Kris Hartvigsten - Founder and CEO of Dooly

Fresh off of not only a 17 million Series A this year, but also a series B of 80 millions this past May. Chris Harfixen joins us today to talk about his journey as a B2B entrepreneur and being the type of leader that inspires and empowers their team.

3, 2, 1.

Welcome to another episode of Founder Journeys Season 2. Today we've got Chris Hartvigson. He is the founder and CEO of Dooley. Chris and I have had numerous encounters on the road for our Traction CEO events and seen each other in San Francisco, I think. Did we see each other at south by Southwest? No, I don't think that was you, Saster. And then were you at Collision in Toronto a few years ago? Yeah, so lot a lot of activity. We probably see each other more on the road than we do within our own city. But Chris is a staple in the ecosystem and recognized as one of the more up and coming CEOs and startups. They just closed a funding round recently and it's a unique company because it's a product led growth strategy. But Chris, tell us a little bit about yourself and then talk about Duly and the industry that Duly is in.

All right, thanks for having me, Ray. First off, my background is, I would say, as pure to tech as it gets. Right out of university I had this crazy intention of moving to New York and becoming a creative director in an ad agency and living sort of the Mad Men lifestyle minus the misogyny. But I very quickly got into tech and fell in love with it and just never really looked back. I started in hardware, worked for a company out in Montreal for a few years, and right after that I almost, almost immediately after that in a little stint with my first startup which we sold to a company that was traded on NASDAQ at the time, a company called Forefront, which we sold to a company called Bell Micro. Right after that we or I got into SaaS, pretty much pure play and did a nine year stint at a local Vancouver startup that grew from Nothing to about 100 million during my time there called Vision Critical, where I traveled around the world living the sales lifestyle, lived in Australia for a while, lived in the UK and what I learned from that gig and I was easily triple quota. While I was there, I was crushing my number. Worked with some great people like Jason Smith and Jenna Dorman and Andrew Reed and a bunch of others. When you're the top performer in the company, nobody ever walks up to you in the hallway and says, hey, congrats on signing the National Football League to that multi year agreement. Just. Just wondering if you took the time to update the competitor field and the next step field in Salesforce. So what I realized is that my ability to perform limited me from the brain damage of doing administrative work. But not everybody was immune to it. And certainly as you start to reflect back and take different roles within the business, you realize the importance of actually updating the CRM and doing good handover and keeping your product management team informed and all those different things. So I looked at my system that I was doing inside of notebooks really at the time, and I walked away from Vision Critical. It was like an encyclopedia set of notebooks. What I realized is that every single meeting that I took had a very similar pattern to it in terms of how I manage the meeting, how I manage the outcomes of the meeting, etc. And I use that as an idea that turned into something far more than an idea over the last few years. And that started dually. Dually is what I'll call a connected workspace that allows people to very easily update the people and systems that live around them within the organization. From Salesforce to Slack to your GCAL to G Drive and all the things in between so that you have a single place to manage your work as an individual contributor. Today we focus on revenue teams without having to go into that sort of maintenance mode after you've finished a call and. And open up the virtual filing cabinet that lives in the cloud to do all of your updates and things that are like low value work, so to speak, for you as an individual when you're trying to stay in your high value mode. So we just mitigate context switching by letting people take notes on our product that just deliver tremendous value to and from the rest of the organization.

But it is an essential task that gets easily overlooked or pushed aside, that people don't want to get out of the groove. But this is a common theme that we see with a lot of successful entrepreneurs is that they're scratching their own itch. And more so in the B2B side because you lived in that world, you were a high performer. You didn't realize that this was an issue at the time. But after you kind of moved on from Vision Critical, you look back and say, well, that was a critical issue that I think I can solve. Yeah.

And it's not that I didn't realize it was critical. I knew it was critical. I just. The pain was overwhelming. Things like doing your expense reports and legal and updating the CRM, those are not the things you put at the top of a job description of any salesperson, it's the stuff that you put in the, in the subtext to say, and by the way, when you're not selling, you're going to do all this shit. And it is, it's shit, it's stuff that people just don't want to do. So I looked at it and thought I was alone on the island at first, but you just saw the same pattern with everybody. And you talk to CEOs, you talk to VPs of sales and whatnot, they all know that the information isn't where it's supposed to be. And they just. You don't get fired for buying Salesforce just like you didn't for buying IBM years ago. But at the same time, the data quality inside of that CRM platform is like a percentage of what it should be and a very small percentage of what it should be. And it's never current, it's always out of date, it's always incomplete. It doesn't matter where you go, it's always the same.

Well, I've got a nightmare on my hands where we changed over to a new CRM system and my team's been amazing and structuring it and leveraging it. We're using HubSpot for new ways that we can leverage that CRM and our business processes. But the problem I have is having run Launch Academy for nine plus years now, there's a lot of stuff that's floating in my head that should be in the CRM. I just don't have the time to go in and start updating records and creating new templates and things for the team to leverage. But I need to do it. I need to find the time to do it. It's just, I push it aside.

Same as when you're building a product, you accumulate tech debt over time, right? You're accumulating like this intellectual data debt over time and it's almost irreparable. That's why a lot of people will declare CRM bankruptcy and then like switch from Salesforce to Dynamics or from Dynamics to HubSpot or whatever, thinking that'll solve it. Really all it does is it's equivalent of like moving out of your house. That's a shambles because your kids have crayoned on the walls and left socks underneath the couches. You moved into a brand new house, everything's perfect. Well, guess what happens over time? It decays.

And so could you maybe give us a quick example of how some client is using duly and if you can mention some clients that'd be, yeah, I.

Mean we have some pretty cool clients from like Procore to Asana to Airtable Intercom, some pretty big names in the SaaS world. And then we're starting to see like Home Depot and Black and Decker and all sorts of crazy logos coming online as well. The users find us because they have a visceral pain. And this is the product led growth thing that you mentioned at the beginning of the call. So product led growth means that the product is what's generating interest in your business as opposed to your marketing engine or your sales engineering engine. It's the product that is becoming viral that people are discovering and using as a free ish version that might be full powered at the beginning, but over time you create paywalls. Think about Zoom. When we all started using Zoom and you hit like that 38 minute mark and it's like you have two minutes before this call is going to hang up and people are like ripping their credit card out to try to pay for it so they don't lose their call. Same sort of experience in that product like growth world. We get users using the product, we get users falling in love with the product. They start telling other users about the product and suddenly you have this network effect that's going across the whole business because the more people that use, better the product gets and the more streamlined and more efficient your organization gets. By the time we actually initiate a proper sales cycle within an organization, most of the selling is already done because the users already love it. They've already told their boss they need it and that if their boss doesn't buy it for them, they're going to quit their job. So it works out to our advantage. I would say what Slack did to email, that's kind of what Dooley is doing to meetings and collaboration. In your conversations, you're having customers and internal meetings even as well.

No. That's awesome. We had your former colleague and friend Jason Smith on. We talked about the sassification of everything and he commented that there's over 150 different SaaS products in organizations today. And you nailed it. A lot of it is driven by the employees. They dictate to the manager. I need this to do my job properly. I want to use this platform. And so Dooley is one of those ones that are your champions, are the frontline staff.

Yeah. It's not the CIO or the director of IT that discovers tech anymore. It's not even the director of sales or the director of operations or director of Whatever anymore. It is end users that go, I have a pain. This drives me crazy. I need that pain to be resolved. I'm going to use this thing to resolve the pain and if it helps the business, so be it. But damn, it's going to make my life a lot easier.

So that must be like a stark difference from when you were back in the Vision Critical days, the people that you were selling to and trying to convince to use your services compared to today. Is it just a change in culture? Is it a change and the technology is so different now that your entry point is a lot easier?

Well, I think that there's a collision of trends that are making this come to life. Like you have mobile devices that have high quality apps on them that are, you know, if you don't like it, you blow it off your phone right away. And it certainly isn't making it onto the front page of your phone if it's not something you're going to engage with all the time. So everybody's competing for that real estate and people realize that they had to have that same sort of competition for mind share within the organization. Just to give you an example, we are on average, our product is used between two and a half and five hours per day per user. So we have incredible mind share within an organization. And I think the other thing that dictates this is we're living in a generation where everything is on demand. You know, you got people that expect great experiences. It's a fundamental shift from us Gen Xers to where we are now, where people just don't have patience for bad experiences anymore because anything they want to do, they can context switch in like a second.

And like I said Gen X to Gen Z, it's like a stark difference because they're growing up in a world where they don't know anything other than having everything at the tip of their fingers on their phone 24 7.

Just watch.

Watch how your kids interact with the device. They're flipping through things left, right and center.

And I want to. That's a kind of, it's a good transition into the Vision Critical experience. But on for you, like, you have grown into a great leader, you're a great entrepreneur. What did you take from the other experiences that helped mold you into who you are today as a leader? But also what did you want to do differently?

I got to work with some really smart people at Vision Critical. And even before, like you'll always have these jobs where you remember how you felt, felt right, how the person treated you in Moments of truth. Right. Some people had tremendous empathy and amazing coaching abilities and all of those different skills that made you feel good, and you had people that made you feel the exact opposite of good. I've experienced both, and I would say you learn equally from both because you know who the person is that you want to become. You can. You can choose to go down the Darth Vader path and follow the. The evil emperor and all that stuff, or you can choose sort of the higher ground experience and try to become somebody that your parents would be proud of. And certainly for me, that's super important. And also somebody that my kids would be proud of. Right. I don't want anybody to walk away from their work feeling crestfallen, because I've felt it. I don't want anybody to feel like they were pitted against somebody else in the organization without them even knowing, because the CEO or whoever didn't take the time to even care about what was happening and was more interested in the outcome than the people that were doing the work. And I think the bigger lesson from my Vision Critical experience, because Vision Critical could have been Qualtrics, Vision Critical is, look, they're doing okay, but they could have been Qualtrics, they could have been user testing. They could have been all sorts of different companies that are, you know, unicorn valuations and beyond. Too much zigzagging, too, like, run in a straight line, find your North Star and chase it, and don't get stuck on and hung up on shiny objects to pander to one customer or the other. You really, really need to know who you are and what you want to be and be so convicted in that that it would take something pretty earth shattering for you to shift directions. So those are my biggest learnings, and I would say, like a personal value that I bring into the business that we don't write it up on the wall as one of our values. But for me, it's a massively important one. Never, ever forget where you came from. Everybody started and had a hard run at some point in time. Everybody had the lowest person on the totem pole job at some point in their career. That person doesn't want to be there forever. That person wants to earn their way up, help them, get them there, inspire them.

It's definitely like having some mutual respect for your peers, but also people that are new to your organization understanding that, hey, they've come from somewhere and they want to be somewhere. You're part of that journey. Now. There's definitely a lot of. I get what's the best Word. I wouldn't say nostalgia, but you hear the stories of how Steve Job was a very, very difficult person to work for and, and he had high expectations. And Elon Musk, same thing. But there is a stark difference, and I think you kind of alluded to before, between somebody that has high expectations and, and a very laser focused trajectory for delivering. I mean compared to somebody that is, is just being an asshole or ego driven and just there to. You're there to just placate their ego and vision.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's so one thing that I really subscribe to even from Steve Jobs, who as you know, people like him or hate him. The man was, he was incredibly smart. His ability to inspire people to do things that they didn't think with it were within reach. Which is the same thing Elon Musk does is they call it the reality distortion field in Jobs biography. That reality distortion field gives people superpowers they don't even know they have. I think that's whatever you think of Jobs posthumously, who by the way passed through the same disease and my dad passed away from in the fall. Jobs was incredibly adept at getting people to where they needed to get to.

And that's the traits of the great leaders. They're able to bring out the best in their teams. And like you said things that you didn't think you were capable of doing, your leaders helped you achieve that. And that's kind of what you're doing with your team at Duly and helping them achieve things that they didn't think was possible.

Yeah, and we try to carry it one level further. We try to carry into our customers too actually. Our vision as a business is to create space for people to become the best version of themselves in their work. And that comes with what we call the 501 promise. The 501 promise means that at 501 you're no longer working. You're living your life, the life that you want. If you want to work, great. But you can do whatever the hell you want at 5:01 because 5:00 clock struck and the work was done.

And it must be really appreciated within your organization. Especially now during COVID times and having to deal with so many other things right now.

Yeah, your work is always with you. Because look, we're working in our homes right now.

Right. I do want to make a little bit of transition in you. You mentioned your father having passed away. Same same condition as Steve Jobs. You talked about trying to be a leader that your kids would look up to, but also your parents would respect. Can we talk a little bit about that? The drive to be who you want to be, but also realizing that there is a family component that needs to be worked in. So kind of dive into work, life balance, but also layering in the challenges that you had with your father passing away and the commitments that were there through that journey. Through that journey.

Yeah. It's pretty wild when you have somebody that's part of your life that is no longer there because of this random bad luck. We're all going to experience this random bad luck. I have the same with my wife. Everybody has this their shit like every. I don't care who you're talking about. Like everybody has stuff that they got to get through. We, we raised a pre seed round in Q1 of 2018 and in Q3 of that same year, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which completely changed my focus, my passion for work, my questioning of what I should be doing and when I should be doing it. I spent an inordinate amount of time in hospitals with my father for the next two years. And when I was, when he was in hospital, it was the daily phone calls, the check ins, the are you okay? Are you losing weight? Are you gaining weight? How are you feeling? All that stuff, it's just, it is always top of mind and trying to balance your personal life with your family. You know, three young kids and your parent and your mom who's going through it right beside your dad. And your work is so challenging.

You guys, geographically, how far were you from where they were?

35Km. So not, not that far, you know, South Surrey. But I still, because my grandfather passed away from the same disease and my grandfather's brother and my grandfather's brother's son. So we knew what we were up against. And you know, pancreatic cancer took Alex Trebek and took Steve Jobs, took. Oh gosh, the, the Supreme Court.

Ruth bad again. Ruth.

Thank you rbg. And those are people who have access to all the resources in the world and all the King's horses and all the king's men and still no chance. So we knew we were getting into and it was not an easy journey. And certainly, you know, you drop everything to try to solve that problem because there's no problem more important.

Yeah. And the reason why I brought the geography like this again, you said you don't know what other people are faced with, but everybody has their bag of shit. And I've known people that have had to deal with this, but their parents were in Toronto or New York. And it's like a flight away to.

Oh, yeah. Well, we lived in Australia before this. And thank you. Thank goodness we had made the move back because there's no way you could do that remotely.

And so how you said, you guys just raised. And you're probably in your mind in Q1, say, okay, let's pedal to the metal. We're going to drive this thing further. And now you're hit with something. How do you make that adjustment and how do you get your team?

So my wife wonders about this sometimes, too. It's like, how do you find the capacity? And I just say, you know, you're dealt a decade, you're dealt a hand. Right. And it's up to you to try to make the most out of that hand always. So you can choose to turtle or you can just say, you know, I have capacity to take this on. It's like, I actually equate it to having kids. You have one kid and you love that kid with all your heart. You have two kids and you love. And you love both of those kids with all your heart. And it's not that your heart has expanded. It's your. You have this unbending capacity for loving and nurturing as many kids as you're going to have. I feel the same way is possibly true with regard to the hand that you're dealt in life. And just like, yeah, oh, well, I didn't even realize that I didn't have more capacity for this. Yeah, you realize you do. And. Yeah. Does it take. Does it take a distraction or does it make you distracted? Well, yeah, of course. Sitting in a hospital, watching your dad's chest go up and down, making sure he's still breathing and making sure that his treatment is going according to plan. Yeah, that's a focus changer for you. But it's quality time, too. Wouldn't trade it.

Yeah. And it just goes right back to, you never know what somebody else is dealing with, so be kind. Never.

And I've had a lot of people in my life that are pretty unscrupulous, including competitors. I have some competitors that are incredible, by the way, that I would help out in a heartbeat, and others that truly took advantage of situations. And you realize in those moments. Was it a Maya Angelou quote? When somebody shows you who they are, believe them.

Yeah. No, that's definitely very valid points. And I want to transition to something that you just said there. Said there is. Knowing who people are. Raising money is a task that a lot of people kind of get glorified around startups like, hey, we just raised X amount of dollars and we're raised from this partner and that partner. But there's a lot more to it, a lot more behind the scenes. And the stark differences between not just geography, like Canadian investors versus U.S. investors, but sector investors as well. Somebody that's investing in SATs as compared to somebody that's investing in crypto, somebody that's investing in cybersecurity. Can you touch on your experiences and what you think our audience should know about the journey of raising funds for a company?

Yeah, I mean, I think that and I had this conversation with Jason not too long ago to Jason Smith because we both had sort of similar journeys with regard to fundraising. Our first fundraise was not easy because nobody knew about us and we raised through a couple of angels and scale up ventures in Toronto. And I think for the, for where we were at the time and not knowing any better, they were the right investors for us because they gave us oxygen. But when you start to really examine the quality of the air, so to speak, you realize that there are some investors that are different than others. Even within that group that we had taken investment from, you have some that are, frankly, they're like remoras and you have others that really want to roll up their sleeves and help. When we raised our seed round, I'll give you some of the journey. So we went down to Saster, or we're planning way down to Saster, I should say, when the pandemic struck. And of course you get the email from Lemkin, you probably get the same one, hey, FYI, this is off. And we were planning on being down on Sand Hill Road doing the whole investor circuit and still really wasn't all that good at fundraising when it put us into the oh shit category. Like, we were concerned and then, you know, we started having lots of conversations and started tweaking our messaging and started tweaking our focus in terms of where we're going to reach out to. It only takes one investor. First of all, it's so cliche, but it's so true. But when you're scooping through the tub of butterscotch ice cream, most of the time you're getting vanilla. And sometimes, sometimes people make you feel really good when they're talking to you, but they're still vanilla because they really have no interest in investing. Well, you know, we'll get back to you. I just want to see this metric improve a little bit. There's all this sort of like lingo because they don't want to totally miss out, but they don't want to commit. When you find somebody that totally gets you, that understands your thesis and aligns with it and really grooves with your vision, that's the first butterscotch vein. And you go, oh, that's why I bought the tub of ice cream. That's what I wanted. I wanted something that resonated with me. When you hit that vein, if it's a really good investor, you will hit the convergence of all of the veins of butterscotch and you'll be in that, that sweet spot right at the bottom middle of the tub that everybody goes, wow.

And is that because of just the validation that so and so is invested in, or do they open up doors for you and say, hey, here, let me show you where the rest of the butterscotch is?

Yeah, it's a combination of a bunch of things. So what I've learned since, because I've done a couple of rounds of funding since, is you're looking. What you're truly looking for isn't somebody who you should be honored to take the money from. You're taking money from somebody who is honored to give you the money as well. They are an honor to be a part. They're honored to be a part of your. Your journey. And they will bring superpowers ad nauseam to your business. So boldstar, Ed Sim. Great. Amazing. Like, one of the best seed investors on the planet was rated, like, in the top 10. Ed totally grooved with what we're saying. And at first he didn't want to take the call, but as soon as he saw what we were building, he's like, oh, shit, I want in on this big time. Because this is the future of work. This is something that the pandemic just fast forwarded into the now as opposed to being in the future. And Ed brought us superpowers. He brought us access to other investors that would be perfectly synergistic to the business. He brought us access to talent that we would have otherwise had to pay $100,000 per recruit to get. He brought us access to customers that are now paid users of our product, which helped us to improve our MRR and our weekly average usage and all the rest of that stuff. And he also brought us intellectual smarts that were aligned with the business. And that last one is actually probably one of the more important ones. It can't be dismissed because he understands bottoms up growth. He understands product first mentality. He didn't want us to think out of phase. Some of Our earlier investors wanted us to think out a phase of like.

Oh, what are your.

What's your MRR metric? What's your SaaS metric? It's like, I'm still getting the product right. I don't have a SaaS metric for MRR. I need to get the product fixed. And Ed totally got that. And that led to us raising or. So I played golf with my dad for the first time in two years on July 19th of 2020. We got a term sheet from Ed six days later. So it's a pretty good month. And we. We closed the round, the seed round with Ed and bold start on September 1st. My dad died three days after funding, and it was just like this total punch, total punch to the gut. And it was a total surprise, and we had no expectation that that was gonna happen. We thought he was actually through the worst. And then six weeks after that, because of the superpowers that I just mentioned and the people that were brought into the round and the network effect of having Ed in our round and the curiosity that others had in our business, we raised a Series A six weeks later. And we are. This is. I know this is going to go live a little bit later in the summer. We're now April 27th as of today. Ray, while we're on this podcast together, I just closed my Series B seven months from a series seed to a series B with a total of $82 million worth of capital coming, or $83 million worth of capital coming into the business. US is completely due to who we brought into the round. So be picky. Find the people that bring you the most synergy. Find the people that are aggressively willing to promote you and that can find the rest of that butterscotch vein for you, because some of them just don't have the network to do that.

That's an amazing journey. And I. Awesome, awesome analogy with the ice cream. I love the ice cream analogy because my whole Dairy Queen background, but it's just like, could you imagine in 2018 that in seven months you're gonna go from a seed to a series A to a Series B? Series B. No.

If you told me in July that your dad was going to die and you were going to raise a bunch of money and your business was going to thrive, I would have said, no, you got that backwards. And then the world just flipped. So, you know, it's been quite a journey. So, Ellie, who runs my customer success team at Duly and who I worked with at Vision Critical prior when we did the seed, we'd Heard the rumbling that people wanted to do an A, like a preemptive A in us. And I said, ellie, I give it like a 10% chance at best, it'll never happen. And it happened like three days later. And with this one here, I said, ellie, point point one percent chance at best that we're going to do a series B. Like we're not. Our metrics don't justify it necessarily. A week later we, we got a term sheet for a series B. And she said, as soon as you told me we had 0.1%, she was like, I was already counting the money. She's like, I was already counting the money in the bank.

Did you have a lot of the same investors from series A to series B or is it a different.

Oh yeah, they all followed. They all followed in some new investors that came in as well. Like I have. And if you want an important lesson for your listeners, I have a scorecard on all my investors. Every single time they do something for me, they get like the equivalent of a tick, if you will. And I grade them just like they should be evaluating me. And based on the performance of the business, I evaluate them based on their, their ability to contribute to the business. And what I do is I use that as a vehicle to figure out like who do I want to give some pro rata to that maybe isn't entitled to. Pro rata, who do I want to give access to some secondary for? We're doing a secondary offering and it has paid off in spades. But you really want to have people who understand, like where they can help. And I asked the question up front, like, what are your superpowers of these four, which ones can you contribute to? So again, talent investor capital, customers and then intellectual chops. And then there's some intangibles in there. Like we have the chain smokers. Like that doesn't seem like a normal fit, but it's an amazing fit for our business for like recruitment and retention strategies. And then they tell me what they can contribute and relative to the size of their check, I then will look back on the year and go, yeah, you did pretty good.

Or yeah, I think for a lot of first time entrepreneurs or young entrepreneurs, they're just enamored with the capital, like just give me money. But there's so much more.

Yeah, somebody likes me.

Yeah. And it may not even they validated my idea. They just gave me the time of day and yeah, they want to put check into us.

So we brought in like Jay Simons, the CEO, former CEO of Atlassian, Xander Lurie, the CEO of SurveyMonkey, the chain smokers. David Eckstein, who's the CFO at Venlo Security. These are like some real, real high caliber individuals. They were all brought in through introduction, through our cap table. You need to bring this person in. This is their superpower. You'll love having them in on your round. And it's only been a multiplier effect for us. Absolute force multiplier.

Yeah. And also at the end of the day, it's a two way street. Like they're coming in on your cap table. But as you said, you're looking for ways to reward them or give back to them. And the portfolio effect is something that's real as well. Like how do you benefit the other companies that they've invested? So, Chris, this has been a awesome conversation. Lots of twists and turns, talking about some of your personal side of things. Really appreciate you opening up for audience on that front. I want to get your insight into an app or a tool that has been instrumental in your entrepreneurial journey. Something that you think our audience should definitely download or read or adopt in their life.

Yeah, I got a number of different things that I would suggest, but you can go with the usual. I actually think that Slack is probably the most overrated of all the things you can bring into your organization because it is just. It's the FOMO machine. You're just constantly like, what did I miss? I constantly got to keep on track of things, so it's almost a struggle. We use a product called Miro M I R O internally, which is like a whiteboarding application, which, when the world went remote, was a godsend for us because we could still whiteboard and ideate as a team. So Miro and Mural is the other one. M U R A L. We're using that for a different exercise that we're doing. They're both fantastic for their purpose.

Remote collaboration.

Yeah, Total collaboration and ideation. It's like what Vizio probably should have morphed into over time.

Yeah. So I've got a team in South Africa and France and I'm here in Vancouver. Our CEO, Gary, he's in Sun Peaks, so we use Miro whiteboarding. And so it is definitely.

I'll ask about the Sun Peaks piece afterward because I love it up there.

Yeah, no, so that's definitely a valuable tool that. Especially in today's world and the world moving forward. Remote work and remote teams are just a reality. And so tools like that and tools like Dually are essential. What Piece of advice would you give to a first time or seasoned entrepreneur? Doesn't matter. But somebody starting something new today, what would you tell yourself if you were starting something new today?

Really? So a couple things. First of all, be super passionate about whatever the heck it is you're building. Don't just build something because you think that there's an opportunity to have an amazing exit. Build an amazing company. Right. Build an amazing company and your exit will happen or your opportunities will be in front of you. I would say the other thing that for me is really important is really, really pay attention to the user problems. Don't try to trick yourself into believing that you're on the right track because you have this amazing idea. Everybody's got an amazing idea. Dig into the problem and then validate the hell out of it before you actually do anything.

Yeah. Customer validation. I think a lot of people are afraid to talk to people because they don't want their idea to get out there until it's perfect. No, that.

Which is total bullshit, by the way. There's like 300 people in Vancouver alone that have the same idea as you. But I mean, the bigger reality is that if you don't listen to the market, you're gonna build something because you think it's right and everybody's gonna be like, what? It just won't work.

Yeah. Nine times out of ten, what you envision and what you start up building is not what ultimately gets sold. Chris, this has been amazing conversation. I want to wrap it up giving you a chance to give your call to action. What can our audience do for you?

Yeah, well, look, if you are using Salesforce today or if you know others that that are and eventually we'll plug into a lot of other things. But today Salesforce and you want to try to simplify your life, go to start Dooley AI that's D O O L Y A I and try our product out. You'll find that it gives you a lot of joy. Our goal is to make you happier in your day. So hopefully by taking it for a spin, you'll feel that joy.

Hopefully that joy continues throughout the summer and you have a great relaxing one because I know the journey that you've been over the last year and having closed your series B, the work is really starting now. But hopefully you get a chance to enjoy family and the summer.

Thanks, Ray. Appreciate it.

All right, thanks, Chris.

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