Chris asks co-founder Brendan if they're happy and realizes they've chased growth at any cost, spending profits to scale faster after taking venture advice. They switched into 'venture mode' and lost something that mattered.
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I look at Brendan, I'm like, are you happy? And he's like, no. He's like. He looks at me and he's like, chris, are you happy? I'm like, no. Like, why aren't we happy? Why. Why do we want to rebuild the company? And we realized that, actually, we had a few years before, kind of changed how we were running the business. And we switched to a growth at any cost approach. And that was because we'd gotten so much advice from other entrepreneurs about how we were doing. And everyone I talked to was like, you guys are idiots. Like, you could be growing much faster. You shouldn't be profitable. It's way too early to be profitable, blah, blah, blah. Which is general advice, like venture capital advice. Right. But everyone I talked to said that, and Brett and I started to question ourselves. And so we decided you're. We aren't growing enough. We should be pushing harder. And so we started running negative. And because we'd been profitable for a few years, we'd saved up cash, so we used our own cash. It was like we. It's like we switched into a venture mode.
