it's, you know, it's not always easy to just have a plan that works out exactly the way you want. Right? So, uh, I actually started my career in law. Andi. It's easier to thio detect what you get inspired by by by detecting what you don't what you don't want to do. And so I was interested. Warned some of the clients that we had that happened to be in, uh, in technology and entrepreneurship and specific. You know, the law is not not what I want to do. Eso I got an MBA at Carnegie Mellon. Actually, Andan moved to Tech Onda. Uh, my first job out of school was with the Bell Labs with a T and T Lucent Technologies at the time. That's about 20 years ago on, do you know? So you learn from the experiences of working for such a big company onda a time. They're also breaking up A T and t into different organizations. So you learn you learned a lot about, uh, you know what? What what's what's happening good in a big organization was not, but yeah, I clicked quickly, was able to join on early stage company that kind of invented Ah, voice over I p. So everything that we do today online, uh, you know, kind of started from that company and and others that came about the same time. So kind of get got me all into the bug of entrepreneurship and really pushing, Pushing forward Onda Uh, that's that's how I got into telecom or and eventually lead to where I am, where I am today.

so. So. As I said, I've been in the industry voice of our API industry now for a very, very long time. And when When? When we when we started the our company phone dot com. The idea was and still is, uh, to be a cloud based communication service or platform toe offer phone service or now also other collaboration capabilities to small businesses. Entrepreneurs, etcetera. So, essentially, that's that's that's in a elevator pitch where? Cloud communication provider serving small businesses and entrepreneurs. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you know, when, uh, when we started a little over a decade ago a small business, you know? Really small, small, small under 20 employees have to quit. Afford to get a whole business phone service with all the capabilities that that you know, whether you have an administrator answering the phone and welcoming you and transferring you toe extensions, toe executives or if it's automated. Well, what have you, right? Uh, you know, they used cell phones. They used maybe a landline. A few lines in an office. I'm talking again. Ah, small. A small office could even be a blue collar. A plumber, um, just uses a cell phone on. That's the only way you can get reached or or just a couple of landlines in a store or what have you. But yet the features and the capabilities air so rich there, just out of out of reach financially and implementation wise from these businesses. And that's what we try to replace. The fact that they had to use a cell phone or a new old landline didn't really do too much on that, pretty much kept you, uh, just connected to that line that you that you had eso it opened up the opportunity Thio look and feel like a like a much bigger organization if you can share a transfer calls between members. If if you and I are partners, I can transfer to you, uh, eyes an extension, you can dial in the same number and press one for me, too. For you. You can put the business numbers on a business card or on a website, and then from there it just grew and grew, of course. But that was the beginning. In the early days,

So when you when you think of any of any business when you started, right, you have the, uh the idea that, you know, I was again from from previous experience I saw cos I was in the industry seeing applications that were similar to Skype 23 years before Skype was brought into market. So think how how old this is on. You see how great technology isn't there in the right time because maybe the broadband isn't enough or great technology isn't enough to market a service. In our case, I had the opportunity to get Apartment two a partnership with the guy that owned the domain name phone dot com. So we can't argue with with value off website. That's www dot phone dot com. But then you have to start the business. And, um uh, I had a very good you know, partner technologists, which was one of the entrepreneurs that kind of on the tax side invented, invented the voice technology, paraphrasing a little bit, Um, and then we partnered with another organization that had the e commerce platform of credit card capability and all the functions to sign up online. They didn't do phone service, but they have those capabilities and then they built, um, the basic functionality for us on. That's because technology involved and let you do things that were easier than 20 years ago to build it. Eso the very beginning. You you scramble, your budget is very limited and you're putting together a team you're putting together. In our case, it was a partnership. Um, it also wasn't all over in New York. They were in San Diego, was somewhat obviously a long distance relationship, not international, but was long distance and on we had to get something live. Uh, you can imagine the first few months there's a lot of back and forth a lot of planning on Berry, very much careful under under very limited budget that you that you have, uh, todo So we wanted to reach a point where we could just put something out live and and hope people will start assigning up. So there's a lot of just a DEA sharing going back and forth to get the product that what we call the minimum viable product out there uh, that would be the first few months, somhm way. You know, obviously you learn, you learn what you can do. You learn what, uh, more doable. Some things you want to do, but you you realize I have to delay it. Um, some functionality in our case. Uh, you know, uh, realized that it sounds like it's all Internet, but it really is the, uh, telephony and telephony is regulated as opposed to the Internet. That is not so regulated with taxes. And, uh, other requirements. Uh, maybe the simplest example is 911 right. If you if you offer a phone service, you need emergency services. If you do chat, you don't. You don't need thio offer emergency services. This is certainly back then. So there is a lot of things that we have toe learn and adjust and, uh, plan accordingly. You know, over time you learn And, uh, you know, when we when we launched the service, we didn't even plan to go live. The website was still a www that data that from that camp. But because of the popularity word phone people just found us and through Google, and, uh, they did phone service or something. They found our website and started buying the products and we weren't even ready to sell it. It was live, but we didn't. The website didn't even exist, so so that was caught us by surprise when we got our first sale. But then we just start experiencing and you start working with customers and you grow and luckily we groom or we raise some money and things, you know, you move on, things get a little a little easier, but there's always the next step.