Yeah, so I never, you know, growing up. And even through college, never thought I would be an entrepreneur. I kind of stumbled into it about 20 years ago when I joined my first start up. Andi. Iran, you know, product marketing and sales. Um, and from there, I sort of caught the the bug. Loved build, loved creating, you know, not only product, but also teams and ideas and concepts. Um, so that's kind of what got me started was just taking a job and the startup space and then realizing this is where I wanted to spend my career. Um, you know, the current startup gonna have, um was really inspired from an academic approach. I had had two successful exits previously. Ones? Yeah. Whom one To Facebook. Andi was looking for something very big to Dio. And so the team and I kind of looked at a number of different industries. Um, Andi thought about what has not yet been disrupted by data and technology was an industry that was looking at different monetization paths on settled it on apparel. Eso is a very academic approach. It was not the standard, you know, whitening flash of an idea that then says OK, this product absolutely needs to exist. That's not the way that we went about it.

Yeah. So Castle is a logistics and technology infrastructure that allows retailers large brands toe offer clothing as a service to their consumers. So basically, we are the technology and logistics infrastructure that powers rental for all the major mass market brands out there. Um, there, uh, there are two types of startups. One is like, an incrementally better idea. The other is brave New world. This is a category that did not exist before we started it. Um, this is an idea that retailers didn't know they need it. Um, so we've really had the challenge of creating the category itself, which is rental and then convincing retailers They need a solution for this category and then selling them our solution. Um, the problem that we solved for them is a profitability issue. Um, our model makes clothing much more profitable for the retailers. Andi, that's the problem that we solve. We give them this rental model of this technology on back end and allow them to make more money on each individual item of clothing

um, the first few weeks were really around figuring out what team members we needed to get an Alfa product out there. So, you know, obviously we need engineering. We need a product, you know, what else did we need? How could we be as nimble and as light as possible and what did? So after we figure that out, it became what is actually minimum viable product. Right? What does an hour look like? And deciding how we were gonna measure whether or not we were successful. Andi, I think that's one of the critical things to figure out. How are you gonna look back over a defined period of time? Call it six months and say, Did we achieve what we wanted to achieve? If not, why? On def we did. What's that next set of milestones? I think it's really critical. Um, toe lay out some measurable objectives that you are trying to hit so that you know whether it's gonna be worth spending the next two years of your time on it and then the next five years and the next 10 years. And so without those, um, goalpost, you could spend a lot of time kind of going all over the place and not really focusing in on what's necessary. As faras building goes, eh? So that was really the first few weeks in the first few months. Was was around figuring out how we were going to measure success and why those were our objectives.evolving from that, right? If you're if you're looking at well, what was it? It's about setting milestones and then working to achieve those. I mean, that's kind of the the entire game on the startup side eyes figuring out, What are you building? Why are you building it? And how are you going to measure whether what you built is actually the right thing to have built on DSO that same sort of mentality than rolled through week after week and month after month? It just gets bigger in its problems it