From College Dropout to Billion-Dollar CEO - Sean Henry - Stord - Episode #54

Literally fired a few hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue at 18 years old. And we spent the next six months so mad at ourselves. Like what did we just do?

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 from our own journeys. Today's guest is a unique blend of visionary and customer obsessed operator. At an age when most people were studying for finals, today's guest was scaling warehouses. He started his first e commerce business at just seven years old. By 18, he founded Stored while still a student at Georgia Tech. He dropped out to focus all of his energy on the company. Fast forward almost 10 years and he's now built Stord into a $1.5 billion logistics powerhouse. Stord is building the infrastructure, fulfillment warehousing and supply chain software that empowers businesses to run and scale their own online operations. They've raised over $525 million from top tier investors like Kleiner Perkins Founders Fund, Bond, Franklin templeton. And since 2021 they've grown the business by a amazing 10x. He's also an angel investor supporting the next generation of tech founders. Please welcome co founder and CEO of Stored, Sean Henry.

Great to be here David. Thanks for having me.

I'm very excited to be doing this. You've had a busy couple of weeks so I really appreciate you making the time. A lot of exciting things to talk about but we're going to jump right into it. The first question, what is the one thing you've done, big or small? It's Stored that's had the biggest impact and you'll do again if you're CEO of another company in the future.

Yeah, this is a hard one as I thought a lot about it because at the end of the day, one thing my co founder and I recognized is there's this quote out there that there's no such thing as a company. There's just a collection of people and decisions. A company without people is nothing. And so you have all these people making decisions and it's what are the little decisions you make that actually lead to greatness. So for us, the one thing as we thought about the decisions over the years was making customer obsession the cornerstone of our culture and our decision making processes at store. And as I think I shared with you, it can kind of go both ways. Where some people don't love customer obsession because of the implication where we actually are very blunt in saying customers come before employees. And early on that actually frustrated a lot of people we interviewed. A lot of people we were talking to in the company said that's not how we build the culture. Hire the best people. You want to be the people first. People first, people first. And it's not that our employees aren't so important and we have an incredible culture. It's just that we try to take this view that whether it's the idea of what we're building, the culture of how we're building, the decisions we're making, all those things should be influenced first by the customer. If we don't have a customer, we don't have employees. If we have a vision but have no customers, that vision means nothing. And so that also comes to the point of customer obsession is how we got here. Because Jacob and I every day say, it's not like we woke up one day and said here's an incredible idea and all the features underneath it that is going to be this massive company one day. No, we said here's a problem and let's be customer and problem obsessed. And our solution to that problem might actually change a lot over time. And we've made so many pivots, big ones, from a total 180 pivot, firing all of our revenue about a year into the business to a division we shut down that we pivoted. That was huge two, three years ago, or sorry, one, two years ago, all the way through micro pivots and evolutions along the way. And so if we weren't customer obsessed, we would probably be 10 times more static, 10 times more insular and self obsessed versus customer obsessed and we wouldn't be moving as fast. So I pick customer obsession as number one. The only other thing I'd add is we do talk a lot about speed and time in days and it's these little milestones and mile markers of how are you signifying the passage of time in a startup. And that maybe sounds strange, but as a startup it's kind of that like early on your default dead. If you don't move fast, if you don't grow, if you don't get to profit, if you just let time pass, you will die as time passes. And so some of the best kind of startup friends we have and ourselves have tried really hard to whether it's speak in terms of days Internally we're about 3,500 days since we started. That sounds like a long time, but it's not that long. We talk about projects, sometimes we speak even days when we think about Managing. I send a weekly email every Sunday to the business. We have a weekly business review where we go through every metric in the company. And I just don't think it's enough to have a once a month review or have a once a quarter all hands. It's that constant communication showing every day and every week matters. So those are the two that I'd really pick, customer obsession above all. But focusing on the small passage of time and having those small mile markers to set the pace early on I think is something critical. I learned later in store that I'd also bring earlier.

I like both of those a lot. I want to start with the customer obsession 1. How do you hire for that? Because that is, I feel like the couple times we've talked, I think it's very clear you mean this like sincerely and authentic. I met Jacob, but my assumption is that it's the same with him. But a lot of people will say that, you know, when you're interviewing someone, yeah, I love customer. I love working with. Like how do you actually get underneath that when you're, when you're interviewing for someone to join the team?

That's a good question because sometimes it's, we have to instill it and here's what it means to stored. But a lot of times we're trying to screen for it and some of it comes from where are we hiring from? There's organizations out there that are just known to be incredibly customer obsessed. Like we have the benefit of being a fulfillment and operations business trying to help businesses take on Amazon level capabilities. So we hire a lot from Amazon, which is a very customer obsessed organization. But some of it comes down to, like you said, the questions and the screening and the interviewing. And so we do try to weed out where someone is very, very focused on how are you taking care of internally, how, what are my benefits? What is my growth path? What is my, my, my. It's not that those things are the wrong questions and it's not that we have the wrong approach to them and we don't have these career ladders. It just is like a yellow flag of like, wait a second, what are you focused on the most? Because if you're most focused on internal rather than external and the customer, it might not be a mesh. Sometimes I'll ask a potential employee in an interview, how do you define customer obsession? How would you describe it? How would you use it to make a decision? And sometimes when you throw something loose out there like that, you get such a shocking answer back that you're like, oh, we are really thinking about this differently. Whereas when I hire someone or we talk to the team, I say customer obsession is almost like roi. It's thinking that the small pain today, whether that's a pivot, whether that's a cost we didn't want, whether that's just saying yes to the customer, is going to pay back tenfold over the lifetime value of the customer, that we will do what it takes to keep them happy today. And so I think it's these kind of little conversations that just tease it out and then it's the constant reinforcement and I'd say a principle we have internally that I think constantly reinforces it is working backwards, working backwards from the customer. Again, we steal a little bit from Amazon. They have a great kind of PR FAQ approach where when you want to launch a new product, launch a new division, make a big decision, it's like write a press release like you just launched this product and actually make up customer quotes. And what are they going to be saying about what's valuable about this product, why it makes their life better, but don't just make it up. Actually go talk to some of our customers and figure out what would they be saying, do they like this product? What's their feedback early on? And so even when we're launching new products, we're trying to say like we don't want to build this unless we have 5, 10, whatever the number may be, customers already signed up to use it once it's built, once it's launched and helping us in those scoping and requirements. And so I don't know, I think it's kind of like the point of focusing internally versus externally. I think sometimes in product it's very tempting to want to kind of be this very intellectual, like we're going to figure it out, we're going to figure out what the customer wants. And the answer's like, well why don't you just ask and why don't you just like get in front of them over and over and over and over until you have incredible clarity of what actually needs to be built.

I really like that one of them you said there. I, I've seen work in other companies as well as my own is the feeder. Like the idea of another company's already identified this talent, has already trimmed this talent to be customer obsessed or you know, it's kind of self selecting for us it's was actually hiring people from Apple. You know, we found that it people specifically who were geniuses at the, you know, at an Apple Store. They were really good interacting with customers because you just got people walking into an Apple Store being like, I can't turn on my laptop and they have to deal with that and they have to, you know, engage with that customer. And actually at Vocalocity in Atlanta, I used to go to the Best Buy where they had the Geek Squad set up, and I used to bring a broken laptop and bring it there and talk to the person. And I hired like five people from Geek Squad because they were people sitting in a Best Buy having to deal with consumers with these broken electronics, you know, And I'm like, okay, we're selling to small business owners. We need that support. So anyway, I look, that theater piece, I really, That's a really interesting that, that's especially because you've, you've had to scale. I mean, how big now is for people wise.

If you count our 15 fulfillment centers, 2,500 people, that gets a little, a little over the skis. Corporate wise, call it 500 plus. But we still think about the culture holistically. And those frontline employees in our fulfillment centers arguably have to be the most customer obsessed because it's the experience that actually ends up with the end consumer. And so across the business, you nailed it. That I, I think early on, a lot of companies think about, let me hire from all my competitors. And it's like, why do you think your competitor's better than you? Do you think they have a better culture? Like, oh, you just want some competitive intel, great, if that's really going to help you win. For us, it's like division by division or function by function. What is the best in the world that we want to be like, and then go find it, go hire it. And I think as CEOs, you kind of get this perspective of like, oh, here's the four companies that if I see that on a resume, I'm just involved with it kind of right away. You also get the counter, though, which is you start to see these interesting patterns of like, oh, I don't want to hire from there. And it's not necessarily I don't want to hire from there. Sometimes it's like a phase thing or a role thing where you just start to get this kind of pattern recognition very early on. And I look at a resume all the time, or I talk to a person all the time and I'm like, you're the fifth person I've talked to from that company. That's all told me you accomplished the same thing. So clearly none of you did. So there's kind of like both positive signaling and inverse signaling to getting these pattern recognitions that can be really powerful.

Yeah, I like that. Actually, one of the things I coach, especially early stage founders, is to really think about what you just said specifically around stage. I find that, you know, you, you talk to someone, they're like, oh, I ran marketing at Datadog, you know, when we were 500 million of revenue. You're like, my 11 year old son could have run marketing at Datadog when you know, like, it wouldn't have mattered, you know, and, and, and like, and they're like, well, I built a sales team at Google. It was the 19th regional sales team selling GCP in 2018. You're like, I mean I, I don't know, does that prove that you've built something something or you were just, you know, there for the ride? Which is okay, actually. It's great if you're there for the ride. But it's different than joining a company that's a million of ARR trying to get to 10 that, that's not the right, you know, spot on.

And it's also for culture too. Like sometimes the thing you see at Google, let's say, works really well for their culture. It doesn't mean it works really well for a brand new business or a startup who's life or death every single day because oftentimes you have to like weed through. Is this what got them there or is this a product of being there? Because once you have that massive cash cow that can't be disrupted, it's not that hard to think about three or four day weekends or more flexible time in the office or everyone should reserve 20% of their time to working on problems that matter to them, not necessarily to the customer. And all those things that people would argue are the incredible parts of their culture and it's more just like kind of getting to the harsh reality. As an early stage founder of is that what's going to make it for me or is that once I'm there? And I think for better or worse, we've been able to carve a culture and a team that works incredibly hard is so customer obsessed looking at it for the long term. And I think when we were young founders and we're still, still young, but 10 years in, we were very young, it was almost like we're nervous to overwork or push people too hard because you think that the kind of cushiness is what's going to keep them happy. But oftentimes I find the opposite. It's like when you actually work really hard, but you actually see it move the needle and build something transformative or loved by customers. You don't care that you worked extra hard. You love the work and how it's paying off and you're actually 10 times happier. And so it's just a weird fallacy where a lot of the things we tried early on as a function to try to make people happy were actually kind of inversely drive or uncorrelated driving the goal where the things we thought could upset people but actually make the business successful end up making people happy.

I just talked to a founder yesterday. I was recording an episode and he was talking about how he's. He's kind of bringing the band back together for his next. His next company and his first company is really successful. And he said the reality is that actually the hardest times are the times that everyone reflects on most fondly. After the struggles to get past this, to overcome this, to reach this thing that were really hard actually is what bonded the team more than the easy times, more than. And it's very interesting, like you think. I think a lot of times I have to be careful. I don't want to push these people. But the right person, like you're saying they're going to be motivated. Actually when you talk about I want to transition to the measuring in days culturally, I know people who've worked there. I think those are the people who are attracted to that urgency and mindset that life or death that you talked about.

Yeah, exactly. I think that if you step back, there's. There's very little kind of right or wrong in a lot of these cultural decisions. It's just what works best for you. And early on it's very scary because you're being told by potential hires, right, wrong, I want this, I don't want this. And you often think your job is to kind of make everyone happy and be the best culture you can. And in reality it's like, well, just what works for you and then build. Not like only what works for Sean. I mean, what works for the company, what works for the mission, what works for the customers. And then just go all in and be kind of unapologetic about that. Some of the things I love about some companies are the ones that put a like and why not to work at Anduril and have a whole you should not work here if this is what you're looking for. And that the kind of don'ts is really powerful. It's like the whole good product manager, bad Product manager document out there. I think from it was a Ben Hurwitz or Mark Andreessen one of. One of the two of them. It's here's the good things that a good product manager does, but let me also spell out all the bad things a bad product manager does. And early on, Jacob and I wrote those docs for. For sales, for marketing, for operations, for product. We don't really have them anymore, but I do think that the here's what we aren't is just as powerful as here's what we are.

I like that I want to talk about the measuring in days, because actually most companies do not. Actually, I would say most companies measure in quarters. That's what how most. Maybe by month, but definitely by quarter, not by day. You mentioned a little bit about this. Your. Your email that you send every week. You know, can you just talk about how you actually manifest this? Because it does matter. And I've seen examples where people say, no, I don't do quarterly quotas for my sales team, I do monthly. And I've actually heard people. One person told me I do weekly to ensure that they're going to be on a monthly and a quarterly kind of pace. So the idea makes complete sense. But can you give me just two or three tactical examples if someone wants to do that in their org? How do you do that?

Yeah, I think it's inherent in both myself and my co founder, Jacob. Growing up, I slept and still way too little. And I'd always make the joke of we sleep eight hours a night. By the time you're 60, you've slept for 20 years and that doesn't feel very great. And Jacob's even crazier than me. And when I met him, he had his whole new tab on a computer, was an exact decimal of how old he was. And then he had a whole different counter app he had built for the exact percentage of his life that had already passed. His background on his computer was like all the months in his life and constantly checking off. And so you could say that we're a little impatient and a little urgent, but I think it's like the little milestones, right? Like it is talking in days in terms of projects, it is tracking projects really well. Early on we created this we call vmo, just Value Management Office. It's a team of one or two people, but they just track all sorts of projects across stored the ROIs, the dates, the owners, exactly when they're supposed to be done. Even that weekly business review when we set it up and it's every team, all their metrics, almost like a board meeting every week. It felt like the most daunting thing in the world and what's actually going to change week over week in a lot of these. But it shows the level of detail in in care that we want to push through and deliver to every level at storage. And so I think it's all the small milestones and it's showing the team just the pace we work at. The things like the Sunday morning email every Sunday, sometime before 8am let's say. Sure. I like the fact that it's a weekly email and touch base with the team and saying, here's everything we need to work on. Here's what's going on wrong, here's what's going on well. And it's not like a format of good, bad, ugly, it's just kind of raw. And here's what happened this week, here's what we're doing next week. Here's a story from a best in class company we heard and something we need to embody differently. But it's even like the small marker of sending it on a Sunday or early to remind like the week's about to start or we're always on or I'm not just sitting around by a beach all weekend. This is really important. Time matters. And so I wish I had more tactical examples, but one other I'd throw out is in board meetings super early on, one of our investors advised that it'd be really cool to start the board meeting with the same slide forever. That is basically like, what is our percent market share? And at the time we're like, our percent market share is like.001%. We're in a $200 billion market. Like, okay, I guess. Um, but as that number starts to get more and more and more real and. Or just like where are we in the top 10 of our size or our category or so on. It's pretty exciting. And I think long term you can set these numbers, like how many days, what percent market share? Even one we set five years ago was like, here's what we want to be when we're public, a billion in revenue, blah, blah, blah, all these things. And when you set it, it's like, this is the most daunting thing in the world and why are we wasting our time looking at something so big. But when you consistently look at it over a long period of time and you start to realize, wait a second, we're getting green on almost all these categories, it starts to feel as good as it felt bad a while back.

I love that. Let's go all the way to the beginning. How did you get your first kind of your. You were very young and you're starting out this company. You know, how did you get your first customer?

Yeah, so I mentioned that we pivoted early on. And I'll actually talk about both because when we started, we first basically set up an Airbnb, like website for anyone with any capacity in a warehouse, storage space, whatever. And we saw this rapid deviation from kind of the mission of make a warehousing network for brands to start to compete with Amazon to people wanted to store anything and everything from movie sets to cars to all sorts of things. And we were like, okay, this is interesting, but it's not exactly the use case. We thought that was very guerrilla kind of like, we were on LinkedIn, we were in Facebook groups, we were on Craigslist, we were posting this website everywhere, just attacking messaging people. And then we said, okay, let's fire all these customers. We kind of got this kind of mixed bag of use cases and let's just go all in on our ICP of these versions. But we quite literally fired, literally fired, literally fired a few hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue at 18 years old. And we spent the next six months so mad at ourselves, like, what did we just do? This new model of trying to get the perfect customers is so much harder. But it basically became from like, let's be a marketplace and just see what transactions happen to let's go sell and let's go direct to direct customers. And that became an approach of quite literally selling. We got into an accelerator around this time called Dynamo, supply chain focused. And I say that just because they had started a freight brokerage and sold it to Coyote, became part of UPS eventually. And a freight brokerage is very much a manual brokerage, like a smile, dial. Call someone, say, do you need a truck? Call a truck and say, I have a load for you. And so these guys were basically like, call. Cold calling and cold emailing is going to be your life. And they gave us the advice of basically lock Jacob and I in a room all day, every day, just making hundreds of calls and hundreds of emails. And so Jacob and I literally set quotas for ourselves. 50 plus calls a day each, 500 plus emails a day each. So probably even higher than that. And then it became, well, where do we get all these leads and how do we find this? And we got super scrappy because we had no money. There was a government website that was the kind of a record of every single ship coming into the US Every container on it, and they all have a bill of lading. And we basically built a scraper tool, went through hundreds of millions of documents, got hundreds of thousands of emails and phone numbers from every one of those document, and just started aggressively outreaching. It went from 500 plus manual emails a day to tens of thousands of emails and calls. Emails a day and hundreds of calls. And so that's really where we ended up meeting our first customer. We, we were not the company that could go sell to everyone in our Y Combinator batch because we're just a company that all of our friends could use. Our first true customer for this business model was a publicly traded solar panel manufacturing company, publicly traded in China, and that doing business internationally was quite interesting. But I think I joke to you, we got them to agree on the pricing the network where we're going to put their stuff in the warehousing network. We were building so on, so forth and we were just so iterative that we got all the way to them saying, all right, send us a contract. And we were like, oh, we don't even have a contract. Like we should go build one. Unfortunately, we didn't have AI at the time. We got them to sign the contract and then our accelerator asked us like, you know, this is a public company. They're on this massive erp, blah, blah. Do you even have like a ein. Do you know how to send them a purchase order and get them to remit payment to you? What the net. What are the net payment terms? And we were just like, listen, we're going to figure it all out, but no, and we'll get through it.

So I have a bunch of questions on this. The first is you and Jacob are both technical by nature.

Not so much on me. I used to have the code for my own websites and apps. Was very light in partnering with like, let's say I'd take existing WordPlus press templates and fully customize them for a new E Comm store. But he's like the full technical leader in full depth.

So because to go and start doing cold calling like that, even non technical founders I know don't want to do that and technical founders definitely don't want to do. I mean, at least in my experience, was that just a life or death kind of thing? And you're like, this is the only way we're going to do it. Was it because the Dynamo conversation, like what, what triggered you to go because. Because that Is that's actually the number one challenge I see for technical founders is technical. And the other founders are also technical. Getting them to that first set of customers could be really difficult because they're not comfortable doing that, which not fun for anyone, you know. But I'm just curious, was that just. Was that just a. It was the requirement. That's what you had to do.

I think it's. We always want to show the team we're willing to do anything we'd ask from them, and that's. We're going to take any role in the company at any time. And so back to customer obsession. If we don't have a company without customers, then we should pour all of our focus on customers. Early on we were kind of that like, what's the one leverage point in the business right now? And let's go put all of our weight on it. And so if early on it's growing in sales, let's go spend all of our time on sales. And that became a big function for the business. We actually hired two sellers before we started hiring any engineers. It was just Jacob coding and we were starting to grow and starting to build the company because we said we want to build our product around our customers and around their use case, not kind of like build it and they'll come and sure it got him a lot more stressed out and, and sleep work nights and things like that, but we went very much in on a sales first portrait. And the one funny thing I'd add is that I look back at these videos of like Dynamo, how to spend the day just stopping people in the street, pitching them our company, trying to sell to them, and then having them like sign a form that we, we did it. They would have us go like, stand in the most crowded area we could find and just start like giving our pitch. They were like, we want to break you guys basically in terms of don't be afraid to talk, don't be afraid to sell, don't be afraid to be told no. And then I get asked all the time today, like, and I'm not saying I am, but I guess asked about public speaking and where did I get X, Y, Z skill or sales? And I'm like, as a founder, that is basically your job. I'm talking to employees, investors, customers, media, so on all the time that if I don't know how to kind of sell and talk about our value proposition, I'm basically delegating one of the most important functions of a startup that is you got to grow and grow fast. And if I don't know how to help us grow and help us sell, I'm just really hoping I'm a really good hirer and can go find the right CRO for the business.

Wow. They made you do, they made you do that as part of the program.

They're probably like, don't make us sound too mean. But no, it was not mean. It was awesome.

I think it's great. I think it's great. I just never heard of it. I've never heard of someone doing that. That's amazing.

Yeah. I think back to I, I'll never forget, I, I watched Ted Ted Alling at Dynamo because again it was a very, their business was very smile and dial. He sat with each startup and he made five or ten cold calls for them and said like watch, I'll show you what to do. Ask for. I'm looking for this department. Oh, introduce yourself, talk about your value, say you're part of this cool program, whatever. And, and just watching that this person who had exited a business for hundreds of millions of dollars and now is running this massive program and so on was willing to do that himself. Okay, I better be willing to do that.

That's amazing. That's amazing. You know, when I, when I started I really hated public speaking. Like really hated it. And I've had that realization at some point that if I'm not good at like I got invited to a conference to speak and I actually turned, I was like, I don't want to. It was a great conference, great ICP customers there and I didn't want to go because I was that nervous and I, that was the moment for me when I said this can't. I got to get better at this. Even if I like it to your point, you know, it's like you and especially as you can grows and even speaking to the team is public speaking, you know, like so, so, so that Dynamo and you were in, you were also in a Georgia Tech program as well, right? Yeah.

So kind of sequential, maybe like a few weeks of overlap. But we got accepted to the createx accelerator program at Georgia Tech and while that was incredible, our only hesitation was well, we're kind of late stage process with Dynamo. Let's say their kind of application selection was longer and if we get in we're really excited because it is supply chain specific and were 218 year olds. Well Jacob was actually 17 at the time. We're very young. We don't have a ton of contacts in this space if they're able to either a Give us a stamp of credibility of they know the space and they know what we're doing is unique or B, help open the doors for customers, employees, potential other investors and more. That's going to be critical for us. And so we didn't take capital initially from Create X. We took the $30,000 from Dynamo. And then Chris Clouse, who is the backer of Create X at the time, ended up leading Our angel round six to 12 months after the accelerator program.

When it comes to those early customers, partners was challenging. I mean, I don't know the business, the space that you're in, I mean, just based on what I've read and everything else, we'll assume it's kind of an old school. It seems kind of old school. You know, generally speaking, did you have a problem getting, being taken seriously, you know, because of your age at that time?

Yeah. Both from investors, employees and customers. And I'd actually argue employees might have been the hardest. But I'll, I'll start on customers, which was. It's funny today I sell all the time as co founder, CEO, as a power. I'm reaching out to so many brands in our pipeline, so many companies we want to meet, saying, hey, I'm personally reaching out. This is not a fake email. I don't actually write that, but like, hey, we'd love to partner with you. Here's why I'm excited. I give almost every one of our customers my cell phone number. Speaking of customer obsession. And I don't have multiple cell phones. And so the point is these are a lot of founder led businesses, a lot of brands or enterprises, but they love that we are a founder led company. So today it's a superpower. Some in some ways. But when I was 18, it was like my biggest fear. We get made fun of sometimes because we were on the Forbes 30 under 30. Just meaning it has the connotation. People joke about it, but we got nominated by one of our investors and we actually called Forbes and we're trying so hard for them not to put us on it. And we were trying to get them to take us off because they posted 18 and 19 at the time. And we were like, this is the last thing we want with all of our customers. This is the last thing we want with the market. And so frankly like to our earliest customers and apologize to any of them if they're watching, I said just Sean Henry Business Development. I tried to avoid my age at any cost. I didn't want them to use any of those against us and think, oh, they're, they're too young to handle it. And I'll never forget we met one of our first customers in person and he kind of started pushing me and challenging on it, like, how old are you? And I was like, oh yeah, you know, like 20s. And I was like 20 at the time. And I'm like, please don't push this issue too far. But I would actually argue and same thing. Like when we were leaving an accelerator program, we were talking to some investors about raising our first one, $200,000. And that was right when we had kind of reset the revenue. We were now selling to new customers. And they were kind of like, you're two 18 year olds, you're barely any revenue starting to grow. If I give you a hundred two hundred thousand dollars, like the business is probably worth a hundred two hundred thousand dollars. Like I am the business. If I give you this money and we're like, okay, that's the wrong approach from some more traditional venture capitalists than, than kind of more modern and west coast. But employees, I, that's where I'd really hang the hat. That was the hardest. And when you think about our first employees, we were hiring the people who are willing to work for not a lot of money, but also for two 18 year olds. And our hardest was when we wanted to start now hiring real leaders, not just our first BDR or AE or our first scrappy engineer. It's like, who can actually help us level up. And that's where I give a shout out to our mutual friend David Hardwick, who joined us, our first VP of engineering and added so much credibility to the business as coming from one of the most successful startups in Atlanta. Having call it a decade or so on Jake, but I maybe a little more and being able to then go to his network and say, yes, this is a real place, you should come join. And so serious shout out to him because it was him and then our COO still with us, Steve Swan and others that really started to level up. Okay, people are willing to join. I know this is a long answer, but I'd add one more, which is I'll never forget one call I had where we get on with this guy who applied to Stork. He applied, we didn't reach out to him. And he literally just starts the call with like, yeah, yeah. I just want to say I read an article before this. You guys are like 18 years old. Why are you wasting my time on this call? Like, not a chance. I'm going to work for you. And quite Literally like hung up. We were like, okay, like that's quite a weird way to do that. You could just email, you're not interested, you could not show up. But again, you applied and so you clearly didn't do your research before, before applying.

I mean that I think that, that, that if you, I think everyone pretty much has imposter syndrome. And if you already have that, you know, being layered on top of, you know, the age and everything, I, I, I told you before, you know, when, when I was early days, 22 years old, you know, and I was running this, the Vocalosity company and I met with a partner and I'll never forget that they said to me, how old are you? And I was like 22. And they said, we're not going to do business with you. Like how are we supposed to trust our customers to a 22 year old? And I, I, I looked at that company basically every six months until they went out of business. You know, and we scaled and I was like, okay, well you know, our business scaled and you went out of business anyway. But not that I hold it against them.

There's from some quote out there cheesy enough it might, I think it's from like a James Bond movie that I've always loved and I've used sometimes. And it's like youth may not be a guarantee of innovation, but age is also not a guarantee of wisdom or experience. And so judge us by our merits as much as possible.

I like that. I want to, so one of these things I really want to dig in on that I am just still kind of floored by is when you shut down a pretty large line of business. Can you talk through what happened? I mean you talked about the first pivot, but that was a small, you know, kind of the early days, small revenue number. I mean you had a real business, tens of millions of dollars of revenue. You, if I understand correctly, just shut down. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it didn't even quite feel as existential as shutting down the small revenue because that was 100% of our revenue to zero versus a segment of the business. But you nailed it. And I think that when you're a multi product company, the thing you have to do really well is knowing when it's working and when it's not. And a, I can keep making new bets and launching new layers of products on top of each other, but if it's not driving the success we need to our core flywheel, our core metrics, so on this is just creating A distraction. And so we've shut down many things over time. But that is the one that stands out in the short story is that when you think about building an end to end fulfillment network, we started with a network of warehouses. And when I use the term warehouse it's a little more think pallets of goods in and out flow versus let's say fulfillment center where you might be more a highly robotic small units picking and packing hundreds of thousands of small parcels per day. So we went from a warehousing network to then have started our fulfillment network where we were opening our own buildings. We built this top to bottom warehouse management software, transportation management software, order management software, consumer experience. And then we layered in other movements, not just buildings for last mile delivery. So parcel and trucking, the big trucks you see on the road. And what happened was that trucking for us was always supposed to be hey, let's bring things from the port into our fulfillment network or move goods between multiple fulfillment centers or finally out of our warehouse to a retail store or a B2B customer. But those are kind of like the loads truckloads. You have the right to win as this network versus you can also go win all sorts of just point to point moves of trucking out there in the market. And so we launched this trucking network to do this in the network moves. And during COVID trucking capacity became so scarce that this business blew up. It went from oh, it'll be a few million of revenue for us. It'll be kind of like an ancillary service we do internally almost to nearly a hundred million revenue segment of the business. And we had to just really look internally where I went through kind of multiple months of work thinking through what do we want to look like when we grow up, what are the metrics that matter for our business? And then let's pull that back. And now whether that's growth rate or margin or return on capital we're getting or the value prop to customers, or even small things like customer retention, customer stickiness, customer contract length. If this is harming every single one of these metrics, then maybe this isn't actually good revenue for me. And it was a hard decision where we had, I had personally advocated to our board, this is why we have to get into trucking. I had personally focused so much on growing this segment and nurturing it every day for three, four years. And finally we shut it down and said we're only going to do the trucking, we have the right to win, which is maybe 5, 10% of what we had gotten to and we're going to hand this off. And we essentially shut it down, but found a partner who said, be a great home to these customers. If they want to transition to service, we'll make it easy for them. And yeah, we really reset. And I think for a founder, it's more just the kind of. It comes back to customer obsession and my favorite core value of ours, which is just learn and iterate, which is things aren't static. We're constantly seeing new data, making micro changes. And if you want to be successful over a long horizon, you kind of have to be willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes, maybe that's not the right phrase for this, but, like, tell yourself you were wrong and finalize that decision and move on. And the speed that which you can finally come to that conclusion and move on is critical because I think over the last 24 months, stored has grown so rapidly. We've trained so much. Our all of our metrics are so dramatically different. We just had a board meeting earlier today and everyone's almost not pushing much, smiling, clapping, that type of stuff.

And we're like, wow, doesn't happen often.

Let's keep these board meetings going. I'm happy. But that only came from back to the day's comment pace of decisions. As I reflect when you're earlier on, when I'm a more junior CEO, when I'm more scared, it's like, let me go ask every board member, every investor, every executive, what do you think of this decision? Let me, like, convince each one of you and then finally make it. And as you get over time, one of my board members, one of my independents kept telling me, like, you would not be here unless you were making at least 50% of decisions. Right. You must be taking more steps forward than backwards. So trust yourself and make decisions. And finally, in 23 and 4, we just started making decisions that would have taken quarters in days or weeks and saying, all right, we have the conviction. Let's do this. Whether that's hiring someone, firing someone, divesting something, acquiring something, so on, so forth.

Wow. Let's talk quickly about your investors. So you mentioned Chris Clouse, who, if people don't know, a legend in Atlanta, founder of iss. And so that's where it all started. But you've raised now over $500 million with, I mean, the who's who of venture firms. Was it really easy from, like, when Chris saw you guys? Was it like he wanted to write you guys a check right away? Was that first round that you did, really easy, you know, could 500 million plus is a lot of money to raise. Like was it, was it super easy kind of along the way or, or, or has it been challenging? That's, that's really question one and the second question which is somewhat connected is how deliberate have you been with the investors that you're kind of soothing to, to, to go to and to bring into the business?

Yeah, there definitely has been ebbs and flows to it and that's where I try to encourage any founder. I think it's so easy to look at someone like us from the outside and be like, oh, everything's so easy. So up into the right. It's like, no, no, no. Every day is hard. There's so much you got to do. There's so many nos you're going to hear to get to the yeses. And so even when you see kind of a star studded cap table, it doesn't just mean everything's easy and everything's up and to the right. And so for us, I've been very lucky to have a few mentors and kind of people who today it seems obvious where the business is, but when I was back then, it is not obvious. And so whether it was an individual who mentored me when I was call it in middle school because I was trying all these businesses and he had started a few companies and started giving me advice or whether it was the German automotive manufacturer I worked for my summer before college because I had been buying parts from them for my own e commerce business. And I just kept emailing the CEO like, I'd love to work for you guys. I'll do it for free. Just teach me how you've built this business. He finally gave me a shot. Chris was one of those that kind of gave me the shot. He met us after I presented at the Create X demo day. We had now started to get to some real revenue. We were kind of both in Dynamo and createx at this time. He's like, I'm so excited that we invested in you. And I'm like, well, I'm sorry, but unfortunately we didn't take the capital because we were doing this other accelerator. And I think that kind of poked him a little bit to be like, all right, let's, let's have another meeting. Let's go through some numbers, let's think about it together. And over the next six months, we were just building and building and building and seeing some real revenue growth. And that's where he finally said like, Listen, I'd love to lead this. I'd love to be a great partner. And he did. And he's been such an incredible partner ever since. Now on the selectivity though, I do think that is a key point because suse Ventures, for example, let our seed and I started the seed process and said if anyone had come could lead our seed round, I'd want it to be suse. And I'd never even met them at that point. And the premise was, okay, they invested in this other company in and around logistics and supply chain. So they know kind of pattern recognition, they know kind of what metrics matter, they know what good looks like. But they also invested in Robin the Hood and Andela and all these other great businesses. And so when I pair that with kind of, I follow one of their partners, Leo and then Chad, on Twitter and I'm always reading their threads and I just love their perspectives. And I'm seeing all these founders give them good feedback. It's almost, it's, I think you get really lucky because we ended up with some incredible term sheets from incredible firms that I won't name because we, we don't want to say who we said no to, but I'm talking top, top VCs. And we said no, we want to go with SUSE. Because I decided to do one thing at the end of the seed round when we had five or six term sheets and there were some great firms, I said, I want you to either write or have a conversation with me about what you view as kind of the next five years of stored. Like, what is your thesis on this business? And still today I always ask for investment memos because my real question is like, are we aligned in what we're building? Did you listen? Do you really understand where this is headed? Because just because you're an incredible firm doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be the most value add doesn't necessarily mean you understand where we're headed. And there was a very well known logo that what they told me at the seed round was so deviated from kind of what we presented our mission. They basically started saying like, you're going to be the next Etsy. You're going to bring all these small merchants online and help them with all these backend commerce tools for their kind of sourcing their next products they're going to manufacture. And I was like, well, first, we're very mid market. Second, we're not the commerce platform with a backend platform. We're not the sourcing and manufacturing we're the delivery. But point being, quite a deviation. And so I think that trying to ensure alignment is so much more important than going for a logo. And second to logo, you're not really partnering with a logo, you're partnering with an individual. So think long and hard about who do you actually want to work with. And that's where it's the jokes like the airplane test. Would you want to sit on an international flight with this person and actually jam out about your business or just life a long time? Because if I think back, I did not necessarily believe when you're picking this partner, oh, I'm going to be with this person 10 years because it's kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, if we're successful, sure. And another Atlanta founder, no longer Atlanta, but Adam Getty started Ionic Security and now another company. He, he used to tell me something early on I thought was funny, which was none of us as founders knew what we were signing up for when we started, but we wouldn't change it for the world. And the point is simply you don't actually necessarily have the ego to believe this is going to be this massive company. I'm going to be so successful, I'm going to be doing this for 10, 15, 20 years. You're just like, I'm going to solve this problem and if I do it right, I'm going to have a year or two or I'm going to keep going and keep going. And then you get there and you're like, oh man, I backed myself into a large CEO job constantly, 18 hours a day. Did I really want this? Yes is the answer. But it's not like you necessarily really believe that when you started, the two.

Things you said there I think are so important. To underline the alignment with the investor and where the business is going is so important. I actually have not heard of people asking for that kind of, you know that, that five year vision doc from the investor, which I love that that that's very tactical, something that people should do. And the second one, and I think maybe even more important is the logo really doesn't matter. Like at the end of the day people think it does and at the end it's the person because you're not interacting with the logo, you're interacting with that partner.

Exactly.

And that is so important. That to me is, I think that by the way, in everything in the law firm you choose, in the search firm, you choose, in the accounting doesn't matter, the logo really, really, I mean, at the end of the day does not matter the, the person that. That's who you're going to be in the trenches with.

Absolutely. And I would only asterisk that sometimes there's correlation between the logo and the type of talent they attract or the ethos of the firm of, well, you love that partner, but that firm has a track record of taking out the CEO or whatever. And so there's sometimes like a signal of correlation, but it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, it's that person that's gonna be texting you every day. You're gonna be talking to them all the time. They're gonna be making decisions with you. And it's back to also that other point on mission and are you aligned? Because I've just found, and we haven't always gotten it right, particularly some of our smaller investors. We focus so much on the lead. We have an incredible set. But when you have that kind of constant tension between they thought they were focused on a different business or a slightly different mission or slightly. It's just this tension. You don't need every day of, no, I'm going this way and you're, you're going that way. And so the more aligned you can be, the better. And that's why I think whether it's the weekly emails or things like that, communication is so important because we all have to know here's where we are, here's where we're going, and here's kind of the, the risks and opportunities and tools we have along the way.

I love it. Just a couple more questions I want to get to your personal, you know, your background. But the question I ask everyone, you know is what. What is the biggest challenge you've ever faced stored and have you overcome them?

We face numerous challenges. I think early on it's how do I get over the age and win our first customers? And that's kind of hide behind the screen and the phone. No, I'm kidding. It's get out there and, and push through.

I think.

And we face challenges like all throughout, we were stuck in the SVB crisis and I don't have a business where you can be flexible on payments and cash flow, meaning I have thousands of people in fulfillment centers that every paycheck matters. And so when you on a Friday found out we have no more money, at least for now because this bank is shut down, how am I going to pay people on Monday crisis? And thankfully that's where we have incredibly supportive investors that helped us through that and great policies since on diversification and I think finally the real challenge is the turnaround. When we go from 2021 to today, I'll be the first to say we were very much one of those potentially risky businesses where you could, where the question of will you make it to the other side of the unit economic hurdle and the kind of valuation live into hurdle was a real question. We had gone through this period of 2015 to 2020, we had raised $20 million and then by the end of 2021 we had now raised $300 million. And so we had a boatload of capital but also a boatload of pressure on living into that, keeping our growth rate and so on. And that was in a timeline where it was growth at all cost. And I'll still remember an investor saying I don't think in your next round a single person will care about your margin or your bottom line. It's only keep growing. And I had to convince that investor hard like that is the case today. But what we're starting to see and we're starting to hear and thankfully we had some great public oriented investors who were kind of right on the front of the curve talking about interest rates, talking about what was happening in the public markets and saying like alarm bells, alarm bells to the portfolio. This party is going to stop. We had some hard board meetings at the start of 2022 where we said plans changed. Not just board meetings, actually kind of all investor calls plans changed. Here's where we think we were going and here's what's happening now. Where we need to go here instead of, and that might be a slightly less focus on top line, a slightly more focus on durable growth, durable margin, durable bottom line. But over that timeline, from 2021 to 2024, we grew our revenue over or sorry to 2025 today, grew our revenue over 10x. We went from massive burn to profitable. We expanded our margins from break even to industry leading and we won investor trust. And that's really how we got to this round. But when you're kind of making this turnaround, and that's why we have these, these exciting and celebratory board meetings now, when you're making this turnaround, you don't turn in harsh waters without a lot of resistance. Every day is resistance. Every day you're making a hard decision. You're, you're killing a business unit you hired, you're firing an employee you hired, you're raising a price on a customer who you just want to be friends with. You're. Whatever, whatever it may be, you're making hard decisions. I think the hardest thing is just the grit and the tenacity of wanting to see it through to the other side when each day is some pain. And I have so many founder friends who kind of use that 2022 period to say let's hire a professional CEO. And I actually went across our investors and said, do you think that's what we should do? I'm not saying that's what I want. I just would rather you have the conversation with me rather than show up to a board meeting. And it surprised me and some of our investors freaked out and we're like that's not what we want. Are you trying to quit? Like what's going on? That's not my point. It's. I want to ensure alignment and here's where I'm planning on taking us and here's the playbook and here's my plan and are you aligned? And so I think that is the thing I'm most proud of is a very hard. Well, we gotta change everything we thought make it through some really, really hard periods. And we just have a thesis that these two to 10 strategic moves will pay off and can we be long term focused enough to actually see them through to the payoff?

And so how big now is the business today?

So we went from under 50 million in 2021 to today. We should be half a billion plus for 2025.

It's amazing. Really, it's amazing. And you just. We just recently announced a really big acquisition. Seems like a game changing acquisition. Look forward now three years. Seems like you've been pretty good at kind of being able to see where this business is going. Look forward three years, it's 2028. What does stored look like? Not just revenue. I'm saying what does the business look like?

Yeah, I'm smiling only because it's a lab question for me today because I keep referencing this board meeting. The biggest discussion topic was 2028 work back.

Oh really?

You don't, you don't even know that. So easy layup. Well for, for us it's, it's interesting because I think what attracts people to stored investor wise, employee wise, customer wise is it's a massive opportunity. We are essentially a deviation of GDP about 15% of a physical product. Businesses revenue is spent on our capabilities. And so the industry is massive. 15, 1 5, 15% most of our customers. If you're a 100 million revenue business, you might be spending 15 million a year on end to end shipping, delivery returns and more. And so that's why we have large ACVs, large customers. And when our customers are $500 million billion dollars revenue businesses, they mean massive customers. And of course there's kind of like a curve where as you get bigger it might start to get to 10 or nine, but it's not going to get much lower than that. And so my point is not only is it a massive opportunity, but it's also one where you get bigger with sc, better with scale. And that's not always the case. The more scale I have, the more I can spread packages and inventory close to consumers. So the faster shipping speed, the lower cost, the more consumer recognition thereby the more trust. But when you're trying to build this prime like capability, scale is really everything. And so we're excited by the next few years, not only because as we get bigger, we get better, but also because I always laid out to our investors a kind of multi act roadmap. Here's what we're doing today, but this is act one and then there's act two and then there's act three. And for us that was always if we win this prime like fulfillment network, we're going to have all the order and inventory data and the direct storefront and financial integrations for our customers, right? Going to have an opportunity to be the business software for our brands. And then there's going to be an opportunity to use all that inventory order data software we're powering them with to build a capital business both for lending to our customers, for financing and payment flows with consumers and all these other things. And so as we've charged down this roadmap, we really gotten to a point where act one is kind of compounding and just getting bigger and better and more and more and more predictable. And we can now really say hey, we have the base layer network now make it truly Amazon like. And that's where you're probably as consumers start to see more stored packages on your doorstep, more stored tracking, more stored delivery promises. Because early on we just had the power and market size and share to say hey, we're just slapping X carrier label on this like anyone else. Well now it's a stored label. I actually have gotten three texts this week from people saying I just got a package from store. This is incredible. And so over the next three, four years we just want to get the business to a place where a consumer will actually be in a cart, see stored either via the delivery promise, the shipping insurance, the post purchase tracking flow where we're in the URL, it's powered by stored at the bottom or on the final delivery label. And they'll say, I trust this brand more as a result. Awesome. I've actually had incredible experiences from stored before and we're starting to see that. Where you can see sometimes reviews on our customers say this was the fastest, best experience I've had. What is stored? I've never seen this. And start to grow. And a stat or two I'd give you is we delivered about 30 million packages last year. This year it should be 50 to 60 million packages. Last year that was 11 and a half percent of unique US households we delivered to. Not 11 and a half percent, if you take the number divided by that. I'm talking unique houses. And also powered about 1% of Black Friday Cyber Monday. And so we are getting to a real increasing scale.

I love it. One of the things I said like when I businesses like this many SaaS businesses right now are at risk of being disrupted by someone just vibe coding like a competitor. You can't vibe code your way to stored. I mean it. No matter how you cut it right, it's going to take someone else, even if they had unlimited money, a long time to build the actual physical network and infrastructure. And that. That's why I think it's such an amazing. I mean once you have that, it is, it is. That's. That's real moat that. That is hard to compete with.

You nailed it. That's an incredibly insightful point. Because early on we wanted a flywheel. We talk about, well, the more volume we get, the lower price, the lower prices, the faster speed, the more trust. But you don't really see that flywheel spin until you actually get pretty far along in 2023 and Ford started flying into where we are truly scaling volume, getting lower prices, getting faster speeds, getting more trust. And over that arc of time, you and I talked about this in a separate conversation. But the industry's kind of ebb and flow and there's been times when like Covid and everyone's having supply chain challenges. Every investor in the world wants businesses like Stork. And there are times like in 2019, right before 2020, when WeWork blew up and no one wanted a thing to do with a business that had anything physical in the name or title anywhere. And so there's all these kind of different periods all the way through today. Over the last 12 years, you saw all this focus on AI and we're saying that's exciting. But if someone could vibe code that product and grow it to X revenue in Three months by themselves, can't anyone else? And all of a sudden you see all this pricing power and margins go down to the right. You see products that were charging $5,000 a month a year ago, charging $50 a month now. And now all of a sudden there's this new shift to, well, what if we actually apply AI to, to traditional businesses? And it's like, oh, well, that is actually our model where we're saying, let's apply vertically integrated technology to industrial assets. Both the complexity of the industrial network and all the software you have to build is the moat inherently as much as the scale is part of the moat. And once you have that, we're one of the best positioned to deploy AI across our full stack to help decide every. Every order routing, every parcel selection, every delivery promise, every labor plan in every fulfillment center. And so you're kind of starting to see this massive new interest come to businesses like us. There's even been a few venture funds launch new funds just designed to acquire existing businesses and infuse AI into them. And we're kind of like, you know, we've been saying that for four or five years now, but glad everyone's catching on. Um, I'm just fusing, but it is very much part of the moat.

Love it. Okay. I want to transition to your, your background. So I said in the intro, you had your first business at 7 years old. Can you talk a little bit about your upbringing? Like, did you grow up with entrepreneurial parents? Did you see that growing up? Is that where it came from? Like, where, where did this, this entrepreneurial spirit come from?

Yeah, it's a good question. And I wouldn't quite call the 7 year old a business. I was making some money. But the answer was we were very lucky in the sense that we traveled a lot one year, we homeschooled one year. And so we were doing online school that year and I'd finish up class and I'd just be browsing the Internet. And it so happened I found ebay. I had some Christmas presents I didn't like. And I quite literally listed two or three of my Christmas presents too, actually, they sold. And then I asked my parents, like, hey, there's this theoretical money in ebay that I don't have a bank account to access. Can you give me some cash and you guys can figure out how to get it to your bank? And he drive me to the post office and they were furious that I didn't ask for their permission. Didn't, didn't. So on and so Forth. But they embraced it and they helped drive me, they helped lean into it. And it started this journey of just buying and selling things on the Internet from, from phones and computers and electronics parts and cases and accessories to then automotive parts all the way through electronics like TVs and more. In the early days before drop shipping was so exploited to the point that it's not even really a thing anymore. It's just, it's too slow, it's too expensive. But I'm talking like 2003 to 2010. I was constantly selling on ebay, Amazon, my own websites. And so long story short, my parents, no, we're not entrepreneurial. My dad worked for a massive telecommunication business for 40 years. From the time he was first job to retired. My mom was in communications and in media. But I think the thing they did the best was say we want to put all dollars we can towards your education and whether that's books, summer classes, things like that, but more of the fun. We want you to help earn yourself and figure out yourself. And that was my way to earn. When I wanted to go buy my first firm, buy my first computer, buy my first car. I started selling and buying the things I wanted to, to get into and to be able to purchase on my own. And they were just supportive. And I think some of it traces back to. It sounds cheesy, but I think about it a lot because I think it is part of this. When I was very young, same age as my favorite show was how it's made. I love just watching these manufacturing processes for how is this microphone made, how is this coffee cup made, who's purchasing it, where is it being sold? And so I constantly, everything I was interacting with, I was asking like, could I build this, could I make this, could I find a manufacturer for this? And my parents were basically before, before I was able to use a title of business development, they were like my front man for being a real adult when I was trying to go purchase something from a manufacturer, meet someone who I had purchased a quantity of inventory from online. This one time I purchased this large lot of cell phone cases off this guy from literally Craigslist. And my dad drove me worried we were about to be killed. And then I went and sold them on ebay. And so it was a. It was not glamorous, not sexy, but I think more than anything, they just embraced it and helped fuel my entrepreneurial passion.

How do they feel now?

I think they're pretty happy now. I'd say that the scariest day for them is probably When I called them and told them I'd be dropping out of Georgia Tech to build the business full time. But at that point I had really built the business as long and far as I could as a student. We had employees, we had just closed our two and a half million dollar seed round, we had customers, I was stepping out of class, constantly answering the phone, answering emails. And we got to a point where I just went to the dean of the business school and the dean of admissions and said, listen, you have been an incredible school, an incredible partner. I have a scholarship, so I really don't want to mess this up, but I kind of have a trade off cost and switching cost of this opportunity is here right now. And I'm always going to regret if I didn't go all in and trying to maximize the success. And they said, your application will come back to our desk. We'd love to have you back if anything changes. And since then I've had the great fortune of giving a commencement speech. I'm on two Georgia Tech boards. Georgia Tech foundation just invested in this round and so I'm incredibly happy and I think my parents are full circle proud of my, my relationship with Georgia Tech and hopefully me.

Where, where does your work ethic come from? Because clearly you have a drive that is somewhere deep down, you know, where does that, what, what drives you? What motivates you this way?

That's a good question. I think it goes back to my parents. My dad grew up in rural South Carolina trailer park. His father never made more than $5,000 in his whole life in a year and had a very hard upbringing. And he started working when he was 18 and worked his way up to be a great leader and a great executive. And from the time I was a young kid, between him and my mother, I just saw such a drive in hunger and work ethic to just. They always gave me a line when I was young that was, I don't care if you are a janitor, be the best floor sweeper anyone's ever met and you will get promoted and you will be a leader eventually. And so I think it was some of that and some of the innate trust and opportunity they gave me just made me have kind of the chip on the shoulder of it's all on me. If I don't succeed, it's not because I didn't have the resources or tools or experiences or education. It's because I didn't try hard enough. And so I think when you, when you have that, you can either abuse it or you can lean into it and say, I want to prove myself and I want to build. And I'm not trying to say, oh I'm so great and I work so hard, but from the, from the earliest days, I just wanted to kind of make it on my own and have a great, great business and was so passionate about getting involved somewhere in the value chain and, and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, I don't know about you, I just find myself like a student of business. I just love learning about businesses, learning about their founding stories, learning about the value they create for customers, learning about how it got started because I find it so fascinating. I think there's not many things you can do to have that level of both agency, but also accountability and kind of the whole man in the arena. Quote I love of as building a company and putting it all on the line.

Yeah, I love that. I mean I tell my kids all the time, like work for me is not work. I don't know, I enjoy, I enjoy it. You know, I actually if getting stuff done and moving things forward. Like I get dopamine hits from like sending emails. People think I'm crazy. I'm like responding to an email with like a good email. I'm like, yes, you know, I feel good. You know, like I don't solving some problem, making some major progress. So no, I get that. It's, it's, it's, it's very interesting. So many of the people I interview, the work ethic, the drive, everything comes from, from usually from seeing that growing up, but not necessarily in like an explicit, you better work really hard, you better. It's just through osmosis, through observing, through, you know, so I always like to ask that question because it's, it's actually as a parent, you know, it's a, it's a good lesson. You know, your kids notice and your kids notice the whole family. You know, I've heard this from a number of people. Not even the grandfather, the great grandfather. You know, the stories of the great grandfather who moved to the US and had, you know, and that sticks with people, you know, for generations.

Yeah. And again, not at all a self inflating like, oh, you should want to be like me. A lot of things you don't want to be like me for. But I get asked the question a lot by people with kids of like, well, how do you get them to be more entrepreneurial? I'm like, I don't think there's anything you can do to make them more entrepreneurial. But I think a Lot of it comes down. And I'm only bringing this up because it applies to employees, too. It's like giving that trust to where it truly is on you. You're not being limited by someone else. And early on, whether it was my parents, like, helping me send letters to CEOs of companies that I wanted to learn from, help making me write thank you cards when I got copies with those people and saying, like, be professional. Show them you care. Show them you're different. I gave that Georgia Tech commencement speech. I brought up a story that when I was like nine years old, my mom helped me write a letter to George Lucas. And he actually wrote back when I was saying, I want to learn how you make these props and where you manufactured these and how you made the mold and so on, because I was just obsessed with making things. And so when you show somebody, hey, I trust you, I'm going to lean in and let you do this. Not because I'm giving. I'm not giving you permission. I'm giving you belief. I think it makes them want to go prove themselves right or prove your belief right and go earn it.

I love that. I really love that last question, Sean. Knowing everything you know today, your entire experience, that's stored, and if you go back and give yourself one piece of advice before you starting the company, what would that piece of advice be?

Move faster. Early on, I think I moved slow, and I think we accelerated over time. And also it all comes down to the payback of your decisions. And so don't get over your skis. I think early on, we were more tempted often to throw more capital at something when it wasn't working as the potential solution. And over time we realized, wait a second, it's when you kind of deconstruct it down to the skinniest base layer and then refine it and make it work and then grow it, that it always works. When it's here and you just try to grow it to solve it, it doesn't work. And that's normally I'm thinking about, like a team. If this function of the business isn't going the way we want, don't just go hire bigger leaders. Don't go hire more and say, well, maybe if I have more sellers, they'll figure it out, say, let me get down to what's really working, and then build the playbook, refine it, and scale it up. So it's kind of like a opposite. One piece of advice is move faster, but the other is only move faster when you're measuring and you know you're laddering on new success, not moving fast just to kind of burn all the ships and hope you make it.

I really sincerely this was like the master class. There's like at least 10 days I want to pull for this conversation and I'm sure people listening learned a lot. So thank you very much for doing this with me. I really appreciate it and, and I look forward to watching what you do over the next three years. I'm pretty sure you'll crush whatever, whatever goals you have on the next three years. So congrats and thank you.

Means a lot. David. Really great to be here. Always looked up to you and like we said, some of your team with David was such an incredible part of our early story. So really full circle and awesome arc to come spend an hour or plus with you on the show.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for everyone listening. I hope you enjoyed if you did. Please share this with your networks and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.