Well, I've been really lucky because I've been around startups for going on 16 years. Early on in my career, I spent the first couple of years out of undergrad working in more traditional jobs. I worked in strategy, consulting and then, actually, immediately after that, took a short detour into a startup where I had an opportunity for a number of months to work for a really impressive entrepreneur who's also going to do great things. And long story short, I was gonna hook from them after that way in-depth, actually, something the company shortly after I joined just got plenty of experience. Lomg story short after that ended up joining an investment fund in New York, where I was responsible for covering investments in early and growth-stage financial technology companies in particular. And so I've got a lot of exposure quickly to space and then from there ended up taking an operational role in one of our portfolio companies and the rest is history. After that, I kind of decided about two years in that business, I decided that I was ready to come back to the West Coast. I was in New York at the time, and I was originally from the West Coast. So come back here went to business school. Wallace Business School I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do. And that was about 11 years ago. I and my other co-founder, we, started actually in succession two businesses. One was a fitness business, a set of gyms. He did have a lot of exposure. I was an investor in it. We really did make some cash flows and long story short, the bad experience ended up inspiring us to start a lending company which I end up running for it's going on seven and a half year. We ended up taking a platform that happens is part of the public in 2018. I ultimately transitioned my operating role right around the IPO and I spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do next. One of the experiences I've had as an entrepreneur of the years was the fact that managing your business insurance as you scale a company is really a painful experience and so, ultimately teamed up with my co-founder, Travis. And our early backers are Ribbit Capital and Silicon Valley Bank to start what is now Vouch. We've now been building Vouch for a year and a half and have a team of almost 40 people split across Francisco, Chicago and we're having a lot of fun with that.

For this business, we had a really fast start and the reason was the case is number one. We and our backers had a pretty high degree of conviction around the idea. And so I would say that actually is kind of an exception in the start-up Journey. I mean in the normal ways you actually spend a lot of time and with a set of hypotheses or experiments you want to run. And you can test things and you kind of man around a little bit while you're trying to find some level of conviction over an opportunity, where there's an intersection between an idea and a market with that need. In this case that need having already been validated. So with Vouch, we raised capital out of that gate. We used that capital. You put together our initial team. We did spend a lot of time thinking through some major design decisions on kind of brand. So what do we want to call the company, what do we want the look and feel to be, we made some decisions around business model design, how we're going to face that end and we thought a lot about going to market as well. But from pretty early on, from for the first few months through today, I would say it's been a lot of focus, really, on just building the infrastructure necessary to launch. Insurance is a sector where there's a lot of set-up on its land, the minds and the approach for a company like this is rather different from some sectors where you could actually run up a few low-cost series of experiments or perhaps start as a service-focused business. Unfortunately, they're not available. If you're building a company like this one so you can have higher conviction and spend more time upfront only

Having been around the start-up space for a long time, I think I've seen two approaches in the building of startup teams. One is you kind of get generalists oftentimes people you're friends with and you just kind of slop people into different roles. And particularly since the idea itself is evolving. People kind of move around a bit. For us again because we had a pretty high degree of conviction around what we're building and also because frankly we're just a little bit further along in our careers. We made the decision early on to really be awful about the specialized expertise we needed on the team if we wanted to build what we need to build. And if you take a big step back, there really are two crucial disciplines to giving this company right. In addition to all that, normal functions. But those disciplines early around, the technology side on the one hand and the insurance side on the other. And so if you look at the people, we brought in the team over the first year, we tried to get folks who really deep expertise in either one of those, ideally, to get a bit of both, but who also had a shared vision. We could actually hybridize them so that we can actually again get the best of both as we all vouch. Talking about the challenges, hiring really good people is always hard. And it's basically a part in the context of the workplace market. That is quite tight. You can look at the unemployment rate for technologists. Regular is negative unemployment. And so you kind of need to be able to articulate a really strong vision and also be able to, frankly articulate why it's more likely than not the thing you're gonna be working on will succeed. And the reality is even from seed financing onward, 70% plus of the companies fail. And so figuring out how to maximize the chances that you're one of the ones that succeed, it's a bit circular with getting great people on the team.