From Hedge Funds to $100M+ Startup Founder with Everett Cook of Rho

Ro's mission is actually to make finance frictionless for organizations. It's really about making every interaction that a company or a person working at that company has with their money as seamless and easy as possible.

How do you look at hiring remote versus in-person? Just what do you think about in terms of that?

You would have to pay me double, you know, to not be able to be in an office with other people. Like, I find like being alone in my apartment trying to work, trying to look at a, you know, 13-inch screen as my interaction with other humans, really unfulfilling and also pretty slow as a decision-making process. The regulatory environment had shifted. The notion of sponsor banking, of technology companies partnering with banks to deliver solutions to the market, had been proven out by the consumer companies like Chime. And so there was this window where you could see the market shifting. I went out on a high note. I produced the first hip-hop concert at Lincoln Center with Jay-Z and The Roots.

Wait, what?

We can talk about that later. But probably the biggest thing that differentiates us the most versus some of the other folks Is really our focus and obsession around service. We need to be partnered with a bank that has the most sophisticated capabilities, risk management, and is a bank where our customers would feel great about working with, keeping their funds at if we didn't exist as a brand.

Did you always think you'd be a founder? So, I'm Justin Gordon. Welcome to Just Go Grind. On today's episode, we have Everett Cook, the CEO of Ro. Today's episode is sponsored by Ro, the all-in-one finance platform built for startups and high-growth businesses. With Ro, founders get a single pane of glass that they can use to run and scale their business. Bank accounts, corporate cards, expense management, bill pay automation, and accounting to help them move as fast as they scale. Ro is trusted by thousands of companies from two-person YC startups to brands like Perplexity, Cal.com, Splitwise, and more. The big thing with Ro: every customer has a person at Ro. 24/7 customer support—that's phone, text, email—they will be with you at. every critical milestone in your startup's journey. To learn more about why startups choose Rho, visit rho.co today. That's R-H-O dot C-O today. Everett, welcome to the show.

Thanks, it's great to be here.

I love Rho's story. There's so much to dive into. Let's go to the very beginning though. You have a crazy background to even get to this point. Like, how did you start Rho in the first place?

Sure. Yeah, I mean, it was really falling in love with the problem and spending so far the last 6 years, probably the rest of my life, trying to solve it. I was a hedge fund portfolio manager. I wanted to leave and start a business. I thought I was going to start a consumer business. It was 2017. It seemed like there was interesting stuff to do there at the time. And I got to step 1, which was incorporate that business. Step 2, open a bank account for that business. And I kind of got stuck there. Never started that company, but I started a different one, which was Ro. And it was really solving that problem for people that were like me at that position. At the time, you couldn't open a business bank account online. There were no next-generation credit cards, really. And running a business— small business, big business, didn't matter— meant cobbling together a lot of different tools that really didn't talk to each other very well. And so what I kept asking myself was, like, why is it this way? And really, after a couple of months of thinking about that, what I really uncovered was, well, it's a hard problem to fix. And nobody, at the time anyway, had really tried, or had really tried in a serious way. And there was a third— answer, which was there was a really clear why now. The regulatory environment had shifted. The notion of sponsor banking, of technology companies partnering with banks to deliver solutions to the market, had been proven out by the consumer companies like Chime at a really large scale. And that hadn't happened before. And so there was this window where you could see the market shifting. And we weren't the only people that saw this. Folks like Mercury and other people started around the same time. But you could see that there was a new way to do things, that there was a new opportunity. And as a result, you could be a technology company and truly build tools and products that fundamentally shifted the way that business finances were operated. And so that was 2018. We're 6 years later. We're still very early in our journey, but it's an exciting problem to solve, and it's amazing to work with awesome entrepreneurs.

It's kind of crazy to think back to that it didn't exist, right? Because you think now how ubiquitous like Ro is, for instance, a company like this with business banking online. Oh, great, we have beautiful software that helps it look cool. And back then they didn't. It's like, how was this not a thing? But I always, when I hear your story and know a little bit of the background, How do you switch from investment banking, though, to being like startup founder? Because very different roles, I imagine. Like, take me through that. Even psychology. Where's your mind at the time?

Yeah, it's one of those things where it seems really different. It's actually not that rare a path. So a lot of— well, maybe not a lot of people in finance as a percentage end up in, you know, in building startups and building companies. Yeah. A not insignificant number of founders, especially fintech founders, you know, came from finance. Obviously, fintech is fin plus tech. So, you know, it's pulling from both sides. But a lot of the early fintech founders actually did exactly what I did. I was a math I was a macro portfolio manager for briefly. I was a macro analyst for a long time. And it's really interesting. Folks like Peter Thiel ran a macro fund before and after starting PayPal and becoming a legendary VC.

Yeah.

You know, Mike Cagney, who started SoFi, also ran a fund in the global macro space. There are a number of other folks that actually ended up doing this. And I think it's because there's a similar sort of thought pattern that you have to get good at when you're being an investor, especially a public markets investor, versus when you're being a founder, which is you're trying to understand You know, what is the thing that the market's missing? What is the thing that is not priced? What is the thing that everybody thinks the world is this way and it's actually this way? And you get really good if, you know, if you survive long enough, you get really good at, you know, having an independent view, being prepared to defend that view, and ultimately, you know, seeing things that hopefully other people don't see. But ultimately they do, right? If you're non-consensus forever, you're just wrong.

So eventually.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the world does have to come to your view. So that, plus, like, just thinking about risk and reward, being comfortable with risk, you know, all those things are, I think, good ingredients for an entrepreneur. There are certain things that you don't learn in that space. Like, you don't necessarily learn how to build and manage teams very well. Typically, teams in finance are very small. You, you know, so there's stuff that you definitely— that I've had to learn as a founder, as a CEO, just on my own and by surrounding myself with great people. But I think it's actually more transferable than you think.

Yeah.

The other thing that I, you know, you learn from markets is really Getting comfortable with risk and getting comfortable with sort of the emotional roller coaster of running a company, right? Yeah, I think if you talk to any founder, any CEO, you know they'll tell you it's you know it's highs and lows, you know every other day basically, right? Something great happens, something you know not fun happens, and that's what being a founder is. Elon Musk said it's like chewing glass, right? Well, that's what being a trader is too, right? You know you have to just deal with the fact that the market, you know the market's going to be in your favor sometimes; it's going to be against you sometimes. Hopefully, it's in your favor more than it's against you. But if you get emotionally torn up by that, again, you won't last very long. And so learning how to manage that is actually something that the markets teach you very well. They're pretty ruthless. And so— and that's something that, you know, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, certainly been valuable for me. Did you always think you'd be a founder? I did, yeah. It was— and so that's sort of how I got here. I— when I was really young, I worked for one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, Mike Bloomberg.

Ooh.

And I had the privilege to sort of be in the room with him a lot from age 15 to 19. I didn't do anything important for him, but I was an observer. And that was really transformational for me because I was able to see how entrepreneurship happened at really the highest level, at the best level in the world. And Bloomberg at the time was, I think, like a 5,000-person company maybe. So it was pretty big, right? But it got a lot bigger. But for me, what was incredible was just seeing that this was possible. And I never thought that I would be, you know, anything close to what Mike accomplished. But understanding that he's, you know, he's a human being, right? He's flesh and blood.

Yeah.

He is, you know, it is not— it's not otherworldly, right? It is just fundamentally, you know, have a good idea, get the right people around you, and do it really well. And then, you know, repeat that for You know, 30 years, however long it takes, right?

Yeah.

And you can build something that's really meaningful and that changes lots of people's lives.

Yeah.

So that's what I, you know, what I've tried to do. Again, I'm not, I would never compare myself to him, like, but—

Not yet, not yet, but soon as Ro gets bigger.

No, but I think that for me, it was, there was a moment that really changed my life very early. And again, I was very lucky to have this exposure very early where it was like, wow, you can shape the world. You can really change things. You can build something that doesn't exist if you see something differently, if you have an expectation of, Hey, here's this thing, and it should be— I think it could be better. I think I could do it better. Again, so that stuck with me. I went to work. I worked on Wall Street for 10 years. But I felt like that was missing. I felt like I was sort of selling myself a little bit short. I wasn't able to build something that I felt like had meaningful, enduring value. I loved working in investing, and I was really lucky to work with some incredible people. But, you know, Jan. 1— December 31st goes to Jan. 1. Clock starts over again. Start back at zero.

Yep.

And it was a little bit of Groundhog Day. And so for me, Really trying to you know build something that's going to be around hopefully you know forever is really motivating and exciting.

It's interesting with your journey because I read like Mike Bloomberg's autobiography, and I thought it was phenomenal. And it's like one of the largest private companies in the world. Like Bloomberg is massive, and like even him saying like obviously his work ethic and all of that. But he's saying I still made time for fun on the weekend. I still made time for like doing other things besides work. And like because we're so driven, all these entrepreneurs like he built one of the biggest companies out there for a private company especially, and yet still had some fun with it as well. But then the impact he's made. Has been insane, which is crazy what's possible with entrepreneurship. With as well, so with Bloomberg, so obviously you have that experience, which is phenomenal. You go through kind of as the investment banking world, and you have a big appetite for risk then, and then you're like, start this company. Is this like a one-day decision? Is it like a one-week decision? Is it like two months of thinking about starting this company? Like what was that decision time frame of like, I'm going to start a company, I'm going to solve this problem?

Yeah, so this is something I get asked a lot about people that are thinking about. starting a company, they're thinking about making a career change, and they're trying to figure out what they should do. For me, I always had company ideas. I had a file on my computer, and I would write business— I would always write business plans. And a lot of them ended up getting made by someone else. Someone else saw the same thing and did it, which was cool, but kind of validating. I believe that if I were trying to come up with an idea for a business part-time, on the weekends, at night, while I was doing something else— and again, this is only speaking for me— I was like, it probably is not going to be my best work. And so I sort of treated starting a company like a job. And I was like, okay, I'm going to leave my current job. I'm going to spend 90 days trying to figure out something. And if I think I have the best idea for a product that needs to exist on day 1, I'm not going to actually work on that until day 91. And so giving myself a really clear buffer and then developing, working through developing business plans, working with talking to as many smart entrepreneurs as possible, technologists, people, you know, people building other stuff. That really was, you know, a formative exercise for me because what I saw was that the quality of my thinking, you know, just got better and better. And as I kind of unplugged from this world of being, you know, plugged 24/7 into markets and investing, you know, and moved out to, hey, how am I thinking about, you know, what I want to build for the next 10 years? You were really able to get in a zone where you can, you know, develop really great ideation. And so for me, that was, that was my process.

Yeah.

I did kind of stumble into the idea. But at the same time, I came back to it and was like, okay, of all the things that I've worked on and that I believe are interesting, this is actually probably the most interesting one. And so there's always some luck in that, and you want to, you know, take advantage of that. You want to, you know, be able to embrace luck. But I believe, yeah, it's about just giving yourself time to really let it come to you.

What was that early days like in terms of thinking about a co-founder and how you're gonna actually go about solving this problem and leveraging technology? In banking? Like, what were the early days? What are some of the first things you had to do?

So, so I partnered with Alex, who's my co-founder, early on. He was on the podcast a couple of years ago. And we really set about trying to figure out how to, you know, how to develop the product experience. What is— what are founders, what are CEOs, what are folks that are building companies, what are they actually looking for? And, you know, Alex had a product background. We really thought about it from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. So We started by rethinking like what is you know what is banking? What is money? You know, what are these actually doing? And we came up with this definition, which is we believe that like Ro's mission is actually to make finance frictionless for organizations. So it's not necessarily about building the biggest bank or you know making return on equity, whatever like banks think about their goals. And those are important things. Don't get me wrong. But but it's really about making every interaction that a company or a person working at that company has with their money as seamless and easy as possible, safe too, but ultimately, you know, saving them time, saving them money, and creating a delightful experience for them. So we think about what is finance for us? Definitely, it's the movement and storage of money.

Yeah.

Right? And that's actually a different view than most banks take of it. I talk to banks all the time, right? And they—

Of course.

You know, and I talk to executives at large banks and they have you know, there's usually like a lot of clear, pretty clear division. Hey, I'm in, you know, I'm in the business banking section. I'm in the credit card section. You know, I'm in lending section. For us, we really took a holistic view. We were like, I don't, you know, whether it's a swipe of a credit card or, you know, movement of money via wire, ACH, anything else, like this is just methods of moving money. They shouldn't operate in totally siloed systems. There should be one system and it should ultimately, you know, when you press sync, all those transactions should sync. If I create rules about how those transactions should flow, it should flow through all of them. It shouldn't— I shouldn't have to have 2 sets, one for, you know, one for my credit card, one for my non-credit card spend, right? So that was actually— I didn't think that it was that unique. I thought that was just how the world should work. Turns out that actually was pretty unique because of the way that banks are set up, the companies that build this, right? There's a famous notion called Conway's Law, which is that organizations, the product that organizations create, is reflective of the shape of the organization themselves. And this is really true.

Mm-hmm.

You can see this in any product. If you look at the product, you can almost instinctively understand You know, how that company is set up, and where do they put design, and who reports to who, and who's in charge of what decisions ultimately feeds through the product. And for us, that was true as well. So we try to keep those things consolidated. It doesn't mean companies need to use everything at once, but it means that it's a single system that the more people use of it, the more value they get out of it. Yeah.

One of the things you mentioned, so the frictionless experience, it reminds me of Uber. So Uber, like Travis Kalanick always talked about frictionless. It's everything you wanted, which helped it become— it grew so fast. Everything was frictionless, just like getting it out It's like done, which is so important in that. And like for you in banking, it's the same type of thing. In the early days, though, to even get this thing off the ground, you obviously need banking partners. Yeah. How did you approach that in terms of who you want as a partner? What was the pitch to them? Because you're just this startup, like, yeah, same thing. More of that.

So 2018, there were not many banks that were doing this while it was, you know, we considered it de-risked from a regulatory perspective. Yeah, it was a pretty small industry. It was a little cottage industry in a lot of ways. So we partnered with a small bank. Early on, and then we what we really learned was that hey, we need to be partnered with a bank that has you know the most sophisticated capabilities, risk management, and you know overall like is a bank where our customers would feel great about you know working with keeping their funds at if we didn't exist as a brand, right? Because when a fintech works with the bank, those funds sit at the bank, technically not at the fintech. The fintech is effectively an agent of that bank.

Okay.

So we worked with a small bank to start, and then we moved to Webster Bank, which is a larger bank based in Connecticut. It's about $70 billion in assets. And we're really one of the only fintechs that, that has worked with predominantly large national banks. And there's a lot of reasons why other folks don't. For us, it was like we wanted to really go to the highest bar. We wanted to find a partner that would, you know, do things the right way, make sure that our customers could feel good about that, and, and hold us to a really high bar from a regulatory and compliance standards. That way we always would feel good, you know, in the future. And so that's, that was pretty against the grain in 2020 when we made that move. And it took us a long time. We had to build our own core infrastructure to be able to power that, which took us several years. But ultimately, we feel like we're in a really good place as a result of that. And we feel like our customers should feel like they're, you know, they're in a really good place with us as a result.

It's obviously a two-way street with that, right? Like, you want to find the right partners for you, but they also have to accept you as like, we want to work with Ro. What do you think it was that made him want to work with you?

Yeah, I mean, so at the time when we moved to a larger bank, it was— we had a lot of traction in the market. We were growing really quickly. We were, you know, quickly becoming one of the key brands in the space. Yeah. And also, I think we tried to do things the right way from day one. So it was, you know, building the right team, building a legal and compliance team. We had a chief compliance officer very early, earlier than, you know, we had to. Yeah. And ultimately trying to do things the right way, I think, And being a good partner. And so those are key things. And we always think about, you know, one of our objectives at Ro is to be the best partner in the space. And that's really something that I'm really proud of our team for delivering on, whether that's bank partners, you know, commercial partners, accounting partners, customers. We view these all as partnerships and, you know, relationships that we should be giving first before we receive. And so that's ultimately what we try to do.

And you said you were growing really quickly early on. Like, what was— why? Like, what was fueling that growth in the early days?

So in the early days, you know, we were one of the only games in town, right? So we saw all this pent-up demand because we experienced it. Everybody wanted to— nobody, especially nobody that was like, you know, of sort of the next generation, millennial or, you know, ultimately Gen Z, right? Wanted to go to a branch and wait in line and like deal with this, you know, process that, that felt like it was, you know, 30 years old. You wanted to do this now. I'm starting a company. You know, let's go. And so again, we built Rope for people like me. So I understood the pain point because I experienced it. So I think that there was just a lot of demand. And then we got a little bit lucky because, you know, we launched in October 2019, March 2020, right? The world shuts down. And all of a sudden everybody that, you know, would ask these questions and be like, well, like, don't you want to walk into a branch? And I would always say, no. Why do you want to do that? Definitely not. But, you know, there are a lot of people that were attached to that version of the world. They were suddenly forced to adopt a different version of the world, right? There was no alternative option. Yes, like the large banks tried to put up online portals. You know, it took them a few months, and it was not great. And so there was a, you know, just a meaningful surge of companies that came to us. And so we were really lucky about that. Again, we were able to take, you know, luck is preparedness. I'm misstating the quote, but— Something about luck and preparedness. There you go. Yeah, meets opportunity. Preparedness meets opportunity. So we were prepared. You're there in the game. And we got lucky. And so I think that helped a lot, but overall, I think it was, you know, like we were onto something. There was a lot of demand. There were a lot of other people like me that were frustrated with the current status quo.

Did you know pretty clearly, 'cause you have, obviously you experienced that pain point, did you know who your ICP was gonna be in the early days? Like, okay, we're gonna go after these types of customers, these types of customers. I'm curious about that, especially when like you went to market.

Yeah, we did. We tried to keep it really simple. And so we were based not too far from here in Nolita, New York. Yep. And so we wanted to go after other companies that were in our backyard. So at the time, what was happening in New York, you know, was the rise of all the direct-to-consumer companies. And so, you know, Glossier and Caraway and, you know, all these companies were, you know, a block or two away from us. They were all kind of in one little area. And so we would do events with them. We would try to get to know them. And, and we were trying to build a product for them. So we would talk to them and try to understand where their pain points were. How do we solve them? How do we build a great product for them? So that was where we started. We were just like, hey, like, we want to, you know, whatever is happening here in New York, we want to be supporting and be a part of because it's our backyard. We know this market. I grew up here. I, you know, we're able to be, you know, be the best option for folks in here. And as the market evolved in New York and we evolved with it too. Now we have an office in San Francisco. We have folks, you know, in a lot of different markets. But our, you know, we still try to look at our backyard first. We're like, what's happening around us? How do we make sure that, you know, our products are able to solve problems for those entrepreneurs that are You know, in this great city.

Was that just intuitive to you to do events early on?

It was. I don't know. That's, you know, that's how I always saw things get started. I was— I had a— when I was really young, I started a company that did concerts in New York City. This was my first attempt at entrepreneurship. So, you know, briefly lived, but I went out on a high note. I produced the first hip-hop concert at Lincoln Center with Jay-Z and The Roots.

Wait, what?

We can talk about that later. But, but, but for me, yeah, it was, it was— this is how you get stuff going, right? You just, you figure out how to get people together. You create value through community. And then ultimately you can amplify that through marketing channels. But that's the easiest way to kind of get things going in a market where, you know, people are pretty well networked and are, you know, talking to each other.

That's just like a perfect example of companies being like a reflection of their founder. I think like that community approach, because you have that background, makes so much more sense now because I was always thinking about that and knowing that you did that, I'm like, why? Because everyone doesn't think IRL right away.

Yeah, I think that, I think that it's a mistake. IRL is great. Like, and one of our first hires was the head of community. And she did PR and she did community. And, you know, we would start with just like really easy, fast, you know, I'm at Maman Coffee Shop, come by, you know, if you guys want to chat about e-commerce. Or we would do, you know, events with VCs. Or I think what, you know, being a founder is, can be a lonely journey, and especially in the early days, but really throughout. And so, you know, one of the things you want to be able to do is bring them together and I think this is something that, you know, the older banks like SVB did pretty well back in the day. I think that, you know, the technology side, I think there was a lot of a lot to be desired, but I think this is actually something that that people really valued. And so we try to do that and really just turn it up to ten. I think we're the most active producer of startup events in the ecosystem, at least as far as I'm aware. Yeah, and and it's fun. It's great. You know, our team gets to meet customers every single day. Not only is it great from a business development perspective, but You know, you— there's really no substitute for meeting with a customer face to face. I love talking to founders. I love talking to people that are starting companies. I always, you know, start the conversation with, what are you building? Tell me about it. And for me, it's like I learn so much. I learn so much about what's happening in tech. I learn so much about, you know, what is new, where are people, you know, focusing their efforts. And more importantly, I learn about, you know, what can we do as a financial platform to help them get there, get a little bit further, make things a little bit easier. So when we hear, hey, what's really valuable? Actually, like, bringing us together is pretty valuable too. All right, we want to do more of that. Yeah.

With that context, though, you're growing quickly, 2019, then it's March 2020, COVID hits.

Yeah.

You were doing all these events, you're doing all this in-person stuff. Then what?

So, yeah, the good news was, you know, we had all this stuff coming bound to us. The bad news was, yeah, our kind of key growth strategy sort of stalled out. We tried a lot of stuff. It was— none of them were as good as events. We kind of went back to that after, you know, when the world opened back up. But yeah, we did a lot. We did a lot more content at the time. We still do a lot of content these days, but it was you know it was challenging.

Well, so that shift. So going from events then to you said content. What was that? Was that videos? Was that newsletters? Was that what types of things do you switch to when you're like, "Wait, we can't do our bread and butter," which is events. We have to shift to something else. We have these resources. Like what did that look like?

Yeah, I think at first it was just dealing with inbound demand. So we weren't really doing that much marketing at the beginning of COVID because. We were frankly just like inundated with customers. Yeah. A little bit later it was, yeah, we were doing, you know, more, more written content or long-form content. And then I was doing more media. And then we ultimately, you know, we ultimately continued to develop other channels of growth partnerships. And, and then, you know, the world opened back up and we got back out there.

When the world opened up again, like after that, so you go from in-person event strategy, then COVID hits, you're like, no in-person, then it opens up again. How are you prepared on like the in-person event side? Did you double down again? Or like, what did that look like after?

Yeah, so the period, you know, from COVID to post-COVID was a little rough. I don't know if any of you remember, you know, virtual happy hours and webinars. They weren't nearly as fun. Not very satisfying. I think we did one of those and, you know, called it a day. Like, nah. For— we were really excited when the world opened back up. And we, you know, we started doing events with other companies based here in New York. I remember we did one with Olipop, the soda company. And that felt like the world had just opened back up. And all of a sudden, everybody, especially founders, you know, wanted to be together, wanted to learn about how, you know, how everyone else was doing. And, you know, we got right back on it and kept going. I love it.

No, that's crazy. Like, it just keeps growing from there. One thing I want to talk about with, like, the competitors and, like, where does Ro fit in the landscape? You said when you started, it was like, There wasn't a ton of people out there. There were some that were starting around similar time, but I know from part of your answer before, like you're very customer focused. Yeah. Like how does that manifest? Like why has that always been your focus? And like where does Bro sit in terms of the market?

So I think, you know, I have a lot of respect for the other founders that started companies around the same time. I think we all saw similar things, which was the world is changing. This will be the future. You know, I think we all hope that, you know, we're, you know, the Bank of America, Chase, you know, Wells Fargo, maybe not Wells Fargo, of this industry in the future. For us, we think about, yeah, customer obsession. So we don't spend too much time thinking about our competitors. We spend a lot of time thinking about our customers and what they want and trying to build from there. I think probably the biggest thing that differentiates us the most versus some of the other folks is really our focus and obsession around service. So where most technology companies, I think, view service as something that you should ultimately automate away. And as a result, it's a second-order problem for them or a lower-level problem. For us, it's primary. We believe if you ask people, we've done lots of surveys and we've worked with companies that have done these surveys, you know, what are the main reasons why you would change banks, why you would pick a bank? You know, the 2 reasons are technology and service. I think tech companies get the tech right. I think that the service part they miss. For us, those are neck and neck. You can't have one without the other. So really, we focus on, you know, understanding our customers really well and supporting them throughout their journey, whether they're just getting started or scaling all the way up. We hope that they never have to talk to us. You know, many— most of them don't. But if they want to, there's someone there that's knowledgeable, that's, you know, one click away, one phone call away, 30 seconds, you know, or less in terms of time to response, and ultimately, you know, able to help them get on their way.

What does it look like in terms of just gathering information, getting feedback from your customers? What does it look like? How are you kind of filtering through that to be like, we're going to build this versus this? Obviously, customer service is a huge part of that, but like, where does the gathering of information from customers— how does that process for you guys work?

So it started pretty informally where we would go out to customers and I would have our team pitch customers that we knew we were not going to win. They were too complicated, they were too difficult, and we started just keeping score. Okay, what do they want? Because we didn't have really much of anything at the time. And we started just stack ranking those things that they wanted, prioritizing them, and that helped us inform what are we going to build. As we built more of a product management team, that became much more formalized and structured. And today we do just a tremendous amount of customer research, persona research. You know, we'll look at like, where is our sales team winning? Where are they losing? Why are they losing? You know, where are customers happiest? Where are they, you know, struggling? How do we solve those problems? How do we prioritize them? We We always think about, you know, sort of our 3 key personas as people that are, you know, our product users, our stakeholders. That's the founder of the company, the finance team— that could be the CFO, that could be the controller, could be, you know, the COO, depending on the size of the company— and the accountant. And so that's the 3rd stakeholder, which is not in the company, but is generally using our product to help them run the— close the books. And so we want to make sure that we're making the lives of each 3 of those people easier. They each have slightly different needs. The founder kind of wants to get the account open, up and running, wants to make sure that, you know, it's safe and secure. And ultimately, like, he or she is able to, you know, delegate a lot of the rest of the tasks and then on downward. The CFO or finance person wants one platform that's able to get everything together in one place. When he presses or she presses sync, everything just goes to the accounting platform.

Yeah.

And then the accountant, same thing. They want to be able to close the books efficiently at the end of the month. They don't want to be emailing. They don't want to be collecting receipts. Finance team doesn't want to be collecting receipts either. They just want everything packaged, you know, as pre-coded as possible so that when they're closing the books, they're really checking and maybe doing 5% work as opposed to, you know, 95% work.

Who is Row typically not for? Because like, I know your ICP a little bit, like who's generally not your typical customer? Like, take me through more of that.

Like, so I think that some of the other folks in the market have done a great job at focusing on the large-scale enterprise customers. For us, at least today, that's not our key focus. I think that the needs there are fairly different. It's a really interesting part of the market. There's a lot to do there too. But I think for us, it's, you know, it's companies, you know, less than 1,000 employees. Why is that? The— just the demands become a lot different. I think that banking and cash management becomes less important up there because that generally is tied to the bank where that company is borrowing from. And generally companies that scale are almost always borrowing. In addition, you see global payments, global stuff becoming more important. While we do have global payments, we have global capabilities, we're very US-centric, and all of our companies are based here in the US. And then just the way that the product works is a little bit different. So it's not to say we won't go there, and we do have some clients that are bigger than that today.

Yeah.

But most of our time is spent focused on how do we get you from startup to scale-up to, you know, a couple hundred people. Ro today is about a 220-person organization, right? We run on Ro. We close our books in 2 days at the end of the month. Part of the reason why our SVP of finance joined Ro is he was like, I used this and it helped me run my finance team so much better than before, where I was using a credit card from one company, a bank account from another, you know, and another product from— a bill pay product from another institution.

Are these all like high-growth companies then? Like what, in terms of the type of company you typically work with?

We work with a lot of high-growth companies.

Yeah.

You know, could be venture-backed, could be not venture-backed. Generally speaking, you know, we're looking— we try to put ourselves out there as, like, the best partner for, like, ambitious founders.

Yeah.

So anybody can sign up for Row. There's no subscription fee. There's no bar. There's no minimum revenue requirement. But we think we're the best partner for folks that are, like, in— have a growth mindset. You know, they want to grow the company. Maybe they have 1 employee today. They want to go to 10. They want to go to 100. So, but, you know, we can support companies at all stages, right? We have companies that are, you know, 200 employees that are coming to us today and going to migrate to Realm. But generally speaking, we like to start early and grow with companies. Yeah. Take me through the SVB crisis.

Like when you first hear about it, like just the whole entire thing, like take me through that experience.

Yeah, that was quite a weekend. I remember getting calls on Thursday night being like, you know, from some clients and other folks saying, you know, I think SVB is going to fall, can you open up accounts for us? And we, you know, our team did a phenomenal job, worked basically around the clock for, you know, for 5 days straight to make sure that every account that came through was properly onboarded, was, you know, went through compliance, but was able to, you know, be responded to extremely quickly and get up and running. So we were, you know, we were there to support all of our existing clients that had, you know, that moved some funds over as well as net new clients that were looking for a home then. A lot of those clients stayed with us, which we're really proud of. Yeah. Overall, for us, you know, we think that created a big void in the market that still has not been closed. SVB was, you know, stalwart in the startup community. They, you know, in total had about $375 billion in assets, if you include— or in deposits, if you include off-balance sheet and on-balance sheet. Now, a lot of that is really big companies, but a lot of it is just the startup ecosystem. I think they had about 40% market share, but probably more than that on a dollar volume. So that, I think, that ground is, I think, still up for grabs, you know, 2 years later. And We're all trying to figure out, you know, who is the best product for each sort of customer. But yeah, we're excited to continue to innovate where that void was left.

Other challenges that you face along the way, because like you're going from investment banker working crazy hours in that, I'm sure, to probably startup founder working crazy hours. And in the middle of all of that, it's like figuring out one thing after another from like hiring to product to whatever, all these different things. What have been like the biggest challenges for you as you've built this company the last 7-ish years?

I think learning how to be really good at hiring was something I definitely had to learn. I think early on when I was starting Ro, someone, someone told me, you know, nobody's actually that good at hiring and 60% hit rate is, you know, about as good as you can get. Yeah. And I sort of took that at face value. And I think that was probably— that was wrong. I disagree with that now.

What do you mean? What do you think?

I think you can be really good at hiring. I think you, you know, I think it's a process, and I think it's pretty straightforward. Doesn't mean it's easy. You need to build a great employer brand. First, you need to build a great culture. You need to build a great employer brand. And then you need to be really deliberate, really clear about what is the job, what are the roles of the person trying to solve for. And then I think you need to be really not looking for the all-around great, but looking— or all-around good, right? But looking for, OK, where is this one person this one task, is this person great? And this is the main thing that I'm trying to fill. This is the— I want this job done really well.

Yeah.

This job, not everything. As you start, you get— you start a company, you start with more generalists. You trend towards more specialists over time. The other thing I think I learned was that stage fit really matters a lot from hiring. So folks that have been at a company at a similar stage as you, generally understand more about how another company in that stage would operate than, say, someone that's been in the same industry as you, but at, you know, a company that is like a large public company, let's say. So we're in fintech. Generally speaking, you know, folks that have worked in commercial banking may not be a great fit for Ro. Sometimes they are. And we have some amazing people that work there. So, you know, we definitely like look at every applicant. But from a percentage basis, you know, our hit rate would be higher with someone else that was at a Series B startup That, or C startup that, that may not be exactly in this space. Just the time to ramp, the time to learning is much faster. At least we've experienced. Again, there's talent everywhere. Yeah. And, you know, there's no like one place. And we have a phenomenal recruiting team that looks for people everywhere. But those were learnings that I think that I experienced.

You know, I was just talking to a couple of engineers at a Series B company last night in New York here, and they were saying, and so they are remote. And they were saying they'd have to make 30 to 40% more to be in office. I think it was like 4 days a week, 'cause I was trying to get in their heads, like, what are they thinking about with that? How do you look at hiring remote versus in-person? Just what do you think about in terms of that?

So I think it depends, you know, there's, it's very self-selecting. I think there's some people that, that feel that way. And there are companies that are set up well to support folks like that. My view is the opposite. I want people that want to be in office. You would have to pay me like double, you know, to not be able to be in office with other people. Like I find like being, you know, being alone in my apartment trying to work, trying to look at a, you know, 13-inch screen as my interaction with other humans, you know, really unfulfilling and also like pretty slow as a decision-making process. So we're very big on in-person. We want other people to feel that way as well. It's not for everybody. I completely understand that and respect that there are, you know, many ways to do things. But for us, the only way that I I know how to move really fast is put everybody in the same room and get them on the same page really quickly. That way, we can all kind of sync, make decisions quickly, and move fast. I sit on the floor. We have— our offices are set up like trading floors.

Mm-hmm.

So it's one big room. I'm sort of in the middle of it. And anybody can walk up to me, ask me a question, or my leadership team is sort of right there next to me. And that allows, I think, number one, it reinforces our culture of transparency, and number two, It means that our teams work really well together because you kind of have to. Like, you're 10 feet away from the next person. You're 20 feet away from the next person. Whereas if you're remote, I think it's a lot harder. It's a lot— and you have to put a lot more effort. We have some— we have a handful of folks at Ro that are remote because they are exceptional talent that, frankly, we just can't find in the New York area.

Fair.

Or they're in a market that we're in. And so we're not absolute about it, but we have to work really hard, and those folks have to work really hard to make sure that they're on the same page in a way where if you're just in the same room as people, it happens almost naturally and subconsciously.

Yeah. Now, there's so many debates on that, right? In-person versus remote, like, okay, we're in-person, but like how many days in-person? I have an engineering friend who's like, he's 4-ish days like in-person and it's a whole thing. Like, but like the company's really good, so he loves it. Like that every, so many different opinions on it. There's no right answer. It's just like what fits for your company.

And like, we want, you know, we wanna build a culture and a team and a place of work where people are really excited to be there and they want to be there every day. Yeah. And that's—

well, and also for you, like, you grew through community, like, through events in person. I can't imagine— I can imagine, like, if you did that growth and then you just didn't have an in-office culture, it'd be very strange to be like, we love in-person, we love events, and then we're remote. We never see each other.

Yeah. So again, that may just be me. It works. But that's, you know, that's how I know how to do it.

Yeah, and one thing we had to talk about because you've raised a bunch of money is like you again, you're in finance, so a little bit different in terms of you in that world kind of. But like in terms of raising capital, you hadn't raised money for a venture-backed company before. So like take me through that in terms of what's helpful. I'm thinking about my listeners and my people are going to watch this like who haven't raised capital before. Like yeah, what was helpful for you in that process? Even going from the early stages to then you have metrics and you have growth. It's a little bit different. Take me through that fundraising process for you in row. I guess starting with the first one maybe.

Yeah, sure. Each stage is really different. And at each stage, investors are looking for different things. At seed stage, you know, they're looking for— they're looking for an idea. They're looking for a team. They understand that there's at least a medium probability that idea may shift. So it's more about a market direction and are you able to get the right team around you? Or, you know, magnetic personality. Do you believe that people will follow you? Do you have, you know, enough technical capability either in yourself or with a co-founder where you're able to ultimately You know, make that thing a reality. Do you have a clear vision for what you're going to bring into the world? Right? That's pretty much what seed investors are looking for, at least from my experience. You know, Series A, you want to be able to deliver on traction. You want to be able to show, yes, this is working. You want to be able to demonstrate some revenue. You want to be able to demonstrate that you've, you know, you've built more of a team. Series B, it's really, you know, it's really all about— it's really all about growth. Like, how fast are you growing? You know, and like, how, you know, how efficient is that growth? Is it, you know, Are you like hockey sticking, exploding off the page? If so, it'll be really easy. If not, it'll be hard. Series C, again, more growth. And then as you get later, it's more like unit economics, multiples on revenue, or multiples on gross profit, or multiples on net income ultimately in the very long run. I think that people underestimate a little bit how much of a relationship business VC is. It is a relatively small community. Relationships matter a tremendous amount. You know, being a you know a good participant of that community, right? Being thoughtful, respectful, you know, but also showing up in the way that you want investors to see you, right? Which is like yeah, like you want to you want to be persistent, you want to be focused, you want to be determined. You should expect that most of your answers are going to be no, right? Like statistically, like you only need one yes. So yeah, like just getting used to rejection and then but being really passionate about your idea and also like not asking the market or not asking investors for. permission to build your company, right? And I think that's something that's really important, especially at the very early days, when maybe you're raising seed capital and you don't necessarily have very much to show for it. Maybe, you know, maybe you have a prototype, maybe you have, like, an idea. It can be a trap to go to investors and ask them, well, what would you like to see? Or, you know, ask for permission. Like, you— I think you have to approach it with the mentality of, this is happening, you know, I'm doing— it's happening with or without you. Regardless. I would love you to be part of this journey with me. But, you know, if that's not gonna— if that's not a fit, that's okay. I will make this happen. And that's something that I learned pretty early on, but I made that mistake, you know, at some of our very early first meetings. And it's an easy mistake to make, again, as a very early-stage founder.

Take me through like that first fundraise. Like, that's what I'm most intrigued by because you hadn't raised before. In terms of that raise, was it smooth? Was it like 20 meetings? Was it 50 meetings? Just like roughly take me through like more of that first round of funding because I'd Probably more applicable for most people. I'm curious about that seed fund.

You know, it actually wasn't that many meetings for us at the time. It felt like a lot for me, but now knowing what I know, I'm like, actually, that was— In hindsight, yeah. I think I had it easy in some ways. We met with a number of funds for our seed round. We had raised— we sort of raised a pre-seed round from some angels. We started building a prototype, and we wanted to raise a seed round before we went to market. So we spoke to a number of funds. We really wanted to raise from investors based here in New York. We believed a lot in, you know, back to what you said about community, right? We believed in, like, trying to help build that tech community here in New York. It was pretty nascent at the time. It was 2018. There actually weren't very many VC funds based here. There were a couple, but for the most part, all the funds were on the West Coast. And so we were constantly told, well, you should move to San Francisco if you want to start a company, raise VC capital. Your odds are much better, all that stuff. Statistically, that may be true, but, you know, I love New York and I felt like a real strong connection to the city. I was not going to build my company anywhere else and really wanted to, to work with other, other funds that were here where I could walk down the street and talk to them and meet with them. And so we, we met with a number of funds that specialized in fintech based here in New York. And I was fortunate enough to get reconnected with Alexa von Tobel, who was starting her fund at almost the same time as we were starting Brownstone. And I had known her from my previous life and her previous life and told her about Ro. She had, you know, just sold a fintech company and was starting her new fund. She introduced me to her partner, Mark. We actually got an offer from another fund at the time, but, but really liked Inspired a lot better. And so, you know, we're able to move reasonably quickly. They got what I think is a very good deal. And, and that started it. And then for us, I think after that it was, You know, trying to build great relationships with our existing investors, and then leveraging those relationships to make sure that— to help meet new investors. And so that's, over the past, you know, 6 or so years, how, generally speaking, we've met most of our funds through our previous funds.

One of the things I want to go back to quickly is that angel round. So, like, friends and family angel round, some people raise from, like, 2 people who had money. Like, some people raise from, like, 30, 40 family and friends. Like, the angel, the first capital, literally first capital, what was that? Like, if you could say how much, you don't have to, but I'm curious about that too, and, like, what that was like.

We raised from actually one individual who's like an extremely successful, wealthy tech founder.

Nice.

And he, you know, I think he and his team just really believed in our team and were largely, I think, making a bet on that. I think they understood, you know, we had a general direction. They agreed with our general technology thesis. But that was, you know, that was a big leap of faith. Yeah, for sure. And incredibly grateful for that.

Yeah, no, I love that. That's what happens a bunch. It's like you're betting on the person, especially at that.

Yeah.

You have nothing to really look at anyways. You're just like, oh, Everett. Okay, Alex.

Yeah.

Are we doing this, guys?

Yeah. I mean, no, we look— we had— we did a lot of work. We had, you know, what I thought was a good idea.

Of course.

But I think that, you know, that idea evolved really fast, and we made, you know, a lot of changes to it, you know, within the first 3, 6 months. And I think that they were great.

How does the raising of, like, the debt piece change compared to the equity that you've raised?

So we use debt to fund our credit card warehouse, which ultimately is when you swipe your card, that's ultimately where that lands, right?

Yeah.

We can't fund that on balance sheet because it would, You know, consume all our capital.

Yeah.

That's how credit card companies work, whether you're a technology company like us that is a credit card issuer or whether you're a big bank that does that as well. So that is— it's a little bit different, but it's honestly, it's not about— that's less about like the company and it's just more about, hey, what are the, you know, what's your track record as an issuer? We have a really strong track record from a credit perspective because we do really good work on credit, and we automated a lot of that work, but our team is really talented there. And it's really about that. It's about like, hey, you know, they're trying to understand, are we going to lose— number one, are you going to be able to put that money out there? So do you have a good product that's actually going to be able to, you know, perform in the market? Are we going to lose money? Are you going to, you know, do things that take stupid risk or that ultimately aren't what you're telling us? So there's still a tremendous amount of trust there. We've had great partners there, but in many ways it's a lot more straightforward because it's just, hey, what's your underwriting process? OK, what are your controls? What are your rules for how you do that? How do you think about risk? How do you think about marketing? This is something that we had— we got really good at really early on. I made a sort of opportunistic hire for someone with a credit background. We didn't even have a credit product at the time. And then when we started launching the credit card, he was on our bench, and he was able to hit the ground running. And I knew enough to be dangerous, but wasn't an expert. So the two of us were able to get to market pretty fast.

That wasn't intentional?

Did you know credit was coming, or like, I knew that something was coming, but I wasn't really sure what we were going to do when. And then again, when COVID happened, interest rates went to zero and we were like, hey, like our part of our revenue model just died. And, you know, we— part of our revenue model was making money on interest on deposits. Those would go to the bank. The bank would pay us, you know, a percentage of the difference between what was going out and Fed funds. Yeah. When that went to zero, that stopped. We always had on the whiteboard that we were going to build a credit card, a corporate card, and But we thought it would be a little further out. And so we were like, OK, we've got to pull that right up. I think we launched our card within a couple of months. It was really fast. And then I was surprised at how good it actually got because it's a really hard product to build. But we put our team together, and we really focused on making that awesome. And for 2 years, that was a lot of the focus.

A hard product to build, why? What makes it difficult?

So there's a lot of sort of transactions. There's the customer layer, like it's a product that has a lot of activity, right? Transactions are happening real time throughout the day. There's a lot of customer involvement with that. So the customer experience and UI needs to be good, like the way that you kind of manage issuing. All the little things are really hard. And then you have this like this backend of like, how do you manage all the transaction processing and all the infrastructure associated with that? And so ensuring that you're doing both of those things really well simultaneously is a lot of work. And, you know, it's one of those things where It sounds easy. I'll just launch a credit card. Like, and I think a lot of people adjacent to fintech were like, yeah, we should just launch a credit card. It's like free money. And I think what a lot of those companies have found is like actually becoming really good at this is something that takes years and years of dedication and focus.

Yeah. One of the last things I'm curious about is just for you as a founder, what has helped you learn, grow in your last, you know, 7, 8 years of this journey? What's helped, whether it be books or people that have been mentors for you, like Anything that's helped you learn and grow as a founder, obviously being in the job. But yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think it's you know just approaching life with a growth and learning mindset, right? I'm always trying to talk to people that you know have different perspectives or experiences from me that are building companies that are maybe a step ahead of me or maybe you know a step earlier than me. So really trying to understand. You know, I always whenever I get a chance to talk to other founders, I always ask them how they you know how they run their team, how their companies are structured, stuff like that. That's always. always fascinating to me. I used to read lots of business biographies. I, as a kid, I found that fascinating. I haven't read one in a little bit.

Any favorites?

I don't know. They're all— There's a lot. There is a lot. I really— the one I read recently that stuck in my mind was like the John Malone one, which was who started Cablevision. And it was like, it was telecom entrepreneur. But that was a really cool one because what you see is like all these industries that you think are You know, really sort of stayed like they, you know, at one point they're sort of Wild West and there's someone that, you know, says, I'm going to do this. And there's that. That was a cool one to me because—

Wasn't that Cable Cowboys or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a good one. So, but yeah, I used to read, you know, every one I could get my hands on. It's interesting to see, you know, the entrepreneur journey and just how, you know, how different they are, but also how similar they are. I think, you know, number one, it's just like starting with— most entrepreneurs just start with a small insight and then it grows over time. The second thing is that I think that most, you know, great entrepreneurs that I've observed or seen, you know, they really focus on what works for them. You know, you're not out there making, like, bold proclamations about this is the way that, you know, that, like, all companies should be run.

Yeah.

But what you're saying is, like, this is the way that I want to run my company because I think that it's the best way for us to grow, to build, et cetera. And I think that all, you know, pretty much all companies are a reflection of that founder. the way that he or she thinks, the way that he or she works. And I think that's a good thing. I think CEOs that embrace that tend to do really well, I believe. I'm not an expert on this. I think that folks that are trying to be someone else, like, oh, I want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and I'm going to model my life after him. Or even my early example, right? Like Mike Bloomberg. We're very different people. I'm not trying to model my life after him. Right. I think that's probably the most apparent common thread through all that is, you know, just understanding yourself and setting yourself up for success. And that allows your company to be set up for success, right?

Yeah, there's so many just unlocks learning from history. Like, you're taking bits and pieces from these founders and applying them to you given your situation, like your focus, your problem you're trying to solve. But you can learn from a Bloomberg, from a John Malone, from all these other great entrepreneurs, and then carry that into like how you want to run your company. Obviously, it's your decision, right? Like how you do it. But that Wasn't there another book? I think it was like The Art of Learning. Is that one you also like?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's one of my favorites.

Dan's book.

Right. So he was a chess prodigy and he really learned, you know, the book was great because it was like the title. It's about how he sort of learned how to learn, how he learned how to, you know, acquire new skills and ultimately become a champion chess player. Right. And then teach other people how to become a champion chess player. And I'm not a, I'm not a great chess player. I was okay when I was Yeah. But I didn't keep it up. But for me, it was just fascinating about how you can truly— your perspective on the world really influences the way that you absorb information and the way that you absorb the way that things are. And I think that most people, because it's very easy to do, accept the world for what it is today. And it's very hard to think about different configurations of the world in 1 year, in 2 years, in 5 years. It's easy to just assume that the status quo is the status quo. But if you think about, if you just go back and you think about the last five years, and you think about all the change that's happened in the world, you know it would be unimaginable like at that time. And I think that's that's really probably the best thing that you know whether you're like as an entrepreneur, I think you need to keep in mind as an investor too, frankly, is just how you know how fast the world changes. It feels like it's static. You walk outside, it's going to feel like you know the same as if it was you know. 10 years ago, but it's, you know, it's moving so quickly. It is very malleable. Things that you think or that we think are, you know, are, you know, impermanent are really not. And so that forces you to be creative, right?

Yeah.

You have to kind of like really think critically about like, okay, well, you know, if this moves, this can move. And again, that was— that is global macro investing too. That is like, how do you understand and stay 2 steps ahead of markets. And, but it's also tech, right? Yeah. Okay. If, you know, if ChatGPT and LLMs are going to evolve at this pace, what does that unlock here and here? If you go back in time, like Google, when they launched Gmail, it was a lot of people thought they were crazy. They're like, you're giving away, I think it was like a gigabyte of free storage at the time. And that was their hook. They were like gigabyte free storage when at the time there was Hotmail. that had, you know, I don't know, much less, 50 megs or something like that. And then there were maybe premium services where you had to pay for storage like that. And they, you know, it was not profitable, at least on paper, but they did the math and they were like, look, like the cost of storage is just gonna fall and we're just gonna make a bet on that.

Yeah.

And we're in a similar moment today, right? Where it's like the cost of compute is gonna fall. The, you know, the power of large language models is only gonna increase. And, you know, I think good or great founders are making, or You know, are making bets on that. It's like, okay, like this product may not be, you know, where it is, where it needs to be today, but I know that's gonna shift. You know, if you look at like all the no-code tools, right? Like, are the— they're like, they're cool. They're fun to play with. You know, products like Cursor and Windsurf, I think, are doing much better than the no-code products because the no-code products are really not there yet in terms of like being able to, you know, truly build end-to-end in a way that's like not endlessly aggravating.

That's true.

But you can see where it's going. And I think that those, the founders that run those companies completely understand that and say, look, and understand that, hey, this is where the world is gonna be. And this is where the foundational models are gonna be in 6 months, 9 months, 12 months. And so you understand that, okay, this is really just a bet on the future and it's probably a good bet.

And to your point, it's like, if it's gonna be that way, well then what does that mean for us in the future? Totally. If we know it's going this direction and a couple things you mentioned, I wanna highlight the art of learning. First of all, it's like learning how to learn. That meta skill is so important because the world is changing so fast, especially with AI and everything. And the thing about mentioning about like, being malleable. Like, that's like a Steve Jobs quote around like, the world's a very malleable place. Yeah, like you can build it, you can shape it, you can change it, which is always very inspiring to me as like an entrepreneur. It's like, yeah, oh, it just— it is— it can be adjusted though. You can create new things, you can build new stuff. And the other piece of it just being like the show Billions, how it's like they're moving the chessboard all across it with like all different ways, like Chuck and him are going back and forth, is like always reminds me of this in entrepreneurship. It's like, oh yeah, there's like so much strategy behind it. Like, if you know where it's going Well, then what are we doing? Like, what's Ro doing? Because you know where AI might be going is so fascinating.

Yeah, we have a good bet, right?

Like, you have a good bet. Yes, of course. Where's the best place for people to learn more about Ro, all that you guys are up to?

Yeah, so rho.co. The H, you know, sneaks up on people sometimes. It does. @RhoBusiness on Twitter. Perfect. And, you know, stop by one of our events. Go to ro.co, see what we're doing.

And you're hosting tons of events. I've seen them. They're phenomenal. Thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you for having me.