Take us through when you got your first paying customer and then the growth tactics to get your first hundred customers.

Yeah, we were introduced to a large-scale operator in New York as kind of our first customer.

And most people say, don't sign the whale first.

You overbuild.

You have all these enterprise issues the SMB doesn't have.

I challenge that by industry because if your first customer is a big enterprise customer, they tend to be invested in your success.

And really this operator gave us their full store and their entire G&A to help us understand what's important.

So if someone's thinking, wow, 20% EBITDA profit, you know, profits in 2025 on 60 million, why would he go out and do the 140 million series C? What was your thinking?

And so I'd be interested to think, to, to see from your perspective, just how do you view deal making and negotiating in general? What's your, your philosophy or approach?

Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is, you know, if you, if you've transacted a ton of volume but the deals were bad, then who really cares? You over, you overspent or you're underpaid, you know, one way or another.

And so I, you know, it's, it's a, it's always a balancing act, particularly as a founder.

Like it's, it's so f- you get the ego boost of seeing the, you know, the big numbers and how exciting everybody, excited everybody is for you and all that.

I think the thing that I'm, we're most proud of is just like, you know, in some ways the efficiency on, on the capital or when we've done transactions, the, the synergies that that transaction's been able to actually facilitate for us.

I think when we're raising capital, it's how much revenue are we gonna, and, and, and cash flow can we deliver because of the capital raise? If we bought a business, we bought it because we thought we could do something really special with it and get a, a, a really quick payback period, while also, you know, you want the person you're buying the business from to feel like they hit a home run personally.

Uh, but also, you know, realize that there's a strategy behind buying anything.

Can you tell us about that philosophy? Because I think that's surprising to some people too.