eso My my first role was actually in investment banking, eh? So I started out in finance, did that for four years, and then I moved out to California right after the dot com bust in being a tell an unemployed telecom investment banker in Silicon Valley in 2002. It's not a it's not a great position being so just through the process of kind of networking and not really having anything else to Dio. I started consulting and advising some startups, ended up joining one full time, sort of helping the CEO revived his business. And that's kind of where my my startup career started. Um, started out kind of doing finance and operation roles, given my investment banking background and then kind of broadened it from there. I think the for me the big the role that kind of shifted my career pretty significantly was I was an early exact at what was then oh, desk now up work, big freelancer marketplace with public in October 2018 and I just had sort of magical five years there. Um, the CEO, I reported Thio just gave me a lot of opportunity, pushed me hard. Iran started out running operations, customer service, trusting safety built out. The enterprise business built out the international team rand beating and partnerships for a while. So I just got a lot of exposure to a lot of different parts of the business. And the business was doing exceptionally well. So I you know, I just got lucky. Sort of coming in early, right? Is the company was starting to take off, and I think that really set me up. You set me up from my first CEO role at visually on den. Uh, so we sold visually in 2016 and I joined skill share originally as the CEO and then took on the CEO role. So, you know, for me startups? Um, yeah, I have. I did start my own canoe rental business at one point, which was a complete and total failure. But my more traditional tech startup experience, I tend to come in later and global into somebody else's good idea. So, you know, I joined skill share a t 20. Excuse me? I joined owed. Ask it 23 employees. I joined visually in about 25. 30. I joined skill share at 35. So, um you know, for me, I think and what I saw on skill shares a lot of what I saw at O desk. Just a very mission driven business. Really big market, very scalable business model. Really strong sore retention, subscriber dynamics, eso I think. Now, now that I've got a couple of these under my belt, I think I've got a pretty good, uh, sort of gut feel for, you know what? What types of businesses can scale and succeed over the long term?

Yeah. So skill share is online learning community for creative skills. Eso we have about 30,000 classes, video based, typically 45 minutes to an hour long, uh, taught by about 10,000 experts from all over the world. So it is an open platform. Anyone could come in and teach, um, on the student's side. Um, you pay either $19 a month or $99 a year for access to all 30,000 classes. We offer live sessions. We offer workshops, we have discussion groups and forums. Eso we try to really build a full creative community and whether you're a professional designer and that's what you do for living. Or if you're just a hobbyist trying to figure out you know how to do watercolor, we try toe, create a community and a learning experience for everyone. That sort of, you know, encompasses that full umbrella of creative skills. And, you know, prior to skill share, you would you know, there's a lot of content on YouTube. The problem is, the signal to noise ratio is just not very good, and it's optimized for entertainment and not learning, so you don't have it broken into lessons. You don't create projects. You don't get feedback from the teacher and other students. There aren't discussion forums around those topics. So we're just much more focused around that learning experience. Um, you might take a local class. Um, you know, which is fine if you happen to be in a big urban center where there are, you know, meaningful number of classes and teachers available. If you happen to be in rural America or you happen to be in, you know, smaller international market, you just don't have access to that expertise in that talent. So by for you know, by bringing together that international creative community, we can give a lot of experts access to a student community. We give a lot of students access access to this expert teacher network. So I think that aggregation of demand is kind of ah, typical Internet success story that, uh, certainly plays in our businessYeah, So we we pay out based on a royalty model, so we take 30% of our revenue that goes into a royalty pool to be paid to teachers every month. That'd royalty pool gets distributed across those teachers based on their share of the minutes watched. So if you have a hit class and it's 2% of the total minutes that month, you get 2% of that total loyalty pool and our top teacher last month made over $100,000. Eso we have, uh we have some teachers making some pretty pretty significant money on the platform.

Yeah, So I I joined skill share kind of a new interesting inflection point for the business. They they had been primarily growing through supply side tactics. There, they would bring teachers in in Mass, get them to create their first class. Those teachers would bring students with them. Some percentage of those students would stick and retain over time. And that's how they grew the subscriber basing and grew the revenue. That technique had had stalled out in 2016 when I joined, um, so when I came in, they were starting to figure out What does the paid acquisition model look like to bring in supply? Bringing Students are going to bring in demand, bringing students directly. Um, and so we started experimenting with every acquisition channel under the sun. Um, and what we locked in on pretty quickly was influencer marketing, particularly through YouTube s. So it's interesting that YouTube is, in theory one of our biggest competitors, but has turned out to be our largest acquisition channel on DSO by hiring, uh, influencers who just have a very genuine and authentic connection with their followers in are producing content already that is very much aligned with our mission, our vision, our content are creators. We found a very, very efficient acquisition channel that we're able to scale pretty rapidly. Onda, we've grown. I want to say we've grown eight x since I started. So we've seen just, you know, significant growth over the last several years.