0106 Jesse Horwitz - From 0 to Nine-Figures, How Jesse Horwitz Built a DTC Giant

Before we start, I want to thank our sponsor, Quiet Light Brokerage. Quiet Light's team of advisors helps entrepreneurs like you buy and sell online businesses for 6, 7, or 8 figures. They closed over $75 million of deals last year alone, and they've closed hundreds of millions of dollars since they started in 2007. Want to know how much your business is worth? Visit quietlightbrokerage.com/exitstrategy to find out. The site will teach you how to determine what impacts your valuation and how to optimize your valuation through add-backs and accounting methods. Whether you're aiming for an exit or want to run your business for years to come, Quiet Light can help you. Ready to learn more? Visit quietlightbrokerage.com/exitstrategy to get started. All right, on to today's episode. All right, we're going to get started with this episode of the Exit Strategy Podcast. We're here with Jesse Horowitz. Jesse is a published author. He wrote a book called Selling Naked, which is about launching direct-to-consumer businesses. He co-founded Hubble, which is Harry's for disposable daily contacts. And right now he's working on running a bunch of digital ads for Andrew Yang. Jesse, did I get all of that right?

Yep. Great to be talking with you today, Moiz.

Yeah, likewise. You know, you and I met, I want to say like 3 or 4 years ago. You were actually at Harvard Law School for like a day and a half, as I recall. And one of my friends And so she's like, oh, you guys should get in touch because you're both starting direct-to-consumer businesses.

That's right. I was class of 2010 and sort of doing job apps and law school applications at the same time. And the law school applications went better than the job apps. So there I found myself at Harvard Law. I imagine there are— there's going to be a bunch of people the next year or two, unfortunately, who will share that kind of experience.

Sure. Did you make it past the first year or were you there for—

No. So, so I wanted to work investment management. I kept just recruiting. I met a friend who had been at Bridgewater Associates and interned at Bridgewater and just asked them if I could stay on full-time. Um, so didn't go back for too well. Law school was totally fine. It was just, I didn't want to be a lawyer. And so it was like time and money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it makes a ton of sense. Okay. Fast forward HLS, Bridgewater. Tell me how you get into like the contacts industry. Do you wear daily disposable contacts?

Yep.

How did this sort of develop?

One of my friends from Bridgewater ended up at BCG, then Harris. I was working on the investment team for Columbia's endowment at that point. It was an interesting job and also gave me a fair amount of time to kick the tires on other ideas. He was living— his name's Ben. Ben was living across the street from me, you know, was working on shave subscriptions. So started poking around contact lens subscriptions like late 2015. And somewhere pretty early on, I just offered to help out and see if we could roll up our sleeves together. Done that with a few other friends' projects, and, you know, none of the other ones kind of gained traction the same way. So, you know, it was a good way to, in a low-risk way, kind of explore different ideas.

How did Hubble, like, gain traction? So, you know, if you're kicking around the idea, how are you kicking around? Are you creating landing pages and running ads? Are you, like, doing surveys? What are you doing there?

Yeah, we did some customer surveys, you know, some potential customer surveys. We did a lot of work on sort of the manufacturer landscape, Product's obviously kind of central in a business like this. We did some landing page tests and Harry's had done a pre-launch campaign that they had hosted to GitHub, so we copied that and sort of repurposed that. But a lot of it was just sort of the moment in time. I mean, it was like April, May 2016, right before the Dollar Shave Sale, right after— So Harry's had run a pre-launch refer-a-friend campaign. They posted that to GitHub. Tim Ferriss had written a piece about it. So we just repurposed that as a pre-launch campaign just to get some data. And we kind of used that plus the research we'd done on the space and, you know, went and raised with that. And it was— I mean, it's just different. It was, you know, April, May 2016. Yeah, a couple of months before Dollar Shave Club sold, a couple of months after Harry's raised at like $700 million post 2 or 3 years in. Casper was going crazy, you know, and so it was just—

it was just a different era. Yeah.

Totally. Yeah.

It's crazy how it feels like you guys—

people went outside.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

So you're doing that Harry's pre-launch campaign. How many email addresses do you get from that campaign? Like, I remember Harry's was like, look, we don't want to launch to crickets. Nobody wants to. How many email addresses did you get?

Yeah, we got like 2,000 email addresses, I think.

Okay.

I think we got like 2,000.

And then you went and raised on that data. You're like, hey, we're starting this business. We have these 2,000 email addresses. We think that's enough to go start a business. Somebody give us money.

Yeah, I mean, we kind of soft-shooted a little bit more than that. We started reaching out to people and saying like, oh, I don't know, you know, is this something that we could raise for or not? And, you know, we kind of approached friendly investors that way. And at first it's like, oh, you know, should we— oh, should we apply to accelerators? Okay, you know, we sort of applied to accelerators at the same time that we were contemplating a raise. And then people started getting excited about a potential round. It was like, then it was like, oh, should we raise $500,000? Should we raise $1 million? You know, it kind of snowballed from there. Which is like what happens when folks are excited. Yeah.

You guys never went through an accelerator. You guys sort of just did this on your own. How much did you raise before you sort of really launched the business and got a dollar in revenue?

So we raised like $3.5 million in May 2016, and then we raised like another $3.7 million in October and then launched in November.

Okay. So you raised about $7 million before the business launches.

Mm-hmm.

And was that like the most dilutive part of the raise? Because at that point you don't have any revenue. You've raised 2 rounds.

Yeah. The conversation we had with the investors was kind of meet us in the middle and we'll take a bit more dilution than we're looking for. And, you know, and you'll put in a bit more than you were looking for, you know, you know, at a bit higher price. They were reasonable terms, I think. But, you know, sure, it was, you know, a lot of capital. Yeah, I think it gave us a lot of, you know, I know you built Native very differently, you know, since we were kind of going to go the traditional venture route and financing path. I think it's— we sort of caught up a bit in that it gave us a lot of leverage going into our A then because we could honestly say that we had, you know, another 12 months of runway still spending pretty hard.

Yeah, definitely. Tell me what you did with the $7 million launch. So you've obviously got to get a manufacturer. You're not making these things out of your own house.

When we did our next round, we still had most of it left. It was more, you know, if you need money, you need money, you're in a weak position approaching people. You want to be able to have the conversation and say like, sure, if you want to put in now, great. And, you know, if not, we're good to go. Yeah. So we've always been, you know, kind of mindful of that.

Yeah. Never more true than today.

Yes, for sure.

And how do you line up a manufacturer? Because I imagine, like, you know, with deodorants, there's 2 big deodorant manufacturers, like 2 big deodorant companies in the United States. One's Unilever and the other is P&G. There's a lot of manufacturing facilities that can make deodorant. You know, for something like contacts, how the hell— like, you can't call up J&J and be like, hey, I want to make a new company, or like, I'm going to create a new contact company. and destroy AccuView, sell me your contacts. They're going to be like, go get the fuck out of here. So how do you go about finding a manufacturer for this?

Yeah, since it's a medical device category, the FDA had a database of everybody with their approval and we sort of just worked through it systematically. That gave us a really good market landscape as well in terms of which manufacturers had what capabilities and what distribution where, you know, in what capacity. So, you know, both lined up potential options on the, on the supplier side and also just gave us a sense of what suppliers were out there.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. I love that you use like the FDA, uh, like report to be like, these are the possible guys who are going to make this stuff.

Yeah, you— yeah, you know, and then it's just sort of a, you know, down the phone call.

Yeah. Yeah. So you find some guys in Taiwan to initially manufacture, is that correct? Are they still doing the manufacturing for Hubble Contacts?

Yep. So we also do reselling for the large manufacturers.

Yeah.

But for on the Hubble brand, they're our guys. Yeah.

And, you know, I read somewhere that you guys get an exclusivity where you're like, hey, look, you're gonna sell daily disposable contacts in the United States only through Hubble. Is that right? I said I read somewhere that you got an exclusivity with these guys in Taiwan where they agreed to sell only daily disposable to the US on e-commerce. Okay, gotcha.

On e-commerce. So the thing that was nice about them, yeah, was they had, they had 20 years before us of history of distribution in the US, um, you know, through independent optometrists. They just, they hadn't had them through optometrists. They hadn't had a big e-commerce presence. So that was still up for grabs.

Gotcha. And does that cost money to get that exclusivity? Or are they like, we'll do it because you look like you're gonna, you know, build a big business around this? Like, was it right out of the gate that you got the exclusivity?

The way we pitched it to them was we had minimums we had to hit on volume over time.

Gotcha.

And we said, like, look, you know, you guys have had your US business for a long time, you've never penetrated deep into ecommerce. So like, do you really have plans to over the next X months? Yeah. You know, if we build an additional distribution arm for you, great. And if not, you know, you can have it back. Sure. Okay.

Gotcha. Uh, and obviously you did build a pretty considerably sized distribution arm. So you've got that $7 million, you know, you've burned some of it certainly building the site and getting products and doing all the branding. You launch in November. This is pre-days of like ClearBank, right? So like, you're like, you have to raise equity to basically actually fund your ads.

You got it.

Like, how do you start advertising the business?

Facebook and Instagram. Yeah.

Gotcha.

I know you're sympathetic here. I think all this is just built on Facebook and Instagram, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You had 70 years of businesses built on TV before this. Like, one big chunky channel is, you know, is where things happen.

What is your marketing budget early on, and what does the growth look like? You know, are you spending $10,000 a month on Facebook ads, or have you raised $7 million and you're like, we're going to mattresses day one, we're putting down $10,000, and we're gonna get some revenue here?

Somewhere in between, I'd say. I mean, we've always, you know, sort of tried to— we might have gotten a little headier at different points in time, but generally tried to manage against a reasonable CAC. Yeah. And so that's always been what's constrained, you know, constrained us.

What was the payback period that you were going to be comfortable with? You know, what's crazy is like I've talked to the acquirers, like when we were trying to sell our business, we talked to a bunch of acquirers and there was a well-known direct-to-consumer business that was looking at a 5-year payback period where they're like, you know, we sell you the product today, we'll get our money back in 2025. Which means we need 5 years of funding. Like, where are you comfortable with?

In theory, under 12 months, you know, it's always the like push and pull there, you know. Yeah. And I think also it's easier because there was enough access to equity that we were able to get the business to a big enough scale that we could be cash flow positive at, you know, at those sort of payback levels. I think, you know, folks starting businesses today, you sort of have to grow into that because the financing's tighter. And so, you know, I hear a lot of people who are sort of 3-month payback at the start or 6-month payback at the start. Scaling that way brings enough cash into the business that they have the working capital they need. They have, they can build up the relationships with ClearBank or whatever.

You know, one of the things that I read was you said that 40 million people in the United States wear contacts.

Yeah.

And at some point you were reaching about 3 mil, like you had 3 million impressions on Facebook on a daily basis.

Yeah.

So in 13 days you've exhausted like everyone who like wears contacts in the United States has seen your ad. In 26 days, everyone's seen 2 ads. You know, in 50 days, everyone's had their impressions rate is up to 4, their frequency's up to 4.

It, it's interesting. I'm sure you've had this experience too, where it's like based on like who the ads are hitting, you hear from people, either people think you're like ubiquitous and just hitting them all the time, or they've never heard of you at all. And for our category, it's not exclusively, but it's primarily, you know, women 25 to 45. And so like you talk to folks in that demo and they're like, well crap, you know, I, I see your ads all the time. And then you talk to folks outside of it and eh, you know.

Yeah, you're right. There's a ton of people who talk about Native and they're like, I've never— like, that are like, you guys retarget me all the time. Am I the only customer you have?

Yeah.

There are other people who are like, I've never heard of this brand. I've never seen an advertisement for this brand. Even one of our investors was like, I've never seen an ad for this brand. And I was like, you have, you probably just don't realize it at this point.

I talk about this with other brands all the time, which is like, then there's the advertising you do just for VCs where you do, you know, you buy the out-of-home stuff that they see on their commute to work. They're not engaging with Instagram ads or they're not in your targeting segment. And then the ads that have a meaningfully lower ROI, they get super excited about because they're like, well, I saw that one.

Yeah. So you must be a big brand. Yeah. We never did that with VCs, but we did do that once we were in brick-and-mortar stores where we're like, yeah, let's put up a bunch of billboards in an area where the buyer is going to see this. So they're going to be like, oh wow, they're advertising native in Minneapolis and they're saying drive everyone to Target. This is great. I love this brand.

Yeah, exactly. That's the biggest place where the ROI stuff gets a return is like if you have a specific community of small people with big checkbooks that, you know, that you're trying to impress.

Doesn't that make like, it makes zero sense that that happens. Like you're like, this is such an efficient market, right? Everyone talks to everybody. There's so much capital in this business and still like trying to make people happy or play to their whims gets them super excited about it. I read like, you know, Instacart applied to Y Combinator and they were late to their application. And they like muscled their way into getting an interview and they got rejected from Y Combinator. And so the Instacart guy sent a 6-pack of beer to the guy who had done his interview.

Yeah.

And said, hey, understood that we can't get in. Hope you enjoy this beer. Thanks for taking the time to do this. And the guy's like, this is fucking awesome. I'm going to let Instacart into Y Combinator now. Like that, like little, he knows exactly what the business is, but when he gets a 6-pack of beer, he changes his mind and is like, yeah, Instacart's great.

But you see it. I mean, you see this all the time and it's tough because like, you know, it can persist all the way through IPO. And so like, it's hard to say the investors are making the wrong decision. But investors just seem to, I think, have a tendency to overweight and overvalue goods and services that they would consume themselves. So, you think about something like Peloton. Peloton's a crazy expensive bike. It's really nice.

Yeah.

But you talk about long payback windows, you look at their payback model, and even if you accept their— I think they claim 1% monthly churn or something, Even if you accept that, you're still looking, I think, at like 4-year payback on that. But it's a really nice spike and it's the type of product that investors use.

Sure. Yeah. And not only that, they like lock you into a 6-month subscription right when you purchase, which is why like their first year churn is so low because they're like every month for the first 6 months, we lock you in. And so you can't go anywhere. We've already charged you for it. So you can't churn away from us.

So they're, and they're counting that as zero churn. And so then at the end of the year.

Then yeah, I'm sure they're like, when they're pitching to VCs and like, uh, on their S-1 and their 10-Ks, what do you think they're doing? They're like saying, hey, this is how the metrics look, right?

That's smart. I mean, then the return clock starts at month 7.

When we were trying to raise money, actually, there was this one investment advisor that we had. I mean, he was just like helping us out as a friend. And he's like, look, if people buy 2 units of deodorant, you might be able to say they're repeat customers. And I'm like, they only had one transaction and I should call them repeat customers? And he's like, people have done that in the past. It was crazy. You're spending money on Facebook and Instagram early on. 40 million people were in contacts. You're blanketing the world with Hubble contacts. Today it's very different though. Like I've seen you on TV. I've seen you and Ben both on TV. I met Ben and he told me that you were standing on a chair for the TV ad that you guys shot.

I was.

I'm not sure.

I'm like 6'1. Yeah, I'm like 6'1. He's just a freaking giant.

He's a giant. So I've seen you guys on TV, I've seen you guys on Reddit, I've seen you guys on podcasts. Is the bulk of your spend still going to Facebook? And what are the other channels that you found working for you?

Yeah, if anything, we kind of got like more diverse for a while. And then we got less diverse again. And, you know, and I think the thinking there was, it was like, Facebook dependence is scary for everyone. It was valuable to us to demonstrate that we could acquire customers in other channels. But then like, we did that for a while. And we said, okay, we can do it. Like the CACs are higher. Do we have to prove this to ourselves every day? Or having gone through that exercise, which is probably like a year, 12, 18 months or so, can we just allocate the budget where it'd be most efficient today and worry about if that changes? Now that we know where else we could put the money, we can worry about it later.

Sure. Did you find that when you were putting the money elsewhere, you saw lower Facebook tax? A lot of companies I've spoken with are like, When we're on TV, we see Facebook prices drop.

I call bullshit.

You didn't, it didn't work. That didn't happen for you.

I remember there was, I won't say who, there, there was one ad buyer who was complaining when we turned TV down and said, hey, where's my halo? And then we told them that, you know, we turned it back on and we hadn't, and the halo was magically there again.

It's almost like the emperor is wearing no clothes, huh? You're just like, okay, we're on TV ads. And he's like, great, I'm seeing cheaper prices now.

Yeah.

That's great. Oh my God. Was television your number 2 channel of spend after Facebook ads when you were sort of diversifying channels?

Yeah, I'd say it's, and it's still probably number 3. It's just the gap between 1 and 2 has opened up and 2 and 3 flip between TV and search, probably.

Gotcha. You know, at Native, I think I've been honest with this before with you, like, you know, we relied heavily on Facebook ads and Pinterest ads. There were a couple months where Pinterest ads like outspent Facebook ads, but it was generally Facebook. And we never found anything nearly as efficient. And it's hard because you're like, look, I want to diversify channels. So if Facebook starts sucking, I still can rely on television and podcasts and search. But at the same time, like, your greatest weakness is also your greatest strength. We're really good at Facebook ads and this is generating a ton of cash. Why try and fuck that up right now? Why not, like, deal with tomorrow's problems tomorrow?

Exactly. And I think the problem is in a world before Facebook, you didn't just have all these new brands all the time. And so, like, Facebook's what done brought us all to the party.

That's right.

You take a step back, like the problem we're all solving is like you had this new activity, Facebook or whatever, you know, paid social media where people were spending a bunch of their days. They wanted it as an ad-supported service. They didn't want it as a subscription service. And so you needed a new group of advertisers that were going to maximize the potential of the platform so that people could get their Facebook account for free. And that's like, I feel like actually the biggest, like The function that like Facebook advertisers serve broadly, just the same way that like Procter Gamble 70 years ago figured out the potential of Tide for TV. Sure, sure.

P&G actually invented the soap opera. It's why it's called the soap opera. They're like, oh, we're gonna develop content and then so we can run ads between the content. It's fucking amazing.

Yeah, I always joke with our head of creative that one day he'll get a retrospective of all the ads we were running in whatever the stretch of time. Yeah.

You know, you said Facebook is the one who's brought us all to the party. That's so true. I think like everyone's fear though is that when the party ends, Facebook's only gonna go home with one of us, even though it brought all of us to the party. And so we're trying to figure out some other girl to like, uh, hitch our horse to.

But it's just like, you can't always get what you want. Like, I like that too.

It's not—

I'd love to have 10 equally strong marketing channels with great ROIs that were each 10% of my budget. Yeah. Yeah, of course.

When you were like day to day at Apple, one of the things that you guys realized was, well, you've got to get verifications for every prescription that comes through the door. Because like it's an FDA regulated product. I don't think this is the case in every other country. Like I think in Europe, I can just go to like a pharmacy and buy contacts and I don't need to show my prescription.

Just varies market to market. Yeah.

Who's buying prescription contacts that are the wrong prescription and it's like buying them in bulk and like being hap— like, are people doing nefarious things with contacts or is this just a— It's like a historical thing that, you know, the FDA has always required.

I think it's legacy to the industry here. You know, 1-800 Contacts, which is a great, you know, great business, was sort of early to the e-commerce space. And there was sort of a lot of negotiation, you know, back and forth between them and the Optometry Association and Congress to kind of settle on a solution that worked for everybody in terms of how prescriptions would be treated in the space. And I think part of it is because Like a lot of these things, it was preferable to have something federal as opposed to state by state because it was just getting to become a nightmare for everyone.

Yeah. And so, can you tell me how you guys went about verifying those prescriptions? I mean, I know about it. It was really unique. It was incredible and unique. And I know we've copied some of the strategies that you have at Native, not from a prescription standpoint, but from another standpoint. But can you tell everyone?

Yeah. I mean, anything high volume like that, it's a customer service problem and it's It's hard to keep up. So we built an outsourced team and we have an internal group that's in charge of sort of, you know, quality control on the work of those folks. And then we have multiple audit layers, but we moved sort of pay-per-ticket so that, um, pay-per-ticket and then different quality metrics associated around that.

Mm-hmm.

Just across sort of all of our customer service, you know, because it was just very scalable. It was flexible for the agents. It allowed them to work from home, you know, which opened up folks who would have trouble commuting, you know, and got you sort of a higher quality pool of folks. You know, I think the first to do this was actually JetBlue and continues to do this to this day. This is the most scalable way to do customer service and gets you out of a lot of the overhead of a call center.

Pay-per-ticket is something that no, like, I don't know any other e-commerce business really doing that. But what you're saying is that a ticket would come in to like verify prescription and you're outsourcing—

Or an email or a, you know, whatever it is, sort of anywhere up and down the— yeah.

Yeah. Where's my package? It comes into your inbox. And a team of offshore, like a team of agents sort of are raised to answer that ticket as quickly as possible and get paid once they answer and presumably meet a certain quality score.

Exactly.

One, how much do you pay per ticket? Can you talk about that?

It varies sort of task to task and how difficult, how difficult it is to complete. And there's different agents with different, um, tiers of tickets that they'll handle. Exactly. Yep.

Is like the average 50 cents? Is the average $1.50 or is the average like 7 cents? Like, if you had to ballpark it, like, what order of magnitude is it there?

Not 7 cents and not $5 on that, you know, for an ad.

Gotcha. Okay. And then how many agents are sort of racing to answer these tickets?

You know, it's a large operation, probably 100, you know, 100 or so.

Yeah, I remember you told me about this and I was mesmerized by it. You also, like, said at one point you had, like, extra agents. You're like, hey, do you guys want these? And then phenomenal agents from Native. I think they still work at Native. And, like, what happened is we actually shifted from a strategy of using an offsource agency where we just paid an agency and they hired their own employees and like, you know, we paid them $4,000 per person and they paid each employee $2,000 to being like, forget the agency. That's just a bunch of agency costs. Of course, let's hire the person individually and then ask that person to go find their friends who also want to do this. That's how we develop like a reputation system.

And I think the big thing is there's such a scarcity of work from home opportunities for agents. And it's really crazy because it makes no sense. Commuting makes no sense when everything's starting off, um, stuff that you can poke around, then like, why make people trek into an office every day? It's a bunch of their time. You know, if you're dealing with international agents, it's, um, the commute can be very difficult.

Um, so yeah, sure. And the hours are crazy. Like for us, what we realized is the agents were so much happier cuz like ours were in the Philippines in order to work like US hours.

Yeah.

You know, it was basically their nights that they had to be up and like they were much more willing to do that at home if they had a baby around or something similar.

Totally.

As opposed to being in an office.

Yeah, you have lots of single mothers doing this who are like, you know, we probably over-index on that, very talented and, you know, and have trouble sort of finding commensurate opportunities that will, you know, work around their parenting schedule. And so it's great.

Did you build your own customer service platform in order to handle this, or are you on Zendesk?

You're on Zendesk?

Yeah, gotcha.

Yeah.

Have you heard of Gorgeous?

Yeah, yeah, I know a couple other companies who are using Gorgeous who are very happy with them.

Yeah.

Some nice Shopify integrations that, uh, that Zendesk doesn't have. We were just sort of 3 years in and so our team was pretty, you know, you're used to Zendesk and it's massive switching costs. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. It's basically like, I think of Gorgias as like a Klaviyo for e-commerce, which is like, uh, or CRM, like built in and native and specific for e-commerce and not made for something else. But you're right. Like once you're used to something, the switching costs are enormous.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right on both fronts. And we actually had, you know, a friend who's spun up, who's been sort of, you know, helping other teams, you know, helping other organizations spin up work-from-home teams as well for them, a group called Resolve CX. So, I mean, and it's, you know, exactly your experience. It's worked well for sort of multiple e-commerce companies. It's a good setup.

Yeah, I'm really impressed that you could get it to 100. I think we have it in like a dozen or a couple dozen maybe, or like Native does.

And yeah.

You know, they're like, your manager sort of still knows everyone, or they have a manager and like, it's like, you know, manageable. But at 100, do you have like mid-level support there? Like, do you have agents and then like managers?

Yeah, we have mid-level support. Yeah, we have mid-level support. And then we also have a team in the US sort of sitting on top of all, on top of all that. Yeah.

How big is the team in the US? I remember when we just, when we chatted, like you were very much like native sides. I remember at one point you're like, we have 12 people running, you know, $20 million worth of—

Yeah, we're like a little North We're like a little north of 20, I want to say, by sort of venture-backed standards. You know, we continue to keep it pretty lean, although I guess these days, sadly, what venture-backed standards is, has, you know, has trimmed down a bit.

Yeah. But, and so is what lean is, to be honest as well. But yeah. What are the people's functions in those 20? Because like, that's— you're a very large business at this point. You've raised north of $70 million. To be the size of business you are and to have 20-some people is extraordinary and not commonplace. How is this happening? Like, what are those people doing? And what does Everlane have that, you know, you don't?

I honestly have no idea. I have no idea. We have a decent-sized finance and supply chain function. Yeah. A decent-sized group that helps manage the customer service operation. A couple folks in creative and marketing. GC, me and Ben. Let's see, separate few folks who work on the reseller business.

Are you guys running paid marketing in-house or have you outsourced that to an agency? Are you running Facebook ads in-house or is that an agency?

You know, it's funny how loose it all gets is we're outsourced, but with Slack now and Ads Manager, you all sit in the same stuff all day.

Yeah.

Yes, you know, it's all outsourced, but you can work very closely with folks. I think there's benefits to keeping a lot of the spend on the agency side because There's just shared resources that you can build across multiple companies. So like, I'm sure, you know, I'm sure you've seen like a lot of businesses sharing landing page templates now, sharing, uh, I think a lot of the front-end dev work has moved to the media buyers. That just sort of makes sense for us all to share.

And does that like eliminate a competitive advantage? Because like if you have a front-end media buyer, and by front-end media buyer, you're talking about some guy, like you hired some guy to run your Facebook ads.

Yeah.

He's creating the landing pages as well. He's sort of running all that stuff. But once you find something that works, that sort of translates across to 20 different brands right away and prevents like your unique competitive advantage from maybe shining for longer than it would.

Yeah. That's one case. On the flip side, we're getting learnings from the other 20. Yeah.

Yeah, that's fair.

If you thought that you were uniquely talented and that you could just crush everyone else, then you'd want to, you know, keep it all to yourself.

Yeah.

If you think that sort of, you know, surveying the market as much as possible is the best strategy, You just want as much information as you can get and working with, you know, working with external buyers and working with multiple buyers is, you know, seems like the most efficient way to do that.

Yeah.

I also think it's tougher now with so many levers on the bidding side seem less important. Everybody can see everyone's creative in the ads library. You can click on the ads in the ads library to see what landing pages everyone's using. Any enterprising team that's curious about your work can paw through it if they want.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about where the business is today. You've raised $70-some million. Is that right? And who was like the last round? Who sort of led the last round?

I can't remember whether FirstMark or Wildcat led our last round.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

And can you talk a little bit about size of business from a top line perspective?

Like, yeah, you know, we, we're doing more in top line than we've raised, you know, which is good.

And, you know, yeah, that is good.

You know, and we've been break-even the last bit, um, which has been nice and taken some stress off and, you know, have decent capital reserves still. So, you know.

I never went through this process. And, um, in part I didn't go through this process because I'm a coward, but like, how does it feel like, you know, when you're raising money?

I went through the process because I'm a coward.

I think about Harry's and I think about your business and I think about Dollar Shave Club and I'm like, look, at some point you realize the music is going to stop unless there's another round of capital here. That's not the case for you guys anymore. You guys are break-even or pretty close to that. And so like, that isn't the case, but at some point it probably was, right? You're like, the music is going to stop unless we raise the next round.

Yeah.

How much of your brainpower are you thinking about like, how do I keep this business afloat as opposed to how do I make a good business?

You know, I feel like hopefully we did a decent job of sort of shifting with the broader environment. You can see, we, you know, we raised in '16, '17, and mid-'18.

Yeah.

Kind of after that last round, we started thinking really hard about how we could make the business sustainable. Yeah, I think that broadly lines up with where capital availability is. Yeah, in the direct-to-consumer space, you know, we didn't want to get caught flat-footed when we were out of money.

And so were you spending a lot of your time fundraising or were you spending very little time fundraising in '16, '17, first half of the year?

Yeah, the thing is we never let ourselves get to a place where we were really hard up. You know, it was always pleasant enough and it was kind of a never-ending process. You know, we didn't generally just have sort of, we're in market now, you know, Yeah. We'd get lots of inbound. And so we kind of talked to the folks who were inbound and built up a set of relationships that way. And then, you know, if it was time for more capital, we'd pull the trigger.

Gotcha. And are there any strategics that invested? Like, you know, uh, Unilever Ventures? We once spoke to Unilever Ventures and I think they ghosted us, to be honest.

Uh, so Colgate-Palmolive put some money in '18.

Has that been like different in any way? Like, are strategics offering some unique perspective there or is it just like capital is capital?

It's been a good relationship. I think both sides were kind of curious to get to know how the other side ticks a little bit. Yeah. You know, and so just like really nice thoughtful team over there. And, you know, I think good way for us to understand— in a way that was kind of nice because it wasn't our categories, just sort of like broadly how does a, you know, how does a large consumer health consumer goods company think?

Yeah, slowly, you know.

And then from their side, how did direct-to-consumer kids think? I think that that was productive on both sides, or certainly on ours.

Of the money you've raised, have you found certain investors to be significantly better in terms of helping you than other investors, or has it It's generally been capital is capital. Take what you can. Take the best terms you can get.

It's funny. And this probably isn't that unusual because it's like most businesses probably, most businesses that do go venture out probably do raise most of their money when like they're, you know, when their subs, you know, when their little corner of the world is hot.

Yeah.

It's been the same folks around the table for a while now. They're part of the business. And we have, you know, we have good working relationships with all of our board members. You're on a team together and it's a multi-year project. Like, it's cheesy, but the, like, can you get on with each other thing really does become the most important at the end of the day because it's a long trip.

Yeah, certainly. And speaking of long trip, I'd love to understand, like, I think the state of e-commerce today is certainly different than when you started. Yeah, I started. It's completely moved. What do you think about founders taking secondary? What should they think about when they do that? Should they be taking second? And to be clear, secondary sales are just like founders selling their own shares and getting cash in their own pocket as opposed to the company. raising money?

I think it's healthy for the business. I think letting teams participate in that as well is healthy for the business because I think you don't want your management team terrified. You want them motivated, you know, you want them, you know, hungry for an outcome.

Yeah.

But you don't want them like terrified either. I don't think you manage as well through the inevitable kind of downswings then. Yeah, I do think it's kind of healthy. And I think it's very good for the team as well because, you know, to show that you're serious about generating Liquidity for team members when, you know, when it's available, you know, makes you much more credible as the manager who's really on their side.

Did you use that as like a recruiting tactic where you're like, look, we find liquidity for our teammates before IPO or exit?

You know, you don't want to be like too crass about things, but it's certainly something, you know, folks ask about. And it's, you know, and it's also something that I think, you know, potential new employees talked about with current employees, you know, as they were kind of going through the process.

Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think you're right when it comes to like building a longer-term business. Like you mentioned that you started this in 2016. It's 4 years in, you know, at some point founders are going to want liquidity, right? They're not going to work for $75,000. Like, you know, you gave up lucrative careers doing something else, right? Managing Columbia Investment Fund. I'm sure Bridgewater pays more than $75,000 a year. You gave up lucrative careers.

Yeah.

You want to see some of that return sooner rather than later.

Exactly. And you think about like, you know, you know, hopefully they pull it back together from here, but you think about something like Lime or Bird. Those were multi-billion dollar paper valuation companies a year ago. Probably a decent chance the guy, you know, the folks took money off, but if they didn't, what board member really wants to deal with the management team that's taking, you know, an 80% down round with, you know, with nothing to show for an incredible run? It's just sort of a toxic interaction at some point.

Yeah, that's a great point. Let's talk a little bit more about Hubble. The podcast is called Exit Strategy.

Yeah.

You're not there on a day-to-day basis today, are you?

No, no. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

You are there on a day-to-day basis? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, especially now that day-to-day is from the—

is from Colgate.

Yeah.

Okay. Uh, you're there on a day-to-day basis. Tell me what happens. Are you like, what is the goal here? Is it CPG? Is it, hey, Colgate, come in and buy, uh, the rest of this? Is it IPO? Or is it, hey, look, we've made breakeven. We can control our own destiny whenever we want.

I think it has to be the last of them because I think otherwise you don't have any, again, you know, it's like when we were raising, we always wanted to be raising when we had cash left.

Yeah.

You know, if you're thinking about sort of larger events for the company, you need an alternative and your alternative has to be building a business that you're comfortable owning a chunk of.

You're absolutely right. I think like when Native was sort of thinking about raising money and we ended up getting acquired, I was like, people still ask me, they're like, why did you make this? Like, why'd you decide to sell? Like we were doing, you know, tens of millions in revenue a year. I think the last month we sold, we had $1 million in EBITDA. You know, we're going to generate 8 figures in EBITDA in the next 12 months. And I was just like, I have no idea what the fuck is going to happen to Facebook ads. I have no idea what's going to happen to the economy. I have no idea what's like, you know, God forbid somebody like cuts off their thumb and ends up in a stick of Native deodorant. Now all of a sudden we have a public relations catastrophe on our hands.

You can love your business and still feel that it's just diversification. I mean, you know, other than it's your baby, you know, who would ever sign up for having that much of their net worth concentrated in one asset? And I don't think that's contradictory at all with believing in your business, believing in yourself. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, all the rest.

The music stopped so fast. There was like a perfect storm of events. First, like Casper's IPO was like, it was really hard on the industry. Like, you put, you know, Casper was the— you mentioned this earlier, like Casper was the darling of the DTC industry. First business you'd ever heard of that did $1 million in 30 days when they launched the business.

Yeah.

Everyone was like, holy shit, these are the guys. Started in 2013, early on, beautiful brand. you know, New York City subway ads where you're just like, yeah, exactly. You're just like, these guys have figured it out. Raised $400 million, IPO at less than $400 million. At one point a couple of weeks ago, they were worth $100 million. Yeah. You know, Outdoor Voices has to recapitalize, which is really tough on that team, I imagine. Then there was like the WeWork fiasco of like people actually caring about bottom line, I think. And then COVID hit. Like there were multiple events that destroyed this industry.

What's going to be so interesting about all this is you have On the one hand, you'd say like, okay, venture winter again. It's funny. It's like we feel it most acutely in direct-to-consumer because, you know, we're e-commerce guys. But it's like then you talk to your friends in like in other spaces and it's like my friends with like AI or machine learning startups are like, could this get more bloated? You know, certainly all the, you know, all the mobility stuff is very visible in the delivery stuff. And so it just feels like, okay. And so you could say like, okay, does all this— startups just go away for a bit? But like But the flip side of that is $1 trillion in dry powder raised last year. A lot of that's going to go to people supporting their existing portfolio companies and hoping for something to happen. But that's still like a few hundred billion dollars that has to go somewhere. And presumably the VCs aren't just going to return it to their LPs.

Yeah.

I think it'll be interesting. I remember when I was on the investment team for Columbia's endowment, Columbia was, which was really interesting, really meticulous about sort of logging all their historical performance. And so you could look at sort of what their venture funds had done through '07 to '09. And of course, they'd been marked up 6% because nobody takes a down round ever unless they can avoid it. And Facebook was raising still. So you had one whale generating lots of up rounds at huge—

Yeah.

And sort of swarming everything else. But the other thing that was interesting more on the PE side, because venture wasn't having such a crazy moment during that period, was You had these giant bloated funds coming into the crisis. You had KKR, Apollo, all these groups raising $10, $15 billion funds, the worst performing funds in history. But then the ones that closed in '08 were some of the best big funds in history. And so it took a while for those GPs to make it back to market because their '05, '06 funds were disasters and they had to get their '08 fund mature enough that people would forget that. But like, The ones who got some capital closed before the crisis had great new portfolios to talk about in '11 and '12. And what did you see? It happened on a 4 or 5-year cycle instead of a 2 or 3-year cycle. But everybody came back with bigger funds than their, you know, than their last pre-crisis fund.

You're the only person I've heard of who's talked about this from like a bottoms-up perspective instead of a top-down perspective. You're not like, fuck, you know, all of these businesses are fucked. you know, there's no end in sight to this. Like, we're going to be at home for a long time. Uh, like, what's going to happen to, like, the Barrys and Rumble Fitnesses of the world? What's going to happen to the Away Travels of the world? What's going to happen to Allbirds of the world when people don't need— like, they're not going outside to try and, like, you know, go on dates or go to the clubs or anything to that effect. But you're not talking about that. You're like, hey, look, these VCs have to deploy capital. That's their job. Um, and they've got a bunch of dry powder.

Yeah, their job is to be top decile. in deploying the capital they have. That's their job. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that. They're not market timers. Um, if, you know, if the pension funds and endowments, um, you know, and other institutions wanted somebody to try to time the market, they'd give it to a macro fund. That's their job.

If you think about the heroes of the direct-to-consumer space, it's got to be like Casper, Away, you know, Rothies, and Allbirds. Probably like those are the 4 that sort of stand out, maybe Hims Hers at this point as well. You know, Away is going to suffer a lot. I imagine Allbirds and Rothy's can't like love this type of market environment, certainly in the way that like Brooklinen is probably like— you're probably spending a lot more time at home thinking about your bed. If you're like Misen and selling cookware, you're probably thinking a lot more about the cookware you're using. Do those companies take down rounds? Do you think they have enough? You know what's crazy is I feel like the US government has told everyone, hey, you better have 6 months of runway at home to continue operating. Hey, Delta Airlines, you better have 3 days of runway if you don't. If you don't have revenue for 3 days, don't worry, we got you. What should be happening with these companies? If you're running Hubble, how much runway should you expect to have before you're like, fuck something? It's a different environment. 3 years ago, you never thought about this. Today, you're probably like, I should be thinking about runway for a really long time.

I feel like D2C cooled off a little bit before everything else or started to. And so we've been thinking about runway for a while, whether we managed well through that. We think our runway has to be indefinite. I think what'll be interesting about all this is it just, it feels like there's, you know, this is sort of like the Marc Andreessen piece that everyone's reading this week. There's been a really long stretch where like, it feels like everybody's been told kind of just stay in place. It depends how long this goes and it depends how unhappy or not people are spending more of their day at home. But this feels like the first window in a long time to maybe actually reorganize some chunks of the economy a bit. in a way that's more interesting where, um, you know, the 2020s feel more different from the 2010s than maybe the 2010s did from the 2000s or the '90s. But, you know, we'll see.

You know, reorganization of the economy has probably been necessary for a long time, right? Like, the idea that it takes 4 years to get a political science degree and 4 years to get an organic chemistry degree cannot make sense, right?

Yeah.

Like, how is it possible that it takes the same amount of time to get through college for both of those? But like right now, are people like living hand to mouth? Are there people thinking about that? Are you sitting at home thinking about, okay, at Hubble, this is what we should do in order to like move forward in the next decade?

You live your business day to day.

Exactly. Yeah.

But like, you know, but that leaves plenty of time for internal bloviating as well. So.

At Native, I lived it so day to day. I'd often try and time sales at the end of a month. So that like you could get a little bit of revenue at the end of one month and a little bit of revenue at the beginning of the next month.

Yeah.

So like, you know, if it's April, I'd launch a sale April 29th. So like, yeah, there would be a ton of juice there and a ton of juice May 3rd when the sale ended. And that's how I was living it. I was like living it, you know, week to week where I was like, hey, how do we manage expectations and create a great up into the right trajectory?

Yeah.

I think that like, yeah, Marc Andreessen has a great point and like, you know, great, let's invest in infrastructure and change the way we behave. But in The reality is that like Delta Airlines is burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year right now, probably billions of dollars a year. These guys need bailouts. Away Travel should get a bailout. I'm not sure why Away Travel wouldn't get a bailout, but Ruth's Chris would.

That certainly makes sense to me, which is the reason why you wouldn't give Away a bailout is you would say, okay, maybe people's travel behavior is just going to be different on the other side of this and this business shouldn't exist and we shouldn't be making that bet. But certainly by saving Delta, you are making that bet. So it's weird that you'd be sending everyone to the airport without a suitcase.

Yeah, this is the trouble when the US government decides who lives and who dies. I think about when Obama, like, when, like, we passed the Affordable Care Act and people were like, oh, we're gonna have death panels. Yeah, the reality is today we have death panels. Those death panels sit on the US Department of Treasury and they decide what businesses live and die.

Across the spectrum, there's this high, high preference for cash moving through the business to the individual instead of just from the government to the individual through this. And it seems weird because, I mean, you know, I think this— certainly I know everyone in the venture-backed space has been thinking about this. Do we apply for the loans? Do we not apply for the loans? And the loans are really weird when you think about it. It's sort of just an unemployment program administered as a pass-through through these businesses, which is why if you're a bank, like, do you really want to take liability for that if you're a business?

Sure.

Do you want to take liability for that? You want people taken care of, but if it's ultimately just money going from the government to payroll, which is just people, why have these 2 layers in between it all of it's got to go from the government to a bank, it's got to go from the bank to a business, and then from a business to a person? And it's so much easier if it just goes from the government to the person in terms of monitoring, like, what the new consumer preference set might be on the other side of this. Great. Give people cash. keep people in cash so they can let you know what they want you to build.

That's because there is no way it goes from the business or from like the bank to the business and the business to the person without any costs. It's not like the U.S. government gives a dollar to the bank and the bank gives a dollar to a business and the business gives a dollar to a person.

Right.

And the bank and the business are going to take money from that.

Totally. As management, and I assume on the bank side too, you're signing all these things saying that, you know, you personally represent that this is all above board and legit, you know, and your business is actually distressed and you're legitimately meeting payroll. Why? If the person's not needed at that point in time, and it's just sort of a government and you know a necessary cash transfer program with you as this weird signatory with extra liabilities around that, it's very odd. And I think it's why there's you know been meaningful pushback.

Yeah, I think there's been pushback. I'm just not sure how meaningful it's been yet. And I guess like no one knows. This is exactly what happened during the financial crisis as well. And this is what happened like during the Civil War, where the U.S. government was like, "We have money, we have money, we have money," and every Everyone's like, give me some. And afterwards we're like, where the fuck did all the money go?

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I mean, it feels like we couldn't be more incompetent, you know, handling this day to day. And it's in some ways it's reassuring to look across to Europe where you have some countries, you just have more countries. And so you have a larger and greater range of outcomes. And it's like, okay, like we're big companies, I mean, a big country. So we should sit somewhere in the middle of that distribution. And if you were to like look at how different countries in Europe are handling this, you would say, Okay, dimension by dimension, we're not the worst, we're not the best. We sort of just look like a mediocre, or, you know.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like we're crazy innovative and we're like, we've solved the issue to make it like, you know, the world just in the United States and like capitalism to exist.

Yeah. Yeah.

We're just like, we're handing out money and we hope that like there's not a recession, especially because it's an election year.

No, no, we're not testing enough, but nobody is. And we're testing more than some and less than others. You know, all these, Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's kind of middle of the pack.

It's so hard to even get it, like, to get an understanding of that as well. You know what I'm shocked by is the New York Times every day, like, when I log into nyt.com, they don't start with 40,000 Americans are dead. You know, this is like the equivalent of not, uh, like 10 9/11s, more than 10. At this point, it's probably like 13, and every few days it's another 9/11. How are we not leading with that every day? We're like, 40,000 Americans are dead. It absolutely is strong, like a crazy amount. And it's not the COVID of the New York Times every day. It should be like this. I'm not saying it's like fun. I don't want to read that, but I want to like understand the severity of the crisis. And I think by talking about grocery stores and Netflix, we're like, yeah, maybe we should be able to go outside.

Yeah, you should have data-driven reporting around this because it's— I mean, it's, you know, this is a pure modeling exercise. I mean, there's probably— I would imagine Marginal Revolution traffic's probably at an all-time high because an econ blog where everybody's just Going back and forth on epidemiology models is, you know.

Tell me a little bit about what you're doing for Andrew Yang. Like, it's crazy that you're working for him. I feel like Andrew Yang went from being a nobody, maybe he wasn't a nobody 2 years ago and I just hadn't heard of him, to the Yang Gang, to all of a sudden universal basic income went from, are you crazy, to, hey, when should we start that in 2020? Because it sounds like a great idea.

Yeah, he and his team have just, they've been doing some fundraising. for direct cash transfers through this. Um, you know, a lot of that through sort of their established network and, you know, we offered to kind of do some testing and see if we could kind of expand the reach of that, which has been, you know, a fun experiment and a fun project. And, you know, it's got— it's gone well so far.

And so you're helping him fundraise through advertising, is that right? How different are those ads versus the e-commerce ads? Like, certainly, are there skills that you can translate over? Certainly like understanding Ad Manager. Yeah.

Something I've been curious about, Dan Rosen, our head of creative at Hubbell, we did a thing with the Ad Council last year on voting, is how much of these things are just about having deep funnels. You know, I think where a lot of political advertising stumbles is shallow funnels, much higher than other advertiser buckets I think run as display ads. The thing is just like what objectives can you tie stuff to, just like we would when we're advertising for our business.

Yeah.

The buying team around Trump really does a good job of that. You see, you know, if you go through his ads, you see a lot of quizzes, surveys, forms, donate, you know, lots of things that are engaging where they're actually monitoring intent of traffic.

Yeah.

It's not just a Democrats thing. It's an establishment thing on both sides has been weaker. But since the Trump team is sort of picking up the slack there on the Republican side, it's a particularly acute deficit on the Democrat side.

Interesting that the Trump team is good at that type of engagement to determine intent. And interesting that political organizations are still spending a lot of money or more disproportionate amount of money on display ads.

It's a lot more work. It's a lot more harder. It's heartache. It's a lot more time to like, to be tracking performance on your ads.

Yeah.

You know, and so I think the, the, you know, a lot of the time the fundraising apparatus is still sort of the tail wagging the dog there. You're spending so much time on, you know, on your fundraising. that when it then flips around to spend the money, you want to spend it fairly efficiently from an operational perspective. And that does not performance marketing make. Yeah.

Could Hubble have been built in 2020 instead of 2016? Like, would you have done like the same things? Could have been built in the same way? I told P&G, I was like, in 2016, if I had $1 million, I could have made anybody president of the United States.

Yeah.

I could have done it on Facebook ads alone with $1 million. Yeah.

I think it'd be hard to do today because I think the big shift is You have Clearback stepping in and financing your ad budget to some degree, but nobody wants to finance working capital. You know, you have Assembled Brands, which has stepped up a bit and they'll do some percentage of your inventory. But like, by and large, if you're a subscription business, it's building up enough cash going through the business so that you can afford to have cohorts with, you know, more reasonable payback windows. And you don't kind of get pinched at like at the suboptimal super fast payback point. And then if you're a single order business, it's having enough product variety to get conversion to where it needs to be. And I think, I mean, you did an amazing job with Native with, you know, with pretty cap, very capital light. But I think in general, you know, a lot of categories, the amount of inventory that you need to build up is, you know, not tens of millions of dollars, but single digit millions of dollars. And financing that is really hard because nobody, lots of people will step forward to finance More inventory buys on what you've already bought or to finance marketing spend on the existing products. Nobody wants to step up to finance product extension, and product extension is what juices conversion rate and improves the marketing funnel to allow the whole thing to work.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Like when we were running the business independently, we had just-in-time inventory, so we were incredibly capital efficient. Today we have to sit on $12, $15 million in inventory in order to be able to like you know, service the needs of the Targets and Walmarts and CVSs of the world. And like all of a sudden your balance sheet, which, you know, had $1,500,000 on it, has tens of millions of dollars on it or north of $10 million just in inventory because you gotta—

Yeah. It's just, it's, it's just hard to figure. I think it's hard to figure out how to build up your balance sheet to where it needs to be, cover even sort of a light level of G&A. And so I, I do think it's tougher today. I mean, and I think the teams who I know that are doing it well, are like really, really lean as a result, you know, which is great, but it's a lot to ask of a, you know, of a founder, which is build your business slower because the ramp time's longer.

It's counterintuitive.

It's not impossible. It's just a hard road to hoe.

Yeah. Okay. Last question. What is the DTC company that you admire the most today?

What is the DTC? I think the folks over at Pombus have done a really great job. You know, who, you know, who would've ever thought? That's just a classic example to me of, Understanding your customer well, increasing assortment, using increased assortment to increase basket size, you know, and scaling a business far further than I think most people would've thought it would go.

Yeah, that's a great business to reference. And yeah, like I've seen their TV, like great brand as well. Like looks beautiful. I don't think they've raised a ton of money. Like they've just done a fantastic job of it.

Yeah.

Awesome. Jesse, thanks so much for doing this. This has been fantastic. Jesse Horowitz is the co-founder of Hubble Contacts. He's a published author with a book called Selling Naked. Which is fantastic. I think you sent me an early copy, actually. I read it. It was great. If you're wondering how to start a direct-to-consumer business, it's a great place to be like, who are the people that have done this? What do I have to worry about? And, you know, also working for the Yang Gang. So, Jesse, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate this.

Great to chat.

Stay safe during the COVID crisis.

Thank you.

Hey guys, that's a wrap for this episode of the Exit Strategy Podcast. We'll be back next Thursday with another new episode. And if you like this podcast, visit thehustle.co to subscribe to The Hustle, a daily email that will give you the business news you need to start your day.