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The Sondermind Story | From West Point to Building a Mental Health Unicorn with Mark Frank
70 Plays7 days ago
Mark Frank is the cofounder and CEO of Sondermind, one of Colorado’s standout digital health companies. What began with Mark’s own frustrating search for a therapist became a national mental healthcare platform serving clients, clinicians, and payors across the country.
In this episode, Mark shares how his time at West Point, in the Army, and in healthcare shaped the SonderMind journey. He breaks down early risk, fundraising, COVID-era growth, the $150M Series C, founder leadership, and why AI has pulled him back into founder mode.
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02:30 The making of a founder.
11:10 Eighteen months on the brink of bankruptcy.
17:04 Taking a 70% pay cut to go build.
19:01 An unconventional view of risk and control.
26:51 Managing fear: if you weren't afraid, what would you do?
31:03 Stoicism, learned under mortar fire in Iraq.
38:00 The therapist search that sparked SonderMind.
46:45 A hundred and seventy meetings, one term sheet.
51:00 Signing a Series B two weeks before COVID hit.
57:03 The truth about raising at sky-high valuations.
01:12:49 Why the founder-CEO job changes at every stage.
01:18:00 AI and what comes next.
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Mark Frank is the co-founder and CEO of SonderMind. A West Point graduate and Army veteran, he built two healthcare companies before founding SonderMind in 2017 and growing it into a category-defining mental health platform.
Dalton Wright helped launch Kickstart in 2008 and has since helped create early-stage venture ecosystems on two fronts, co-founding Mexico's first seed fund and Kickstart's student-run Campus Founders Fund. He now leads the firm's expansion into Colorado, backing the region's most ambitious founders.
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Kickstart is the Mountain West’s most experienced and active early-stage venture capital fund. Kickstart provides pre-seed & seed funding to ambitious tech founders across Utah & Colorado with a focus on AI, B2B SaaS, and frontier tech.
See Kickstart’s full investment portfolio here.
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Transcript
Broadcasting from Colorado: New Horizons
00:00:04
Speaker
live Live. All right. We're live from the Kiln Littleton. And so Kiln is one of our portfolio companies. Shout out to Kiln. And this is fun for us to record one of these interviews. Our first one from Colorado. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Matt and I have been... Made in...
00:00:20
Speaker
The maiden guest in Colorado. i love it. Yeah. Yeah. You know I'll give a quick um background on our move to Colorado. So, you know, we moved here. i moved three years ago. Matt's been here for a couple of years. And we have an office in Lo-Hi.
Investment Success in Colorado: Sondermine's Story
00:00:34
Speaker
And one of the reasons why we moved to Colorado was to increase our investment activity in the state. Mm-hmm. And really, when we look back at our investment activity, we see we did ah an investment in a Colorado-based company in Fund 1.
00:00:45
Speaker
We didn't do anything in Fund 2. And then with Fund 3, it started to go about up by about 5% of our allocation per fund to Colorado per fund. So we've grown to about 25% to 30% of Fund 6 going into Colorado. And you know we wanted to highlight one of the best investments we've ever made in the state, which is Sondermine.
00:01:03
Speaker
And so, you know you you have built ah an amazing company here and we were fortunate enough to participate in, I believe, every single round of the company. Yeah, every round. Yeah. So we when we first met, you were connected to Gavin Christensen, the founder of Kickstart through grad school days and Common Connections. And you know in those first days, we saw a company that had a services component. It was office space for clinicians, therapists.
00:01:31
Speaker
And you had a vision for what this was going to come. In fact, yeah just before we started recording, and we looked over original pitch deck that we had, and it was remarkable how much your vision has remained consistent, really. It's hard to do that as an entrepreneur because you have to constantly adapt to the market, but your vision has been very consistent.
00:01:47
Speaker
um But we we eventually got involved once we saw it, we were able to wrap our mind around it and create a hypothesis around this kind of an and a network or a marketplace business. And you know similar to the the Uber of, we saw lots of these Uber of, this you know could have been described as the Uber of mental health services. Although I never said that. Yeah, forgive forgive us. yeah you know um But you know i think venture capitalists oftentimes are trying to like put things in categories that we can understand. Yeah, trying to pattern match. Yeah, we're trying to pattern match and we're trying to say, okay, what's the really compelling business model
Entrepreneurial Journey: From Military to Healthcare
00:02:21
Speaker
here? And so I guess without kind of extending this introduction any longer here, I'd love to ask you kind of, you know tell us a little bit about the early days of Sondermind. So I just kind of alluded to it, but what brought you to that point? And if you want to spend some time talking about different ventures you had tried. like Why were you prepared to articulate a vision in 2017, 2018 for the future of mental health care in this country? yeah yeah And why were you able to be so accurate? It comes from prior experience. So yeah love to hear how yeah how you position yourself and what why you were in that spot back then. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so it's like by the time we met, right, which, ah as you mentioned, Gavin and I were were business school classmates. So we knew each other a bit from business school. And, and you know, I was probably a little bit closer with maybe a couple other of your portfolio company founders who were business school classmates. um
00:03:15
Speaker
And then, ah you know, a different partner was the partner who led the round, right? And he had a background in healthcare and it was marketplace businesses and things like that. And so, you you have like, the again, you you said this earlier before we started the the podcast, like, you know, a little less of about the company. mean, you know enough because we've been involved for a while now, for, you know, eight years. But I was never on your board. You're never on the board, you know. And so, um what's interesting, I think, is that 2017, 2018, I mean, i was already deep into mental health stuff by then. Right. And so you have to go actually further back in time to answer that question. So that the lead into that is basically just to permit myself to go further back in time. So so but maybe, i mean, if it's helpful for the ah for like the you know for the listeners, i'll i'll give ah even I'll go all the way back in time, which is, you know, i I studied computer science and went to West Point for undergrad. And then like everybody who goes to a service academy, you're commissioned into the into the military, right? And so I was commissioned. i then moved to Colorado for my first duty station at Fort Carson, which from where we are here, it's about 45 minutes due south from where I live in in central Denver. It's about an hour, you know, depending on traffic. I had traffic, it could be easily too. I was stationed for Carson for five years, except for one year over in Iraq. and
00:04:36
Speaker
and i When I got out of the army, I went to business school and that's where Gavin and I met. and Then I did investment banking for a couple of years. and my My partner at the time was a nurse. She became a nurse practitioner. And so I saw healthcare through her eyes as a provider, right? Operating in in hospital settings, in private practice settings. As a nurse practitioner, she operated in you know private clinics and ran private clinics. And um and that was what interested me in healthcare. Besides that, it's a big, gnarly industry that's very inefficient to say the least, and you know has a lot of problems that could be solved. And so when I left business school, I did investment banking and I focused on healthcare care mergers and acquisitions.
00:05:17
Speaker
um After a couple of years, I realized that wasn't like the the long-term thing for me. Interestingly, not not for the normal reasons think people leave banking or consulting, which is like, oh, you know, the lifestyles things and, you know, you're working all the time. And I actually like, I mean, I obviously I couldn't. You went into like the next thing where, you know, lifestyle stinks, which is like entrepreneurship. um But ah it was more because I just realized at the end of the day as a senior investment banker, I actually liked the work of an associate or VP, right? Like running the deal, um doing the analysis, like kind of analyzing the strategy, all that sort of stuff. um As a senior banker, you're doing that as well, but really you make your hay as a relationship manager, right? Like that's the job. And that's not a bad thing. I have a lot of very good friends and we work with a lot of bankers, but I just like, you know, I went to West Point to lead people, right? i i And I, in retrospect, had more of an entrepreneurial sort of background that I probably even gave myself, I had awareness of or gave myself credit for. it And and and we we can talk about that if it winds that way, but we don't need to. um And so I left and I came here and I started a company not far from where we are here, originally called Denver CyberKnife.
00:06:31
Speaker
So I started, I called it Denver CyberKnife. I changed the name a couple years in, which was a whole learning experience with rebranding and it was a very public facing thing. I had TB commercials and all that sort of stuff to Inova Cancer Care, still treating patients today with brain tumors, lu lung cancer, prostate cancer, built a management service organization around that called Next Oncology and ultimately sold that business in 2015. So that was healthcare care services, right? That's like treating patients with cancer. um And, you know, i I employed nurses and, you know, medical physicists and and radiation therapists and and, you know, partnered with with doctors and radiation oncologists and neurosurgeons and things like that.
00:07:10
Speaker
but very much in healthcare, care right? It was like, you're delivering care. And then there's another company that I, ah ah about a year and a half into that one, i actually started on the side called Safe Image MD. And that was basically a software platform for storing and sharing and viewing medical imaging data. So think of it as like like ah Dropbox for CT and MRI.
00:07:31
Speaker
right in me know it started like I had ah one of my former employees who was medical physicist and then went on to get another PhD in bioengineering with a focus on imaging informatics.
00:07:45
Speaker
He and I and then a third co-founder of that business, a guy named Sid Dennis, who became my first CTO of Sondermind, we started this thing nights and weekends. We built this up to profitable profitable business. It was one of three companies in the space at the time. We didn't raise any outside capital.
00:08:00
Speaker
We talked about it. We talked we we had we had investors coming up to us and saying, hey, like we want to invest in the space. and so I got a little taste of how like the fundraising stuff worked you know on the VC side because the first one was not a VC-backed company. It was and a couple of private investors.
00:08:15
Speaker
and um But it had 12X return, so it was a VC type return for the for that first one. um And the second one, we ultimately sold it. But i I give the background um more because that one was specifically healthcare care technology, right? I mean, it was dealing with a file format that is only in healthcare, DICOM, D-I-C-O-M is the file format for medical imaging data and the transfer protocol as well. A very technical product at a time when The industry didn't, I mean, you know the healthcare industry broadly and even the technology industry did not understand sort of the the needs of the healthcare space. and And I say that just like for the for the listeners who don't understand how how like in the dark ages healthcare care was even in 2010, is that in 2009, there were still incentive payments from Medicare that they had put in place a couple of years earlier to basically pay doctors hundreds of thousands of dollars for them to start using an electronic health record system.
00:09:14
Speaker
To put that into context, that means the majority of physicians in the country in 2008, 2009, 2010, were still using paper charts. Right. And so this is, I mean, like, you're like, wait, that wasn't that long ago. Right. You think of like paper charts and you go, that was probably in the No, no, that was 15 years ago.
00:09:31
Speaker
And the idea of HIPAA compliance and like like cloud services was still very new. you know i mean, Dropbox in 2010, 2011, like you you said, like the Uber, at you like the Dropbox for, sometimes you talk to providers or physicians with that and they were like, what's Dropbox? you know It was that you know the idea of cloud storage and things that were still pretty new in 2010, 2011.
Sondermind's Mission: Blending Tech and Service
00:09:53
Speaker
And so, Sonomarine was this combination. You mentioned the service component, and we are and we have a service component. like ah you know we We treat people with you know with mental health conditions.
00:10:05
Speaker
right We have thousands and thousands of providers and and psychiatrists, and our mission is to improve mental wellness, right is to improve their outcomes and and to enable our providers, you know all these therapists and and and psychologists to deliver better care.
00:10:21
Speaker
And so it has that's a service. That's a service element, right? But then SafeImage was this technology component. So the background of that was how can you use data and really unique technology um tools to actually make care more efficient, right? So with SafeImage, it was how can neurosurgeons and medical oncologists, other people, not have to worry about the CD that the patient brings in. And if they don't bring it, it's ah it's a wasted session. It's a wasted consult or whatever. How can we make it easier to get second opinions?
00:10:49
Speaker
um So, so syndrome is a lot of that. And then there's a whole nother component of like, well, why get into mental health, which is probably where your question was emanating from. But let let me pause if there's no, I think this is really helpful because, you know, most entrepreneurs, you know, one, they, they oftentimes imagine that you kind of meander a bit, and then you find your thing, but you've,
00:11:10
Speaker
you've had some successes. you know It wasn't just like, oh, we started this and then shut it down. you know You've had um a number of things that are still going good. Well, they're baked with failures all inside of them, right? I mean, it's like the entrepreneurial journey is, even the successful ones are are just a combination of failures until success. yeah right That's really what it is. you know So the first one wasn't like, oh, it was successful from day one. It was you know for the first 18 months, I had perpetually about six to 10 weeks of payroll at any given point in time. I was on the phone with the local business bank who we had borrowed a bunch of us. We had financed it with a lot of debt as well. And I had personally guaranteed that debt um as had as had my ah my outside investor. So if it went bankrupt, I was declaring personal bankruptcy. So for 18 months, I was on the phone about every two to three weeks with the banker because I had a line of credit and I had it based against different like parts of my accounts receivable. And
00:12:03
Speaker
I had update my model and I had to sort of like borrow and repay all the time. And that was while running the business. I mean, was CFO. I mean, it was like, I was doing all this stuff myself, but I mean, that was, it was on the brink of failure for a year and a half easily. Yeah. Um, you kept a great head hair through all it. Well, I don't know. It's really gray now. Right. So it, I definitely lost some of the, the army, the army let me, let me lose enough hair too. Um,
00:12:30
Speaker
I want to actually put press on that a little bit. yeah So here in Colorado, we see a lot of defense techs base tech, space tech, companies led by veterans yeah and people you know with experience in the military. And you've talked about how one of the core drivers, when you were a banker, you said, I want to lead people. yeah and I don't really want to be a leader.
00:12:49
Speaker
So you you moved out of that and you went and actually put everything on the line. You know you were personally guaranteeing loans for your startups. um Which, by the way, the time to do personal guarantees, if anybody's ever thinking about it I would say don't do it. But if you are going to do it, do it when you have no net worth.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah. that's but That's the time to do it, right? Because, you know, the difference between zero negative zero is the same, right? It's like you're if you're bankrupt, you don't get more. but So um now you have to make sure you can get underwritten and things like that. But, you know, I basically put all the money I had, which was not that much, but, you know, everything I had. You were all in. I was all in. Yeah.
00:13:23
Speaker
And what was that like leaving a big organization where you you actually were a leader of people? Maybe it wasn't leading in how you wanted, or you actually want to do something you want to more of the analytical work than just kind of maybe relationship cultivation and bringing in the business. Yeah.
00:13:37
Speaker
But, you know, when you're a startup, you don't really have very many people reporting to you either. And so there's something deeper than just, i want to lead. You want to just... I wanted to build. Yeah. so Yeah. I think it was, I mean, it was, it was I want to, i mean,
00:13:50
Speaker
It's interesting because i went into banking after business school running away from leadership. right I was like, I'm done with you know it. was like i had I had been in leadership positions for you know i for the entire time in the army, but in you know in like sort of troop leadership positions for for a fairly long time. So basically my entire time as a second lieutenant and as a first lieutenant until I made captain, which is not like super rare, but a little rare. So for two and a half years, I was leading you know platoons or companies ranging from 30 150 soldiers.
00:14:20
Speaker
um and just dealing with all the stuff, right? Like all the all the people stuff, you know, like Joe is at jail right now for drunk driving. It's two in the morning, you gotta go pick him up, Lieutenant, right? Like you gotta go get him, like that sort of stuff. And I was like, i don't want to deal with this, right? I want to like, banking sounds like straight at office, you know, at the most you're managing one or two analysts and and it's all deal, you know, you have deal teams. They're
Risk and Leadership: Entrepreneurial Philosophy
00:14:47
Speaker
not like, they're you're not like youre they reports for a project, but not like, they you know, like own the results of their performance for, you know, years. um
00:14:57
Speaker
And then I realized I missed some of that, right? you I miss developing people. um And then to your point, also missed like, Again, in the Army, you can say, well, you weren't really building something.
00:15:08
Speaker
But actually, i would i would, and you didn't say that, but I think some would say that, right? and So I would disagree because, you know, i like i remember one platoon I took over. It was a second platoon I took over. So i was in a platoon leader position for my first 10 months, and then my company commander switched me to a different platoon because it was kind of a, you know, in business sense, we would say it needed to turnaround, right? And so, you know,
00:15:30
Speaker
I had to completely change the culture. and you don't have the tools at your disposal in the army that you have in the the private sector, meaning you can't fire anybody. you know like You're stuck with what you got. um You can't willy-nilly promote them um either. right There's a whole process and time and tenure and things like that. There's no idea of bonuses. you do you So you have no you basically no financial levers and you have no sort of like...
00:15:53
Speaker
you know You have no hatchet that you can sort of swing to so so completely change. You have to use a lot of different leadership tools and techniques to change culture, to sort of turn around an organization. I really liked that.
00:16:04
Speaker
Again, I thought I didn't coming out of the army because was like, you know you just do enough of it, you get burnt out. But I missed that after a couple of years. um I think that was that was probably one of the key things. so The last thing was the the jump.
00:16:17
Speaker
was a lot of it was, yeah you know, a lot of was just, okay, I have an itch that I think that I need to scratch, right? And it's this itch of, I want to try starting something.
00:16:29
Speaker
And, you know, I had, when I left banking, when left Morgan Stanley, um my oldest son, who's, you know, 18 now, was one. Right. And ah my wife and i at the time, we wanted to you know have more kids and we kind of wanted to get out of Chicago, which is where we were living at the time and get back to Colorado because we loved it here. um But, you know, it was i mean, I went from a certain sort of total income level and we were dual income. So then we moved here and she stopped working because she was pregnant with number two quickly thereafter.
00:17:04
Speaker
And my total compensation, besides the fact that I put all the money we had and savings into this business and signed these debt guarantees, you know, was cut by, i mean, I cut it myself, but it was 70% less.
00:17:15
Speaker
right It was 30% of my total compensation. So like in the year, in the 12 months after I left Morgan Stanley, and even for the next two or three years, my total compensation, I think actually the next two and a half years, my total compensation was equal to my last year at Morgan Stanley's for almost three years. um Personally, not the family. I mean, if you take the family, it was actually even lower.
00:17:36
Speaker
And so I was like, geez, why did you do that? It was like, well, now's the time to do it, right? always like, how did that's ah that's a big risk. Like, why were we willing to do that? We had a family to support, things like that. And my risk tolerance, or at least my risk calculus, was more of, well well, one, nobody's shooting at me. and There's no IEDs to worry about.
00:17:55
Speaker
um So that calibrates your risk a little bit. And then two was, well, it's actually more risky for me to do it People think it's less, it's more risky to do it when you, you know, maybe 10, 15 years later, at least in my opinion, thought it'd be, like, or less risky to it later, right? You know, I've got some, I've got savings. In my opinion, I was like, that's going be more risky, right? Because the opportunity and the time to rebuild career whatever, if it's failure, I always operated with like, well, if this thing fails, then what, right?
00:18:22
Speaker
Then I'm bankrupt. um But that's okay because there was not that much to start with. um I need to go find a job, um but I felt confident that I could do that with education background, the experience background I had, and even even a failed sort of experience in healthcare care might be valuable to a hospital employer or to you know a private equity firm or whatever. and um And I just sort of was like, I'm willing to bet on that. And and I figured it would if it did fail, it would fail within three years. Right. my My fear was always, what if this thing drags on for a decade? Right. like ah It's sort of an average. that That to me was the bigger fear, but I thought I could extricate myself from that.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. So it's, you know, I i hear that you're a leader, you know, you had felt the call to leadership, joined the military, yeah leader man. call to build, call to create something.
00:19:15
Speaker
You know, these are commonalities that the... Yeah, love me you saying like yeah yeah a of... A willingness to sacrifice, you know, to put a lot of on... them I mean, you you you put it in these, like... I i try to... In fact, I remember um there was another podcast I did with with one of your former partners a long time ago. And he he made a comment. He was like, it's like all your sort of of choice career choices have been oriented around service. And like...
00:19:41
Speaker
And I was like, no, I don't think that at all. And the things you're saying like, okay, i guess those are true, but I don't think about it that way. Like those are very, um grandiosus is exactly the right word, but they're very like, they're positive. i don't I don't look at myself the mirror and think I'm like ah not not like a negative person. i I do think I have, you know, a risk appetite, things like that. But i I think about the choices that I've made, of in my opinion, from my, like from the inside this crazy thing here are like,
00:20:13
Speaker
Well, they're like an analysis of, well, what am I comfortable living with? and what are the things that drive me? right like A big driver of mine is I always very much so wanted to be for right or wrong in control of my destiny. right And you're not really ever in control. There's all kinds of other sort of factors that come into play. But I always wanted to say, if if something didn't work out, I'd rather it actually work out not work out because it was my fault.
00:20:41
Speaker
than somebody else's fault. Right? Like, I'd rather it be a as ah a bad decision that I made than being sort of subject to something but something else's, you know, the environment or or the other. and And you can't control for it that. I mean, that we live in a world of all kinds of other things and all kinds of other decisions and other factors.
00:20:58
Speaker
But I've always tried to I think that that's always been a big driver of mine. And people might hear that and go, wait a second, but you you went to West Point and you went to the army. like You didn't have choice around, like once you know the army's going to tell you what to do. And that's true, but it's actually, in my view, it was, i mean, I went to the service academy.
00:21:21
Speaker
Because I didn't want, you know, won from a from a financial needs standpoint, it was like, hey, this is a free ride, right? So i I didn't need to then take on debt or, you know, things like that to go to college. um So that was a freedom thing for me. That was like in control because I'm going be out of the college. The other thing was i i I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. yeah Like a lot of, you know, 18, 17, 18 year olds And I and we mentioned earlier, I'm trying to push my oldest son to take a gap year between high school, he's graduating and and and college and and do some things with, you know, in in Asia or in Europe, he east speaks Mandarin and things like that. um
00:22:01
Speaker
And i was talking to my mom about this and she was like, well, you didn't do a gap year. like, well, not technically in the way that I'm describing it, right? A year between high school and college.
00:22:12
Speaker
But I'd feel like I did like a nine, like a a gap decade, right? It was like, I went to a service academy because like I don't know what I want to do. So I'll just, I'll go into the military. That'll give me a bunch of skills and I'll learn a bunch things in order to then be better positioned to sort of know. And then I went to business school, same things, right? So I,
00:22:29
Speaker
11 years after graduated high school, i was like, okay, maybe I want to go into this finance world. And then after two years, I go, I don't really want to do that. Right. You still didn't really know, but it was always, get all these, these sort of attributes are in my mind, they always been in service of just be true to yourself and sort of understand, you know, when you, if you fast forward your life, 60 years, 70 years, um you know, not right now, but when you're, when you're 20,
00:22:54
Speaker
And you say, well, if I'm if i'm there you know with my grandkids or whatever, I'm on my deathbed, you know I'm in my 90s or something like that, hopefully. um What are the things that if I look back on, I say, gosh, i even you know if I thought about it and I didn't do it, like why didn't I do it? And if you can't really answer that, then maybe you should go do it.
00:23:18
Speaker
I was always like a driver. love that. Yeah. Yeah. it feels like, I mean, I hear a lot of, you know, these are buzzwords, but, you know, high high agency, you know, desire for freedom. Yeah.
00:23:28
Speaker
um Yeah. And kind of a, maybe an unconventional view of risk, or maybe it's more conventional among entrepreneurs. I think it is. I think it is a bit unconventional, at least. It doesn't feel that way to me, but that's because it's,
00:23:41
Speaker
It's my own view. But I think I have enough awareness now of everybody else's sort of viewpoints that, yeah, it's probably it was probably a little unconventional. The risk-reward calculus is you know it was different for me than for other folks. yeah um And I don't mean that as a positive or a negative, just different. Just different. Yeah. Yeah. so yeah I mean, I think, ah you know, i've I've felt that oftentimes we we overemphasize risk and underemphasize opportunity yeah oftentimes. And so that kind of um fear-based decision-making paralyzes a lot of people. yeah so how have you, you know, do you have anything that you share with the audience would be helpful in understanding?
Military Influence on Entrepreneurship: Lessons and Mindset
00:24:20
Speaker
fear management. I think about, you know I've never served in the military and, but I have, I am aware that a number of the you know top leaders of, you know, executives, leaders of corporations and entrepreneurs have had that refining experience in a lot of ways, that test would be in the military, which doesn't really compare to a lot of the other things that we get to talk about sports. Right. But that's like, you know, kind of at the extreme end of, you know, the pressure that a human would, you know, could be responsible for failing. And so do you recommend that as a path for an entrepreneur? Or there are there lessons that you developed while you were leading in the military that you could that others could develop, you know external to the military? For those who are thinking about their next step and yeah they're not sure if they're an entrepreneur yet, but they have this call to build my agency, they want to have impact, they want freedom you know their freedom, yeah you know what's what's a path? you know Your son's taking a gap year? Maybe, if I can get him there. Is the military ah an interesting path? you know He doesn't want that, but yeah, I think i think another is i mean there's a
00:25:21
Speaker
um like um there's a book called Startup Nation, which is about ah entrepreneurship in Israel. And they tie a lot of parallels to the reason that Israel is such a entrepreneurial economy.
00:25:38
Speaker
um it really is, right? And there's on a per capita basis. and And sort of the innovation that happens there is pretty remarkable. um A lot of that is tied to the mandatory service in the military, right? every every Every citizen in Israel serves for you know at least a year or two and in the military. um So I think that there is there is there's merit to the idea that the military helps imbue you with some skills and points of view.
00:26:05
Speaker
But not, but you have to, it has to be, those seeds have to be planted into fertile ground for it. So what I wouldn't do is say, like, if you have a drive to be an entrepreneur, wouldn't be like, oh, go do a pit stop in the military, right? Like, I don't think that that's the path. like you're not gonna learn things necessarily from the military. But I do think that if you're coming out of the military and you have this, you know, you have this sort of entrepreneurial pull,
00:26:34
Speaker
right, then you should not underestimate the impact that your training and experience in the military has had. Yeah. Right. um One thing, so back to the the the question on the fear management, ah well, there's maybe two things. One is,
00:26:51
Speaker
So actually had a, this is not about the military specifically, but it, the story comes from my time in military. So I had a battalion commander was incredibly influential leader and mentor to me. And for those listening, a battalion, depending on the type of unit is, you know, anywhere from like 800 to 1400 usually made of, know,
00:27:13
Speaker
four to six companies and each company has three to four platoons. um So you can do the math from from that, right? So my battalion commander at the time, Lieutenant Colonel ah Gus Perna was just a ah really tremendous leader, really, really tough. I mean, like he scared everybody. Like he was just a Siri and he, but he would do things, um, like for all the officers in the battalion, we had, ah i can't remember it was once a quarter or every six months, I think it was once a quarter. We had a book club.
00:27:47
Speaker
Um, wasn't called that. It was just like, Hey, you got to read this book. And then we're going to get together for three hours on Tuesday morning. We're to talk about it. And I'm going to drill you on this sort of stuff. And I remember the very first book that we read was Who Moved My Cheese?
00:28:00
Speaker
um And um i had a book club at Sondermind when, by the time we were, I mean, it was probably like right after the seed round actually. So right after you guys had messed it, think is when I started it. So August of 2018. And we would do it every quarter.
00:28:17
Speaker
um And the whole company, had it was mandatory. right And then we would go we would read ah the same book and we would you know then go to dinner somewhere all together and talk about it. And i'll I'll talk about the reason why I did that in the second when i finished this story, if it's interesting. Sure.
00:28:32
Speaker
And the reason I'm tying it together, one of the books that we read a couple years into the book club for Sondermar was Who Moved My Cheese? Because it's still relevant today. So I think you know what it frames is like, if you weren't afraid, like if you didn't have fear, what would you do?
00:28:45
Speaker
right Right. I think that's just a good framing, right? like doesn't because you can't ignore the emotion right so it's and it's not to say that you should just because you're afraid of it you should sort of do it as a means to conquer no that's not true either it's like it's an emotion it's a it's a feeling right and so feelings can cloud your judgment and they're good data points too so it's like you it's it's an and you should you should sort of remove your feelings when making decisions and you should take into account your feelings Why am I so why am i scared about this?
00:29:18
Speaker
Right? If I wasn't, if I didn't have any fear, hypothetically, let's say I wasn't for whatever reason, I'm a crazy person. I would, you know, who's the guy who took clowned Al Capitan? Al Capitan. Oh, yeah. Right? Like, well, they did like MRIs and they're like, yeah he has some part of his brain that's you know, lower functioning in terms of the fear mechanism, right? And it's like, that allows them to reclimb this ridiculous, like huge things, right? Like it's, it's, there's, that that's just a different makeup, right? You know, so you go, okay, if I'm like him um and I wasn't afraid, what would I do?
00:29:51
Speaker
You know? You know, if I wasn't afraid of climbing El Capitan, I still wouldn't climb it because I'm not all that interested in it. And I just don't I don't think I'll get any value out of it. Right. um You're not interested in doing the preparation. for Yeah, I'm not. It's just not it's not something I'm interested in. Right. So but I think it's like ah it's a good framing.
00:30:09
Speaker
um So that's one thing I would say is is ask yourself, like, if I wasn't afraid of doing this, what would I do? And and I don't know that I learned, i mentioned this book and with Colonel Perna, which just to finish the, like, he was an an excellent leader in so many ways. um He ended up, and the army rewarded him for it, meaning like he progressed very well. And he retired not too long ago, a couple years ago. After 40 years service, um he retired as a four-star general, which is very, very rare. And if anybody...
00:30:40
Speaker
her Here's that name. Here's General Perna. Why would I hear that name? he was the His last position was a president presidential appointee as four-star general and COO of Operation Warp Speed, which was that um distribution of all the COVID vaccine yeah right in 2021. So he he led all of that um under a under President Biden.
00:31:03
Speaker
um And so ah anyway, so I think... there were just some things that you you, like there's a lot of things in the military you learn. So there's, that book not wasn't like a military teaching, was from him. But I think it was interesting for me to sort of think about, okay, if I'm not afraid, what what's the decision I would make? And then the other is, and again, I think this's just my own personal makeup. So unlike Alex Hon, Honnold, you know, I have that, you know, whatever it is, to make you know,
00:31:31
Speaker
amygdala or something like that. i got You have a fear response. I have a fear response, right? so um but i But there is probably something in me and i've you know other friends and and people who know me pretty well, ah and and I've read about you know've read about like Stoicism where I think in retrospect, i'm i'm probably like so they said, you're like a natural Stoic. right you know so um And i I recognize that now where it used to be 20 years ago, I would think,
00:31:57
Speaker
why are people worrying about things that they can't control? Like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, you just worry about the things you can control, right? And it's like, well, no, most people do worry about the things they can't control, right? And um and so as I, you know again, a couple of decades later, I started reading more Stoicism and i read it and I was like, this is all, like, duh. like It was like, you read these things. So I think that's the other pieces that,
00:32:21
Speaker
with that mindset or with that makeup that I have, just naturally, I'm not saying people should develop it one way the other, just as works there's me. um It always put me in ah in a frame of mind that, back like I said, i the agency piece, like i i would i want to have control over the over the things that are happening to me because those are the things that I will ultimately spend my time thinking about and engaging on. And the things that I have less control over you know i i don't I don't worry about as much. yeah It's just going to happen. And I think that's ah that plays into the fear piece, right? Because then you go, well, if I can't control So like when I was in Iraq, you know we'd have these like mortar attacks in the middle of the night. you know that um The surgeons and people like that would would be sort of like outside the areas, they'd be lobbing mortars, right? And they they're just random. i mean they're They're not accurate devices. They they land, but then they they blow up, right? They
00:33:14
Speaker
They kill people. And so um we do these mortar attacks, you boom. Like this, you know, thing goes off and you it wakes you up and you gotta, you know, throw on your vests and run into like the the ditch you dug or whatever. You know, not like it wasn't like every single night, but probably a couple nights a week, right?
00:33:29
Speaker
for a while, like for months and months. And when I came back, you know, my but my wife and, and and ah you know, friends were like, oh, wow, like, like weren't you just scared all the time?
00:33:40
Speaker
Like, no. like they're Like, well, how? I'm not like, for it's just like just's like, I can't control that at all. You know, I didn't worry about that. Like, i'm what am I gonna Walk around in fear all day that a mortar might land on my head? If it does, it does. it's not There's literally nothing I can do to control that yeah at all.
00:33:56
Speaker
IEDs, roadside bombs, You know, can't control those either, but you can influence them. Right. So I would worry about that more. You know, I made sure to prep my unit on these convoys really, really well. You know, I would drill into the, you know, you're there for a year and nothing happens or whatever, six months and people get lazy. They're not scanning. don't the rifles pointed out the vehicle. They're not sort of like paying attention as much as they were on the first week. It's just like anything else. You get sort of used to it. And I would just, I mean, I would light a fire to make sure because, you know, that's what I can control. I can control their behavior. I can control thing, you know, we had a couple near misses and things like that. But, you know, I can say, well, I did everything I could do. And at the end, if it hits me then, I'm not going to worry about it because I did everything I can do. I think that's super powerful. And what a great, I guess, snapshot into the mind of a CEO and leader. It's like, what can I control and what can't I control? That's right. As a CEO and definitely as an entrepreneur, it's like you got to focus on what you control and what you can't.
00:34:56
Speaker
And complaining about it doesn't change it. right I mean, sometimes you just need an event. That's okay. right But you got to focus on like what what are you going to do about it? Yeah. yeah a couple that Can interject there? Are there lessons maybe...
00:35:07
Speaker
that you could reflect Sondermine's system where you use purposeful moments where you chose to, I can control that. I can't control that. Do you have any examples? Yeah, yeah. um well let's Let's go straight to Sondermine here. let's Let's dig into Sondermine a little bit. yeah um But the only other you know kind of reflection on a couple of things that you raised here, you know one was Alex Honnold where... One, he has different brain chemistry, and maybe there's a certain element of that in founders and entrepreneurs. um But I've also heard him describe you know his kind of surprise when people talk about how I can never do that. Or how how can you how can you take on so much risk? How can you like put that to the side when there is a real risk that that he's facing? them real at the risk. Yeah. And for him, it's like, i people don't understand how much I've trained for this. you know I've done every single one of these moves so many times over and over. It's been my life obsession for years and years. As a little kid. Yeah. And I take just meticulous notes. And so it's also a story of just obsessive preparation.
00:36:09
Speaker
And you know so some of that, I want want this thread to continue into talk a little bit more about Sondermine because we heard some of the backstory around how you got to this point, the experience. And the preparation, yeah you know, like we a lot of times we hear the story of the college dropout who goes and starts his software business. But you were out leading soldiers for a period of time and you were, you know, doing banking and you put your house on the line for a period of time to become the entrepreneur. And
Building Sondermind: Preparation and Market Demand
00:36:33
Speaker
so I think that there is you had the preparation you talk about. You take the risks early, but you also didn't take them.
00:36:39
Speaker
too early you went and got that preparation. So I live i note that that when the more prepared someone is the the the more they can assess what they should be afraid of or not what where risk or what they can control. with yeah And so I feel like you were able to ah apply stoicism in part because of your experience that you would gain. For sure. Yeah, yeah.
00:36:57
Speaker
The other thought that comes to mind also, and it's interesting that you mentioned Who Moved My Cheese? Because I hadn't thought of that book in years, but I think it was this morning. i It popped into my head because I was thinking about, like how do we talk about AI and the changing industries? And I'm like, oh, it's Who Moved My Cheese all over again. Those are all things that we figured out. Like, okay, I've got my model. I've got my business. I'm making money. like This is going to continue forever. yeah This is great. like i' figure out And then all of a sudden, it's like, something changed. Everything changed. And so if your expectation is like, I'm ever going to arrive at a point where like I've got my everything set up and it's just, you know, humming, that doesn't really ever happen because the the cheese will always move. Always. petition And changing technologies, trends.
00:37:34
Speaker
And so i guess let's spend the the the second half of this conversation really get talking about Sondra Mine and your experience building this. Unicorn here in Colorado. yeahp you know When you went out to raise the seed round, you had already had a couple of startups. You had preparation. You knew what you wanted to do. This wasn't like a you know kind of a passing fancy to go you know solve this problem, address this problem. you know I've heard you talk about your care for the mental health of soldiers. and and This was an inspiring thing for you. So you here you are. I'm going to go make a difference in mental health care in this country. I'm going to, so walk us forward from there. Yeah, yeah. so I mean, I give the background of sort of the next oncology or or a novocancer and safe image, the service and the technology side.
00:38:14
Speaker
And somebody said, well, why? You're like a serial entrepreneur, right? And like, well, I mentioned, I said this the other day. I said, well, they were all, actually, all these things were kind of overlapped, right? Like I was doing safe image while running next oncology. I was doing that on the side. And then I started thinking about the problem for Sondermind,
00:38:34
Speaker
Also, while doing both of those. And the problem emanated from my own search for a therapist. I had three kids in three a half years. I was running these two companies, stressful, all that sort of stuff. And I knew healthcare. was dealing with insurance companies all the time, contracting with them, dealing with providers. I was in healthcare deep, right? I knew the Parity Act had been passed in 2009, which made that par mental benefits with all physical health benefits. I was like, okay, so this is now a covered benefit on my insurance plan. And I was like, I'm going to find a therapist to deal with some things that I need to deal with.
00:39:05
Speaker
And it was nearly impossible, right? It took months and months um to find somebody who even took my insurance or had availability. um When I finally did, because i'm just dog with a bone, persistent, you know, like I could have paid out of pocket, but I was like, no, damn it, I'm using my insurance because I'm paying for this as the employer and the employee, right? Like I'm going to use these benefits.
00:39:26
Speaker
And ah when I finally found somebody, the clinical care was good, but I just was sort of struck by how ah poor the consumer experience was, right? Like we went into this little dingy basement office and there's no windows because that's all the therapist can afford. So that's all the stuff on the consumer or the patient or the or the client, as we call them in Zondermine, side of the fence. And so I was looking, trying to see, well, there must have been solved. Maybe this is a ah thing in Colorado. Maybe if it's you know this exists in other markets. Not really. I couldn't really find it. So was digging into that and I was paying attention to what to me was such an obvious, like the tsunami. This is like 2012, 2013. was like
00:40:03
Speaker
We're going to get hit with this tsunami of mental health need. It's coming. It was just like one of my earliest um leaders, who became my COO, was a friend of mine.
00:40:15
Speaker
He was working for a big healthcare company here in town called DaVita. And i remember talking to him. we were friends. And he was like, i was He said he he heber recalls this and tells me, you you sounded a little bit like a crazy person. You were like you're like, it's going to just be this huge thing. it's going We got to address it. And he was like, I don't see it. you know And so that was one thing.
00:40:34
Speaker
And then the other thing was the whole provider problem, the therapist and the psychologist problem. And I saw that firsthand because my younger sister is a therapist. So she went to private practice and struggled with all these things, how to get how to get clients, how to deal with office space stuff, how to, you know, administrative business running type things. There was no real good EHRs, electronic health record systems at this time for for therapists. And so I was like, wow, wow. And i talked to her, I talked to a bunch of her colleagues. So probably like 2013 to 2014, I think I spoke, my my cousin in Florida is a clinical psychologist as well. So I had that benefit. So these family members who could connect with people in the space. And I probably talked to,
00:41:12
Speaker
30 or 40 different providers, you know, basically doing user research and trying to understand their problem. Because i recognize that the way to solve the the problem that I faced as a patient or as a consumer was going to be through the provider.
00:41:25
Speaker
And so that was the genesis. And so when i i met my co-founder as part of that, himself therapist, and he had a private practice and some office space and a business around sort of a coworking, which i was also interested, I have a real estate license that I got when I was in the army in Colorado. So I still have an active Colorado real estate license. I've always been interested in real estate.
00:41:44
Speaker
um i I said, okay, well, there's this opportunity for sort of like a, you know, you mentioned the Uber for like a WeWork for a therapist kind of thing, right? And he was sort of doing some of that. And I said, well, that could be a way to bring these therapists together. And we can build technology around that. And then by doing that, we can enable sort of better care because these therapists in private practice, they want to be in private practice. They're not trying to join in a back into a W-2 group setting most of the time, like That's actually where they're often coming from. And by doing that, we can then contract with the insurance plans and we can have you know this comprehensive care model where we have so the full tech stack of how they do clinical nose treatment planning, how we get them matched to the right provider because we'll have objective information around, hey, this provider, even though they say they do these seven things, they treat these different issues, they're actually really good at these two. Mm-hmm.
00:42:33
Speaker
And they're really good at those two for these three demographics, right? Because we could see the data around that if we built our own tool. so And that could allow for better matching and that could allow for better care. And it was always oriented to where how do we ultimately drive better clinical quality and better outcomes in the space that I thought was A, very fragmented. So was like, how can you defragment the space? But B, pretty subjective in terms of how we measure care and quality and move into more of an objective setting. So that was the vision. And, know, I'll call it 2014 to 2016 was mostly about building this sort of footprint of the physical space to bring these therapists together in this sort of call it a co-working, but it was more of like a flexible space situation while starting to build of the technology. So even it was ah in early 2016 when we started to build our EHR platform, our elect electronic health worker platform. So my co-founder for Safe Image MD became my first CTO for Sondre Ryan. And he was the CTO from the three of us, and one of my other employees from my and my ah my general manager from Nexon College. By that point, I had sold that business in 2015.
00:43:42
Speaker
A few months later, she said, I can't work at this but with these you know with the new buyers anymore. um you know you Can you connect with these people might be looking for something? I said, oh, I might have something for you. She's like, great. I'd love to work. We'd worked together for six years. and so I brought her in from one company. I brought Sid in, my CTO, my co-founder from the other company. We sold that in 2016. And so, and then Sean, my co-founder, you know, I've been working on this at this point for two years. So that was like the four person team in 2016 and started building around that.
00:44:17
Speaker
And by, you know, early 2017 started raising a little bit of, of like angel money, right? I, i at this point, I put in a reasonable amount of my capital to fund it. And obviously Sean and I had all sweat equity. we weren't really paying ourselves anything. and um and was starting to talk to VCs. In fact, that's when I talked to Gavin, was at my, ah it was my is our 10 year reunion. It was in 2017 in the spring for business school.
00:44:44
Speaker
And- um Shout out to Kellogg. Yeah, Kellogg MBA, 07. And we met up at you know one of these you know things and and Nathan Atherley, another Kickstart former founder and and classmate from business school and service academy grad himself, a refus academy grad. um He said, do you how well do you know Gavin? I said, oh, look kind of He's like, all this stuff you're doing with Sondermar, like he'd be interested in this. And we were talking and he was like, oh, yeah, keep me in touch. I was like, I'm starting to talk. And, you know, at this point, it still had this real estate piece to it. It had, um you know, it was health care. survey we were We were treating patients with mental health services that had a technology component. And to top it all off, to make it literally the most VC unfriendly business, it was a franchisor.
00:45:26
Speaker
So like a lot of little cases were franchised, Because that's a good way to bring in capital to scale, right? It's franchising. But I mean, VCs don't really invest in franchising businesses, you know? and And at the time, VCs were definitely not doing a lot of healthcare service investing and definitely not behavioral health. They're like, what is this industry? um And so fast forward, you know, another six months, but back to the question around some struggles, it was really difficult. You know, it was, I talked to, i ended up splitting the company into two. We started putting into motion, basically a spinoff where we split Sonnermann into two companies. um We started the process in in summer of 2017 and by um by basically end of September 2017, separated it into two companies. So those angel investors who would come in to that pre-split company got shares in Sonnermann Inc., which was the split company, and then Sonnermann Wellness Centers, which is now called it Humanly. um
00:46:19
Speaker
And then we said, okay, and I focused all my attention then on Sondermine Inc. And Sean, the co-founder, focused all his attention on Humanly, which again, wasn't named that until about a year later.
00:46:30
Speaker
And so um that separation, meaning we separated the real estate piece and we separated the franchising piece, I think made us a little more ah palatable. I won't even say attractive, but palatable to institutional investors of venture capital.
00:46:45
Speaker
um But, you know, one of the things people are surprised about when I talk, you know, talk to early founders who are struggling, you fundraising is hard, right? Is is is you know i i had a you know I think I used um first just a Google Sheet, right? And then I upgraded to Streak, right? Which was pretty new at the time. it was like, it's a plug-in CRM for Gmail. I think I had 170 investor meetings for my so for my actual seed round, right? enough of that So um new investor meetings. I mean, like unique investors. So you know times however many when they go to second and third and fourth meeting. 170. Now, all not all were institutional investors. Some were family offices. Some were, you know, and you know large angels and things like that. 170. That's a lot.
00:47:30
Speaker
And, you know, guess how many term sheets I got? Just the one. just the And you know the the the question that is often, as like what were some of like the real hard decisions? I mean, i ah you know it was like we were perpetually running out of money, right? I mean, it was like, while was fundraising for that, I was bringing in You know, 50K checks as whenever I could every month or two from somewhere just to keep the lights on, basically, just to pay that the seven employees that I had. Right. um
00:48:02
Speaker
Nobody made six figures. Literally, like there was nobody was making $100,000 in the company. And these are all pretty experienced people, you know, of the of ah so the seven of us. um And, you know, it was like late 2017.
00:48:17
Speaker
Brandon, who was became the my CEO, o the person, was ah ah he had just sort of, he came in and took no money for the first two months, you know, no salary. And then his first paycheck was December 25th, 2017, December 15. And then I think on December 20th, I said, hey I'm going to talk to you first about this, but I'm going to talk to the whole company, all seven of us. about the need to do a salary deferral like i'm going to ask for volunteers to basically reduce your salary as much as possible so that we can not run out of money um i think i think I'll be able to raise this round in the next, you know, three or four months. And I think I maybe can some more, you know, checks here and there. Um, four
00:48:54
Speaker
And we did, you know, and i most people reduced their salary down by, you know, 70 to 80 percent. And people really banded together. But that was incredibly difficult, obviously, to do and to ask people to do. And um everybody got their money back and everybody got extra shares for it. And ah it all worked out. But, you know, it was not easy. Right. It was like this was all these names bootstrapping with some angel capital, your capital, some angel decks here and there. Yeah. And then you raised kind of the proper seed round. Yeah.
00:49:22
Speaker
in 2018. 2018, yeah. And Kickstart. But i mean, it was a there was really, i think, and I tell founders this, and and this this is not meant to be, i mean, you you know this isn't an advertisement, right? Like this this podcast isn't like, oh, like let's advertise Kickstart. I am speaking from the heart and I do in private settings and anybody who's listening to this who's who's met me and had and had the conversation, I say it, right? Which is, as far as what seed investors promise, institutional seed investors promise,
00:49:51
Speaker
um you know both from my own experience, but also in talking to lots of peers, right? like I mean, hundreds of other CEOs and founders who are also in you c series you know C, D, E, IPO'd, whatever, And when I talk about, you know, how how was your experience with the early investors where they're, you know, first check in, know, first institutional check? um It's a mixed bag, right? And what I can definitively say is that everything that you all said, right, that, you know, the partners at Kickstart said would they would do, you did.
00:50:27
Speaker
Right. Like we will be there to support you when times get tough. ah We will follow on, you know, in as many rounds as we can. i mean, you guys follow it on in every single round.
00:50:38
Speaker
You just follow it on in the series C, you know, 150 million fundraise round. Right. Like that's most seed round. Those seed rounds don't do that at all. Right. um And um and even I mean, one of the stories that i is doesn't get told very often. And you when we raise our series B.
00:50:55
Speaker
think you know this i'm sure it was a pardon and decision at some point uh again we we didn't work together during that time directly But we raised our, you know, we we' signed our term sheet for a series B in January 2020. Great investor, you know, general catalyst leading the round, F prime coming in, all of our other institutional investors coming in as well. We were growing really well. We had grown, know, I think 8X year over year at that point.
00:51:20
Speaker
um And, you know, we were going to close the round in in late February 2020. Like that was... ah And General Catalyst said, i'd really we would really like for you. And they put the pressure on hard. like I kept saying no. And finally, they pulled out the big, I really need you to do this. They wanted to put their investment in Sondram into the very first, basically be the first investment from their fund to 10, which they were raising their fund 10. And they were close that at the end of March. And so I said, no, you you know, this is all allocated for fund nine. I'd rather just get the money in We're growing well. We have a working capital. Like part of when our growth goes, like we we have really good growth. And so part of the financing is to fund our working capital, right? Because we we we pay our therapists fairly much, and so like basically instantaneously, right? Or within a week, depending on on sort of where it where lines up. But generally within like zero, from zero to seven or eight days after they've completed a session. But because we're working with insurance and Medicare and things like that, we don't get paid until 30, 60 days later. right So when you're growing, you run out of money because you're because you're having the working capital. So we were fine with it.
00:52:26
Speaker
And then this then when i finished I go, okay, fine. i you know i I don't really want to wait to the end of March because there's this like there's this virus seems like it's kind of in in Asia. It might've gone into Europe and I don't know, like it's February. And they said, no, it'll be fine. I said, okay, like twist them. Or when I said, okay, let's let's do this.
00:52:44
Speaker
And, you know, two weeks later, we all know the story, right? Like the world sort of shuts down. ah you know, we had a completely re like we were doing pretty much everything in person. We had already been building all the technology for video care. We had already launched our text messaging platform for therapy. um But we pulled up our launch date by two and a half months to launch our our video platform because we had, you know, thousands of therapists at this point who were to delivering care and they wouldn't be able to deliver care. And that's their livelihood and also the care needed by their by their patients, by their clients. if we didn't launch our our video piece. So we did all that you know in the in the sort of two, first two, three weeks of March and got that going.
00:53:21
Speaker
And all of a sudden we're like, and growth was just tremendous during the whole time. And we're like, ah it's going really tight. Like if General Catalyst doesn't close their their fund,
00:53:33
Speaker
because all of these funds were not getting, you know, people were pulled we were like, everything was shutting down, right? Like the, you know, it was just like yeah panic, right? Like, you were like, oh, no, we're not closing funds. VCs were pulling term sheets all over the place.
00:53:45
Speaker
And i was like, well, every day I'm on the phone with with them saying, and they're like, no, we're gonna close it. It's all good. We've got our anchor LPs, all this other stuff that you never know. And so it got really, really tight at the end of the month.
00:53:58
Speaker
And I didn't want to pull on the bank line that we had set up because it would have triggered a bunch of warrant issuance, which would have been just dilutive capital that was unnecessary because we were getting the money in. Right. It was literally like a matter of days. And i came so you know, Kurt was the partner that I was working with and on the board. And I said, here's the deal. Like, can, can we just need like a bridge? Literally, it might might even be a week or two, you know, at most 30 days.
00:54:23
Speaker
of, you know, 500,000, just to make sure that we can pay our therapists and stuff like that in case, and I don't want to pull on this bank line. And he said, yeah, and then came back and you guys, what you could have done was been, you know, not like predatory. They can be like, oh, like, let's get some, you know, interest rate that's higher than normal. And let's maybe have some warrants that are issued around it.
00:54:43
Speaker
And there was none of that. It wasn't even asked, right? it It was like, like the offer was yeah, of course we'll do this. And we'll do this, you know, at a 5% annual rate or something like that, you know, and you pay it back. So I, you know, that all worked out, paid the money back to you with, you know, within 30 days, you you made whatever, like a thousand dollars on that or something, you know, whatever the minimus interest was for that period of time. um But completely supported the company. Right. And so I think that's like,
00:55:12
Speaker
You should be, and Gavin and the rest of the partners should be really proud of the culture that you've created and helped yourself to in terms of supporting founders, particularly when the times are tough and not necessarily like, you know, you could always make the argument, well, we have to do the right thing for LPs and this and the other. And you go, no, we're founder first. Right. So I always appreciate Mark. Yeah.
Growth and Funding: Valuation and Expansion
00:55:33
Speaker
We'd love for that to be the story for every interaction that we have. yeah you know and it is There are times where we can't make you know the investment that we would love to make. For us, it was it always felt very easy in Sondermine because of how well the company was run. um But a big part of what we've tried to build at Kickstarter is certainly a reputation for being supportive to entrepreneurs in the good times and the bad. Yeah. And you know investing out of Fund 6 right now, we know what it takes in order to be a lead investor. and so And that means that as a seed investor, you reserve capital and you we follow on into multiple rounds. So there's a Fund 4 initial investment and we wrote multiple checks out of Fund 4. We wrote and a check out of Fund 5 and out of our co-investment vehicle. yep
00:56:15
Speaker
And so i you know we're honored to be an investors and thank you for the kind words. i'd You'd love to know a little bit more about, let's talk about you know what it was like. It was hard to raise money. You felt like you got you know the support you needed from your early investors. You grew your business tremendously. It benefited from this you know COVID tailwind where everybody was now remote. People still needed therapy more than ever. yeah And so we saw this like 10X valuation increase over that round that you just described. yeah A year later, you were raising your kind of billion dollar valuation. $150 million dollars round. And you know fast forward to today, that was the last capital that you took. Right. Yeah, five years ago. Yeah, five years ago. So one congratulations for being able to manage your business where that could be the last check that you took during that time. And market has certainly shifted quite a bit since then.
00:57:03
Speaker
But I'd love to know a little bit more about, you know there are a couple topics I want to press on. One is just around taking money at high valuations. And I know you have thoughts on that that entrepreneurs could benefit from. um So let's start with that. You know, like you, you were just, it was, it's going crazy. You're one of the hottest mental health startups in the country. Everybody wants to invest in your business, 10x, you know, it's like you're turning money down. So what, happened what you know what's happened since then? And is is there anything you would, you know, what are some of the lessons from those? Yeah. Well, I mean, look, the 2021,
00:57:37
Speaker
2021, 2022, but mostly 2021 timeframe was for all businesses was just crazy, right? i mean, zero interest rates from the Fed, basically, you know, zero interest rate, you have ah just this mania around funding um all kinds of early stage and and medium stage businesses, you know, venture backed businesses, all kinds of investors getting into it, right? From, you know, the, the, like,
00:58:02
Speaker
hedge funds are going into start you early stage investing and investing in seeds. mean, you guys probably, you had to deal with it like crazy, right? You're like, wait a second, who are these investors that are coming from Wall Street that are investing in pre-revenue companies, right? They cared before. They never cared before and they don't care again, right? But there was a period of time. So I do talk about this with other founders of a reasonable amount. um This being...
00:58:27
Speaker
There's a high degree of valuation sensitivity and dilution sensitivity, I think, particularly in the early in the early rounds of funding. um And i I'm not saying that there shouldn't be, it's natural, but you to get to give even more context, right? Like...
00:58:43
Speaker
Yes, the business, the valuation 10x, the business also, but but you know, the business about 8x. So revenue 8x from series B to series C. But if we go all the way back and go, okay, like my seed round, the one you guys invested in initially, you know, from seed to series a we about 7x revenue in a year.
00:59:03
Speaker
And we, and I raised the next round from the seed to the A. Our seed was a single digit post money valuation, yeah right? It was like seven and a half million post money or something like that. 7.8 maybe. um On like two half million. So like a $5 million free money valuation. And we were revenue. We had the experienced founder and would run for couple years and good traction, all this other stuff. Product was you know built in a reasonable sense. Yeah.
00:59:32
Speaker
and And so that's a reasonable amount of all dilution. you know i go that's like That's not immaterial. um And fast forward a year later, and it was you know basically on a pre-money basis, you know a little less than 2.5x increase, even though we had 7x revenue. right And then a year later from there, there's about a 5x valuation increase for the Series B. And we had about 8x revenue year over year.
00:59:59
Speaker
And then a year later, we had we had about 8x revenue again. And as you said, it was about a 10x valuation increase. So um the value the valuation increases that we were having were somewhat actually in line with our with our revenue increases, right? Just on a multiple basis.
01:00:18
Speaker
And i remember it with Series B and certainly with the seed and the A, I was very much optimizing for the right partner. And with the seed, was just optimizing for getting money. Right. It was like when when you have one option, you you like take it, you take it. Right. More or less. um But I was I was it's better to be lucky than good. So I was lucky that I had such a great option with with Kickstart.
01:00:39
Speaker
For my series A, I had basically a lead lined up, but it wasn't institution that was a really, really valuable, like sort of individual strategic investor who ended up getting on the board and has become a very good friend. And he's now running for governor of Maine. And he founded a company called Athena Health. Do you want give him a shout out for his mechanical? Jonathan Bush, yeah, he's a great investor, but a better operator and board member. And he runs company called Zeus, as well as he's running for governor right now.
01:01:15
Speaker
And so I had him sort of lined up as sort like the lead, but you know he's not an institutional. So then I had this tremendous firm in Nashville, FCA Venture Partners, who came in to lead the round. And then you guys. So it was really like three investors and then some little you know on the edges, some people who wanted to take their pro rata.
01:01:34
Speaker
but kept it really small. Like 3 million in our series A, when we were growing that fast with us Big Tam. There was appetite. And more than that, I would say there was pressure actually from some other investors, from other VCs who said, look, for us to pull only put in a million lead this round,
01:01:49
Speaker
It's too small for us. We need to put in three. And they said, we'll we'll make your valuation higher so that the dilution is the same. And so when I give what I'm about to, when I give the advice I'm about to say, um it's not hollow.
01:02:02
Speaker
Like it's the advice that I took myself, right? Which is, especially in the early days, two things. One, this the scarcity of capital is not, everybody thinks of it as like, it's a it's a it's a barrier, it's a speed block, right? No.
01:02:19
Speaker
And it can be in some ways, but you know I'd say in the early days when you're you know sub 30% team, you want that. It like it forces innovation. yeah it it It forces ingenuity, right? It's if you have too much money, you just go do the, you're You'll hire the person who's got the experience because you can pay them. you'll You'll do the thing that's the tried and true way because they have the experience. that's why you're hiring them, right? And you'll do that too early. right So that's one reason.
01:02:44
Speaker
And that's a judgment call. What does too early mean? it's that You can't say it cd or A or B is too early. It all depends on your business. So there's not like a a specific, like, here's what too early means to take you know less or more capital. I felt like our series A was too early. I felt like even though, yeah, there's a case in way that we should have raised three, but six or seven or 8 million, which was on the table from some firms, I only raised three.
01:03:07
Speaker
And we were right we were like out of money. I mean, like if I hadn't raised it when we raised it, we were going to make, maybe have one more payroll for the seat for the seat for the series a Same with seed. We're going to run out of money. I had to do the deferral, right? But then fast forward to the series B and I actually had an immense amount of interest. Again, now we were at a scale, we were nearly 10 million in and run rate revenue. We were at a scale in a market that was starting to get more exposure. People were starting to see what I'd seen six, seven years ago. They were like, oh, wow, this mental thing is a big deal. um
01:03:40
Speaker
And we had enough traction. We were early, you were you one of the first sort of, maybe the first sort of of of of our model, the first one out there, there was a couple the companies that were more like employer focused and and more tech focused.
01:03:52
Speaker
And so we had these, we had, ah I would say, a plethora of term sheets for our Series B. And i remember there were a couple of firms who were trying to play the valuation game again. And in that regard, you you know you could say, OK, I'm raising roughly 25 million. These are real numbers we're talking about right now. You know, the dilution and the amount of capital you raising matters. And I still said, no, I don't want to raise. i don't want overraise. I certainly wasn't optimizing for efficiency of capital. wasn't like, oh, let's raise a tiny amount. 25 is a lot of money. um But I wasn't so valuations as if I actually had a couple investors, a couple of prospective investors who said, what would be the price where we would win this?
01:04:30
Speaker
And I said, you know what? I really like this firm, General Catalyst. I really like the partner, or the the operating partner who would be coming in, Eric Rosa, because i have ah have a bias toward bringing on ah prior CEOs onto the board. I just have a, you know, for better or worse, like I have a bias having operators on around the boardroom with me. um And so they were going to do that. and ah And I said, no, I'm not i'm just not going to play the game. don't Don't even tell me.
01:04:54
Speaker
I said, unless it's 10X, what you're going to do? And they were like, well, it's not going to be that. But I told few of them, I said, however, in the Series C, Whenever that is, i didn't think it would be a year later. But when I raise my next round after the Series B, maybe two or three years from now, I am going to optimize for price then.
01:05:12
Speaker
That's when going to for price. And so now fast forward to the question. I know it's a long-winded answer to get back to the back. But I think the backstory matters, right? Because then it's like, okay, I raised this big amount of money. I actually didn't go to market saying I was going to raise $150. I went to the market...
01:05:26
Speaker
one without need, we were still, we had only deployed a third of our series B capital a year later. So I still had plenty of capital to keep doing the thing. um But the market was there, right? And so, you know, what's the the adage? Like when people are, ah you know, when when when they're handing out money, you you pass around the hat kind of thing, right? um And as a CEO, particularly later stage now, like, and not like that the company was so late stage, but at least from a funding standpoint, you know part of your job is to get the right cost of capital.
01:05:54
Speaker
right So this is where you know I wasn't focused on cost of capital for my series seed or my A or even my B that much. right It was like, let's just get the right capital. But for series C, my cost of capital, meaning like what's the valuation and how much is this really you know diluting and diluting other shareholders? Because now it's not just me, it's other other institutional investors, things like that. i got to think I have a job to do the right thing for all my shareholders. And I always had that. but Before that was pretty much me and my co-founder were the shareholders, you know? um So I don't regret, we we went up from 75 to 150. The reason we did was because, you know, we had some investors who said, well, what's, they kind of did the same thing. What's the price that would have us win this round? And I said, well, this price with this amount of capital.
01:06:39
Speaker
And i made the i made the price higher, but I also made the capital, you know instead of 75, I made it 150 because I knew I would need more. And then I was really freaked out when they said yes. I really, I mean, I proposed the price and there I was like, I thought there'd be a negotiation, but there wasn't. Because it was this was the craziness of 2021. It was just like, they you know they didn't say yes on the spot, but a day later they came, yes, that's it. And I was like, what?
01:07:03
Speaker
wait What? what you said You said yes? Like, I thought this was a negotiation. That's how ah negotiations work. I was angry and high. Opening bid, you know, you're going to come back and it's probably going to end up being somewhere in the middle, right? So it's like, here's my anchor and then you're going come into something there'll be somewhere in the middle we'd land. And I was like, oh my God, I have to go fill the rest of this round. And it ended up being nearly 2x oversubscribed.
01:07:25
Speaker
So it was like crazy. I mean, i was just blown away. I remember talking to one of my board members at dinner a month, ah sorry, a week or two before we closed the first closing, we did like, i think two or three closings for this.
01:07:37
Speaker
And I was totally freaked out. Not because I was worried about the closing. We had it all lined up. I said to him, I don't know how this how how how I'm going to generate a 3 to 5x return um in the next 3 to 5 years on this price.
01:07:55
Speaker
you know And I'm like, am I doing the right thing? And he who was ah he's a former CEO of a public company. And this was this wasn't Jonathan. It was another board member. um He said to me a couple things. He said, one, um it's not your job to set the valuation. Your job is to get the right cost of capital and properly capitalize business and then deploy those resources properly, right? you Use it wisely.
01:08:17
Speaker
And two, in that process, he's like, did you lie about anything? did you Do you think you can meet your projections? Were you you know open and and and sort of direct and transparent in in the diligence and everything throughout all this? I said, absolutely. He said, do you think you can meet your plan over the next two to three years? said, yeah, i do. I think I can meet the plan. Right. And where we are today, you know, five years later is we've more than 4X the revenue of the business. We've
Leadership Evolution: Scaling and Adaptation
01:08:46
Speaker
gone from basically, you know, whatever EBITDA margin was a negative 50% or burning crazy amount of capital in that time period to basically break even to EBITDA positive now and and on a plan for more like, you know, in the three to to 8% EBITDA range. um you know over a quarter billion in revenue um in all 50 states. I think we were at that point in time, maybe we were in like eight states. um We've acquired now four companies. We just closed another acquisition in February. Acquired four companies of very different nature, technology. Otherwise, we've built up the technology suite in a huge, huge way. So the company is definitively better. Oh, by the way, we have almost the same employee headcount today as we did
01:09:26
Speaker
three, you know, five, maybe not five four years ago, but I think we had 225 when we closed the series C and pretty quickly we got to 300. So we have about you know, a little over 300 employees now. So basically all with the same head count.
01:09:37
Speaker
Right. So it's like the company is definitively better. And just to be transparent, we're probably not as much worth as much as our last round. Right. Like we're probably underwater, you know, that we were very solid in the lead capital, but you know,
01:09:53
Speaker
There's what you can control and what you can't control. It's like, i mean we've done I mean, if multiples had stayed the same, the business would be 4 or five x better, you know, be valued 4 or 5x more. Yeah. Right? But they didn't stay the same.
01:10:04
Speaker
And so that's the the challenge that I think entrepreneurs have. in these environments. And I know that there's companies today, particularly in the AI space that are dealing with this, which is it's when there's when they're really frothy, you I'm just take a bunch of money.
01:10:18
Speaker
But when you take that money, you got to clear that hurdle. Like this is preferred equity. It's debt-like in that you got to pay, no matter what, you got to pay the money back. Right? And so the amount of money you bring in You know, you got to pay that back.
01:10:33
Speaker
And so you have to really think about, okay, that value, and you got to pay it back at the valuation, right? Meaning you got to think about if I sell this company in X years, will I be able to sell it for at least as much as I'm raising, like the price I'm raising at now?
01:10:48
Speaker
If I can't, then I'm just paying that money back right off the top. And that's going to impact my my return as a founder, right? And and those early investors who who bet on me when it was nothing. um So be very careful about the quantum of capital you raise in any round.
01:11:02
Speaker
um But I think especially in the early rounds, because it's harder you know to to sort of achieve that, that and you know if you if you're raising your big amount of money in the early rounds on a higher valuation, you have to cross that hurdle just to raise the next round, right? Not just for an exit. It's like, you gotta to ideally have at least a 2X increase on your valuation from post money to pre money, right? From series A to series B, from series B to series C.
01:11:26
Speaker
rule of thumb. ah And so it makes it very difficult to raise around if you don't, if you can't do that. And then hard it's hard for your other investors to sort of participate and do things. And moreover, from an exit standpoint, you know, you're really, it it makes it really difficult for your for you to return capital to those early employees, to those early investors, to yourself as a founder, when you raise too much at too high valuation. One question I have through all of this, you know it was lean times early on, but you were you know growing your business 5 to 10x year over year in this period. And then you eventually kind of hit this breakout moment where you were turning money down. You had more than you know you could accept. And then we've had the stretch where valuations have shifted. And so when when you think about the beginning to where we're at right now, you know cheese has been moved a little bit. Yeah, all the time. And I'd say also kind of the requirements of the leader have shifted, you know where you're proud of market fit early on, true founder to scaling an organization. yeah what you know what Sometimes we hear these phrases. I think um Horowitz from The Hard Thing About Hard Things talks about
01:12:30
Speaker
wartime CEOs, peacetime CEOs. yeah And I'm wondering, like have you felt yourself shifting from like, okay, it's wartime, peacetime, or is it always wartime? you know know you know How have things changed with more money? Does that mean like, hey, we've got this valuation we have to grow into, multiples are compressed. We're on the path or is it, hey, we have...
01:12:49
Speaker
more resources just to go take market share right now. I mean, I don't know, like maybe it's the wrong framework to even think about it, but it's how has your leadership had to change as you've had more or less resources in at the different stages of the business? Yeah, it's yes and. It's like all all the above. So I think maybe to the extent that there's founders that listening or watching, know, CEOs, um you hear it all the time, but it's just just a hammer at home. Your job changes.
01:13:17
Speaker
I mean, as a founder CEO, your job is incredibly different. You know, when you're a 10, 15 person company, scrappy, whatever, 15 to 30, 45 person company, you know, 50 to 100 person company, each of those are, I don't mean like, oh, it changes a little.
01:13:39
Speaker
i mean, it, like what you should be doing changes little. materially, dramatic i mean, like almost completely differently. Like you have to unlearn you to unlearn things that you that were the ways you were successful for as a leader, as an entrepreneur, um as an operator in order to be successful in that for that period of time, for that scale, for that stage. That's just, and that's just, that's That's irrespective of sort of what's going on in terms of how the you know external market is, both your your industry as well as the funding market or the public you know the public markets or whatever, the you know the investor market. um that's That's external of you know what are the specific challenges that are happening within the company even. That's purely just...
01:14:28
Speaker
the the size and scale of the company you're dealing with. And I'm using employees as ah as a rubric, but that's not the only, you could think it. It sort of, it points to more of like the complexity of the business, right? And so, you know, you could have a hundred person company that has, you know, ah basically an 80 person engineering, you know, product and engineering team. right, and a 10 person go to market team and a 10 person GNA team.
01:14:51
Speaker
that's That's very different from a complexity standpoint than a 100 person company with a 25 person product and engineering team and a 20 person, you know, sales team and a 15, you know, 10 person marketing team and a, you know, and and and and end right like those, the the latter is obviously a more complex business, right than the former. So I'm using employees as ah as a crude rule for that.
01:15:17
Speaker
What I think is really difficult, and and so for me, what I've had to do through these times, besides the, that's just the scale change, right? um But there's also then the maturity of the business, and then there's this investor, like or like the the size of capital you're dealing with and sort of the um and this's the size of the company employees, but then there's sort of like the the scope and the reach of the company from revenue or from a mission standpoint.
01:15:42
Speaker
Um, and then there's just the things that happen, right? Like we've, you know, I've had, we've had to do a couple of riffs. Um, I had a really reset the culture cause I had had some, some, I had a one really bad, uh, hire at one point and that, you know, and I, what I allowed to happen. was I allowed a ah toxicity in the executive team to to sort of creep in. And then that spread throughout the company. And and so there became this cancer inside the company that I had to that i had a fix.
01:16:10
Speaker
And i you know I don't know if I was, it's not clear to me. ah it wasn't clear to me at the time, even if I was the right person to, but i sort of said, i let this thing happen. I have to fix it, right? So what is important, I think, for founder CEOs, and on the point of advice I would give,
01:16:27
Speaker
is you really have to look in the mirror as a major shareholder in the company at every one of those points in time where there's been a major shift in what your job should be. One, you should be you should surround with people who can help you recognize when that shift has happened, whether it's on your team, on your board, um peer group ceo peer group, advisors, exec coach, whatever it is, um who can really say, you know what, like the thing you've the way you've been operating before needs to change. I i can i can't tell you how it needs to change, but this needs it's going to to change. And then it's on you to really be honest and look in the mirror and say, one, do I think i'm I can do this?
01:17:04
Speaker
Right? Without hubris, like, am I the right person for this or not? And if so, then the next question is, do I want to? Mm-hmm. right?
01:17:15
Speaker
Because you have to have the the the aptitude and the attitude, right? Just like, you're hiring yourself at that point. yeah It's almost like, say, I'm a shareholder and founder of the company. I'm a major investor. i'm ah you know I'll but probably still be on the board no matter what. Would I hire me as the CEO of this company, right? And and think about how I hire people. Would I hire them based, and do I think that they're the right person for that job? Do i I think that they're going to be all in on it?
01:17:42
Speaker
right And actually, you have really be honest with yourself. And that's hard to do. you know That's really hard to do, to be honest with yourself about that. And I've had to go through a lot of those, okay, why am I doing this? why like it is this Is this the thing that I think I'm good at?
01:17:58
Speaker
Can I learn it? you know but is there something know what Would I hire me for this sort of if it wasn't if if i wasn't sort of default into the position um and And then do I really want to do this? Because you have to have the attitude and the desire. Or or you know there's a lot of founders, myself included, who get a huge amount of energy from creating something from nothing. right And so, yeah, there's like i have to I have to keep scratching the niche. I've found ways to do that inside the company right that isn't disruptive, that is that is generally speaking you know a creative. I think most of my team would agree. Most of the time, you know sometimes Mark comes in and does disruptive things that...
01:18:35
Speaker
you know, are are often not not good for the company and other times they are good for the company. But, you
AI and Innovation: Embracing New Technologies
01:18:40
Speaker
know, I've found ways to be able to scratch that founder itch while still running now, you know, a reasonably scaled company. Yeah.
01:18:48
Speaker
Well, I only have one more question and this is around, you know, you're still hiring yourself. Yeah. And like, what's what's next? You know, we're living through this AI revolution right now. It's impacting your business. So where is the founder energy coming from right now? It's it's insane. I mean, this stuff. So we've been, we acquired this machine learning company in 2021 that now would be called an AI company called Quantify.
01:19:11
Speaker
and And then another company in 2022 that had an immense amount of machine learning and what, again, what we call is sort of AI from a data science and from a training model standpoint. So we've been deep into building AI-like tools. And now a lot of AI-specific tools using third-party LLMs and whether they're open source or or paid into our suite of products and services. That's from a product standpoint. What over the last six to you know nine months,
01:19:36
Speaker
We've been, so like ah just to close on that, and we've been using AI inside the company ah to improve efficiency as much as possible outside of the product itself for three years now, right? At our all company event three years ago, we did a hackathon where we were building, you know, AI things um in 2023, right? And it was, again, it seems like, oh, that was a really long time ago, right? And it of does feel that way, but the time we're like, oh this stuff's amazing now you look at it was so rudimentary but what you can do today with you know these i mean with these coding models um to build it inside the company is it is incredible i mean it is i am so incredibly energized by what we can do um we've had a phrase you know back to this like who moved my cheese so the change thing
01:20:26
Speaker
A phrase inside the company forever, i mean, since since I think we were five or six people, is it's on our mind changes our constant. And that's not that's not like super imaginative or whatever, but it's said all the time.
01:20:38
Speaker
Changes are constant, right? Because we're changing ourselves constantly and because the market changes, right? The puck moves.
01:20:45
Speaker
Right now, the opportunity for change is, is it's not just, it's exciting, but it's and it's not just, oh, what you should you should think about how can you you deploy and utilize AI to reimagine your business, is that if you don't, if you're not, you're you're literally just putting yourself on a path for failure.
01:21:06
Speaker
So I am incredibly excited to be in the seat that I'm in now because I actually get to think about how would I start this company today Right. Knowing what I know about the company, the industry and everything else more than I knew 10 years ago, ultimately.
01:21:20
Speaker
And with all these tools at my disposal that didn't exist even three or four years ago. Right. And, and the energy that that creates, um, in me and in, and in the the right team members in the company is pretty amazing.
01:21:36
Speaker
I mean, that's, you can hire a CEO, but you can't hire the founder. Yeah. And you're in founder mode right now. Yeah. That's cool. Thank you for taking the time to share this with the audience. and Yeah. thanks for Thanks for having me on the show and happy to happy to do this. And thanks for being a great, great partner.
01:21:52
Speaker
Thank you, Mark.