So I grew up in South Central L. A. I was born from immigrant parents. I was the first person to go to college and graduate college, and I think a lot of that sort of immigrant mentality opportunity of this new country has been instilled in me, and I've tried to take advantage of that opportunity as best I could. So I grew up two blocks away from the University of Southern California, thinking that I was gonna play football and study architecture there my whole entire life, I thought I had it figured out. My mother, unfortunately, got divorced when I was about six years young and raised three kids all on her own. So she really paved a path around work ethic and academics in school and how important school is, I never saw her sleep. She worked for jobs. I got a bus stop at the San Fernando Valley and my bus stop was 5:45 a.m. We would wake up hours before that and do our paper routes, and then she would drop me off. I go off to school in the San Fernando Valley, where I went to junior high and high school, and then I came back almost when the sun came up. So it's about an hour and a half each way. And then we would sell produce on the back of a little pickup truck through neighborhoods to make more money. And she was a seamstress during the day, and the evenings we would take up would take some garments from the shop and we would help her stitch them and get 1/4 a nickel for each of those things. And then she'd go back to sewing in the evenings and again. I never saw her sleep, so that sort of started creating this sort of work ethic that I have, I think today and sort of shape my way of being so as I continue to share these experiences. That's kind of what helped me sort of create this career path. We then moved to Las Vegas after my mother got remarried. Maybe 2000 or so. We moved to Las Vegas. I finished my last two years of high school there. I pursued architecture. Architecture's still a huge passion of mine to this day. And during that time I was waiting tables to put myself through college on. And this is where the Homie creation story comes from. So I kind of now loop that in a little bit, unfortunately, got caught in the subprime crisis about too many homes that I shouldn't have been buying in the first place? 2008 Hit It crushed me. I completely lost everything. And then I just woke up one evening one day in early 2009. I think that it's my responsibility to fix it. And that was obviously about 12 years ago, I decided to go back to college. So this time I pursued finance at the University of Nevada and then started my finance career as an investment banker. Did that for a couple of years. I got married, and that's what brought me here to Utah. My wife's from Sandy, Utah, and then I work in venture capital for a couple of years. So again, learning the finance, and then going over becoming an investment banker. Learning a technical skill that helped shape some experiences. I spoke a little bit about incidents that helped shape my career and then moving to Utah, working at Mercato Partners on the investment team was a wonderful learning experience. Then, in the middle of 2014 I had this epiphany again around the real estate industry, and then a lot of research I saw open. I saw Lyft. I saw uber, I saw Airbnb, and then I realized that a lot of disruption was happening. Consumer behavior, the emergence of it, of mobile phone technology, the speed at which things were happening and it was an eye-opening opportunity. And then I just started researching tech-enabled broker, Discount broker and, of course, so ByOwner.com came around, FSBO.com and I'm 6-7 pages in, and I realize that there's Blue Ocean, right? And of course, I ran across Redfin and thought, OK, well, there's something that validates the idea there. Then I started talking to investors, started talking to entrepreneurs. Got lucky to be introduced to Johnny Hannah, the co-founder, and president of EnTrata, a real estate software business in Utah, of all places, which was really serendipitous, if you will. He introduced us to our co-founder and CTO, which was his co-founder and CTO Adam Trotter for the 1st 5 years. And the three of us came together and started the business and launch the product in March of 2016. So that's a very longwinded story about myself but hopefully covers how I got here today, the incidents that helped shape my career path and obviously, the experience both professionally and academically on in terms of inspiration, honestly, on my wife and my mother, a huge inspiration for me in my life. I think being fairly frugal and being poor, I guess for lack of a better phrase really helped me make my work ethic and really the inspiration about maximizing human potential and that education is really all equalizer. And as long as you have a great education and a great skill said you'd be able to prosper, and then there's obviously you gotta be hopeful and you gotta work hard. You gotta be persistent and something that you want because no one's gonna hand it to you. My experience, obviously no one handed me anything.

Yeah, so the first few weeks was how do we build a team, right? There is no I in team. You can name any successful start up in the world, and it's never one person, right? It's always a team of people. In order to build a business, you have to be selfless. You have to find entrepreneurs and managers that are also selfless, that believe in the mission that you're building, right. And if you find those people you have a good head start, right. Nothing is guaranteed, but you have a good head start. So, the beauty of the founding team is there's not a lot of technical overlap. Right? I lead our finance, accounting, strategy, and data team. Call it the fast team. Our CTO leads engineering and product. Our CEO leads acquittal on sales and overseas operations. And that's the beauty because you don't have to people doing the same work, right? You don't have a lot of redundancy, especially early on. So the first few weeks were finding the right team and sketching out what a potential product would look like. And specifically, a product-market fit. Where do you find you know, the people? How do you message them? Can you find friends and family to do, to be case studies, to be guinea pigs if you will in terms of what happened over the next month is exactly that we convinced people that we can sell their home? Obviously, we did a lot of free transactions to get us into speed, and we documented a lot of that. Then we created a website, and then we took it one piece at a time from a marketing message. It's very easy to market to a sellar, comparatively nothing to see that by using homie, you'll be able to save $10,000 on average. On the buy-side, the message is a little bit more complicated for the buyers. More importantly, interested in buying the home of their dreams. And then the saving is a little bit secondary is kind of what we've started learning. So the next months were let's go find people and convince them now we can sell their home and a successful transaction and that it evolved that created our product road map.

I'll kind of translate this between my venture capital experience and then obviously, as a tech entrepreneur start-up guy. So, in terms of the challenges, honestly, I got really lucky. The stars were starting to align, right? And I believe that when you work hard-luck favors you more times than that. So it's if you're doing something that's worth fighting for, the stars will start aligning. And I got very lucky. I couldn't believe that. You know, Johnny Hannah was gonna leave EnTrata after 12 and 1/2 years or so, and I pitched him on his last day, right? I mean, how serendipitous is that on a day? And here is a guy who's extremely smart and intelligent, extremely humble, and he built a little real estate software business. And not only did he build a successful real estate software business, he built that in Utah. And I didn't have to find, you know, a co-founder outside of that. And he had a deep experience. And huge domain expertise on what it takes to build the real estate start-up from zero, from the normal amount of BYU, and then the same thing with Mike Trionfo. He had been at EnTrata as a co-founder there. I think he was the first CTO. And then, he worked with Johnny and Johnny introduced him. So as I started talking to a lot of entrepreneurs I was looking for people to add software experience, people that understood the mission. So I guess I was a little bit luckier than most on overcoming those challenges of the initial team You know, there wasn't an overlap. I had two co-founders with technical expertise and their domains. Right, and I got very lucky to say in their great partners and weigh all love each other and have a high degree of respect for each other. In terms of how much time and resource is the founding team committed. You know, if I put on my VC hat, especially as an investor in a young start-up in a seat stage business, you have to be all in, right. You have to create channels of revenue for you and your family when you commit to this 10 hours a day, every single day until you get traction. And maybe if you want to raise venture capital, you do that. I don't think if you in my opinion if you do something halfway, you're gonna get halfway type of outcomes. Right? So we committed. a bunch of capital ourselves. And we committed 110% of our time, so we were all in from day one.