Transcript: How Klaviyo Built a $7B+ Public Company With Just $15M Raised | Andrew Bialecki, Co-founder and CEO of Klaviyo

Speaker 1: Thank you first have to explain the name. Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 1: Now we can pronounce correctly. Speaker 2: I think all great companies are made up of two things. Speaker 2: thankful for the 1500 clavios around the world, 130,000 customers that have bet on us. Speaker 2: I remember calling my co-founder after that and saying, hey Ed, I think we're on to something here. Speaker 3: One of the headlines that really stuck to me when Cleo went public was how capital efficient you were. Speaker 3: You raised around 400 plus million dollars but you only spend like a fraction of it by the time you went public, which seems to be a little bit of a rare thing in startups these days. Speaker 2: My advice to any founder is always, I think you should try to delay fundraising as much as you can. Speaker 2: And the other thing is we never celebrated, you know, how many people worked at Clevio. Speaker 2: I think a lot of other companies would say, wow, it's impossible. Speaker 2: AI is just going to change a lot of workflows. Speaker 2: There's a really interesting charge that they said, okay, let's look at internet usage and how much of it is coming from desktop. Speaker 2: we think of like traditional desktop versus mobile. Speaker 2: And if you look at those graphs, something really interesting is it wasn't that desktop usage, you know, went away. Speaker 2: It really that was that mobile usage exploded. Speaker 3: AI is sort of like open up a new sort of 10x, the amount of automation that you could do as an individual. Speaker 3: You can do so many things like just one person because of so many tools or you can just become so much more powerful than you ever were. Speaker 3: How do I automate things? Speaker 2: For some use cases, it can just do the entire process of marketing for you. Speaker 2: So this chat agent put on your website. Speaker 2: Customers were conversing with it not just about, you know, which swimsuits to buy, but literally having conversations about how to plan a great vacation. Speaker 2: What swimwear do you think I should buy? Speaker 2: And by the way, here's a couple of locations I'm going. Speaker 3: you can almost say that the customer don't doesn't actually have to come up with ideas. Speaker 3: And Cleo AI will come up with those ideas. Speaker 2: I remember talking to that business and they said, oh man, if you do that, we'll triple the amount we spend with you. Speaker 3: Hello everyone. Speaker 3: Welcome to startup project. Speaker 3: Uh, today we have an incredible guest, uh, who's not only built a multi-billion dollar company, uh, but also fundamentally reshaped how businesses will connect to their customers. Speaker 3: Uh, my guest is Andrew Buleki, co-founder and CEO of Clavio, uh, a AI for CRM platform that has become indispensable for B2C brands worldwide. Speaker 3: Uh, whether it's Liquid Death or Skims or Mattel, all use Clevio uh to stay in touch with their customers and market to their customers. Speaker 3: Clevio initially started as a email marketing company in 2013 uh and later integrated advanced marketing attribution, optimization, SMS marketing, and recently cutting edge AI capabilities uh with the launch of Clevio AI. Speaker 3: Clevio's impact has been undeniable. Speaker 3: They are a public company, uh was around $9 billion, about 180,000 brands globally use them. Speaker 3: Uh as of Q3 2025, they did an impressive uh $300 million in revenue and expected to reach uh $1.2 billion in revenue for this fiscal year, um, and have a impressive 32% year-over-year growth rate. Speaker 3: So we'll talk about, you know, Andrew's entrepreneur journey, the decisions that shaped Clevio's growth trajectory, his perspectives on the evolving landscape of data and AI and how they are approaching building products uh using AI. Speaker 3: Uh, so get ready for an interesting and high-value conversation. Speaker 3: Andrew, welcome to the show. Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me. Speaker 3: Uh, so I want to set the stage for the audience. Speaker 3: Uh, anyone who is in e-commerce or anyone who is selling something on the internet, I think is familiar with Clevio. Speaker 3: Uh, but uh, if the audience is not familiar with Clevio, can you just give a brief description of what Clevio does and uh, you know, what are the products that you have? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: Well, that was a that was a good um description up front. Speaker 2: So uh man, so we started Clevio 13 years ago. Speaker 2: And uh our our dream was whether you were an entrepreneur just starting out uh or you were an iconic, you know, multinational business. Speaker 2: We felt like you ought to be able to treat every single one of your customers like they were the most important only customer in the world. Speaker 2: And you know, we found that like a lot of businesses when they really want to deliver an exceptional experience, like just a stunning um customer experience, they really relied on people to do that. Speaker 2: And our feeling was is like, well, in the future it's going to be less, you know, like white glove through, you know, you or I getting on the phone with somebody and it's going to be much more delivered through software. Speaker 2: Um, I think that's probably a take that's uh, I don't know, I guess feels like it's aging pretty well given all the stuff that's uh, you know, happening with AI and LLMs these days. Speaker 2: Um, but anyways, we wanted to make that possible. Speaker 2: And uh, so we actually we actually started out as a, you know, as a a database business. Speaker 2: Um, you know, because we felt like, well, if you're going to do that, then you're going to have to replicate the way a human thinks and stores information. Speaker 2: And then we actually after we built that kind of brain, this kind of like uh, you know, very low latency, uh, you know, database that could that could handle some like deep analytical queries. Speaker 2: Um, you know, we gave that to a bunch of customers and uh, they, you know, they said, okay, this is awesome and we asked them like what they were hooking it up to or what they were doing with the results and a lot of them said, hey, we're plugging that into our marketing system. Speaker 2: Uh, and so we actually for a while just started trying to partner out with a bunch of those other marketing, um, you know, softwares, platforms and then we just pretty quickly realized that, you know, it's a little bit like uh, you know, if you took a human brain and you sort of like without it being connected to like, I don't know, some arms, some legs, like a voice, it's like just actually not that useful. Speaker 2: We realized it was actually pretty hard to integrate this with some of the older tech that was out there and that got us into marketing like you mentioned and then this past, you know, uh, a couple months ago, we expanded the surfaces as we say, um, that Clevio supports to go from marketing to now uh, customer service. Speaker 2: We have our customer agent uh and as well extend on people's websites and their mobile apps um with our customer hub products. Speaker 2: And uh, yeah, I mean ultimately for the 180,000 brands that we serve, our goal is that if you want to, you know, treat every single one of your customers like the only one that matters and you want to be yourself as an entrepreneur or like at that business, your best, you know, sales rep, product expert, um, you can do that at scale and you can do all that through technology. Speaker 3: What was that um maybe initially like what was that uh year or moment when you felt like okay, we fix some kind of product market fit here. Speaker 2: Yeah, so um, well I knew we were on the right track when, you know, so we started out and I had this experience um, before Clevio where I had all these little side projects. Speaker 2: And uh, you know, I remember building this uh race search engine, like road race search engine because I ran a lot like 5Ks and half marathons and things like that. Speaker 2: And I remember, you know, I would the you know, the business there was like I was go talk to these race organizers, right? Speaker 2: And I I'd keep I'd pitch, you know, this like search engine that we built. Speaker 2: And I remember doing that over and over and over again. Speaker 2: I was like, man, this is really repetitive. Speaker 2: It'd be awesome if there was like software that could do this for me, but do it the same way I was doing it, the same enthusiasm, right? Speaker 2: The same like uh, you know, level of depth of like what our product could do. Speaker 2: Um, and so anyways, we built this, I remember our one of our first customer was this uh Haberdashery. Speaker 2: So for folks who don't know, Haberdashery means they they make, you know, kind of these bespoke, you know, custom tailored suits. Speaker 2: Um, you know, in their case, most of their client tell was men, but some women as well. Speaker 2: And uh, I remember talking to them that business and they were like, yeah, yeah, this personal touch really matters and we built this kind of database engine that just knew everything about every single one of those um, that um, uh, that uh customer, that business's clientele. Speaker 2: And I remember talking to them and saying like, you know, hey, we're thinking about getting into uh marketing and messaging and not just being this database and source for analytics. Speaker 2: What do you think? Speaker 2: And they said, oh man, if you do that, we'll triple the amount we spend with you. Speaker 2: And I remember calling my co-founder after that and saying, hey Ed, I think we're on to something here. Speaker 2: Like this idea of being the, you know, the brain of a business and being the way that they actually like talk to their customers, like, you know, for this for this company that really, really cared about every little detail of the customer experience. Speaker 2: Um, you know, that's I think when we knew we were onto something. Speaker 2: I think after that, you know, I had a friend probably maybe six months after that that had um, you know, had just started his own business. Speaker 2: Uh, and he was selling uh, you know, quilts, um, you know, selling quilts online, doing e-commerce and he just spun up. Speaker 2: He's like, hey, there's this thing called Shopify. Speaker 2: Have you ever heard of it? Speaker 2: I said, no, but I looked at it and I was like, oh, I was really impressed by, you know, their APIs and the product itself. Speaker 2: I said, hey, you know, I think we could probably integrate with this, both to like kind of, you know, be this, you know, like pull in all this information into our kind of brain that we built. Speaker 2: Um, and then also to like, you know, integrate, you know, onto their, you know, website, um, and uh help, help solve for them. Speaker 2: And anyways, I remember he's like, yeah, I would use Clevio if you guys uh could support them. Speaker 2: And man, I remember we built that, you know, we we were connecting with a lot of different SAS products um in like 2012, 2013, but I remember that just took off like crazy within like, you know, six months, 12 months and then we're like, okay, I think we'd found, you know, this really good use case um in uh retail and commerce and that became uh, you know, kind of where we started. Speaker 3: Were you an app on Shopify marketplace at that point of time or how how did the integration look like at that point of time? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of the really interesting things like you know, I know um you know, there's this this idea that platforms have kind of an App store, you know, a little bit modeled off off of Apple and I remember, you know, uh, Toby and the Shopify team were really early into thinking about this. Speaker 2: Like the funny part was, I don't think it was I mean they might have called it an App store, but it was I mean there weren't, you know, hundreds of, you know, um apps or integrations in there at the time. Speaker 2: Um, and so one of the things actually I we are very strong believers about when you're building a business is we um really like this uh partner model of uh, you know, how do how do customers find you? Speaker 2: And we have this, we have this thesis that hey, look, there's really like three things that you should aim at uh if you want to get discovered. Speaker 2: So or three ways to think about like, you know, nominally like marketing and doing demand generation. Speaker 2: Um, and those three are like peers, so like word of mouth, like you want people to talk about you. Speaker 2: So if your product is so good that people are like, uh, our our litmus test was always like, hey, if people are at like a cocktail party or they're hanging out with their friends and you know, maybe they all do something similar and somebody says, oh, hey, like what's interesting. Speaker 2: You want to build products that are still good, people just can't help but talk about it, right? Speaker 2: Um, so, you know, rely on like word mouth and peers and then um, you know, partners for us. Speaker 2: Uh, you know, we work with uh over 3,000, you know, marketing agencies and we kind of felt like they were the experts that everybody's turning to. Speaker 2: So if they were recommending us, that was great. Speaker 2: And then the third was platforms. Speaker 2: And um, you know, we have this thesis that when people were building businesses, you know, everybody obviously wants to have a, you know, know their who their customers are and wants to, you know, treat them well. Speaker 2: Um, but like we would we could do we could get to a lot of those businesses faster if we could partner up with some of the platforms. Speaker 2: And so we thought about what are the platforms that people are building businesses on? Speaker 2: And this is around, you know, 2010, 2012. Speaker 2: We thought that a lot more of that would be software as a service. Speaker 2: I mean, I think that's all so like has I think come to be true. Speaker 2: Um, but at the time there's a lot of people that were building things on their own or they were self-hosting, um, using open source and we kind of felt like more and more businesses were just going to say, no, no, I don't want to deal with any of that. Speaker 2: Just point me to the platform that's a winner. Speaker 2: And um, you know, I we so we talked to dozens of these platforms and Shopify was just so forward thinking about this. Speaker 2: Um, you know, they had this approach they're like, look, you know, we're going to be great at this part of the entrepreneurial journey. Speaker 2: And uh, you know, we cared a lot about, you know, entrepreneurs and folks just starting out too. Speaker 2: Um, because it was in my co-founder and Ice, you know, kind of background and roots. Speaker 2: Um, and you know, we said, hey, look, we can, I think we can help solve some of like, you know, these businesses not just, you know, um, you know, uh, standing up a website and uh, you know, uh, actually transacting on the internet, doing all the hard things that revolve around payments and fraud. Speaker 2: I think we can be that source of truth of who your customers are and then help, you know, help them do better marketing, better experiences, which one turn will drive, you know, more growth for them. Speaker 2: You know, we should partner up and uh, yeah, they were just they were awesome. Speaker 2: And I think back then I've talked to a bunch of folks that have talked about, hey, how to think about these like App stores and platforms now. Speaker 2: It's gotten a lot more maybe competitive or a little more crowded, but back then there there actually weren't a lot of folks thinking about this way and there were very few um like Shopify that were actively trying to curate, you know, um, you know, developers and software companies uh to kind of help them, you know, flush out or, you know, make their overall product better. Speaker 3: Yeah, one of one of the things that I always think about Shopify is as it's sort of like they've looked at WordPress and removed all the complexity for e-commerce. Speaker 3: Uh, and you basically copy what WordPress can do and used to do, but remove all the complex part of WordPress and make it more easy to do this for an entrepreneur to not think about hosting WordPress, to not be with plugins. Speaker 3: And plugins evolved into App Store in Shopify, but it's a much better marketplace, it's much better integration. Speaker 3: Um, it's a it's a such a simple idea of abstracting away things. Speaker 3: Um, but you know, it became sort of like this big opportunity when you just focus on e-commerce. Speaker 3: Um, in like the internet stack of things, like we have these broad use cases. Speaker 3: Uh, one is like if you want to do get customers, you use Facebook or Google Ads. Speaker 3: So they found their product market fit there. Speaker 3: If you want to just host anything, then you have the three clouds. Speaker 3: And I feel like there is a spot space where if you want to in talk to your customers consistently once you once, you know, you know who your customer is, then you have you need to have Clavio or Clevio light product. Speaker 3: I I feel like in that map of internet tech stack, then Clevio has its space sort of drawn out. Speaker 2: Yeah, like our so yeah, I I I totally agree. Speaker 2: I you know, um some a product principle we have is you can learn a lot from the folks that are maybe the early adopters, the most advanced users. Speaker 2: You know, so we have this product um principle that's like, hey, first build things to make it possible so that the folks that are maybe pushing the limits, they can at least accomplish what they want to accomplish. Speaker 2: So I remember for us it was it was interesting. Speaker 2: When Clevio first started, you know, we we built this, um, you know, database, we built all these APIs and we pretty quickly realized there a whole bunch, you know, we could actually expand, you know, our reach if we would just build some of these like connectors, these data connectors because there were so many folks are like, I, you know, I'm either technical but I don't have time to build an integration into this. Speaker 2: And so we sort of a bunch of like, you know, language libraries, you know, Ruby, Python, you know, node, um PHP etc. Speaker 2: Then we realized is like if we actually just connect to some of these platforms, it actually would take a lot of the cognitive load and a lot of the work off for folks. Speaker 2: And then obviously you got a whole bunch of people that just were not technical at all and they were like, why, by the time I go find a developer or build this thing, like I'll have already given up. Speaker 2: Um, so this idea of like make it possible first, like maybe with those APIs and then make it really easy, so then you add the kind of the, you know, the almost like the sugar layer on top, right? Speaker 2: That makes it fast is the thing. Speaker 2: And then, yeah, I think any any great product company, you know, you look at, hey, what is the abstraction, or we use this, you know, engineering term, what's the primitive? Speaker 2: What's this like Lego block that you're putting out in the world? Speaker 2: Uh, because you're right, because then you know, people when they're, you know, when they're building any project, right? Speaker 2: Whether it's a business or a startup or maybe they're, you know, uh, they just think about like, who has the best, you know, infrastructure and kind of building blocks and uh, you know, there's really powerful thing when you start to become almost like a default, right? Speaker 2: Folks. Speaker 2: Um, you know, one of the one of the crazier things that's happened to Clevio as we've grown is, I used to talk to all our customers and I'd ask them, you know, uh, you know, hey, hey, why did you pick us? Speaker 2: And they'd have these very technical reasons. Speaker 2: Oh, I I tried you. Speaker 2: I bake you off against these other products. Speaker 2: And increasingly, it it's a little jarring. Speaker 2: They're just like, well, well why would I why would I start anywhere else? Speaker 2: I mean, you know, Clevio is just the best. Speaker 2: And I thinking about that, I'm like, man, that's like not founded in, you know, any kind of logic. Speaker 2: I mean, that's great, but that's it's become almost like, you know, a brand identity of like what you're good at. Speaker 2: Um, so we have to work to keep that and then also I think for some of the things we're building now is like we have to basically, you know, we have to we have to become, you know, the uh building block or the primitive um for those other use cases. Speaker 3: One of the headlines that really stuck to me when Cleo went public was this, uh, you know, how capital efficient you were. Speaker 3: I think you raised around 400 plus million dollars but you only spent like a fraction of it, you know, by the time you went public. Speaker 3: Uh talk a little bit about, you know, your fundraising journey and, you know, the approach to being capital efficient, which seems to be a a little bit of a rare thing uh in startups these days. Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's interesting people talk now about this, hey, you know, when will the first company with maybe, you know, I don't know, uh 10 folks or even a single folk, you know, achieve, I don't know, a million dollars or 10 million or 100 million in revenue. Speaker 2: Um, that was kind of our method our our thinking from the start. Speaker 2: Um, so my belief, my advice to founders is especially if you're technical is you actually don't need as much capital as you think. Speaker 2: I mean, now it depends a little bit on, you know, um, what the uh, you know, what what industry or problem you're after, but in general, I think people overweights, you know, how much fundraising and sort of the boost that, you know, um, gives you and really just boils down to like you just got to build and you just got to, you know, you got to go nail it for some customers. Speaker 2: Um, and then the interesting part is once you do that, I found a lot of the best investors, the best VCs, they're sort of following, you know, customers in markets anyways. Speaker 2: I mean, I a lot of our investors over the years have told me they're like the reason they know about Clevio is because they were just going and they looked at what they felt were large market opportunities and then went to go talk to those customers. Speaker 2: They did their own primary research and they said like, what products do you love? Speaker 2: And that's how, you know, we get on their radar. Speaker 2: Um, and I always thought that was like a wonderful way to go about it is because you're really doing building it up from first principles. Speaker 2: Um, so then the trick for us was, you know, when we we started we said we just want to aim at markets that are really big. Speaker 2: And you know, this idea of like, hey, we can deliver, you know, if you're a business, it doesn't matter whether you have a thousand or a hundred million end consumers, we can deliver every part of the customer experience, you know, as if, you know, it was the founder or, you know, the you know, the best product person or the best sales person talking to them. Speaker 2: Um, that we just felt like, you know, nominally we thought of that as like the CRM market. Speaker 2: But that we just felt like is a massive opportunity. Speaker 2: And then, you know, when we when we even looked at that, and this actually was a big thing of sort of confusion for a lot of folks that, you know, not our customers, but really like maybe some investors. Speaker 2: What people said like, well, hasn't the CRM been done? Speaker 2: I mean, isn't that, you know, what hubspot or sales force? Speaker 2: And you know, our what what we said is like, no, no, no. Speaker 2: We're we we were going to do it in a very automated way. Speaker 2: We're going to so we're going to aim at businesses that frankly need to use software to connect with their customers. Speaker 2: That's why we talk about building a B2C CRM. Speaker 2: And we said, look, like we think in the future more and more of the customer experience is going to be more autonomous. Speaker 2: Like software is going to decide what to, you know, what what experience to deliver to which person. Speaker 2: It's not going to be like you're setting up a human to have a conversation. Speaker 2: So that's what we're going to go after. Speaker 2: And we think this is going to be a monster category because if you look at like just world GDP, two-thirds of it is consumers interacting with, you know, small and large businesses and yet they sort of don't have the tools to do it. Speaker 2: Um, so we're going to build the data infrastructure where we started and then we're going to build the marketing infrastructure. Speaker 2: And then, hey, by the way, there's use ad agency. Speaker 2: Uh, you know, we're going to get into customer service and our customer agent product. Speaker 2: And we're just going to we're going to build the entire stack that allows these businesses to operate and because, you know, because they need software to do this, you know, to drive, you know, customer engagement and therefore revenue, you know, we're going to become very sticky and a must have. Speaker 2: And uh, you know, when we showed when we showed that vision along with, you know, kind of some of the early traction we had, um, I think that that frankly made, you know, our experience with fundraising was actually was quite pleasant, right? Speaker 2: I mean, we mostly got to we got to spend time talking to folks that, you know, we felt like would really add value to like our thinking, would level us up. Speaker 2: Um, and uh, yeah, so anyway, my advice to any founders is always, I think you should try to delay fundraising as much as you can. Speaker 2: You know, not everybody can do that, but in general, you know, two things, two rules we had to clevio is we would never celebrate fundraising milestones. Speaker 2: Like we looked at those like those are non events. Speaker 2: We'd celebrate a lot of customer milestones. Speaker 2: Um, or maybe revenue milestones, but we never celebrate fundraising milestones. Speaker 2: Um, and then the other thing is we never celebrated, you know, how many people worked at clevio. Speaker 2: Um, I talked to some other founders and they celebrate, yeah, I've got a hundred people or I've got a thousand people. Speaker 2: And we always looked at that as like, well, that's I mean that's cool, but wouldn't it be better if you were like a smaller team? Speaker 2: Like wouldn't it feel more intimate, you'd know more people bet you know more people, like the communication tax would be less. Speaker 2: So I think that's something we've tried to even as now we're a public company, we really try to stick to is, you know, we don't celebrate fundraising milestones, which to me is like you don't stare at the stock price. Speaker 2: And then we also we just don't look at like, hey, how many people work at Clevio? Speaker 2: We think about like, hey, smaller is better and that's why we really believe in like, you know, the power of small teams. Speaker 3: I mean, you said you wanted to delay fundraising. Speaker 3: So, which, which is a little bit counterintuitive to the idea of going public. Speaker 3: Because most companies go public to fund rates. Speaker 3: Obviously that might not be the reason for you. Speaker 3: So talk to me about that decision because I used to work for this company called Epic Systems. Speaker 3: I don't know if you know about it. Speaker 3: Um, it's the healthcare software company. Speaker 2: Incredible company, incredible business. Speaker 3: Incredible business, pretty much 70 to 80% of, you know, US individuals healthcare records are managed by that company. Speaker 3: the founder Judy Faulkner still runs the company started in 1979. Speaker 3: So incredible company, but she had this thesis of like never to go public and I think she also ensured that the company will not go public posthumously also. Speaker 3: Uh, so she had a very strong point of view and now you're seeing like strive doesn't go public. Speaker 3: There's some other crazy good companies that don't go public for different reasons. Speaker 3: What was your thought process, you know, when the time came that to decide whether you should go public or not? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you know, it was I I had studied all of the, you know, kind of all we felt like all time great companies, software companies, technology companies. Speaker 2: And like the vast majority of them, but not not 100% because your point like, you know, Epic is was one of the examples there. Speaker 2: There's a couple of others, um, you know, we'd look at these like very large, um, you know, uh private uh technology companies, but most of them went public. Speaker 2: And you know, I kind of looked at that as like, okay, it's a bit of a right of passage. Speaker 2: Um, you know, there's some other things like it gives, you know, liquidity to, you know, investors and obviously like folks at Clevio that have worked very hard for many years. Speaker 2: This is before the private markets were maybe a little more liquid. Speaker 2: Um, so I also think the public markets give you a chance to, you know, just tell your story more directly. Speaker 2: Um, I guess there's nothing stopping a private company from, you know, doing, you know, press releases or sharing, you know, their numbers, which I know a bunch do, but I also felt like it's like there's a there's a bit of a trust you can build up when you say like, here, just, you know, look at our books. Speaker 2: You can tell how healthy our business is and you know, there's going to be some accountability um, you know, every quarter, every year. Speaker 2: Um, so it's interesting, like now that the private markets uh have gotten, you know, I I think it's they're almost operating as these like pseudo public markets. Speaker 2: Um, I think uh, you know, I don't think that changes our calculus, but I think it sort of it makes things things are almost merging a little bit. Speaker 2: Um, but I for us the most important thing was when we knew, I I felt like we would go public at some point for all those reasons. Speaker 2: We just didn't want to change the way we were going to operate. Speaker 2: Um, and that meant, you know, having a real strong like long-term point of view, being very like product and customer focused. Speaker 2: And uh, you know, I don't know, frankly, I we just felt like because of the strength of our culture, like there just wasn't a lot of risk um, you know, in doing that. Speaker 2: You know, we had a saying back in 2020 when we were thinking about like, hey, when we would go public and, you know, would we and all this kind of stuff. Speaker 2: And we said like, look, there's some all-time great companies, like if you look at like Microsoft or Apple and, you know, these companies is like, I think everybody knows them as these these like, you know, um, uh, you know, kind of standard candles for tech. Speaker 2: Um, and yet if you said like, hey, what year did they go public? Speaker 2: Everybody probably has a vague sense of when it was, but nobody knows the date and nobody really cares because a lot of their best work has come since. Speaker 2: So clearly they have like, you know, cultures in a way of working that just has stood the test of time. Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, as a from perspective of a retail investor, I think it makes most sense for more companies to go early public