A 10 Point Checklist To Use When You Sell Your Company: Live at SaaStr Workshop Wednesday:

And then, yeah, as I said, David, you'll see there's a bunch of both people and AI note-takers in here now.

Right.

People got to join throughout. But yeah, I'll, I'll let you guys take it away in just a second. So you are now live.

Right.

Welcome everyone to Workshop Wednesday. We'll give folks a minute, folks that are joining on Zoom, Twitter, X, LinkedIn, the Facebook, all of it. But we have a great session today. David Frankel, managing partner of Founder Collective. Founder Collective is probably one of the most jaw-dropping successful seed funds that maybe has a slightly lower profile than folks that shout from the roof every day on social media. So we'll chat about that. Incredible, incredible companies from The Trade Desk to Olo to Coupang to like just, just, uh, uh, and I want to briefly talk about David, about investing. But, um, you know, the other day, a couple weeks ago, he wrote something on Twitter, uh, on a niche topic. It is a niche topic, but it's so important to founders. And he wrote up his 10-point checklist on what to use when you sell your company. And I thought in all the years I've been doing this, it was the best thing I've seen on M&A. On selling your company, the best thing. And we do a bunch of this on, on SaaStr. Recently we had, uh, the head of corporate development from Own, which Salesforce bought for $1.9 billion, saying what it was like on the other side. He'd done, keep on buying companies and he finally got bought and it was so different after 20 years of corp dev. He couldn't believe what it was like on the other side. We've done a lot of sessions at SaaStr Annual. It is a niche topic. It is a topic that as founders you don't have to obsess about every hour. But I liked his checklist so much, I put together a SaaStr post on it with my learnings because I wanted you to dust this off, dust this off when you get that email, when you get that call. And I want everyone to know just enough about this to be smart, right? And the reality is, look, we've had 5 IPOs in B2B since 2021. So if you're gonna have an exit someday, it's probably gonna be M&A, right, David?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Jason, thanks so much for noticing that post and for having me alongside. I, you know, you're— I've been reading your stuff for years, right? You're truly, you're a SaaS legend. And, you know, there are very few VCs who for so many years have been like teachers, not bankers. And I count you amongst them. So it's a great pleasure to be here with you.

Yes. And tell us just I'll tell you, listen, I've been following the partners at Founder Collective since I started to get on social media. The deal that made my jaw fall off for founders was the Trade Desk, though, on this slide. There's some— I mean, these are some good ones, right? We can talk about— we can talk about Uber and Coupang and all these, but the Trade Desk, from both a founder and a VC perspective, is the gem we all dream of, basically. 1.5 rounds led by you guys and IA both owning 20%. Harder to do today, right? Harder to do today. And that was about all the company needed. I know it had a slightly rough quarter, but basically like 38 straight quarters of execution worth tens of billions of dollars today. That's like in its own way, it's like one of the greatest VC investments of all time, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, it is all credit to Eric Paley, my founding partner, and, uh, who's like one of the most humble, brilliant people you've ever met, right? I think you know Eric. And, you know, it's, he stuck with it. I mean, Trade Desk, we broke the rules. We wrote a significant initial check, but then they were out of money and there was no money. And like we were committed. Fund 1 was a literally zero reserve fund. We were, you know, there was no follow-on, zero. Like when we said we were seed and pre-seed, That's exactly it. And we had no choice. And, you know, rearview mirror, I mean, Eric, it's just mind-blowing. Eric was on the board of The Trade Desk till about, I think about a year and a half ago, 2 years ago. We owned roughly 12% at IPO. And frankly, going into this topic, you know, Trade Desk is one of the reasons, like, I think we're gonna talk about selling companies, but the, you know, the disclaimer is I hate selling. I hate selling anything actually.

Yeah.

I look in the rearview mirror and I go, everything I've sold pretty much has been a mistake. So I'm a contrarian, but, you know, I've been through enough sales processes to try to figure out what works and what doesn't if you're in that process. But Eric, you know, I have the most amazing partners. I mean, Eric did Uber, The Trade Desk, and Whoop. You know, not on this, but our new spate, Micah did Vacada, which, you know, just got a huge valuation and is the winning company in that space.

Yeah.

So obvious, but so hard to execute. So, um, between them and what Amanda's doing and Joe, yeah, I feel, I feel like the luckiest, the, the luckiest partner on the planet. That's for sure.

Pretty lucky. So I wanna talk about M&A, but before you fast forward us to today on Founder Collective, two things. Tell us your average check size today. I know average is tough.

Yeah.

The, the ideal moment in time, the average moment in time you invest, right? At seed. And then three, objectively, why are you in so many winners?

Yeah. Well, thank you. On the— I'll channel Eric on the last question, and then I'll go back. Is, you know, how many winners— I remember one of our LPs leaning across the table at one of our annual meetings at the dinner saying to Eric, how did you know on Uber? And Eric, without missing a beat, going, I didn't know. I didn't know. I had equal hopes for the one before and the one after. I would say we index tremendously on founders, on the who. We do the same thing that we've been doing almost since 2009, and I've been doing it for my whole career. My, my first business was an ISP that had significant cash flow, and I started without even calling it seed and angel and venture investing. That's what I was doing in my early 20s. And, you know, having made enough really dumb mistakes, what you learn over and over again is the who matters hugely, the what actually matters. But, you know, if you get the who wrong, you kick yourself all day long. And sometimes you get the who right and you get the what wrong, but you don't kick yourself as much. And if you're lucky enough, you get to try again. We do more or less the same thing. Our check sizes have changed with the environment, but we typically won't write a check much below $400,000 now, and we'll write up to $3 million. It's still seed. Seed is this very, very vast continuum. So we are right from literally an idea and someone we love to, you know, a few $100,000 in ARR. Even valuation doesn't define us as much as the beginning. And I would say more than, more than the financial outcomes. And you could say a lot of people have cottoned on to investing at the lowest price per share. So that's, but the journey and vicariously being on these journeys with these amazing founders is the drug. And I would say for my partners and me, that's what keeps us passionately interested in the next one. And the minute that goes, you know, I'm outta here.

All right. Let me ask you about, to frame the discussion, and then let's go through the 10 points that you made. You said something that I have in the last 18 months I've changed my mind on, which is a little bit I've got, or at least I would say like many things I've gotten more gray than black and white, which is that all the ones that you sold, you wish they didn't sell, right? You've seen— and I'm going to assume the reason why is you saw that growth go later, right? You saw— I mean, part of the reason SaaS was written is I had these regrets of selling. I sold the business at $1 million a month growing 100%, with 110% NRR that was cash flow positive. You would never sell a business like that today, right? And I saw it even while its market share declined, still grow to $250 million, even neglected, right? That's the power of recurring revenue, right? From $12 to $250. But what I learned, I've learned a lot of lessons from the 2021 boom, right? And I also learned some of them should have taken the offer.

Yeah, yeah.

Some of them should have taken the offer, right?

Yeah. We've all got those, right? Like, you know, I was involved in TrialPay. Terry Angelos, who became the head of FinTech at Visa, Alex Rampal, who runs one of their main funds at a16z, fantastic founders. You know, PayPal offered them $500 million and the Goldman bankers were like, not enough. You know, they waited another, I don't know, 3, 4 years until Visa bought them for, you know, at least, you know, half of that. So we've all got those stories. I think market timing is incredibly difficult. And just, you know, to your point, like overcoming the initial inertia, making the mistakes, galvanizing a team and having this team where you trust each other and you believe in each other's competence and you keep on growing, it's very hard to get paid for that growth. And then even if your growth has kind of flattened out, but you've got some kind of sightlines to the next inflection.

Yeah.

You know, to me, I often advise founders like, take a 3-week break, and if you need more, take 2 months, take a sabbatical, come back. Because so often, You know, folks are just too tired. They're tired or they're, I don't know, they're bored, they're not energized enough. And it's just easy to stare down what you have and totally, totally take it for granted. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. It used to be, when I started the SaaSers app, I would track a lot of M&A back then. And I found that so much M&A happened around year 5 because that's, you start to get really tired after 4 years and then a decent offer comes in around 5 and it's enough. Like it's more— sometimes it's more on an absolute, quietly on an absolute basis than you need as a founder. Forget about the VC side. Right. And a lot— and in fact, there is a very well-known VC firm that a few years ago had a practice to buy founders around 5 years. They actually went in tactically, a multibillion-dollar VC fund that kind of had a PE-like element, and they would try to buy out at year 5 was their magic moment because it's PE.

It's fantastic PE fodder. I mean, look, the obvious tactic, and we use this a lot, is just encourage the founders in, particularly if it's a, you know, particularly valuable round, is just take 10% off the table, right? Like, de-risk yourself, take pressure off yourself. But I listen to you and I think, you know, in my very first business in my early 20s, my partners and I were offered $5 million by Sprint to buy the business. So grateful we said no. You know, Olo, PayPal offer to buy the business. You know, PayPal came in and made a $100 million offer and literally it was like Christmas and that deal fell through. Noah and I were very disappointed. I remember like the 29th of December, they offered to invest $5 million at $100 million. We took the money, we bought them out pre-IPO. But, you know, you look back and you go, the favors that were done to us, like when it's like these things fell through and we were left to continue to accrete. And in these accretive growth situations, if nothing else, and it plays into our discussion to be had now, is think of that as an alternative. Think of the worst alternative is you keep on growing and owning your fantastic business.

Yes, I think so. I think for what it's worth, then let's get into your points. My only nuances today are one, and I just went through this with the founder that had a similar Olo type deal, much bigger, but just went through it. And I asked him this. I said, I boiled it down to them. I said, listen, I'm going to be How badly do you want it? Like, because the IPO— I'm going to simplify the IPO bar today as 50% growth at $500 million. Okay. Now, that's not a billion-dollar IPO. That's a much bigger IPO. If you're all in on that, if you can smell it, if you can taste it, if you can feel it, say no. Right. But if you're not sure, take a couple of weeks, to your point, and maybe take the deal. Like, if you— I know it's hard. That's just my nuance because The outcomes are bigger, but the bar is higher. And I want you to want it, right? You got to want it because I just think— and the other thing in the age, I believe in this recurring revenue, it's called SaaS, right? But I think we're in an age now where AI is fueling so many competitors that if you don't want it badly enough, you're going to fall behind in a way you didn't used to. I believe you're going to fall behind, right?

I think there's always that risk. I think the flip side is some of these SaaS businesses are best positioned to use AI to kind of enrich their customers' experience and to go off in another direction. Regal is an interesting, you know, business of ours. It's, you know, it's a call center as a service. And now, you know, if you look at like Agentic AI and literally voice agents, right? And that is the call option. But, um, but, you know, to, to one of your earlier points, like, we look at what founders want to do all day long. And if our founders say we want to sell and we think those are really coherent and good reasons, right? Like you have no choice. But often there is an investor on the cap table that's been there for a long time and their model, it's like the tail wagging the dog here. Their model is they need to see some liquidity for the next fund. So they're often very problematic reasons in, in, in, but that, but they get us to the point where if you're gonna sell, well then like I think there is a checklist and I think there is a way of optimizing that.

Yeah, it was. Now, wanting to get into the checklist, you know, one of the many mistakes I made as a founder in M&A, and I think it would be— I don't know if it would be different today. I think it would be different today is I was scared of my VCs. I wasn't scared of my VCs. My first startup, I had years of runway. My second startup, we went cash flow positive at $5 million. So I wasn't scared of the VCs in the sense that I had to listen to their edicts, but I was scared. They would block any M&A. I was scared that they would narrow my options. I was scared they would say no to everything. And it clouded my way of thinking about it in ways it shouldn't have, right? That there is this VC mantra that if the founders want to sell, you should sell, right? And I think founders should find out if it's true. Maybe they should ask if they're worried.

Yeah. And I think the different incentives play a lot, right? Because The— I have this view is if you're growing and you just keep growing, right? Like, really keep growing and see where this thing goes. But again, you know, there are other timetables at play and founders get tired. You know, we've all been through it. Founders get really tired. And then they also have people around them. They have CFOs, they have CEOs who are saying it could be time, who see that big check. And sometimes, like, the mistake we make is we take pressure out of the system by giving the founders some kind of liquidity, but we don't think enough about the rest of the team. And then the team's playing on the founder. So, you know, even that growth, even that nonstop growth comes at a price, and you're lucky to have it. Uh, but, but I've seen most of the situations I've been in, and I regret so many situations that I've sold in. Media Radar is a great example. New York-based, one of the biggest, uh, media sales SaaS businesses. Todd Kreiselmann, is, you know, it got time for some of the investors. And, you know, Bain— Scott Friend was in that with us, and Bain had been in it for many years, had been very patient. And at some point they're going, it's time. And I think that's where many VC funds, many investors don't have the ability structurally to go, I'm going to keep, keep this going. Right. So in a Fund 1 or a Fund 2, like, we can do that all day long. We can say, look, we provided a lot of liquidity to our LPs. They'll trust us in these situations. And frankly, there've been situations where we've thought of, we've done it less than we thought of it, but is, uh, of just rolling, just rolling with the next set of investors. Yeah.

Let me ask, uh, let me ask you a nerdy inside baseball question on that. Then let's get to our 10. But I, because I think it is helpful for founders. In fact, I'm still trying to, I'm learning, right? You're an early stage investor, you're doing a seed investor. It can be the average time to IPO now is about 12 years, but it's probably gonna be longer in many cases, right? If you're truly like an inception pre- VC investor. So let's imagine you've got— and funds legally are structured around 10 to 12 years. Okay, so you're 16 years to an IPO, 2 years to distributing, so that's 18 years. Let's assume you make the investment in the third year of the fund, you're 21 years out into the fund, and you want to hold, right? We'll look at— we'll look at the HubSpots and the Shopifys that grew. For just so founders know, how does that work mechanically? How can you hold an investment for 20 years as a VC, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're totally up against this. Fund 1 was a 10-year fund. We did, you know, so we did Uber and SeatGeek in the same year, 2010. So we, so, and I was on the board of SeatGeek until about 2 years ago. The, and that's still, we have not sold a single share that's in our Fund 1. So you're way past your extension period.

Yeah.

You know, you, I think you're seeing more seed funds that have a 12-year initial term with 2 extension periods. But to your point, right, like you're at this for a very long time and forget, you know, with your winners, the obvious answer is there's been a more active secondary, you know, secondary market, particularly for companies that are doing really well. And it's almost like a leading indicator when the secondary market for one of your companies hots up, you know, there's something about to happen. So if I think of Shield AI, Verkada, I can mention both because they've both announced—

Super hot right now. Yeah, super hot.

Yeah, but you always saw the secondary, like the secondary interest from the usual suspects, like hotting up a lot 3 months before those deals.

I see.

Right? And you had insiders clearly wanting to buy ahead of those announcements. So there is some kind of market in that, but I would say that's for the hottest companies.

Yeah.

You know, 90% of the companies in the portfolio, right? It's less liquid. Than that. But your point's absolutely right. The holding period, the length of this for your good companies and the fund terms, there's definitely a mismatch.

Sounds like you're still learning. Even with all your winners, we still don't have all the answers here, right? For venture, right? Oh yeah, totally.

By the way, I wrote the first check for Olo. I wrote the first two checks and then participated with the third check for Olo coming up 20 years ago, 2005. Right. Haven't sold a share, you know, for better and for worse. Right. Like if you took the totally utilitarian view of, you know, 2021 when, you know, at that point. But, but it's not financial. Like, I've, you know, I've held on to that. And, you know, the, the other situation is, you know, there's just SeatGeek. We haven't sold at all.

Right. Yes.

We believe in the company. Tremendously. So, you know, I think patience is a huge virtue, but, you know, real understanding that it's a luxurious position to be in with patience because it means that you've distributed to your LPs and they're in a patient position as well. You're under less pressure. So you see a lot of newer fund managers just having to get some kind of wins on the board. In order to justify raising the next fund.

Yeah. Well, I guess the interest— maybe we can summarize this and get into it, but I think the interesting— my takeaway is that oddly today, it may be your seed investors that, that will have the, the fewest internal pressures for you to sell. It may actually be the Bains or the late-stage folks that have put in large checks that maybe in some cases are hoping for liquidity in 3 to 5 years. And oddly enough, oddly enough, your seed investors who may be well beyond the length of their fund one way or another can be your most patient investors sometimes, right? It's a little, it's a little, there is a, there can in some deals, at least it can be counterintuitive how that works, right?

I don't know. That could be, you know, one hopes that that is again, less pressure on the entrepreneurs, on the founders. And there's no question seed is the longest stage by far. But I look at like some of these late stage investors, private equity in our, in our businesses. And, you know, the proximity to markets and what the market's doing matters a lot. So I think there's been a lot of pent-up hope for more M&A, more IPOs coming now. And, you know, if you look at the market moves in the last kind of 2 weeks or so, it's getting— feels jittery again. But certainly we entered '25 with a lot of hope for more M&A and IPO activity. Let's see. Let's see what happens.

Hope so. Yeah, let's, um, okay, so let's, this is the checklist again on SaaStr. I wrote up all of David's points and then I added a few anecdotes on it on this post. We'll keep it live and we'll add this video to it. So, so, uh, come back and check this forever, whenever, whenever, whenever, whenever, whenever you get into MA, this 10-point checklist and we'll, we'll keep updating it. I, I, I would like it to be a canonical piece of content to help founders. This first one, so let's go through 'em. Um, And folks, if we'll— I'll try— we've got 10 points, but we'll try to add some time for questions. So add them to the chat and the Zoom and the other windows. But this, this one is— takes a while to understand. Understand buyer motivations, know what they're buying. Um, do a little bit more of a deep dive here. What do you— in practice, what have you seen?

Yeah, so I think you really do have to understand, and It comes from listening and speaking and engaging with buyers. And yep, hopefully what you've had the opportunity to do is have those conversations before the moment where you say my company is for sale. So you actually know what you're gonna plug there. And I do think that if you have this luxury, you've got to tailor your pitch for those different buyers. So, you know, an example, could be Amazon Pullpack, where really I think what Amazon was ultimately interested in was the software system. You know, we thought that the packaging, the robotic packaging and the delivery mechanism was like incredibly novel. And it was. But the reality was Amazon could replicate that and make it better in a heartbeat. Like that wasn't what they needed. But the spaghetti between the providers and the insurers and the PBMs, so the pharmacy benefit managers, actually making that system coherent and making it work with multiple stakeholders, that was a huge, huge, huge software effort. And that's what— and it is Amazon Pharmacy today. It's literally based on that pill pack code. Getting that right— and we kind of always looked at that as this was just an enabler. The real business was what the consumer saw in the consumer packaging and messaging, and we had to get that right. But the— yeah, and that was what was— what Amazon was interested in. Yeah. So tailoring and understanding that makes a huge difference. In some cases, you know, you need to look at your people and go, it's very difficult to put this team together. What they're actually doing is, is they're interested in us for an acquihire. And these can be very expensive acquihires. You know, you look at like the Google character, deal, right? Like off, off the charts, off the charts. Yeah. It's a, it's, it's very difficult to put this group of 5, 6, 10, 20 people together and that's what they're interested in. Understanding that motivation well, I think is a step change, right? Because, because you're, you then have the emotional intelligence to understand what's their willingness to pay, how aligned are we. If they're looking this as a cheap acquihire and we think, you know, we want this as a multiple of our revenues, We're totally mismatched. And I think that's how, particularly in larger situations when you hire bankers, that's how you keep the bankers honest. And that sounds almost negative. That's how you work with the bankers. That's how you empower the bankers. And that's how you become a kind of team that gets to the finish line. But understanding what each acquirer— because typically there are multiple acquirers. You know, there could be people who value you from a fintech perspective. There could be people who value you from a SaaS perspective. There could be companies who view their lineup as boring. Right? And we've got a pet food company. And we've got Mars and General Mills as investors, a high-end cat food business called Smalls. And they're investors because they're watching the space. It's like, how do they charge what they charge for fresh cat food? Right? And could that be a differentiator in our lineup? You're talking about the two largest pet manufacturers in the world. But understanding why they invested and what they're interested in matters, right? So comes down to listening.

I think it's listening, asking, and you know, one little tell I just was thinking live in the meetings I've been at, watch who they bring to the early meetings. If they drag a very technical leader, right? It's a sign, right? It's a sign, right? If they bring a GM of the business unit or something, they're gonna care about your revenue. right? If they bring the CTO to your tech, like who they bring, because they want to socialize the deal or get opinions or decide, right? And when I'm looking back, that extra person in the back of the room has been very telling on which of they, what they want to buy here, right?

Yeah. And then some of it's, sometimes it's more obvious than other times. Like we've been involved, we were involved in a company, we sold it at the end of last year. And there's a, hugely PE-funded roll-up, you know, game, and they're rolling companies up. And fundamentally, they're going, look, we think that we provide a better platform for what you do, and we can give more leverage than you can, than you can do in the, in the market. They fundamentally believe that. And, you know, we had a PE investor with us, PSG, great, great, great folks, and they literally sold into that roll-up because they believe in that roll-up as well. So there were different motivations on the cap table there. Founders kind of got involved to some degree in the roll-up. You know, earlier investors took cash, but it all worked out quite well. But, you know, if you'd said, look, we can do a 10 times better job of like levering what we have than you can, that, you know, you would have committed suicide straight away. So I would say that was a more obvious situation. But like really understanding the motivations of your buyer, what is your buyer trying to do? What is their thesis? How do you play into their thesis matters?

Yeah, a lot. I think the key takeaway here is, is align, align the pitch to what, which of these three they really want, right? And, uh, so often, you know, we, we, we, we, the, the, the, the short-term revenue of the target is immaterial to the acquirer, right? What is Amazon doing in revenue today? It doesn't matter who they buy. Yeah, right. Your revenue may matter, you know, the further you are on the P spectrum, probably the more important revenue is, but whatever it is, you got to listen, right? It's, it's often different than we think.

Right. And even understanding, okay, so what are the buyers' alternatives to you as a target? Right? Like, and could someone be a better fit? So understanding your dynamics and your desirability matters too. And that's, by the way, that goes to trying to build something that is distinctive, that has a moat for all the reasons that you should build anyway. But certainly that stares you in the face when you're looking at, at, at M&A.

Yeah. This one's the next one. Um, share the story, fully commit to the process. Uh, selling's highly distracting. Don't proceed unless you're all in. I do think you have to take baby steps to learn, right? There is a line, right? Where it's not that one meeting is not a huge distraction, is it? Um, but sh— share your learnings here.

Yeah. So, so just in fairness, this is size and a, a this is size dependent, right? So, you know, some of what I will say is when you've got a CEO that has a really, really good C-suite that's built out and that CEO is, you know, is not frontline selling and they've got a fantastic COO and CFO, then it's easier to commit to a process, right? It's easier to spend time on a process. If you're in year 3 and you're still, it's still like founder-led sales and you don't have your team built out as much, then the, um, then, then the cost of the distraction can be that much higher. But it's even like fundraising is, I see people kind of taking one meeting, taking one meeting, and then, and then, you know, one fund says they're interested, but you never had any other funds involved. And that just takes on a life of its own.

Yeah.

Like any process, think hard about whether you want to go. And if you do want to go, understand that it's going to take time. Some of the best fundraisers I've seen say, I'm gonna effectively take 3 weeks off my business and I'm gonna raise this round. Well, M&A, you, you've put so much time and effort into building your company, into putting this team together, energizing the team, you name it, every aspect of building. And yet, you know, you're gonna half-ass your sales process, like arguably one of the most important things in your life. And, uh, I see it done. So I think the fact is it's not just the founders that have to be fully committed and aligned and in agreement, but it's your top people, your top people. And there's, there's a balancing act here between how many people know about it and leaks. But your top, you know, arguably your CFO, your COO, your top people who are going to be involved in diligence need to be committed, need to put time aside. And, and need to drive that process. Otherwise, you're doing yourself an enormous disservice. And these processes take tremendous time.

Yeah. It's funny. Recently, I've found, maybe you haven't seen it, but I, there, there are culture and tech continues to evolve in many ways. Right? But there are certainly pockets that are more transparent than in the past. And I find folks immediately tell the whole company about this sort of stuff and immediately engage them. Probably good, but so distracting, right? It can be.

It's, uh, that, that has, that has a whole bunch of other problems. And I think we'll, we'll talk about them. But the fact is, if it's like people are dreaming about that house or that car, like, this thing takes on a life of its own and you're defaulting to what we talked about at the beginning of you got a great business. Your business is growing. Your business is accreting. You've got, like, particularly you see this in enterprise SaaS. You've got, very tightly connected. It's a— in great SaaS companies, it's harder and harder to leave. Right? And even this dream of, well, the AI will just, like, sweep it all up and put it into a different system. Easier said than done. Right? Like, these are— you've got sticky customers. It's accreting. I know— I know there is churn, and, you know, we— we can get into all of these discussions. But ultimately, if you've got a business that's working, At some point, your alternative of, you know what, I'm just not seeing offers that I like, and this is just not the right moment, um, of going back to saying we're just going to run the business— that alternative certainly degrades more and more as people are just so excited about this. And I, I have seen many companies sold at the end in suboptimal situations because the team was just so into it by then. Yeah, you overshared.

It's complete. Yeah, this one I put up if folks want to watch. I interviewed Ben Chestnut at SaaS right after they sold Mailchimp to $12 billion to Intuit. Right. And to learn, you know, there are actually a lot of learnings, but one is they had a deal before that that fell apart and it almost destroyed the team. He said, going to your point, it really resonated, almost destroyed the team. They thought this deal was going to happen. It consumed a year, right? And then the deal with Intuit took a full year. It took a full year, right, to happen right from the beginning to end. So that's 2 years on this journey. And, and it was just burned into them how much that first one falling apart almost just wrecked the team. It was so distracting. Right. And then it didn't happen. So, you know, smaller deals don't all— they can take 2 years, actually. Right. One-on-one. But it is— it was— I mean, this happens all the time, versions of it.

Yeah. You know, there are many reasons also that are outside of the team, right? That those fall apart. Many reasons. I mean, if you look at like the Amazon iRobot, that was a regulatory reason last year that that fell apart. But wow, you know, that has— it's not— hasn't destroyed the company, but wow, that has been a huge, huge value loss situation with people leaving the, you know, the drumming into the people who are involved in that sales process, like, forget even creating competition. Our other alternative is we just say this was not the right time and we're gonna continue to grow this business and we're gonna, you know, you've got customers have to believe that as well. So you have to go, look, we tried, you know, we, we had some very interesting inbound. It was tough not to, like, take it seriously. And Yeah, we just figured out this was— it's really easier said than done, this. Like, you know it, I know it. Like, the team gets so into it, it's just tough to pull out. And by the way, the worst-case scenario of that is there's one buyer, and that one buyer at that point knows, right? Just knows that they have no competition, that the team is fully into it, the main stakeholders or the VCs. And at that point, particularly if it's a financial buyer, not a strategic buyer, Right? They go into their mode, which is, you know, let's, let's buy this company. Let, but let's buy this for the least possible amount. And, you know, they've got you on the hook.

They do. You know, another related point, and then let's, let's hit the next one, is, um, brings up to your point is what, what, what I, what you don't fully realize until you've been on the other side, until I was a VP at Adobe or saw a few times is, um, on Fully Committed is almost every corporation, even at the CEO level, the priorities change every year. So you talked about deals falling apart for regulatory like OBRA. You know, another reason deals falls apart, the SVP leaves or is fired. That's actually a top reason for like sub-billion-dollar deals is the head of the business unit retires or is kicked out or is fired. All of a sudden that's not on the— it's not on his or her priority list, right? And even if the CEO changes, it's even if the CEO changes, right?

I so grok with that. I so grok with that. You know, the Yeah. We, we've seen that time and time again. The, exactly the point actually, the CEO, like the CEO was being fired and the board knew, but you go like, what's wrong with me? Right? And in the rearview mirror, you see the CEO is being fired. Or you go, why were, so we, we put up a, a satellite with Intelsat. This is in another lifetime. We own 25%. Intelsat owns 75%. They just like the, the leadership who we thought were pretty great there. We dealt with the COO all the time. They just like put the screws on this partnership all day long. And, you know, 6 months after you've exited, you go like, what was going on there? And they just said, look, you know, we had our new PE investors, the level of pressure that was being put on us on every single project. And you don't know about that. So at some point you've got to remember that as well. Remember that there are facts and circumstances that are extraneous to your little deal. right, in inverted commas, your world, right, that you don't have a handle on. And, you know, maybe that in itself is a reason to say, take a moment here, uh, and, and pull out. I've seen competition where we had very, very good competition in a deal. It was down to two, uh, and, you know, the, the, the, the company that was— that desired the, the acquisition more dropped out completely. And exactly as you said, you know, SVP was fired, the sponsor's gone, gone. It's just like, you know, you're, you're not your time.

Yeah, I had a weird one not too long ago. And then let's go on where, and this happens less often than people think, out of the blue, this public company wanted to buy this company for about almost, for about $150 million out of the blue, like just out of nowhere. And it, they were insistent, right? And, and the founders were like, well, we have this, just to be clear, we have this issue, we have this challenge. They're like, no, no, no, we're, we're all in, we just need a couple weeks. What's the price? 100? Fine. And it turned out then they went dark right after this. And it turned out this public company got acquired shortly thereafter, and they were looking for another asset because they were shopping themselves. It's the most extreme example I've seen recently, right? Where, uh, but they needed— they wanted another tentpole as they were shopping themselves. Who knew they were selling themselves, right? It's, it's like, it's like a meta version of this whole process.

We have a saying at Founder Collective, and when the partners are talking to each other through a deal process and, you know, the term sheet's been signed, uh, we have a saying, many a slip between the cup and the lip.

Yeah, for sure.

And, and some of it's for your own reasons, right? Uh, you know, for reasons that you can manage, and a lot of the time it's extraneous. By the way, again, like, you know, what can you manage? Well, building a great business, right? Building an efficient business, building a business that is you know, much more about like resources. Scott Belsky at— I love parroting Scott, Chief Product Officer at Adobe— goes, you know, resources are like protein and, you know, cash is like carbs. And there's been too much cash, right?

Yeah.

But building a business that is efficient and lean and resourceful and, you know, all the things we know, like delivers a great product for your customers that your customers don't want to leave, makes you more and more unassailable, and makes that asset better. Eric talks about assets versus businesses and talks about— and, you know, in Trade Desk and Uber, there's a point at which this is an asset, not a business, because it's just so hard to replicate that business. And I think, again, that plays into the earlier conversation of do you really understand the value of what you've built and how hard it is to build that again? Because maybe that's the take a 3-week vacation and come back and really look carefully at what you've built. But it's also, you know, or am I, you know, because of AI, because of new waves, am I actually more of a business? Am I more commoditized than I think I am? Right? Now, it's tough to know these things. And ultimately, the energy of the founder and the founding team should trump that. Does the founder just want to keep going and accrete?

Right.

Great. Like, let's not sell and let's manage our other shareholders. Let's manage the VC funds and the PE, you know, who need exits. And let's try to figure out a way where everybody gets a bit of what they want.

Yeah, for sure. Okay. Manage team expectations. We probably hit this one before. Is it as simple as make— manage their— don't let them start planning their new Tesla or beach homes or anything actual beyond that?

It's a bit of many a slip between the cup and the lip. Like, this is a 3%. Like, just because we're going into play doesn't mean we'll get it done. Doesn't mean we'll get it done now. And the default is you have a job at a company that is, you know, hopefully doing well. Again, if you've got a company that is not doing well, that is not growing, that is not meeting your expectations, your funders' expectations, your market expectations, then then you've got a different situation on your hands. Right? You know, and, and it's in the context of this conversation, I guess it's not fair not to mention that side of the spectrum. But over there, probably the expectation to manage is like, this is gonna be very hard to sell. This is gonna be very hard to sell other than as an acquihire because we've taken a lot of money. We, we unfortunately, we've made some mistakes. And we don't deserve much more than that. So either way, being open and honest and aligned with your top stakeholders can save you a tremendous amount of time.

Yeah, for sure. I think looking back, one of the simplest things to do with the broader team is just to say, listen, we're, we're, we're, we're doing this in large part to learn, right? Don't take it too seriously. Be, be, be 90% honest. Don't, don't share these two things over here. But, don't take it too seriously either, right? Odds that's happening are very low. We're here to learn. As, as long as that there's a lot of truth in that, I think it's helpful messaging, right?

Yeah, I listened to that. I guess a little bit of my pushback is, you know, we hire bankers for $100 million exits often because we think they professionalize the process and it's like good cop, bad cop and testimonial marketing about the business. Once you've hired a banker and you've committed, it's like, it gets tougher to say we're only here to—

Once you've hired a banker, the process has, uh, I want to hit that before I run out of time because I'm with you for any deal, even approaching $100 million, you should hire a banker, right? You always pay for itself. I think always I found and I don't want to do it out of order. It was one of my top 10 mistakes as a founder. If you don't hire a banker, even if they don't get you another offer, which they probably don't, even if they don't get you another deal, even if they don't negotiate better than you could, they take the pressure off of you as a founder so you don't have to be the bad guy. That alone makes everybody more money.

Yeah.

Someone's got to say, no, that's a bad deal. No, we don't want to do that term. Right.

I would say I'm with you. It increases the chances of, like, getting to the finish line. And sometimes it's, you know, and everyone thinking of selling their company should look at this carefully. But, you know, James Kim at Catalyst had sold multiple businesses, or at least, I don't know, 2 or 3 businesses to Amazon. And, you know, he has their trust and respect.

Yeah.

You know, relationship with buyer matters as well. Like, you're buying that as well. Just your chances of getting to the finish line are accelerated for sure.

Yeah. The only exception— I know we're out of order, but I think it's okay. The only exception I've found to this banker rule, and I've written this so many times, hire a bank. One of the earliest Astro posts, if you sell your company, hire a banker, right? Huge mistake I made, um, the second time. The one nuance I found over the years is when the CEOs know each other. Now you can push back on this, right? But there are times when there is a deep level of trust between the two CEOs and the CEO reaches out to someone they've known for years and says, you know, David, I want to buy your startup. Okay. I know the last round was at $100 million. I'd like to do $150 million. And you say, no, no, Jason M. Lemkin, it's got to be at least 3 times the last round, $300 million. And you kind of get get there quickly is trust. I've found folks bring in a banker into that, and I've seen several deals fall apart because all of a sudden greed slips into a trust and it breaks the trust. I don't think it's going to break the $10 billion deal to change the company, but when the CEO doesn't have to do the deal, when they don't have to and they reach out to a friend and they muck it up, the friendship kind of gets broke. I know these are business friendships, but I've seen this happen twice. Where the banker mucked up a CEO-to-CEO deal. The only exception.

Yeah. Look, the, what you're articulating is rare. It happens for sure. Uh, you know, someone was pursuing that company, someone was strategically interested in the target for a very long time. Yeah. Uh, and it's like unequivocal and you get to an arrangement that works for both sides. I've definitely seen that. Even in that situation, some kind of intermediary to professionalize and get it. It could be good lawyers, right? It could be like great, you know, lawyers on both sides. But particularly if the buyer has a successful and experienced M&A team. So again, this is size dependent. Then you're up against an M&A team that's been there, done that a lot, and you're doing your first rodeo to do that without— and I agree, it can be, you know, deal-savvy lawyers, professionalizing it is tougher. I've seen bankers and VCs generally help get that to the finish line.

For sure. I'm with you. You need that leverage. I've just seen the banker. I've seen there this, you know, this trust thing just get broken by bankers recycling, starting the process over again as their job. And the CEO being like, you know what, David, I got 3 other things to get done this quarter.

Okay.

Like, I got AI, I got this. It's like you took something that I thought you could solve my problem. Problem by me buying your company. Now you're turning into part of the problem, right? It's, uh, the one thing I'll say, I wanna get your other points is I did, we did this deep dive with Brian Halligan a couple months ago on our podcast, founder of HubSpot. And we got into M&A, uh, unexpectedly, right? And the track we went down is founders way underestimate how big a deal it is for an acquirer. It's so much work. It's so distracting. It's years of commitment. Forget about the money. The money often doesn't matter. It really, we could talk about accounting for M&A, but up to a point, it doesn't even matter, the accounting, right? You can either defer it as goodwill or write it off for when your grandchildren are born, right? It's the soft costs and the years of commitment that make M&A like really risky for a lot of companies, right? VCs and founders don't even think about it this way.

You mentioned, you catalyze so many thoughts. The one thing is, you know, rewinding was agency risk. So the banker either wants to just get the deal done because something more lucrative has come along, or, you know, in parallel, the other thing that they had as almost stock, right, like, be— hots up, and you're here, you've got less of their attention. Agencies. Buyer motivation can be, you know, the buyer has a huge, huge PE, right? So people have forgotten about multiples, but there was a time where, you know, if you had like a raging multiple and you could use cheap currency, which was your stock price, right? Like, you know, that's understanding that buyer motivation. Or you've got a buyer that's like, I don't know, billions of free cash flow a year, right? And you know, you're reasonably small in that. There are buyers that, um, where the strategic fit is perfect, right? The strategic fit on paper is perfect, but you know, they've done very little acquisitions. They've done very few acquisitions. They're, you know, they've got their own mojo in terms of their product market fit. They're growing like going gangbusters, but, you know, they're not, uh, M&A fit. There is so many. And then your point, the last point you made, is, you know, buyer reputation. Someone goes, oh my God, like, my reputation at this company is going to be based on that acquisition, right? And I'm getting cold feet. This is where, again, like, the chances of getting it done— yeah, people should know the chances of getting these things done are low. They're tough.

They are tough, right? Thinking about it, if I had to distill some of this advice in a different way, and let's talk about financial leverage. Just remember when you do have M&A discussions with companies, you're, you're being bought to solve a problem. The problem might be a feature gap. The problem might be I got 3 years behind. The problem might be I'm gonna miss the quarter. The problem might be, it might be a positive problem, but I want to use leverage on my model to combine 2 companies. But You're like, the advantage to M&A is it's a quick fix to a problem, a flawed fit, an often flawed fix. And, you know, hair on, hair on it. But like, you can— an executive or CEO in a matter of weeks can solve a problem that otherwise would take years or maybe impossible to solve. Right? So if you want to get acquired, be the solution. Like, now, don't listen. Be the solution. Listen and then figure out what problem you want to solve. And sell yourself as the solution.

Yeah. And you're also back to build versus buy, right? As a founder, you know, my, my CTO would want to build everything, right? Like if it was, you know, everything, right? And we learned a lot of that the hard way. And I had a wonderful CTO. They were such a fantastic partner, but we learned, we learned it the hard way. So who you pitch to matters. The CTO is like, The build versus buy is ever present, right? Someone there is going, you know what, we could build it, but it's just gonna take way, way too long. And meantime, we're losing market share to XYZ competitor. But, you know, if you're pitching to the engineering team, still, typically, they'll go, they will underestimate what you have built and go, we could build that.

For sure.

Every single situation. So, again, who you're pitching to, if you've got a banker, bankers tend to know this. But when you're trying to do it yourself, right, you're up against all of those acquirer team dynamics. Let us do this. You know, take us 6 months to build that.

Yeah. The only insight tip I'd add to that, um, is when you hear from the company, when a, when a potential buyer says build, buy, or partner, right? That's usually internal, uh, code word for we're thinking about buying, but we're not quite there yet, but we're pretty close. Like they're not really thinking about build or partner, or they'd be partnering, or they would've already partnered with you, or they'd be building, right? It doesn't mean they wanna buy you, but when you hear that, realize they've started, that it's somewhat serious. It's some, it may not be you, it may be someone else, but they're somewhat serious. Yeah.

Jason M. Lemkin: Jason, I think we can move forward on this. Like, I agree massively with you. Like, you run out of money and you just run out of leverage.

Yes.

Yeah.

You run out. I mean, 9 months would be nice, right? I guess the reminder to founders is buyers smell that you may already made the point. They smell it. They ask, they can smell you running out of money, right? They can smell it out of your pores. Even if you hide it, they'll still smell it before you share it, right? They know, they know, right?

And I think, uh, smart investors know. Smart investors know, just give the company a note, give the company some breathing room, because that's the best way. If you're all committed to a sales process, just make sure that they have some kind of balance sheet. Otherwise, you're like committing suicide as an investor. Yeah.

We hit the M&A banker. We had unanimous agreement on this, right? If nothing else, negotiation's great. Prevent mistakes, but give you a buffer. You got to have this buffer, right? Let's tie it into this one.

It's like, why would I, you know, why would it— it's like just having a professional, having someone who does this all day long, got to have it. So much experience has made so many mistakes. Like, why not have that?

Got to have it. You've got to have it. And okay, I want to just— I want to— well, we will run out of time, but there's a couple I want to get some of. We already have, but secure multiple bidders. I think this is maybe even more nuanced than it looks, but share your learnings here. Competition drives better terms. Aim for more suitors. What are your learnings here?

First thing that I find is you hire a banker and the banker kind of says, you know, the pitch is, you know, here are 6 potential buyers. Like, you're meaningful to all of them. And then, you know, as time goes by, like, they nail down and they go like, you know, 3 of those said not interested at all. 2 said, you know, come back to us, timing's not good. And, you know, a few months down the line, what you find, you've got one, one buyer.

Yeah.

And I'd say that is a decision point because it's— because if you carry on at that stage, right, like, you have very little leverage. At some point or another, that buyer later on in the process— and again, we've seen this with financial sponsors, you know, their job is to know that they are the only buyer. Their job is to go back and go, you know, this is not what you represented. Their job, like, particularly when you've got— it's a smaller acquisition, you've got junior people on this— there is a lot of, uh, extrinsic stuff going on where that person shaving money off the deal is looking better and better to their partners and to their associates. So there comes a decision there where I think the thing to do with the bank is to go, we're just not there, pull out at this point. Now, again, your earlier point, you've got to have cash, you've got to have managed the process, you've got to manage your stakeholders because my even saying that to some people who've done this many times will sound like crazy. You go like, You know, you've committed to a process, you can't back out. That's when, you know, what kind of company do you have? Do you have a company that is like running out of money and you have no choice here? Do you have a company that is like breakeven, but everybody's like lost, lost their energy? Or do you actually have a company that's making some money that is growing and you can afford to say, screw it? You know, like, you know, we'll come back from this, will take us time, but Lack of competition to me is hugely problematic.

Yeah. The one sort of insider tip I've learned over the years, um, that's actionable is, look, it would be great if you magically had 7 offers to buy your company, right? And could run a process, but you, like, you need at least another one in flight. And what I mean is, this is another advantage of a banker, okay? What, what I didn't fully get until I was the other side, until I saw at Adobe how it worked on the other side, right? Is M&A goes into modes. Okay. And mode 1 is it's up to me. I have, I'm kicking the tires. I have 3 months, I have 6 months, I have 12 months. I'm gonna meet the founders. I'm gonna take my time. VCs are, are the same.

Okay.

When you tell, especially a corporate development team, that there's another offer, they don't freak out. No matter what they say, they just go into a different mode. They go into deal mode. When you have a banker, they go into banker mode. And when you have another offer and A big company might take 9 months to look at an M&A offer, just like a VC would if they could sometimes, right? Give me— take a couple months. But when you tell them there's another offer, or there really is, they literally can get it done in a tenth the time and it minimizes the games on pricing, right? Faster and less games. So get another deal. And now maybe that deal will never close in time. That's the problem. I rarely see the second offer or the third being super firm. There's just not enough time usually, but it has to be out there and it has to be honest. Right. And then they will go into deal mode. But without it, like, everyone wants more time, right? And everyone wants to talk through this stuff. It's just natural.

You know, sometimes you luck into these, like, one of the luckiest moments was we were quite far down the road on Amazon and TJ Parker and James Kim at Catalyst were leading this, uh, with the sale of PillPack to Amazon. And I go to my 20th business school reunion and a founder that I backed, it hadn't worked out well at all. It was a company called Get Me— sorry, it was Bragster, a guy, Bertrand Bodson. Bertrand became the chief digital officer at Novartis. And literally at the end of the night, like, he is leaning against the one door. I can see this. And I go up to him. I kind of go out of the very noisy hall. And what are you up to? What do you— and, and I mentioned PillPack and his, like, eyes, just the way he looks at me changes. And he— and anyway, cut a long story short, the next day he says to me, we want to buy PillPack. Like, we really want to buy PillPack and introduce him into the process with James, with TJ. Fact is that they were very late, right? Like, they— and, and Amazon was underway. But the fact that we knew, and, and there were other potential buyers, But, you know, the, the, the, the Walmart was a potential buyer, but that had gone quiet. And, you know, I think Amazon kind of knew that. But suddenly we go back to Amazon with renewed, like, it wasn't a price difference, but we go, they go like, these are the 5 things, cross that out, cross that out, cross that out, cross that out and go, it's not happening. Right? It's just not happening. The, what that competition gives you. In terms of saying, like, I will get the terms that I want, which is not something we've spoken much about. We've spoken a lot about price, but I'll get the terms that I want. Competition maintains that tension. Now, again, the other form of competition is we just keep growing the business. That is actually a bidder, right? Tough as it is, and people listening to this go like, that's just not reality. But that is a form of competition.

It is. It's a great one. And it's the, it's the best one, right, to get the deal up. But if you're going to your first point and we can wrap it up on Let It Grow, going to your first one, if you do commit, having that Novartis, man, it just, it takes so much friction out of that because it doesn't need to take this long. And those 5 issues don't really matter. And you don't need to meet another 100 people, but it will happen naturally. It will happen naturally. Right.

And that's back to those 5 issues was back to your agency risk point. You've got some lawyer trying to prove that they're super smart and trying to like make their client feel good. And lawyers kill deals as well because a lot of the time, like the buyer can't say no to the lawyer depending on the sophistication of the buyer, right? Like they get totally seduced by the legal terms going like, yeah, well, like, why not? I've got to ask for that, right? And it depends on the strength of the target as to whether you can rebuff that or not.

All right. Last one, 'cause we, we, we are up over time, which is fine. It's our show, but let it grow. I picked two, I guess I think I got this slide a little wrong, but Shopify and HubSpot both IPO'd at just under $1 billion, right? Shopify today worth $143 billion when I did this. HubSpot worth $38 billion, right? When your point is keep going if you have good metrics and good unit economics, but when do you know if you have a Shopify or HubSpot? It's easy to bang your chest. When do you know?

And this is the rare air, but I, you know, with a huge hat tip to Eric, I look back at, again, at Uber, Trade Desk in our portfolio. I was lucky enough to meet Bong Kim as he dropped out of HBS. And there's so much of that rather be lucky than be smart. But if you'd said to me in that moment, Coupang will be worth $60 billion at some point—

Yeah, Coupang's a great one. Yeah.

No, no, no. So the answer is it's a roller coaster all the way. And we've seen situations where post-IPO, you look at this and you go, wow, this feels pretty fully valued. Uh, you know, Trade Desk is like 25x or whatever it is, 20x since IPO. Coupang, you know, came out at a pretty hefty valuation in, uh, you know what it was like Q1 2021. There was a lot of exuberance in the air then. And so you look at it, you look at these companies and there's moments in time where you go, this is, this is very well valued. Look, the other problem as an investor is You see everybody else's bright, shiny hood, and you go like, they're amazing, right? But you know what's going on under your hood. So you always kind of, you know, undervalue your situation because you just know, you know, all the tough stuff, particularly if you're a founder and you've like, you're dealing with all the problems. It's an easy way to undervalue. But I don't know, you know, Jason, I think there is a moment where it's like, this is becoming very hard to compete with. Atrades today, you know, Eric's not on the board. I'm still a shareholder, but we're not insiders.

Massive network effects there.

Yeah. Even post the correction, like Atrades is just hard to start from the beginning. I remember a multi-billionaire coming to me post-selling the ISP, coming to me and the team saying, you know, let's start again, right? Let's start it again. And I was like, give me half a billion dollars, right? Because that's what it's going to take to take on the telcos. Right today. Otherwise, like, I'm not starting this again. But you— so there's a moment when you're in the rarest of air, right? And even then, like, I look at insider trading and I go, it's like the whole market thinks that they know. Now, there are clearly egregious issues with that, but a lot of the time the insiders are like, you know, they're high on their own BS as well. Right? I don't know. I, you, you may have more wisdom and insight than I do on this. I think there is escape velocity at a point, but I think a lot of the time pre-IPO, you're not entirely sure. And, you know, you always run the risk of that inflection that's just about to come, you know, that customer that you've worked on for 5 years that you don't know, this is the positive side, is about to say yes. Right? Or, you know, that like product that, you know, everybody thought would be okay and just like hits pay dirt. Yeah. That's the risk in selling.

It is.

Yeah.

I think maybe we can wrap up. I think if you have a great team and you're gaining share, maybe never sell. If you have a great team and are gaining share, if your team isn't great, be honest. Like there's a great team out there, especially today. And if you're losing share, you can gain it back later. But easier said than done. Make sure you're committed to gaining share back because founders will see a decline in market share before VCs can see it, before anyone can see it. You'll smell it. You'll go walk into that deal and you'll start losing deals, but you're still growing at 100% or 80% or 200%. You'll smell it and it can be turned around, but only with a great team, I think. Right? A mediocre team can still ride a wave. But I think great team, gaining market share, never sell. But those are the— maybe we can wrap it up. Those are my things to be honest about. Do you have a great team and are you gaining share? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, David, this was great. I know we went long. Thanks for everyone. We went a little out of order. I think we got our 10. And watch this, read this and everything. When you go to sell your company, maybe go long, get a banker, be thoughtful and have, have another offer. These are some of our big takeaways. But this was great. Thanks again for all the time.

Thanks so much. What fun. Thank you.