So how did I get here? Um, I grew up in the sort of mylan Nowhere in Pennsylvania, in the hills and and had a love of telling stories as a child, um, but was told by everyone you can't make any money doing that. So I didn't pursue writing or acting, or any of the things that I was told could not be financially beneficial enough. When I got to University of Notre Dame, I studied finance and really the driving force on that waas a Naro I based decision around. Hey, what's the least amount of effort for the most amount of financial outcome? And that's how I chose to be a finance major. But I never really fell in love with finance. So I got some basic grounding in business but ended up working at at Bain and Company out of undergrad and doing high level strategy consulting for Fortune 100 companies. And that was a really great experience. It reaffirmed that I really loved the storytelling piece in business. We told stories around complex business problems, but it was still telling stories that led me to advertising. Um, two years of advertising which I love the storytelling creative piece of it, but didn't love that. It was sort of pigeon holed in this marketing world. I wanted that bigger, that bigger vision. I got my MBA U c l A. Anderson got a job at Disney and corporate strategy, and there was sort of a blending of the two worlds, you know, great company. That tells amazing stories. Um, but we got to dig into really big, you know, important things like big acquisitions, um, new expansions of businesses, new regions, all that kind of kind of great stuff. What was lacking for me in that experience was the execution. I was just telling everyone else, you know, our perspective from corporate, but we weren't actually owning anything. And it also moved at a pace that was, you know, in a company of 200,000 people at the time you're steering a cruise ship. You know you don't you don't go hard pivots when you're in a cruise ship, you make gradual turns. And I was always sort of a tinker alongside of my formal career. I had this. I always had a side project, something that try out whether it was producing something or trying to form a company, whatever might be. And so I knew I wanted something that was a little bit more nimble, a little faster, and so I didn't. I wasn't quite ready to jump into a startup. Just go straight from Disney to four people in a garage. Um, And so I went and got a job at a start up, a sort of mid mid stage startup called Shoe Dazzle, which had raised a $40 million series C round led by and recent Horowitz. Andi. I got a job there as a vice president of strategy and brand, and I'm really fell in love with the dynamic of the startup job and and the environment. It was fast. It was fast paced. It was kind of challenging in the sense that you were still forming everything while you were running Ah company. But it was really exciting to me. And then not too long after I started that job, my co founder and I started talking about Floral. He was running a flower farm in South America at the time, and he explained to me a whole bunch of challenges for the farmer and as a consumer. I saw a bunch of challenges with the way my experience was. There was a lack of, ah, brand that really spoke to me. There weren't designs that I thought were compelling. There was no transparency of sourcing. Freshness was a real problem. And so, as he and I talked more and more about the farmers challenges and the consumer challenges, we thought, Huh? There's something here. Why don't we try to build something? And so we we scraped together $13,000 from friends and family, and we put in a couple 1000 each. And we just started working on it kind of nights and weekends as a side project. And then it got to a point where it was launching and it was, you know, there's some momentum and people were excited. We launched, we started getting some sales, and so from that point forward, we really made it our full time focus

um So our pitch at the time when we were first starting out was very different than our pitch today. Our business thesis at the very beginning, Waas simplify everything like the we had. We had only 40 bouquets. We had one size. We had one price. We had one speed of delivery. We had no vases. We really started off as being a very simplified business model. And we focused heavily on on on the sourcing and where are flowers came from And our elevator pitch At the very beginning, the business was we drop ship flowers from an active volcano in South America for $40 flat. And that was the whole pitch. That was it. Um, we we have since evolved the business a lot because our customers have told us they want different things from us. They want faster delivery. They want multiple sizes, they want bases are sourcing, went from three farms in one country to 140 farms around the world. So today, what we really are is we are a ah platform for fresh floral delivery with a knee commerce demand driver on top. And what I mean by that is We use technology to connect farmers directly to end consumers cutting out four or five different layers, and in so doing, returning better economics to the farm. We keep great economics for ourselves, and we deliver a better product for the customer. Um, before us there were and there still are lots and lots of players and online floral. It's It's an industry with very low barriers to entry, very high barriers to scale. Um, and so before us there's 100 flowers. There's FTD, and generally speaking, people went toe local florists or to their local grocery store to solve their floral needs. We really are solving for people that are gifting someone who isn't where they are. You know, if your if you're going to a dinner party in a pre cove in time when it was safe to do so, you might pick up a bunch at a local florist or at a grocery store and bring it with you were for the sending to the family member who is back in Pennsylvania. You know, when you're out here in Los Angeles,

when we first started, it was it was really conversation with my co founder and I. He was down on the farm in Ecuador and I was working my day job. It was it was mostly sort of spitballing ideas and trying to come up with concepts and researching. Could this solution work? How would this work? What would the cost look like? And therefore, what would our price you have to look like, so very high level. Once we got through that and that was that was a couple weeks, um, it really became about how do we get this off the ground? What resource is do we need? And so we formed a team of people that essentially working for free for equity only nights and weekends, all this side gigs to try to pull together enough to get it off the ground. And so we would meet once a week on Wednesday in a cafe in Santa Monica and just get together and swap ideas, swap, um, share our progress and talk about where we need to go from there. There wasn't any firm deadlines or time lines other than we knew we wanted to launch in the fall and we started that probably JR July of 2012, and by mid October we were taking test orders and we launched November 6th of that year.