're in it and you're talking to other founders and CEOs, you realize like it's not exactly the case. Obviously for some it is, but, but it's not exactly the case. Like you've seen this yourself and now you've seen it across some amazing companies and some that are amazing that haven't seen that liquidity yet. Like what, what is your view on that?

Yes, and so I get lots of Requests. And I've gotten them over the years from people that want to get into, like, angel investing. And so they're like, oh, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna take 200 grand and I'm gonna do four 50k investments, and one will be successful and, you know, two will. Two will go to zero and one might, I might get my money back. And I'm like, no, no, it doesn't work that way at all. You need to budget for like 20 to 30 minimum investments. It takes way longer than you think. The vast majority fail. I've personally done over 50 angel investments, and some are small checks, but, you know, the majority of them are real checks. And my experience, both starting a bunch of companies and angel investing in a bunch of companies is that liquidity is really rare. There's two main cases that I've seen on the liquidity front. The first one that gets talked about a lot just because it's popular to do so in TechCrunch and Techmeme and, you know, online is if you have a really hot startup. So if your startup is really hot, every time you raise a financing round, investors want more ownership in the business than what is typically sold. You know, so your primary capital is like, oh, we're going to raise 10 million bucks. Typically, the investors want to put more than 10 million in, and the way they can put more than 10 million to work is by buying some existing shares either from the angel investors or the founders or whomever might want to sell. So again, you gotta be white hot. And if you are white hot, which again, most startups, even ones that raise money, are not white hot. You gotta be white hot. And then every time you raise a funding round, you can do a little bit of liquidity or, you know, if there's a secondary market for it or there's an exit, like selling part out. It was. It was within the small little marketing automation world that we played in, Pardot was white hot. So you gotta be white hot. And then it's either a transaction or it's some sort of funding. And you can do some liquidity or there's moments in time, like in 2020 and 2021, where the market is bonkers. It's a bubble, everybody knows it. But you got to play the game on the field. And so during those times, investors are just throwing money at everything. Whether it's recaps, whether it's secondary, whether it's buy the whole thing, whether it's buying common shares because they just got to get into the business, they got to deploy the capital. And so from my experience, and again I've been doing this for, you know, close to 20 years now, liquidity is really hard to come by. And when you read about it in the news and people talk about it, those are either the hottest of the hottest startups out there or you're in some sort of bubble. And so for entrepreneurs, if you do get a chance, my personal opinion, as I do recommend entrepreneurs take some liquidity. You know, make it so that you can sleep a little better at night. Maybe a down payment on a house or buy a house, you know, maybe it's put it away for your kids college tuition, whatever the case might be. I am a fan of taking some money off the table and that's my, my recommendation for entrepreneurs. But boy, liquidity is really, really hard to come by unless you're in a brief window of time where that liquidity window is wide open.

Well, you just said, I, you know, I, I, I talked to a founder, very successful Atlanta founder who told me that until they had liquidity, they had an open loop in the back of their mind at all times. You know, 10 years into the company, a decade in, never got liquidity. And they were just doing the math. My entire net worth, which is paper, is in this company and I have nothing else. And I've been taking a lower than market salary. I could be getting paid at Amazon, you know, five times as much. And my, my wife is upset with me and my kids don't see me and I don't have enough money to pay for child, you know, all of this stuff. And I have this open loop and I could do secondary, but we're gonna, we're still crushing it. You know, we're still, we're gonna raise, but we're still, and that, that decision to take that secondary, in that case, you know, million dollars completely changed like the chemical almost makeup to say like now I can actually go, now I can actually try to do this and I have at least some buffer to pay for a babysitter and make sure my kids have a college fund. And, and I think not a lot of people talk about that enough.

One of the things that I think is not talked about enough as well is that the paper valuations that you get by and large are call options in the event things go really well. So like when you go raise 10 million bucks at a $50 million post and you've got 3 million of revenue or 5 million of revenue, you know, which again, if you're not AI That's a great multiple. That valuation that you know was just paid for the business is a great papermark. And don't get me wrong, you should be really proud of it. But that is not what the business is worth. So what the VCs are investing in is they're either buying a call option that you're going to be worth 10, 20, 50, 100x whatever they bought in at, or more likely, if things go well, you're going to keep growing nicely and they're going to 3 to 5x their money in 3 to 5 years. But 3 to 5xing their money in 3 to 5 years doesn't mean that you're worth the valuation that you just got from the last funding round today. It means that you're growing fast and there's a chance to not only grow into that valuation, but grow well beyond it. And so I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially, you know, humans, myself included, love to do it like, oh, I own 10% of the company. In its last round, the post money was 50 million. So I got $5 million of paper wealth. Guilty as charged. It's something that, you know, the, the business by and large is not worth what you just raised money at.

I want to transition you to, to. On the people front, you had some amazing people come out of Pardot in Atlanta and go on to do amazing things. I mean, people off top of my head, Adam Blitzer, who's, who's COO or president of Datadog, and Jordan Rackey. And you had a lot of people.

What was it that you were looking for in that early team that you, that you brought together at Pardot that you think led to so many people going on to do these things?

Yeah, I think there were several factors at play. I think on the, on the culture side, of course, we were really focused on people who are positive self starting and supportive. And so everything we did from the hiring process and onboarding and making sure to drive home those core values, positive self starting and supportive. And so that was sort of the, you know, part of the human side of it. But then there was another side of it that I thought was really important, especially in hindsight. There's a famous Robert Woodruff quote, somebody like yourself who went to Emory. You know, Woodruff is a big name, you know, the gentleman who's identified with making Coca Cola great and donating lots of money to Emory and other places. And he has this great quote from a hundred years ago that he looks for people that are discontented with where they are not in a bad way, but in a good way. People who don't like the status quo, they're willing to go do things that others view as hard or challenging. And so us being the scrappy underdog, you know, we didn't have a hundred million of venture capital, we didn't have a huge ecosystem of proven executives to pull from, but what did we do? We went and we found the people who were discontented with what they were doing in their previous job and we gave them an opportunity to spread their wings and really do things that, you know, frankly, I didn't know if they were possible or not. And they were, but the fact that they wanted to put their neck out there and they wanted to prove themselves and they joined a startup. And so, you know, sometimes people talk about, you know, having a chip on your shoulder, having something to prove. I think it's in that same ballpark as finding the discontented people that want to go make something of themselves. And some people talk about it as being a little edgy. You know, there's lots of different terms, but I think they're all in the same ballpark. And so building a team of amazing people that frankly, at their previous roles they were undervalued or they weren't given enough responsibility or when they wanted to do something to say, yeah, let's go do it. And so creating that culture of people who are positive, self starting and supportive, but then really trying to find people that had that chip on their shoulder that had a little discontent in a good way. And so having that culture has led to a bunch of just amazing team members that have gone on to incredible things.

Do you, do you think that you're now a pretty prolific investor now as well? Do you look for the same attributes in founders or is there something different for founders?

Absolutely same attributes. And founders, positive self starting and supportive chip on their shoulder, some discontent, some restlessness, like, man, I need to prove myself, I'm going to go after it. And then, you know, on the founder side, there's that resilience or relentlessness that's also a really important part. You know what it's like, you know, one of the, one of the entrepreneurs that I work with, I like his description for it, which is basically you wake up in the morning and you're so fired up and you walk in the office and you give a fist bump to all the team members and you're just ready to tackle the day and then by the afternoon you've lost your biggest customer and you're in the Fetal position on the floor. Just miserable. And so that entrepreneurial experience has those high highs and the low lows. And entrepreneurs have all different styles. There's not one style. You know, my style, personally, on the CEO front is more of the shock absorber style. Right. So I like to be out there. All the good stuff is hitting me hard. All the bad stuff is hitting me hard. And then I like to be that shock absorber that. That translates it to. Okay, man, you know, it's tough. We just lost our biggest customer or.

Wow.

We just, you know, signed an amazing partnership or a distribution deal. And so for myself, my personal style is to be that shock absorber. So when we hit the really high highs, I'm keeping the team focused. That, okay, this is awesome. But we keep. Keep marching. And when we hit the low lows, man, this is really challenging. This is really messy. This is really difficult, but we just keep marching forward. And so all the CEO styles are different. All the entrepreneur styles are different. But for me, personally, I'm that shock absorber style. I recognize that things can be great and things can be bad and just modulate it for the team.

Good analogy. I've never heard shock absorber as the. It is because you're protecting your. You know, they're still feeling it, but you're. You're kind of translating. I think that that's a good. So. So you built, obviously built in Atlanta. It was the early days of Atlanta. Can you talk about what Atlanta was like to build a technology company when you started? Pardon?

Yeah. So back in the day, Again, this is 15 years ago, a little more than that now. And at the time, you know, Atlanta had all the great. All the ingredients to build a great startup scene. And we had some fits and starts. You know, at the time, I kid you not, there was one single angel investor in the whole city. There was only one person who was writing angel checks, which is insane for, you know, being one of the 10 largest metro regions in the country.

Who is that? Sig and that. Yeah.

Yeah. And he had a few others that if he would write the check, they would follow on. But if he didn't write the check, they weren't writing the check. I mean, it was. It was tough. Tough going from a startup community. But in terms of a city having amazing ingredients to build a startup scene, having Georgia Tech, one of the best engineering schools in the country, big engineering school, tons of amazing talent that comes to Atlanta. 40% of Georgia Tech students come from out of state to Atlanta. Having Emory. Emory's, you Know, one of the best schools in the country. The majority of the Emory students come from out of state to Atlanta. And then of course having, you know, all the big city amenities, the world's busiest airport, so direct flights all over the world, having a great climate being in the south, you know, so we don't have to worry about snow or any of those kinds of things. And then just having a lot of infrastructure, having a full heavy rail system, having the mountains be an hour away, having, you know, miles and miles of all kinds of trails and everything else from a quality of life and then having the big city amenities like the pro sports teams and the big concert venues and on and on. So ingredient wise, Atlanta had all the, all the pieces, including the secret ingredient, ingredient. And that secret ingredient is and was Georgia Tech.

Right.

You just need a lot of great technical talent to complement the business people and the entrepreneurs and everything else that goes on. And so back then the community was, was pretty small, but thankfully there were all the ingredients just sitting there. And so even, you know, even in the, the latter days of Pardot, in an effort to help grow the startup community, one of the things that we were working on was an office space expansion. We had about 30,000 square feet in Atlanta Plaza when we sold the business. But we had a lease that was ready to be signed where we were going to take over the 6,000 square feet of space in the same building that used to house the Ruth Chris Steakhouse. So there used to be a fancy steakhouse in our building. They had moved to a building nearby. And so we had this big restaurant space, tall ceilings, big windows, just beautiful 6,000 square feet. And so when we sold the business, we actually had a lease on the, on the table that was ready to be signed to rent out the 6,000 square feet of retail space in our building. We were on the 34th floor and the 33rd floor and we were going to make that 6,000 square feet. It was going to be Atlanta's first co working space for startups.

I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

And it's just, it was, you know, beautiful space. Of course, when we sold the business, exact target's like, no way we're not signing a 10 year lease on 6,000ft just to help startups in Atlanta. But the wheels were already in motion that like, wow, there's so many great ingredients in Atlanta. Atlanta having a lot of sprawl, being a big metro region, startups were all over the place. There was a little pocket down by Georgia Tech and outside of that pocket around Georgia Tech, there was really no other pocket in Atlanta that had some critical mass. And so sold the business in October. And then by November, a month and a half later, we were under contract to buy a hundred thousand square foot building. And we were building, you know, 100,000 square foot building in Buckhead and you know, a full floor for event space and coffee shop and community center and then four full floors for startups. And, and so we closed on that right after Christmas of that year. So went from selling the business mid October under contract on a hundred thousand square foot mid rise, but a serious mid rise, a big one. And then you know, open for business Jan.1 just a couple months later. And so that was the Atlanta Tech Village. And you know, it's really taken on a life of its own. You know, at the time the original goal was hey, we're going to take two floors, we're going to renovate it, make it super cool, we're going to do a big event space and a coffee shop and we're going to make it the place for startups in Atlanta. And then on the, you know, January 1st, I took my two little kids at the time and we went to Ikea to outfit the second floor. The second floor was completely 100% empty. It was an old law firm that had moved out years before. And so it was a bunch of offices and conference rooms but no furniture. And so I took my two little kids to Ikea and we spent $40,000 on Ikea furniture. So if you ever been to Ikea, like it's hard to spend 40 grand. You know, it's like a hundred dollar desk and a hundred dollar chair. But we had one floor of a five story building, so we had 20,000 square feet to fit out. And so we bought the Ikea furniture, had a giant assembly party. You know, it's not fun putting Ikea stuff together. I've done it many times. But by the end of that first week of January, we had rented out the entire second floor in the building. There was so much pent up demand for entrepreneurs that wanted a private office, to be headquarters, to have a membership, to be, to work in a co working space, to have a community around them, just to be with other entrepreneurs. And so by the end of that first week I knew that there was even more pent up demand than I had hoped for for entrepreneurs to be around each other. And so we immediately started a process to renovate the whole building all at once. Instead of just doing a little bit upfront and so we spent two years, renovated the entire building, interior and exterior. And that was over 10 years ago. And so now we've had over 2,000 startups in the course of the last 13 years come through the building. We've had tons of amazing exits like Sales Loft and tons of amazing secondaries and fundraising announcements like Calendly. And we just had an amazing one yesterday. Did you see Prize Picks?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I did. I did see that. Well, they were in tech. I didn't know that they had started in there.

They started. They were in the Tech Village for years. They started from scratch in the Tech Village.

Adam was in there.

So Adam had a previous startup in the Tech Village for many years.

I remember that. Yeah.

And then that one didn't work out. It worked out okay, but not great. And then he started Prize Picks and. And then just $4 billion exit yesterday. $4 billion exit. Just a giant, monstrous grand slam. And so that was, that was all in the Tech Village.

I mean, I remember when we, our office, we had rented the space in the, in what was going to become the Tech Village, that one office. And then when. And then one day someone said, did you hear David Cummings bought the whole building. It's turning it into a Tech village. I, I called you, I think, and I was like, did you buy this building that works or any g. And so amazing how you transformed really, that whole, that whole area. Now there's the other one next to it.

Tech Rise. Yeah.

What you did with Atlanta Tech Village is amazing and it's changed that whole area. I'd say this is like a crazy project. I don't know. When I hear about the project you've taken on, it's like a lifetime kind of pro. You know, this is, this is multi decade. Feels like me, feels to me kind of thing. Can you talk a little bit about what that is?

Yeah. So after buying the Tech Village, renovating it, filling it up with entrepreneurs, and having a bunch of outstanding success stories throughout the last, you know, 12, 13 years of the Tech Village, I've gotten the question hundreds of times, if this Buckhead location is doing so great, when are you going to open up the next one? When does the next Atlanta Tech Village come along? And my answer for years was, oh, it's a one and done. You know, we're just going to do the best we can right here. And that was partly because we were still figuring things out. And then it was partly because as time went on, the commercial real estate market got hotter and hotter and hotter and Prices went through the roof and on and on. And then of course, we all know that Covid reset it all. Not only reset the office space market, but it actually dramatically reduced the demand for office space. And so tons and tons of empty office buildings out there now, or partially empty buildings. And so the prices had a big reset. And so as part of that, a friend of mine introduced me to, you know, there's this development in downtown Atlanta. German developer had been working on it for seven years, had put a quarter to billion into it, assembling almost 90 property, almost 90 properties, over 50 buildings, 10 contiguous city blocks of land. And you know, they were focused on making it cool office space. And they had signed a giant construction loan at the very end of 2021 with floating rate debt. And so demand for office space fell off a cliff and interest rates went through the roof. And so the whole entire development went into foreclosure. And so again, I wasn't actively shopping around, but in the back of my mind it was, hey, we're, you know, commercial real estate prices are finally starting to reset. And again, this is, this is the tail end of 2023. And so they hadn't bottomed out yet, but it was clear there was a lot of pain ahead in the commercial real estate side of things. And so in the back of my mind it was, okay, if we're going to do something to expand the Tech Village in the next couple years, it's going to be the right time, because again, the office space prices resetting in a big way. And so I reached out to a few entrepreneurial friends of mine about this downtown neighborhood that had gone into foreclosure. And I said, hey, what would you do with 50 plus buildings and 10 city blocks and just all of this interesting stuff. And so we hopped in the car and we went down. And we had originally planned to spend two hours just talking to some of the people in the neighborhood. And we had reached out to the developers that were in foreclosure to see if they would show it to us. And they said, yeah, we've come on down. And they had already showed it to tons and tons of people and everybody had passed on it for a variety of reasons. Very difficult neighborhood and very old buildings, but we just fell in love with it. The buildings themselves are from primarily from the late 1800s, early 1900s to just tons of character. Beautiful facades, really human scale buildings. So these aren't big skyscrapers. These are a bunch of one to five story buildings, one eight story building, but most of them the vast majority are two to four stories. And so it's like walking around the west village in the city prior to the west village being cleaned up and rehabbed and all that kind of stuff. And so just the walkability. So Atlanta was the, you know, it started when three rail lines came together in the 1830s and 40s and they put in a zero mile marker. And where that 00 mile marker was the original Union Station, the place that Atlanta started. And so you get off the train station and right in front of you, you were in the heart of south downtown Atlanta, what we call south downtown today. Back then it was just Atlanta. And so you get off the train and right in front of you was 250 merchants and some small hotels. And the south downtown area became the garment district and it was the retail district. And then north downtown became the fancier downtown that we think of today with the big skyscrapers and all the hotels and a lot of the different amenities. And so for a variety of reasons, as Atlanta expanded and grew north, south downtown became the forgotten neighborhood. And so after a while, downtown Atlanta got so challenged that more and more businesses moved out. And then Covid hit and that wiped out a lot of the smaller businesses that had managed to survive. And a lot of the corporate uses like office space, you know, when people stopped going into the offices, then the local dry cleaners went out of business and the local restaurants went out of business. And so the doom loop had set in and.

We walked south downtown and super walkable grid structure, wide sidewalks, human scale buildings. And the light bulb went off just like we built the tech village in Buckhead. And one building, 100,000 square feet. If we buy this neighborhood in South Downtown, 1 million square feet, 50 plus buildings already assembled over the course of seven years, already enrolled as a historic district. So we would get historic tax credits for all the rehab already enrolled in a brownfield. So we get tax credits for doing environmental remediation. So tons and tons of work had already been done, but the proverbial light bulb went off. Let's build a college campus experience. So we love the college campus, we love college and the live work and play. And so you take the analogy out the next step and you say, okay, in a college campus you've got the different academic buildings like the math building and the chemistry building and the computer science building. And so in south downtown with 50 plus buildings, we can have the cloud computing building, the AI building, the robotics building, we can have all kinds of categories, we can have the fintech building, we can have the DevOps building, whatever you want. We've got 50 plus buildings. And then continuing the analogy, most of these buildings are old department stores and old retail stores. So they have really tall ceilings and really cool facades on the live workplace side, you know, college and food and hanging out with friends and the bars. And so we had the perfect spot to put in a whole bunch of restaurants. Not a food hall, but actual individual restaurants all next to each other and what looks and feels and is an original main street. So if you think about a main street America and you go to a small town and you go down the main street and it's a bunch of two story buildings that are all right next to each other, very walkable. In south downtown we have Atlanta's original main street. It is the main street of Atlanta, but it's south downtown. So that's the small main street of Atlanta, not the big skyscrapers in north downtown. And so the idea is that we can go and put in a bunch of restaurants and bars and we're taking a big parking lot in the middle of the neighborhood and we're making it our town square with a stage for bands and screen on the green. We're taking the first department store ever in Atlanta from the 1890s and we're turning it into really cool loft apartments. So it's going to be hacker houses. And, and again, all of this is in south downtown. Directly next door to State Farm arena, directly next door to Mercedes Benz stadium. In eight months we're hosting eight world cup matches in Atlanta. And so the college campus experience for entrepreneurs, that's the vision.

I, I really can't wait to come see it. I'm, I, when I'm in Atlanta, I'm going to come. This is, I mean this is like a life's work kind of project. I mean this is going to. Right.

I mean it's going to take, it's going to take decades. Yes, it's a, it's a lot of work to be done, but it's going.

To transform not just a neighborhood, it probably transforms the whole city in many ways.

Yeah. And one of the things that has occurred to me a long time ago, but I like to repeat it now, is that every world class city has a great downtown.

Atlanta. We aspire to be a world class city and we have almost all of the elements of a world class city. But to have a world class city, you have to have a great downtown. And now it's our turn to make that happen.

All right, I want to transition to your Personal background. And did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

I did. From the earliest days. I always loved coming up with business ideas. I would pour over my PC magazine and read about Michael Dell and Bill Gates, and I had always, always wanted to be an entrepreneur. A friend of mine in the eighth grade, we were on a traveling baseball team in North Florida, and he gave me this book, Teach yourself C in 21 days. I'd always loved computer. I always loved video games. And so once he gave me that book and I learned how to write code and I started building my own apps and I was just hooked. I was like, this is amazing. And again, it partly goes back to that control thing. Like if I tell the computer, I write some code and I don't tell it exactly what I want, I get the error back or I get the bug or I get the message, but I tell it exactly what I want the software to do, and then the computer just does it over and over again. And so in the eighth grade, I was hooked. I was like, this is it. I'm going to be a tech entrepreneur. And so I've always, always known.

Did you, did you get any of that from your parents? Were they entrepreneurs? Were they or someone in your family, you know?

Yeah. Growing up, my dad was an orthodontist. And so he had his own practice and his own staff. And I would go into his office all the time to mow the grass or help make the. The molds. Like when you get you. Before you get your braces on, you bite into this chewy stuff and you make this plaster mold. So I spend a lot of time making plaster molds of bowels and whatnot. So growing up, I always saw my dad as a small business owner in control of his time. And when he wanted to go on vacation and what hours he wanted to work and managing a team. And so my whole life, I had just seen my dad as a small business owner, and so I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur as well.

Have you. I mean, you started really early in terms of your first companies. Did you have a mentor or role model or someone that in those early days that was helping you figure out this world, or did you just figure it out on your own?

You know, growing up in Tallahassee, Florida, a great college town, a great capital of the state of Florida, but it's not a town that has a huge number of industry entrepreneurs. And so for me, you know, I grew up in the era of the Internet, you know, so the dot com heyday was Basically my, you know, senior year of high school and early college years. And so I just, just grew up reading lots of blogs and lots of magazines and you know, back then they were news groups. Nowadays they would be, you know, Twitter and Reddit would be the modern equivalent of news groups. And so, and then of course, books, lots and lots of books. I, I love reading the Patrick Lyncioni books like the Five Dysfunctions of a Team and I love the Traction book and I love the Mastering the Rockefeller Habits book and you know, Good to Great Built to Last and there's a thousand other ones. So I, I really enjoy just, and talking to entrepreneurs, talking to ypoers and eoers and just, you know, sharing information and, and all those kinds of things. So I would say the, you know, I was lucky to grow up in the, the Internet era. And so Internet plus fellow entrepreneurs have really been my mentors.

You, you have what feels like unlimited drive and motivate motivation generally. And like you talked about before, like the best entrepreneurs, you back have a chip on their shoulder. What is the chip on your shoulder that drives you to, to keep doing and keep building?

Yeah, I think I was, I was thinking about that question. I think it was a combination of, you know, growing up in a smaller town, seeing my dad as a, a small business owner, and then the inspiration of, you know, again in high school reading about Michael Dell and Bill Gates and others and like, oh, if they could do it, maybe I could too. And then from an Atlanta point of view, and I didn't, I didn't plan this or anything, but from an Atlanta point of view, this idea of being able to give back and try my best to be the entrepreneur's entrepreneur. So sort of the, the meta founder, not Meta as Facebook, but meta as, you know, a life goal to be helpful to other founders. And so I'd always loved entrepreneurship and I'd always loved starting my own companies. But in the back of my mind, even in the Pardot days, you know, know, a lot of people don't realize this, but inside of the Parot office we incubated sales loft. And so we, I was trying to be a parallel entrepreneur even before selling Pardot. And so we had incubated Rigor.com, we'd incubated Clickscape.com we had tried some other ideas that didn't work out. And so this idea of letting a thousand flowers bloom and that entrepreneurship isn't a zero sum game like you go invent a new product and the world's better off And I go invent a new product and the world's better off. We're not out there, you know, taking away from each other. It's a net new additive type thing. Especially when it's innovative entrepreneurship versus replicative. I'm not trying to replicate the flower shop on the corner. I'm trying to do something new that hasn't been done before. And so, you know, this idea of being a parallel entrepreneur or being a entrepreneur who helps other entrepreneurs my whole life, that's gotten me excited and I had to prove myself that I could do it first before I could actually do it in parallel and do it in a way that I had the opportunity to work with a bunch of other entrepreneurs.

One of the things I talk about a lot on this podcast because I think that it's a little bit romanticized. It's kind of like people like, oh, you can build a company with work life balance and you know, you can be a first time founder and be building, you know, from scratch. You're very much a family man and you, you, I, I know that family is very important to you. How did you balance that? Did you balance that in the early days? I mean, you talk about that travel that you were doing, leaving your wife and going, you know, for the, all over the world, you know, all over the country, coming back like, how did you balance that? How did you, how were you successful in doing that? In kind of the crazy peaks of entrepreneurship and being a founder.

Yeah, so the early days it was, you know, they talk about 9, 9, 6 now, 9:00am to 9:00pm, six days a week. And the early days for me it was 8am, it was really 8, 10, 7, it was 8am to 10pm, seven days a week, 996, that's for, that's for beginners. And so I don't think there is such a thing as work life balance. I think it's whatever moment you're in, you gotta figure out how to do your best. And so entrepreneurs that are getting started, it is technically possible to catch lightning in a bottle. But by and large, the entrepreneurs that I know that have been successful and my personal experiences, the only way to get enough momentum and the only way to iterate fast enough and to be adaptive enough for the market is to work all the time, put all the effort, all the energy into, doesn't have to last forever, but to move fast, which I think is the primary advantage that startups have, it takes an inordinate amount of effort. And so my advice to entrepreneurs is that you should Go all in. You should be a hundred percent maniacally focused on your mission, but know that it doesn't have to be forever. And so for me, it was very much the case for the first several years. And then as the business grew and we could hire great people and we could bring on more staff and we could have more specialization within the business, then I didn't have to work 10 hours a day, seven days a week. I love doing it. I think it's tons of fun. And again, it's different when you're working for yourself versus working for somebody else. But this idea of work life balance, I don't think it's a real thing. I think it's a work life blend. And I think like anything, it ebbs and flows. So sometimes you gotta go all in on the business and you gotta go crazy at it, and then sometimes you can pull back. And sometimes a family member or a spouse or a child needs a lot of attention. I do think on the kids side, it's definitely. Some people talk about, oh, I'm gonna spend quality time with my kids and not as much quantity time. I do think it has to be quantity time. But even with that said, there's ways to be together in the same room while others are working on other things like homework and you're working on your business. So you're not.

Necessarily, you know, being together together, but you're there with each other. And so obviously with the Internet and laptops and everything else, it's a lot easier to do things remotely and to do things, you know, from home and any other place. But I think work life blend. But I also think that the reason startups do win is because of speed. And the only way to get speed is to go all in.

I couldn't agree more. Okay, last question for you. Knowing everything you know today, what is the one piece of advice you'd go back and give yourself before you started your first company?

So, you know, I was lucky to always love entrepreneurship and always be tinkering. And in hindsight, I would say just because I loved it doesn't mean that I was necessarily cognizant of what I was good at and what I had to do, even though I wasn't good at it. And so my advice looking back on it was I love the technology, and I still love the technology and I still geek out over it. But I spent years just swimming in the technology and building stuff and not understanding the customer discovery side and not understanding that just because you build a better mousetrap, it doesn't mean that people will beat a path to your door. And so for me, for my advice is that entrepreneurs should think in the context of the hacker, the hipster and the hustler. And so the hacker is the person that loves to build things. And so I, I was the hacker, I was writing the code. The hipster is the taste maker. They love to curate it. They love the style, they love the feel, they love the vibe of it. And then the hustler is the person who loves to sell it. They love to go to market, they love to get out there. They love to evangelize it. And so in that context of the hacker, the hipster and the hustler, I myself as the hacker, I needed to surround myself with the hipster Adam and the hustler Derek. And so from a team point of view and from an entrepreneurial advice point of view, my recommendation to entrepreneurs is think about it in that context, the hacker, the hipster and the hustler to do some introspection. Where do you fall into those different buckets? And you don't have to be all in on one. You could do some of the, of all of them, of course, but then find, find the compliments, find the people that flesh out the team, that fill out the team. And that would be my advice for the, for the entrepreneur.

Good advice.

Hacker, hipster and the hustler. Hustler.

David, thank you very much for doing this. Like I said in the beginning, it feels like two decades in the making pretty much. And I, I learned a lot of new things today and about you and about I, I love the, the downtown Atlanta project. So anyway than the time to do this with me, I really appreciate it and, and I look forward to getting this out into the world.

Thanks David. Thanks for having me.

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