Rob Walling Discusses Innovative Growth Paths for Startups

Thank you so much. That is literally the first standing ovation I've ever received. So thank you for the warm welcome. Came here all the way down from Minneapolis, and it's good to be received by that welcome, as well as the lovely weather that I brought with me. Apologies for that. So, yeah, it's my first time to Sioux Falls. Great to meet everybody. I feel very welcome here and I want to thank Nick for the intro and Tim and Matt Paulson for the invite to come out. Speaking. So I'm going to talk about a couple things today. It's basically, my talk's in three parts. I've bootstrapped every company that I've started or that I've. Yeah, every company that I've started. And it wasn't until we started Tiny Seed, which is the accelerator that Nick was mentioning, that I had to, you know, get into raising funding. And so I'm. I'm a few years into kind of learning the ropes around that. But today, you know, I like to make really good use of my own time. And so anytime I'm going to read a book, listen to a podcast, come to a talk like this, I think to myself, what am I going to get out of the next, say, 22 and a half minutes if my timing's on. And so today, what I hope to leave you with is three things. One, how to use a clicker so that it works. And you got to do that. All right, so the first is bootstrapping. I'm going to talk a little bit about my journey to give you context, because I find whenever I hear someone talk or give advice, if I don't know what context they're coming from. If a venture capitalist who wants only unicorns says you should always go after trillion dollar markets, but I just want to make 200 grand a year, then I probably shouldn't take his advice. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story and hopefully entertain along the way. And the next thing is talk a little bit about the changing landscape of venture, venture funding specifically, and what I've seen happening over the past, let's say about 10 to 15 years, really, since Y Combinator started. And then the last thing is this concept of alternative funding. Now, the title of my talk originally was indie funding, but there are like five terms for the same thing. Alternative funding, indie funding, alt vc, alt funding, second wave funding. I've heard all of those used interchangeably for the same thing. So it's. If you're wondering what indie funding or alternative funding is, I'm calling them the same. And that really is this thing between bootstrapping and venture alternative funding. So we'll get into that towards the end. But to kick us off, I wasn't gonna include this slide. This is a slide that I run my own event called microconf. It's for self funded startups and most of the speakers, something that's really kind of a meme that's evolved around that is why we do what we do. And from day one, I didn't start companies to get rich. I didn't start companies to have power. I didn't start companies to achieve amazing things and make a dent in the universe. None of that was important, was important to me was that I could spend more time with these folks and then I could be at my kids cello, you know, recital during the day and then I could spend time with my family as they were growing up. So this is my why and you know, hopefully that leads well into this. And you know, I actually appreciated Mark's perspective who just got the award and that's actually what inspired me to put this back into the prezi here. So let's dive into bootstrapping a little bit. I want to tell you. This is me back in 2006 and the kid, the oldest kid in that prior pick with the glasses, that's him there, that's me being a programmer. He was about six months old and I wanted nothing more than to not work for other people. So I'd been a programmer for years. I was a consultant. I was making really good money for someone who I grew up. My dad was an electrician. I was an electrician for two years out of college. I was making as a contractor writing code, 100 grand. I'm sorry, 120. $150 an hour. It was mind blowing to me. It was more than my parents had ever made. But I hated it. It didn't matter. The money didn't matter. I hated the day to day work. I didn't own anything. I didn't have purpose. I didn't have that purpose that you have when you're a founder who owns something that you care a lot about. And so I wanted to start my own company and I'm a software developer. So I thought what do people do when they have these skills? What kind of company can. And everywhere I looked the media was saying, raise funding, raise venture funding. You look at Elon Musk, you look at, you know, these are all from around that time actually about 2007, 2008 but it was 100 hottest startups. No one was talking about a single founder packing away in a garage and making 100 grand a year, 150 grand a year, but not working for anyone. That's all I wanted. But I had never heard anyone even talk about that. So I went down this path in 2007. My wife, she's a psychologist now. She spoke at 1 million cups here a couple months ago, actually, Sherry Walling, if you remember her. And she had just gotten her Ph.D. and we moved to New Haven, Connecticut for her residency. And while I was there, it was a pretty tough year actually. And I wanted to transition from coding during the day, making good money and I wanted to own my own thing. So my life at that point, I had this 18 month old child who you saw earlier when he was only about six months old. I was making the primary salary for everybody. I was consulting quite a bit, not too much. My wife was working quite a bit as an intern. And I literally had about five to seven hours a week of free time. So if I were to look at this objectively, what I should have done is started a nice little side project, learned some skills, stair stepped my way up, done some bootstrapping, made a couple grand, made a little more, you know, just stair stepped my way up. There was no way I should have been going out and raising funding given my life circumstances. And I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, where I wasn't going to be able to raise a big round. So instead of being smart, I looked at the press and I said, you know what? You know where it's at? It's, it's at Y combinator. This is 2007. It's like the third class. And so I found two Yale MBAs. I was a developer and we applied to Y Combinator and tried to get in. We got to the second or the third round. We eventually didn't, you know, it didn't come through for us. The thing was, is if it had, it may have been like, in retrospect, it may have been catastrophic to my marriage. I would have moved to Boston, Austin. I would have left my wife in New Haven for three months and I would have. And they gave you $6,000. So I'd have had two grand a month to live on. I would have had savings. But it was, it was just a bad idea. And yet, you know why I did it? Because no one else was talking about alternatives. And that's what I've taken with me over this past. That's 2007, past 12 years. Is we need more alternatives for people who are in my shoes and for folks who are in. In rural north and South Dakota, like, the more alternatives we have, the better. Interesting thing is I spent about a year with these two MBAs. We applied to Y Combinator, we tried to get angel funding, we did a bunch of stuff. And on the side I had this little app. It was invoicing software. This is before SaaS, really. There was like two SaaS apps that I knew about, but it is invoicing software you could download on your own web server and you could invoice people. Before FreshBooks existed and it sold. It was a one time product that I had acquired early on from some people who abandoned it basically. And it sold about $300 per license and you know, it sold a grand or two per month. And it was kind of running on autopilot. I was answering a few support emails and adding some features. And at the end of that year, that year in New Haven, the PayPal account had almost $25,000 in it. And I was like, well, this is not life changing money, but I spent like 20 hours during the whole year. How many more of those do I need to quit this job? And suddenly it was a huge reframe for me of, I think this is possible. I doubled down on that. I took net invoice and I built that up and I used my skill and knowledge to. Oops, that was the wrong button. I used my skill and knowledge to start working on a SaaS app that had a little bit of success. Then I had some other. I had an E Commerce side. I had a bunch of stuff I cobbled together, frankly, to make, to make the nut that I needed, you know, to make my house payment each month and over the course of the next four years. Well, actually I quit my job, quit Consulting by 2009. By 2011, I acquired another SaaS app that became a life changing event for me because it was doing about $1,000 a month when I acquired it. And by the end it was doing 30,000amonth. And I had never seen that much money in my life. And I had two contractors working for me. I then took that and I found self funded instead of raising funding and I started a SaaS app called Drip. Some of you may have heard of it or used it. I sold that to LeadPages, which is in Minneapolis in 2016. And that was the moment where I could retire at 41. And it took me a long time. It took me 10 to 12 years, which is much longer than If I had potentially gone out and done the Elon Musk and raised that 1, 2, 3 million dollar round and gone the venture funded route. But the difference is it took me a long time, but it was, it's a much more sure bet to do these little base hits along the way and to stair step your way from one thing to the next to the next and to actually charge real money to real customers along the way. And so that became my kind of my new philosophy of like, wait, no one's talking about this. I've done it over and over and there's like another 10 here literally that I pulled out of the slide. Just jigs. It got to be a mess. All these apps hit tail to Drip. So I started blogging about it, I started podcasting about it and built this community and started a conference called microconf. And actually I put the cart before the horse. So first I started blogging and then I wrote a book because I was getting so many questions like, how did you do what you did? So I wrote this little book, 200 pages, and it started selling really well. There was obviously a resonance of folks saying, wow, there is an alternative and it's called bootstrapping. It's like none of us had realized you could bootstrap software products until this 20072010 range. And then I started the conference microconf with a friend in 2011, and that has grown. We've done it 18 times now. We're about to do the 19th one in Europe in about two weeks. And I started a podcast. And so we're on episode 465 of that. And all I do every week on that podcast is just talk about this stuff. It's like, let's be sane. Can we just start. Like, I don't go and start a dry cleaner and raise 10 million bucks and hope to have bad unit economics and make it up in volume, you know, and it's like I just wanted to build real businesses. And so that's kind of became. Become my, my life mission, I think, my legacy. So that gives you a little bit of an idea of where I've been. I sold, I grew up in California, sold drip to LeadPages in Minneapolis in 2016. Since then, I've been headquartered in Minneapolis with my family for about three years. So now let's talk about how I've seen venture change. And what's interesting is, although I haven't raised funding, I've. I have been an investor now for about seven years, eight years. Ish. And my Folks in my community do wind up raising funding. Originally it was about bootstrapping and self funding, but it's no longer that. It's more about not venture. We call ourselves like the Not Venture Track Conference because there's a whole, it's not binary anymore, right? Bootstrap venture. There's a whole bucket in the middle where it makes sense. So let's talk a little bit about venture. My book 2010, I said I've never been anti funding, I'm not anti venture capital, I'm anti everyone, thinking it's the only way that you can start a tech company. Funding's not bad, venture's not bad. Just know what you're getting into. I was saying this in 2010, even when I was just a hardcore bootstrapper. I've never been, I've never liked the whole dichotomy to always never raise funding. And in this book I said with venture capital you're forced to go after much larger markets, markets that are 10 times the size, they're 100 times harder to get right, blah blah, blah. So yeah, it's harder and it's harder to make. You can't make a base hit once you raise that Series A. Okay. Because a $10 million business to a lot of us is a life changing amount of money. It's a life changing exit if you sell it. It's life changing profit if you profit on it. A $10 million company to a venture capitalist is an abject failure. They make nothing. So that's the difference is it's level setting expectations. So obviously the typical path for a funded startup used to be, hey, I'm going to raise a seed round. Then I do my series A, B and C. And really what we started noticing is the Series A is the point of no return. Meaning once you raise a Series A from a typical venture capitalist, you then need to. They kind of want you to be a unicorn or bust. That's the general, the general consensus. I'm being general here, but that's like Most of the VCs you talk to. The hypothesis started being what if you could raise just a seed round and never raise again? Does that even work? The economics of that work and that's what this alternative funding path has turned into. But interesting thing about venture, I'm going to talk about a little case study. So about 2013ish, I had a guy email me and he said hey, I've never heard of this company at the time. But they later quite big. And he said, I read your book I'm in San Francisco, it's a three hour drive and I'm having wild success. Like one guy, one developer and I think numbers, I'm not exactly sure, but my memory is that he was at about 70k monthly recurring, so about 840 a year and growing like 5k a month. And it was just him. And I was like, that's amazing. Like, congratulations, sir. And he said, yeah, but I have a problem. People are offering me money, big checks. I've always wanted to stay bootstrapped and grow as much as possibly organically, but a lot of people right now are telling me it would be unwise not to take this money. His name is Ilya and he drove down to Fresno, we had a beer and he said, I want you to talk me out of this. Like, tell me why I shouldn't take this money. And if I recall, and again, it's six years, memory is fuzzy, but it's some. It was somewhere along the lines of like half million bucks, $10 million valuation. So he was going to sell a single digit percentage of his company for a lot of money. And I said, well, know what you're getting into. Are they going to take a board seat? You know, can they, can they vote you out of your own board? Can they fire you? And he said, no, they'll have like, what's it called, an observer and I will have control. And in fact, I don't know if they were going to form a board. There was some stuff. He's like, basically, no, they can't, they can't fire me. And I said, well, can they take control of the company? Like, do they have the ability to, you know, have liquidity preference and have these other kind of gotchas? And he's like, nope, that's not in the contract. I said, are you going to get pressured to grow? Like, do you want to grow? You know, a lot of hiring plans is like, burn through your money in 18 months. That's the typical model, right? He said, nope, I've already communicated, I'm not doing that. And they don't have a problem with it. And yeah, grow faster. And then, you know, I said, can they block a sale? Because that's actually been. I have had a couple friends who. This isn't every case, of course. I don't try to demonize anybody, but I had a couple friends who. One guy got an offer to sell his company after he'd taken funding and it was going to be 10 million bucks and he was going to make five and the VCs wouldn't let him do it. And for him it was like, that would change my life. I could feasibly retire on that. So if they can block a sale, that's a tough thing. So anyways, he said, no, they can't do any of that. And he took the funding. I actually was an investor. I wrote him a tiny check, $10,000. And they required this about a year ago almost to the day. And you know, so he grew that company for six, seven years and did it. And I got back in touch with him after the acquisition. I said, congratulations, man. He said, I still remember that conversation we had in Fresno. And oh, I hid that slide. He basically said the reason he took the money was not just because the money was cheap. It was because it gave him a ton of credibility when he was hiring and with customers. It was a fascinating thing of just saying because he was trying to sell these $50,000 annual contracts for out one or two years. And if he was bootstrapped, he had less credibility. And in addition, he could. He was in San Francisco and he was going to have a tough time paying market rates for developers and such. So that was a big reason that he did wind up taking it. Now, Venture is a mixed bag. You got to know what you're getting into. You have to read the fine print. You know, the nice part though is it is getting more founder friendly. When I got acquired by LeadPages, me and my team, I sat in on a lot of board meetings and had to present. And it was. I'd never been in a board meeting. It was kind of interesting. It was not something I would like to do. I would volunteer to do. So. Yeah, there's still board, there's still board meetings. There can be that growth at all cost mentality, the triple, twice, double, three times. There can be headcount as a vanity metric, a success metric. And I don't believe in that. I'm much more about profit. It discourages capital efficiency. And at a certain point I have to ask myself as a founder, is this still fun? You know, but the bottom line is Venture has gotten a lot more founder friendly over the past 15 years. A lot of that is due to Y Combinator and what Paul Graham did starting in 2005 to tie back into my 2007 shenanigans. So I talk really fast and as much as I have tried over the years to tell jokes and be funny, I'm not. So instead of trying to do that, I always have at least one intermission in my talks and this is just a brief. Just a brief thing to kind of keep you into it. Gonna give me a break so I can take a drink of water.

You're in a concrete room with a saw and a table. What do you do?

I don't know. What do I do?

The answer is, you saw the table in half, two halves make a hole, climb out the hole.

And now the deluxe version of that joke.

You're in a concrete room with a table and a mirror. How do you get out?

I don't know. How do I get out?

You look into the mirror. You see what you saw. You grab the saw, you saw the table in half, two halves make a hole, you cut out the hole. This guy's got sweat.

Ladies and gentlemen, Finn Walling. Yeah. All right, last part. I'm going to talk about this alternative funding that has this. That has changed the conversation from being binary. Bootstrapped versus venture. And this in the middle. The interesting part is it's changing so fast. I wrote this talk three months ago for a different event, and when I came in to update it, there was a lot that had changed. So it's an interesting place to be. So the case for funding at all, like, why not just bootstrap everything? Well, the problem is businesses take a long time to get going. And if you haven't watched this talk, this talk is focused on SaaS. It's called the Long Slow SaaS ramp of death. It applies to pretty much every company where you're going to try to get product market fit, try to get a bunch of customers. It's amazing. It's free business. To software. From five, six years ago, it's the founder of Constant Contact named Gail Goodman. It's a really good talk. And what she says is, look, it takes way longer than you think, and it's a lot harder than you think. And having some money at your disposal, whether it's your own personal assets or, you know, some funding, can make this easier. Bootstrapping, still alive and well, but let's, let's, let's make it a little easier for folks. And so I call this point, look at this point there. I call that escape velocity. So product market fit, if you haven't heard that term, is when you've built something people want, right? When you're trying to come up with a new idea for an innovative walker or a device that, you know, protects people when they're. They're out running. You can think that people want it, but you don't know they want it until you figure that out. Until you get validation, until people buy it, until they don't churn out of your SaaS app in my case. And product market fit happens, can happen anywhere along this line. But Escape Velocity is this point where I'm saying that's where you really see the revenue kick start to go up. And this, this is one of my early investments. And hitting Escape Velocity takes longer and longer and longer. And on like my fourth or fifth startup, I was like, I'm going to hit Escape Velocity in four months. And it took us forever. And it's agonizing. So with Carthook, which is a wildly successful app these days, it took them more than two years to hit it. This was early revenue for Drip and this took us, took us about 13 months and I had $20,000 a month that I was pulling off of hit tail. So I was self funding the crap out of this thing and it still took us 13 months. Like it was, it was pretty brutal. And then Hubstaff was another successful app these days and it took about 12 months. So thing is, is every year landscape, not only in SaaS but in anything, is getting more competitive, right? So this is called the Martech 5000 and that's from 2018. And there should be 5000 logos on. There is actually 7000 different logos. So if you're going to launch a marketing technology application, it's crazy how much. Yeah, woe is right? And so what interesting thing is in 2011, the guy did it and there was 150 and then it doubled and then it tripled in two years and then it doubled and then it almost doubled and then it doubled in two years. So it's just, there's just more out there, right? And this is not to say it's always going to be this way. The best time to start a company was 10 years ago. And you know, the second best time was nine years and 364 days. But we can't do that. We got to start today. So yes, it's competitive, but this is why I'm seeing funding become more of an option for folks. Also more vent, just more venture in general coming into these spaces. So the more I've talked about this over the years because in like 2014, the first founder I ever knew raised Angel Round without raising a Series A. He said, I'm never going to raise a Series A. And I said, you can't do that. And he said, why not? And it was an epiphany for me. It's like five years ago, it's like that's a great idea. Funding is not for everyone. But can we have funding that doesn't come with the implied unicorn? Because I do. I know dozens and dozens of founders who make these five $10 million apps software products. And it's like where, you know, where's, where's the help for them? So the more I talked about it, someone eventually came up to me and said someone should really start a fund for this. And I was like, yeah, I guess someone should. You know, I was in the middle of drip. I didn't have time to do it. And someone else came along and did it. And that was Bryce Roberts from Indie BC. And in 2016 he took some of the O'Reilly venture money that he had and he started investing under these alternative terms where it was like, there's no implied Series A here. And it was to my knowledge the first institutional money ever to go into this non unicorn, non, you know, Series A type stuff. So I've known Bryce, he's been on my podcast several times. Great guy. And when I think of alternative, like what can we help define this? It's like a hybrid between bootstrapping and venture. You know, there's tends to be no board. The investor owns what they own. If I buy 10% of your company, I don't have outsized voting rights to poach out. Dividends are an option. Imagine that, right? Imagine a venture capitalist giving you money and not saying you have to sell in the next 10 years because that's the typical edict. But here with Indie BC and Tiny Seed and the other alternatives, it's like, well, just pull money out, you're just profitable. And we all participate pro rata in that cash. We fund LLCs and C Corps in all 50 states, which is unusual, right? Normally it's Delaware C Corp or hit the high road or hit the road, I guess. And then future funding rounds are okay, but they're not required. And it also we healthy sustainable growth rather than working 90 hour weeks. Right. Coming back to that family aspect. So inu VC to look at it. I'll just run through their terms briefly. I'm not an expert put on their terms but I have read them. The cool part with indie VC is they put all their terms in GitHub. So if you search indie BC terms, GitHub, they have all the change history, the change log and you can just look through it and they are, this is at least my interpretation of them and talking to Bryce. So they, they simulate equity. They don't take real equity. It's just a Document you sign and they give you funding. The payback starts on a given schedule. So it's like it's a percentage of top line revenue that they take, I don't know, between 3 and 10% or something. So it is kind of like revenue based financing. And it starts at I think a year in or two years after you sign the agreement. And then once you've paid back three times the amount they essentially lent you, I guess, or funded you with, then you've bought back 90% of the equity that they would have. If a sale happens at any point during that time, then it converts to real equity and they serve pro rata in that. And their average MRR monthly recurring revenue at which they invest is in the 20, it's in the 20s. 20,000amonth, that is, let's see. Yeah. And they funded about 17 companies since 2016. So it's not a huge volume, but I think Bryce is picking them well. And then Tiny Seed, which is my jam, this first startup accelerator design for bootstrappers. We saw what Bryce was doing, but also the clamoring in the microconf community was like, why doesn't someone make this more repeatable, you know? So that's what we did. And I realized, you know, the difference between just funding and an accelerator is pretty big, right? The accelerator comes with the community and the mentorship and all that. And so I'll just show you our terms here real quick. We are one year, we're remote. And we did that because we didn't want people to have to relocate. I mean, me with my wife and kid back in 2007 couldn't have done an accelerator in a place we invest between 120 and 200k per company and we take equity. The range of dollars is number of founders and then we are paid back via dividends or on an exit. Dividends are different than top line revenue. The founder could keep a lot of money in the company if they want to, and it's only when they pull it out that we participate. And yeah, defining dividends, we funded 10 companies about four, about five, six months ago. It's our first batch and then we're opening applications again on November 1st for a second batch. We hope to fund between 10 and 20. In that we raised a fund of $4.5 million, which is the first time I ever had to raise funding. And that was fun. And our MRR is lower. Since we're an accelerator, typical MRR has been between about 2,000 and 20,000amonth. Last thing on alternative, I wouldn't serve you right if I didn't mention this. You know, kind of the revenue financing, lighter Capital, Bigfoot River SAS, there's about 20 of these now. So it's getting pretty interesting where it purely is a loan, literally. They take no equity, there's no equity involved. Some of them take a personal guarantee. You got to weigh your options there. Some of them have pretty high interest rates, not all of them, but it's a tough, it's a very evolving space now. So revenue based financing is pretty interesting. And the other one that I saw right before this is Stripe just rolled this out and I think the last month and you if literally in your Stripe account, if you're making money, look down here, select your advance and they advance it and then they just pull it out of your top line revenue. So the fact that Stripe is getting into it shows you, you know, they're a 25 billion dollar valuation company, shows you that there's, there's really something here, whether it's on the revenue side or the, you know, more the Indian and tiny seat side. So that is going to be it for me. I realize that was a whirlwind, but thank you so much for having me.

Thank you very much. Rob, we do have question.

We have time for about three or.

Four questions from Rob.

I'll start it off.

Rob, so you've been hosting Microcom for how many years now?

We've done 18 of them over about nine years.

Awesome.

Can you tell us an. Obviously you can kind of talk about maybe what the subject matter is, but maybe some sneakers in the past are kind of what you, what you hope to bring for value in that.

Yeah, the focus is on helping folks who want to do it with, with non venture track stuff. So we focus a lot on. It's a lot of developers, designers who don't know the business side of it. So we focus a lot on copywriting, marketing. Less about it's. We never have anything about coding because we figure, you know, you can hire it out or do it yourself. We've got speakers. I mean both the founders of Stripe have done Q and A. They just show. One guy emailed me and Patrick hall and said, hey, I want to show up next week. And I was like, yeah, you can show up wherever you want. Like this will be great. So Jason Freed from Basecamp has come to Q and A. So yeah, it's been a fun adventure.

Hey Rob, thanks for coming to Sioux Falls. Two questions. I recently heard your partner Inar on an Escape Velocity Podcast say that the question was, is there like when will there be too much SaaS? And he said there could be 10x more SaaS. There couldn't be enough different SaaS ideas. So what's your take on that? And then secondly, what do you, what's a ideal fit for tiny seed? What are you looking for when you see this next round of applicants?

Sure, yeah. So 10 times more SaaS. I believe that that is true. Although the thing that see the thing that large amounts of money coming into a space do is they make you can only go after these massive markets. And so the massive markets are way overcrowded. So I don't think you could have 10 times the number of CRMs, ERP systems, invoicing software, email service provider. Like those are the big markets and everybody, those are the billion dollar markets. What's not crowded is this long tail of SaaS is what about the app for you know, for architects and interior designers to like sketch out their plans. So one of the tiny seed companies that we funded is just in that. Will they ever be $100 million ARR company? Probably not. Does it matter? Can it still change their lives and provide us with enough of return that we can raise another fund? Probably. So that's where I think, when I think about the long tail. If it's not even a long tail, it's a pretty fat tail to be honest. There's a lot of untapped niches. We have a friend who runs software that helps countertop installers design the plan and they own 80% of that market. Sounds like a very small market. It's not. It's a high seven figure. Might even be an eight figure business. So second question. Oh, what do we look for so Tiny seed? I mean we look for subscription software, right? Subscription such that the revenue is recurring and software such that it has high net margins. And that's where we're dipping our toe in the water because that's where my experience is and I feel like we can provide the most value to folks. We had consumer package, good folks apply and I was like that's a great idea, but we just don't have the expertise. All of our mentors are SaaS founders. I'm a SaaS founder in our founder. You know, it's like right now that's where we are. We would love to expand. Like Y Combinator started with software and they're doing like medtech and biotech and CPG and all kinds of craziness because they had enough wins that they built the fund and they could do it. And so long term, could we get into that? You know, maybe, but we gotta. We have to prove ourselves in this, you know, in this one first. So.

Any other questions for Rob? All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

Thank you, guys.

Thank Rob for your time.