Evan Teshima

How much did that cost me? Close to 400 grand. I was like, "Okay, John, this is where we want to be. This is where you want to be. Let's play a game of chess." And you know what I thought into my head? Do you know what I thought? I go, "Okay, this guy's really good at golf, really good at tennis, he's good-looking, he's got a good-looking wife, he's everything going for him. There's no way he's good at chess." And so what happened? So anyways, I I make this proposal to John and he literally says, "Come over to my house right now." I'm like, "Crap, I don't even have time to prepare for anything. I have to like I have to like go right now, right?" So I drive over to John's mansion and then he lets me in. The door opens. I'm just like my heart's pounding, right? And he's like, "Come on in. Go ahead and go downstairs." Right? I go downstairs. There's this chess board, two seats, and a lamp that's sitting right over it. And I'm just like, and a chess clock. I'm like, did you guys play time? And meanwhile, my co-founder's like, "Evan, you better win this game. You better focus, right?" And I have like all these people texting me. I'm like, "Guys, guys, like he he's a really good chess player. Like, I'm going to do my best, but come on. Give me a break. Let me like focus here." So, first game you win. Oh yeah. First game I won. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I've got a chance at this. You guys played best of three. Best of three. Second game. Second game I lost. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, my heart's pounding." Right. We get into game three and John, it was close match. John made just a little bit of a blunder, took advantage of it, and just closed it out. And he won. I just won the way the world just left off for a moment. And how much did that cost me? Just that little bit of where we the $50,000 equity difference. You kind of like to remind me how much it cost me. Close to 400 grand. Yeah. There we go. X2. We are so excited for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Welcome back to the Startup Ignition podcast. I'm your host Tyler with my co-host John. John, here we are, the Startup Ignition team. Today we have a super exciting guest that I think we've been trying to get on the podcast for months now, but he's such a busy dude and everywhere in the world it's hard to get him here in little old Utah again. But we have I was just 7,000 miles away. That's the problem. So we have Evan Tashima. Evan Tashima. I have a bio for you, so I'm going to read it. And we This is pre-approved. Evan looked at this so I got everything right. Okay. because I had to go all the way back to his BYU days and even look up what your degree was in at BYU. But so this is Evan Toshima, probably most most well known for your um your CEO role and founding of Forup and we tout you every which way here in the startup ignition ecosystem and our community as a a huge success story and something we were close by the whole time and probably the company and entrepreneur with the single most war stories that I tell. Yeah, tons of war stories from the four days. But real quick and then we'll get into it. Evan Tashima, uh, business management degree from BYU. Um, you co-founded ForUp, which was a awesome idea that you pivoted into over many, many pivots and eventually built up in the SAS uh, arena for golf management software. Um, and without raising much capital, if any at all, you basically bootstrapped that thing to a two 2,300 golf courses. You you told me at the peak of of 2,300 golf courses on on their SAS across North America, and you eventually sold it in 2021 was the technical date or was it 2020? March of 2020. 2021. 2021. Um, and as a CEO, you led that whole rapid scaling process, the product expansion, all the feature sets, and eventually again up to that acquisition, it was acquired by Club Essential Holdings, which I think was was it backed by Battery Ventures or how was Battery Ventures involved? Battery Ventures owns Club Essential. Okay. So, and back in the day, Evan said, "Someday, John, I'm going to be your best angel investment ever because I used to say Omnature was." And we would talk about that. And lo and behold, Evan and Forup became my best angel investment ever. There you go. So Evan got the title. So that's also his claim to be. That doesn't last. Hopefully someone in the fund outdo me. I'll be okay with that. Evan now being successful is turning the corner and has flipped the script as being an investor now. He's an investor in our uh venture fund. Um you're doing a lot of angel investing. Um, and on top of that, you are are a scratch golfer yourself. Basically, technically a three, but that's a three, but who's counting? Utah three. Doesn't travel as well, but but you're also passing it on to the next generation. I just texted you like last week about your son. That's super cool. How old is he? He's 12. He's 12. And he's like doing the circuit. He's going to tournaments and winning the things and getting invited to cool stuff. He is. It It's It's scary. I mean, I play with him the other day and if I don't catch it good off the tea, he can match my distance. Are you serious? He's 12. So, I still got a little over him, but if I don't catch it right, it's downhill from here, let me tell you. Every year for a while, I would go 10 yards shorter and they would go 10 yards longer. Yeah. Yeah. And we were just in New Zealand and uh he beat me for the first time from my T's. He shot a 74, I shot a 76. We're playing from the Blues. And the deal was is that the day he beats me from my tees, I have to take him to Pebble Beach. So So you're going to an expensive trip, but I don't mind it so much. So Wow. That I'm impressed. That is cool. That is so cool. I think that's every golfer's dream to have your son out like outscore you or score below you in golf. I just watched Rory's uh when he was 8 years old uh going on to a television show and he would hit balls into a washing machine, that one. and uh you know and they said do you want to be a professional golfer somebody goes yeah you want to win a master someday how about a grand slam career grand slam maybe we'll see your son there someday that's his goal that long way to go but outside of golf and outside of startups Evan is just an allaround awesome cool friend as well he's been an awesome supporter of everything we've been doing you stay we've been close friends for years now I don't even know how long ago you guys met but I met shortly thereafter after and it's just 15 years now. Yeah, it's been a great time. Maybe 15 16. Met met John in in school. He was my my teacher. Yeah. And we'll dive into that. But first, we're going to do I have to do an icebreaker with Evan. Even though we know Evan super well. Evan, I don't know if you've ever watched the podcast episodes, but we always do an icebreaker, which is just kind of like get to know each other, but also get in the mood of the podcast and just like do something fun. And so I have I I used AI to help me write this uh icebreaker. Oh boy. Do you guys remember back in grade school when you would do the kiss, marry, kill? Have you ever Have you ever heard of that? Like, oh, I'm I'm uh I like Jimmy, Bobby, and Tommy. And it's like, okay, which one would you kiss? Which one would you marry? Which one would you kill? Did you ever do that in in grade school? We're going to do that real quick with startups. So, I'm going to give you three startups and you have to kiss, marry, kill, or invest, build yourself, or kill. Okay, these three startups I have unal alive just in case we can't say kill. So, invest, build, or un alive. All right. All right. Okay. So, here we go. We're going to go round one. I'm going to give you three startups and you both tell me which one you would again you would invest, build yourself, or kill. Okay. Ready? Here we go. So, here's the first three. Number round one. Here we go. An AI powered Gmail plugin that organizes and prioritize your inboxes automatically. Okay, that's the first model. The second one is a vertical SAS for managing golf club memberships and tea times. Okay, number three, an instant investor pitch deck generator for startup founders. And each one of the three gets one of those designations. Yeah. So each one you have to I can't choose like build for all three or anything. No, you have to do one for each. So which one are you investing in? Which one are you building? And which one are you unaliving or killing? Okay, again, AI powered Gmail plugin that organizes and prioritizes your inbox. Vertical SAS for managing golf club memberships and tea times. Instant investor pitch deck generator for startup founders. I would do uh the golf OS one or whatever it is. Invest, build, or kill. That's going to be build for me. That's going to be your own build. For the golf. Yeah. Uh I would build You would build that one too. Well, just cuz you have the domain expertise. But I do have a non-compete. But if I didn't have a non-compete build. Okay. Okay. So you guys are both building the golf. What are you doing with the Gmail plugin that organizes and prioritizes your inbox? And what do you do? I would invest in invest in that 100%. I would love to have that. So I would invest all day long. Okay. So you're investing in that one. So you're killing the instant investor pitch deck generator for startup founders. Yeah, it's I still would like that and I've used those. They're already being developed and I've used it to give me a head start, but I'd like a better one. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, but that's the weakest of all. So you're you're matching the you're matching you're matching the best builder. We're on that one. We match. That that's cuz that was our SAS round. Okay. Ready? Here's the next round. Round number two. It's consumer. It's consumer plays. Ready? Okay. Here we go. This one. The first business is a Tik Tok style platform for reviewing and trading international snacks. So a snack Tik Tok. Okay. Okay. Number two, a wearable fitness tracker and meal planner, but for dogs. Okay. Number three, an app that detects who's dominating your Zoom meetings and recommends them to be quiet and let others talk. Okay. So, a Tik Tok style snack uh social media, a wearable fitness tracker and meal planner for dogs, or an app that detects who's dominating your Zoom meetings and recommends them to shut Yeah. So, so the third one, uh, the Zoom meeting one I would kill. You're killing that one. That's the kill for me, too. Just cuz I don't think anyone will be doing that doing that, right? So, um, I would invest in the dog. Oh, okay. Just because there are so many businesses out there that have to do with pets and they're just people that love their pets and I just I don't know, that's one of those weird ones that I don't initially think would work, but then it does work and so I'd probably put some And then you're building the Tik Tok snacks. Yes. Tik Tok snack social media. Yes. And I'll reverse that. I'll uh build the pet one. Yeah. And I think and I'm choosing build for the one I think has the most potential because I want being the owner and founder of your own company is the way to make wealth. And so technically you're retaining most ownership when you're building yourself versus investing for a smaller equity piece. And uh the snack one uh is would be an easy one for somebody to execute. So I could invest in that and I know it's not that hard to execute. the the the dog one was going to be more difficult to execute. I knew if I and I and I trust my execution skills. I knew if I put a consumer play one in there, you both would kill it if there was other any other B2B SAS ones next to it. So that's why I had to do a consumer round. So you had to, you know, invest, build or kill, right? Okay, we have one more round then we'll then we'll be done with this. Okay, last one. This one's just a straight up weird one. Okay, future future weirdos. Okay, here we go. the the last round, the first company, a neut a neural sync software that lets remote teams collaborate emotionally via brainwave wearables. Okay. Number two, a credit card for teenagers with parental guard rails and gamified savings. Okay. Number three, a SAS for tracking and auto refunding customer complaints before they escalate to social media. Okay. Did you get those ones? Okay. So, the Neurosync software, a credit card for teenagers, or that SAS for tracking and autoreunding customer complaints. Yeah, I would kill the Neurosync one. Kill the neuros. That one's just way too weird. Even it was big, I would never use it myself. So, um I would invest in what was the uh credit card for teenagers or the SAS for tracking and autorefunding customer complaints before they would build that one. I would build three as well. Okay. And then I I would invest in the credit card for teenagers for kids. Cool. Yeah, I like that. I I I actually agree with that one. I I didn't agree with some of your other ones, but this round I actually agree with. Let's kill that neural sync one. Let's invest in the credit card one and let's build the the SAS for tracking and refunding. That's great. Okay. Well, thank you for participating in my AI AI built icebreaker game. I just wanted to get in the mind of investor and startup and where your minds were going there. But now let's take it back to pre icebreaker conversation when you were saying when you met John because I think if we go all the way back to that it must have been at your time at BYU right? Yeah. So I don't know who wants to kick that. I remember the day. I remember the day. How do you remember the day? Uh that I really met and talked is when he and his wouldbe co-founder walked in to an event on the 400 like 408 in the Tanner building at BYU. What was it like? It was an entrepreneur event and they walked in and I that's when we first really met and talked about their idea. Yeah. Well, John's had a lot of students so it goes back even before that for me as um because I I mean I actually didn't even know what I wanted to do my senior year like for like a career or anything. Uh like at BYU or senior high school? No, no, no. At BYU I I mean I was I had been selling pest control so I was going to take like a regional manager position but that never really panned out. So, I didn't like really know what I was going to be doing. Yeah. Um, and I remember having to put one more class on the schedule uh just because I was in the business program and needed a few more credits. And so, I was looking through the syllabus and all the teachers and and all the classes that were available and I heard about creating new ventures and a lot of people spoke really highly of John. So, I was like, "Ah, I'll just take that class." And so, I put it on the schedule and literally from day one I was like, "This is amazing. You can actually start a company." Yeah. And one of the things that John said that really resonated with me was, "Hey, because I grew up around like my uncle's a startup guy, but he did it after, you know, a few years of college and so forth. I thought you had to have like experience in the real world, but John was like, "Hey guys, like I'm so jealous of you. There's so many tools right now that allow you to start companies for free. Like, this is amazing. And you guys are college kids. Like, you're poor and you can continue to be poor. like try starting a company when you're married and you have health insurance and you have, you know, a house and a mortgage. Yeah. Give it a shot now. Right. And John was like, I had times in my startup where on a monthly basis I was I was making more than baseball players and I grew up loving baseball. I was like, you're making more than a baseball player? Like, so he really like enlightened my mind on, hey, maybe entrepreneurship is the route to take. I'm a poor college student. I can just continue living in my brother-in-law's basement. like I I can do these things, right? So, he really inspired hope, but that's like where I really first met John, but like I said, there's a lot of people in this class. I didn't really talk to him much. I was just sitting in the back being inspired and like thinking of different ideas and so forth. Yeah. And I do remember I distinctly remember that one event where we really engaged on your idea. Yeah. 100%. So, where did it go from there? So, like so what did you do when you got that class, took that class? Was it creating new ventures or what was the class? It was creating new ventures. Yeah. Did you do anything in that class? Did you create anything in that class? Uh, yeah. My first idea was uh a toilet seat that was controlled by like a lever. So, because I hate touching the toilet seat. So, like you just step on it and it opens and then closes. And the prize for like the best idea was like some book that John was offering. I didn't win it, of course, but that was my first idea that I was working on. Like a like an automated toilet seat. Yes. Automated toilet. The first assignment in the class was they all line up and get 60 seconds to give an a problem solution statement idea and I grade them on it. Yeah. And for all of our listeners, you know, my dad taught at BYU for 12 years. So when you say there's a lot of students, there is a lot of students in history, but I think you are probably one of the more memorable ones now. Well, and so don't sell yourself short. One of the lucky things was is that during the classes that you know I took he mentioned Boom Startup which he was a a part of. Um it was just kind of like a YC right uh for everyone that doesn't know Boom Startup. And uh and luckily we knew John pretty well. He knew me and my co-founder and so when we applied we didn't really have the best idea. No one really liked it but John liked us. I think he did. Yeah. I want to tell Isn't there a funny story around the boom startup days with Evan? But that's where we got really close was boom startup. So go ahead. Well, we mentored you. Yeah. So as a student, I learned about your idea and and and all that. But you came in and you had done some pivoting even from that first idea by the time you're in Boom Startup. But Boom Startup for our listeners and viewers is literally a Utah clone version of Tech Stars that started in Boulder, Colorado. Um I went to Y Cominator and said, "Hey, can you help me start the same thing in Utah?" And Y Cominator said, "Nah." you know, and I literally talked to Graham and he said, "No, uh, everything should just come to Silicon Valley. There shouldn't be anything located anywhere else." And then, uh, David Con and Brad Feldo of Techstar said, "Sure, here's our playbook. Started in Utah." So, we started, uh, Boom Startup and you were in our second year and you applied and we were selecting the 10 that we're going to get in because we Oh, that was just the second year. Yeah. We would get literally we'd get you know you know 100 to 400 somewhere in that range of applicants right and we had select 10 companies and um you you know we had a committee to make a decision obviously myself my co-founder of boom startup had kind of final vote and uh we were in there and for some reason you weren't getting the vote and I literally stood up in front of everybody and said mark my words this is going to be the best company in the history of this program, Boom Startup. And it's kind of like on American Idol when Simon said, Carrie Under Carrie Underwood, you're going to be the biggest star ever to come out of, you know, American Idol. And he was right. What was what was telling you that? Like why why I just knew I like the tenacious nature of the team and their strong wills and decisiveness, but also teachability. They would they would listen to mentors and follow advice but also were not wimpy and were decisive and took action and that's a great combination. What were what were you doing at that time? Like when you applied to Boom Startup, what was the idea? Like what was the thing? So um like what did you pitch? It it was a Facebook for golf basically. So a social media play for golf. We wanted to create this platform where golfers of like similar handicaps and similar interests could get together, create their own tournaments, meet up, and so it was like a social media play for golf courses. Oh wow. And we had taken this through the business plan competition, the business model competition. We never made it past the first round. Yeah. And I remember spending all night and like weeks and I spent more time on that than like all my homework projects for actual classes, right? Trying to put that together. And it was just a failure after failure. But finally, but somehow John was pulling for you in that in that I literally kind of strongarmed the uh really the jockey, not the horse kind of they made one of the 10. But they I I saw also they were they pivoted many times and we can talk about the pivot histories are a great lesson, but I could tell where you were headed and it was the kind of company I liked and also the team. So the team's a huge uh decision point for investors, but also so is the idea and it was coming together for me and I just really liked it. So I I kind of put my reputation on the line with the entire committee making the decision said I'm just pushing this one through. It's going through and the golden buzzer, right? Yeah. Exactly. There you go. This one's happening. So yeah, again, the jockey, not the horse. He just believed in you and your co-founders and kind of the general idea. But I'm I'm sure you didn't really believe in the social media of golf. Or did you? At the time, social media was hot. 2011, I mean, this that was like the golden era of Facebook. Yeah. But golf was not hot. Yeah. Golf was not hot because we, if you remember, we came out of 2008 where, you know, so many golf courses closed down. It just wasn't like a sexy industry, you know, in general. So, yeah. But you were addicted to it. You You had the love of golf at this time, right? Oh, yeah. I've always had the love of golf. The passion was there. Yeah. Okay. So after Boom Startup, what or what happened during Boom Startup? How did the idea evolve? Because I remember this like really telling story that my dad likes to tell a lot of times in Startup Ignition's boot camp or just throughout the ecosystem that we Let's do this. I I Boom Startup was a three-month program in 2011 that you participated in and literally you pivoted somewhere between five and seven major times in about three months. Yes. And so take them through that during the boom startup time. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean like I mentioned we started out with the social media play for golf courses, right? So we wanted to connect golfers and uh we got into that and you know we started you know trying to validate our idea. So we went and talked to golf courses and we kind of got those like mom and parent responses. Oh yeah that's nice. Yeah we would sign up our golf courses, you know. And so no one was really like taking to it and we were trying to get like these contracts signed for people to like sign up for our services and stuff pre-selling and we we just didn't really get much like we were reading the body language. It just wasn't there. So we switched to like selling tea times because we realized hey there's $20 billion worth of tea times that are going unsold every year. So let's sell tea times. Right. Golf now kind of thing. Yeah. And and so we try to sell those and then we realized that we had a like API into several different point of sales out there that were like old that idea was kind of like price line for golf right kind but then you realized there's a problem there. Go ahead. Yeah. Oh no, the the big problem was is that all these systems that because in order for us to sell tea times, we need to know uh what tea times are available, right? And so you get that through the t- sheets, the reservation platforms that are connected in point of sales at golf courses. And so as we looked into that, we realized like they were so old and outdated and and when we wanted to integrate into their APIs, like these companies would say, "Oh, you have to pay us like $500 per month per golf course." were like, "What are you talking about?" Like $500 crazy like that, right? Some were like a thousand years, so that was a little a little bit cheaper, but we just didn't have the money to do that. So, it was just uh we just we couldn't make the model work. We couldn't plug into these uh systems because first off, their APIs were so old and outdated and they would break and then second, they were just pricey and we just didn't have any money. So, um and so that play just didn't work for us. Right. Yeah. So, and I'll interject just to it's great lesson for those that are watching listening is that like price line for golf which is maybe there's a way to sell tea times that are going unused at a discount like Priceel Line does for hotel rooms hotel room airline seats right and but the reason Priceel Line works is because that industry both the hotel and airline industry have a massive database collection of what's in real time available and then you discovered that didn't exist. So then you actually for a while if I remember right said well let's be that the database in the airline industry called Saber. Let's be Saber for golf. But then you discovered in order to create Saber for golf the way reason Saber works is because all the hotels and airlines use a computer system that reports into the Saber database from which Priceel line pulls. So you said man we have to help them get their t-shirt information into a database. So, we got to create the database and we got to help them get it in because a huge percentage of golf courses used what? Paper and pencil. Paper and pencil. Yeah. Yeah. How do you get the data off of paper and pencil? Exactly. And how do you connect into the APIs from existing software or spreadsheets if they were using Excel? Didn't a lot use Excel too? Yeah. No use. How do you pump? They would have to download a CSV file to you guys or what? I mean, it became very cumbersome. Yes. So, then where did you do Yeah. Where did you go after that then? So, and we took just a little different path. Like I remember one idea was okay like it's really hard to set up a tea time with your group because you know one person in your foresome has to work and the other one is off on vacation. So how do you like sell tea times but allow like tea times to be easily sold to forsomes and so forth. And so we created this really janky technology to kind of make that work. And I remember one of our mentors, Andy, came in. He was like, "Guys, this sucks." Like, he literally was just like yelling at us for 20 minutes saying how crappy our technology was because he could text message out to his buddies in like a third of the time and get something set up than using like it looked like an accordion piece, right? I don't know. It was like a really Who built that? Was that Joel Joel? Yes. Yeah. So, he built it in like a few days. And your team was two business guys. Two business guys founder and Joel Hopkins as the technical founder. Yeah. So, so finally I mean we're just spinning our wheels here, right? And uh it's like two months into the program, two and a half months start and then literally we have like only three weeks or something like that until demo day until we actually have to pitch a product in front of like hundreds of investors and we're like freaking out. But I I remember we were going to these golf courses and talking to them about our ideas and one thing we noticed is it just kept coming up and up like these golf courses out of the blue would be like my stinking point of sale is a poss like this thing sucks and there would be so many comments about that and we're like what is a point of sale and you know I remember a few golf courses saying well if you could solve our point of sale issues we'd pay you a lot of money and we're like we don't even know what a point of sale to be honest with you. So, uh we asked a few golf courses if we could just sit behind the desk. What were they using at the time? Uh just old antiquated software. So, literally we looked behind and the point of sale there literally looked like an Excel spreadsheet, right? To take tea times and to process transactions and we're like, "Here, go ahead and process a transaction like check this golfer in." And it would take like eight steps for them to process like a golfer through while they had like seven people lined up in the mornings. Like it was a horrible thing, right? And literally the the software looked like Organ Trail. I don't know if you remember that game from back in the day. It was just so old. And then we come to find out that this software that they were using at I think it was at uh East Bay Golf Course was the number one t-shirt point of sale software in the industry. Where's that where is that company now? I just want to know. They were bought up by Golf Now or something like that. Oh, they did get and their technology has been replaced. Anyways, uh so we went to more golf courses and asked them about their point of sale and no one had anything good to say about their point of sale. So we thought, hey, I like this because a um it's a way to get to revenue quickly. Like these golf courses are going to pay for this like right away. And it's like a need like they have to have a point of sale, right? Like we can get off to selling tea times and everything else like at a later date, but right now this is like a huge shark bite issue. Like all these softwares are also client server side softwares, right? So basically if these golf courses wanted a point of sale, they had to call like one of these companies, they had to fly out someone to install servers. Uh they had to like download a CD onto one to do terminals and access machines and charged for they were consulting for the service. And the funniest thing is we we heard several stories of like lightning hitting the clubhouse and frying their servers and them losing all their data for like the last 10 years. Like can you believe that? Like this is crazy. So we knew, hey, building a point of sale on the cloud is game changing. And the internet wasn't that great. And this was just a few few weeks before you were going to go before all these investors. You came up, you basically came up and said, "We're going to be SAS for golf." So what did you what did you three think at that time? Like were you were you hesitant to move to that model? It sounds like you were like almost persuading yourselves to do that or no you landed on that like oh this is it. Yes. No because it was the perfect it was kind of like well you went and did lean startup and listen to your customer. Yeah. No 100%. Because we could see the emotion in them. They we knew they would pay for this product. Right. We had uh one of the stories that really resonated with us was the story of Salesforce and how they were basically the first cloud CRM. And we're like, let's just do what CL Salesforce did, right? We'll build the first point of sale in the golf industry on the cloud. Let's do that, right? And and so and so, but this is not the end of the story. So, that was a great idea and that's why I got really bullish on you guys going into investor demo day, but there was still more pivots to go because when you pitched Yeah. on demo day wasn't the final story. What did you Yeah. So, uh, well, well, right before demo day, so right when we figured out the direction we needed, we're like, "Okay, where do we start and how do we get like two customers? We need something, right? We need something to show." Uh, and so we uh we found we just started cold calling golf courses, right? Did you have a product? Um, yes. So, we built like Joel built something. Yeah. He built the reservation piece. Not even the point of sale just yet, but the reservation piece. And we're like, "Yeah, t-shirt." Right. So the the system that takes the tea times and and stores them and can do bookings and we're like, "Okay, we just got to go to like the mom and pop shops that are using cash registers and paper and pencil because this will be an upgrade for them. We can't touch anyone that's already using a t-shirt point of sale electronically, right? That's just so we just started cold calling like course after course. I finally landed on this course in Sacramento called Foothill Golf Course. Nicest old lady. Judy Flint. love that lady. But she was our first customer and she jumped on board and she gave us like payment for it and everything and it was amazing. And uh honestly it was funny because in those two weeks she had a lot of issues but she would just blame it on her internet like our software trying to make it work. But literally I think a Google calendar piece would have worked better than what we had in those first few weeks. But yeah we got her on and then one other course and then we pitched at demo day. Uh we were still excited about the idea. Didn't really get too much traction during demo day just because we didn't have a lot of traction. Everyone else had so many more users and everything else, but we knew we were on to something. Yes. And John, who was an investor at Demo Day as well, knew that we were on to something. So that was the most exciting part for us even though we didn't get a lot of interest at at you know, demo day, but uh that was kind of like the start right there. Like we figured it out right at the end. Some magical. So demo day happened like in August and then a month later in September. Um you took a couple more pivots because and I remember you coming to my house you founders to my house and saying we nailed it. And I remember this specifically and what it was you you first did t-shirt in the cloud but then you were going to start charging for it and be a point of sale if this if you if I'm telling it right. And then you said, we found out that you needed to, they said, well, I can't just do t-shirts. You got to handle all the sales of hats and balls and apparel and whatever else is bought in the pro shop, right? So, you added that in and you went for that for a few weeks and that wasn't good enough either. And then I remember you coming in to my house in late September of, you know, four to six weeks later and you said, "John, we nailed it. Let it tell you what happened." And so tell tell them what happened. What did you add after that and what made it then the bells rang for all of us? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So um it was mainly the point of sale and then the food and beverage point of sale, right? Like a lot of these systems didn't take care of the full golf course itself, but it was food and beverage and then just an all-encompassing like service. Yes. because these golf courses were using one company for their t-shirt and their point of sale, another company for their food and beverage and they were using another software for uh you know their apps and then for their for their website like they were using a different company and so basically you went from t-shirt to pro shop and then food and beverage and that's the D then the general manager not just the pro in the pro shop the general manager of the golf course was saying now we'll buy it. Yes. And I remember you sitting down. I I remember succinctly you came in my house, John, we nailed it. We went to a golf course and they bought it in 10 minutes. I remember you kind of saying, "Got a few lucky ones like that." Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? And so, and that's when I realized, okay, now we've got something and I think I started marshalling the forces for an investment round. So, how long, Evan, from literally that first idea that you pitched to go into the accelerator boom startup to what it evolved into to where you felt like you had product market fit? Like how long was that time period? Probably four months or four months. I say four months. Four or five months right there. And and and then we put together an investment round and I you know was very bullish and post demo day. Yes. So this was late September. So it was after post demo day. Then when I said, "Guys, I really feel they've nailed it." Then a lot of investors followed me into the deal. Yeah. No, I mean, initially no one really wanted it, but John is a great salesman and John believed it and he kind of convinced them like weird. I think my dad's a horrible and I remember like we were in uh just with the Utah Angels, right? And we're sitting there, we had pitched and then finally s John was like, I'm in for this amount and then others came in, right? That's the trick to like angel investing. Like you got to get the big dog in there first. No one want no one wants to do the due diligence, right? Like that's the truth. As an investor, they just like if you've done the due diligence, John, I trust you. Exactly. Right. So all the sharks started to come in and so John started us off and then we had a trickle effect of like 10 other investors that jumped in to complete the round of like 200 grand that we were raising. $200,000. Yeah. In a convertible note. So that's that's where we were at. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And then the company starts going and you start sign I remember you signed up under the new model. I think East Bay was the first golf course you really signed up. Yeah. And you kind of had an innovative pricing I think. Tell them about that. Yeah. Yeah. So um a lot of these golf courses it's interesting they're they're especially the ones that are at cities have different types of budgets and and they can pay a lot for some things and not anything for others. Um but what's interesting about golf is that um they're able to trade out tea times, right? So a tea time is valuable because you can fill a tea time with up to four players, but if you don't fill that spot, you get nothing. So a golf course kind of looks at it sometimes as hey, you know what? I've have all these tea times and if I don't sell one of them, I I get nothing. So um I'm okay. So this is this was actually established before we even got there. Uh but we kind of took it and allowed golf courses to use this model for pricing if they wanted to if they didn't want to pay cash. But it was called a tea time trade where they' barter where they would say hey for up we don't have like 400 bucks to give you a month but guess what we'll give you a tea time a day and if you guys can sell that online you can just keep that revenue right so we would just take this tea time and amongst all their other tea times um we would sell it online and if someone bought it right we' discount it a little bit um but if someone bought it then we keep that revenue for the day through your own software through our own software because we because we provided the online booking program so it looked like it was part of the golf course. So you could even discount it more than their average price, right? Yeah, we could. So it's attractive. Yeah, it it is. But then again, you have some bad actors out there and you have like for example golf now that discount, you know, te times by 50 60%. And golf courses hated that. So we never wanted to get into that realm. Um but yeah, we would discount it like 20. I remember the story though. your first month after nailing the business model getting Eastbay as the first golf course come on and you offer them three or 400 a month or something subscription price or the tea time trade. Yes. For the first tea time of the day sold on the system you got to keep 100% of that revenue and then they kind of felt well no risk here right and and so you did that but instead of the three to 400 the first month I remember you telling me it was like $636 you made something like that you made more than the subscription. Yeah. Yeah. No, because and you know it depends on where a golf course is, but yeah, there were some golf courses that Yeah, we would make double, triple, quadruple the amount, but you could have sold a subscription price for it. Yeah. And and we were never pushing to do because a lot of golf courses Well, you let them choose. But the thing is is they still felt no risk to us cuz if it didn't sell, it wouldn't have been a sold thing anyway because they wouldn't have sold it anyways. You're making more money. Yeah. Because they only sell 50% of their tea times a day or something like that, right? So it's it's just a different perception and we're going to go through a lot more stories on your company, but even up until the day you sold the company, you had a significant percentage on that type of deal. Yes. Yes. On the T tea time trade deal. Yeah. The T time trades went all the way like 10 years beyond. Yeah. So many people about that and so many SAS companies have implemented versions of that for themselves. Oh, just in different industries. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So, okay. I know we're really familiar with the story, but for our listeners and the viewers and everybody that aren't, I know that there were you did not raise a lot of money. You raised that $200,000 and I don't know if you ever raised again. So, we put together a round with 200,000 about 210 or something. 200 200 even with eight investors, eight angels. I was one of them. I was I think I was the largest. You were? Yeah. And then um tell the rest story on that. Yeah. But but first but first you didn't raise any more money, right? You basically took that $200,000 and you Yeah, that's part of the story. But just to listeners and viewers, literally, and you're going to see how the story ends, but they raised $200,000 and no more equity investment after that. Yes. Period. Into the company. Yeah. Yep. 100%. So, we raised that 200 grand and uh I remember just saying, "Wow, like this is the most amount of money I've ever seen in my life." $200,000 in a bank account. My stomach was like churning as like the money like started being wired into our accounts like we better not lose this guys like this is so much money right now I look back I'm like gez but anyways it was a risk on us right I mean we didn't really have too many you know customers and so as you know on the other side angel investing is risky yeah so uh we raised that 200 grand um and we're off to the races and I remember we paid ourselves two grand a month each one like so I paid Yeah. The three and then our our well Joel Hopkins, our Yeah. He had like two kids, so we paid him like three grand. It wasn't much more, right? We had no health insurance or anything. Instead of ramen noodles, he got cupa noodles. Cup. Yeah. We got a couple noodles. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, we we knew we had to make that money last. And so, we were just very very frugal in everything that we spent. Like the hotels that we went to were the most janky hotels that you would ever see. Like lit, we would go to the PJ show. This is just one quick story. Every year um in Florida and the hotel that we stayed at uh for the conference was the same one that like the bicycle taxi people would stay at. Like they would come in from different locations to Orlando and they would stay there like the bicycle taxis, right? That took people to the conference from the hotel. Like that was the same hotel that we were staying in. We met them in the hot tub. This is how we know, right? And it was just like moldy and gross, but like that's how we live. And we and we stayed in the same room. Like we had fit four people per room sometimes and we'd share beds. Like it was really bad. But but anyways, I know I'm getting a little off topic, but that's called bootstrapping. Yes. But but we knew that 200 grand was like a lot, but it really was like it wasn't going to last. Uh, and so we knew from day one we had to be like super frugal. Um, but isn't it amazing how the constraint of only having that much money, what you figured out without throwing money at the problems? I was going to say I think founders today are honestly a little bit um privileged, right, in that that like $200,000 they they b at $200,000 sometimes some of them. But I think that mentality is honestly what grows good founders is like that constraint is like, "Oh man, this $200,000 is not that much." But if you think it's that a lot and then you can go and do a lot with it, like that's the flip of mentality, you know? But the constraint of a fixed amount like that breeds the creativity to solve problems in the right way. You're you're solving problems of fixing processes instead of just throwing money at it. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. 100%. And and with that being said, we always knew what our run rate was. We knew when we were going to run out of cash, right? We knew what we needed in sales. Like I remember sitting down with our our CEO at the time and our CTO and we're like, "Okay, we need to get to 7,000 reoccurring per MR, right?" And like how do we do this, right? Like and so we had to figure out the sales plan. And quite frankly, it made us like completely focus in on the customer. Like 100% we had to be focused in on the customer because they were like our investor. They were the cash that was going to make us survive. There was no round two for us. Was there any hairy situations there? Like did revenue just continuously grow to not deplete the bank account or was there crazy? I'm going to tell a story about this before we get to the investment thing that happened a couple years later. While you're growing for these first couple years, one thing happened. You guys came to me and said, "We got a problem." Yeah. We business guys go out and sell 30 golf courses and get them away from our competitors. and you were at that pace of being around 20 30 sales a month, but then the next month you'd have zero sales because you spent all the time the next month onboarding those golf courses. And so you'd have this weird revenue stream, which is again in a SAS software world, you want to have a steady nice month-over-month growth because that's how you start proving to the world that you've got your things figured out. But you were going like this, if you remember that. and you came to me and said, "What do we do about that?" And I said, "Well, it's now time to get somebody to take over the onboarding so you guys can keep selling." This is something we teach to this day all the time. And this is for viewers and listeners. When founders are selling so much and then they all of a sudden stop having as many sales because they're spend so much time onboarding their new customers, that's when they have to hire another key person to take over the onboarding. Because if they do all the onboarding, your sales will suffer. And that's what you guys went through and you solved it, right? Yeah. No, 100%. I mean, I remember the days like literally I would close an account, so I'd have my sales hat on. Yeah. And then I would call them back and be like, "Hey, East Bay, I'm here to implement you." And then East Bay would call at 7 a.m. or 6:00 a.m. in the morning and they like, "I have a problem." Sales support or customer support hat on, right? Hey, hey, Brett. Hey, hey, East Bay. Like, how can I help you? Right? So it was just like customer service and implementation and sales. And so yeah, once you get, you know, a certain amount of clients, all you're doing is customer service. Really, really important. This is really, really important though. You were able to bring in a non-founder and teach them how to do onboarding, activation, and about your software, and they completely took that over so you could keep the sales engine going. Right. And a side note for our listeners and viewers, one fun experience in my life is I actually recommended my son-in-law to you. you guys interviewed him and Tyler's brother-in-law and he had to leave a job where he made twice as much as you were offering him and you gave him a little bit of equity and he did it and came in and first month you said hey we sold just as many the next month after selling a lot and it kind of increased your revenue. Did it fix did it fix that growth? my son-in-law and making his decision, I had to help him understand how this was going to be one of his best moves ever made and now we are all these years later and he's become a friend of yours and he did really well. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a great story. So fix that problem though. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I guess the emphasis and the the lesson learned here is founder sales like Yeah. It that if there's anything that we did right, it was founderled sales. my found my co-founder and I we sold from like day one till I think through year seven and I would still towards the end sell like the bigger and what's really interesting though you also learned the lesson though founderled sales but not to the point where you're also doing everything else post sale because then that the most valuable activity is selling not onboarding activation and not customer service even those are absolutely critical the founder should give up onboarding activation and customer service and cape sales in other words a lot of founders the mistake of saying, "Oh, I don't want to do sales. I'm going to hire some white knight to save my day." No. Founders sell better than anybody. We tried that a few times. Did not work. Waste of money, waste of leads, and just it it was a boon in our business. When it's done too early, yes, when it was done too early, when you're ready and have it down pat and can bring in a sales professional and say, "This is how we do things here at Forup." Then it worked. But too early, big mistake. Just to clarify on that, from that 2011 time where you f started finding that product market fit and you were selling were you you and Joel Regar were literally over sales sharing that sales role and leadership until what time? Like how long you said seven years, but but when did you hire someone into come in and start owning that piece of the business? Like when did the founder le sales train kind of stop a little or segue to segue? Probably around year seven. So, and and it went off to our our VP of sales at the time. His name was Richie Damrower, but he he was one of my good friends from and who we know really well. Shout out to Richie. Yeah. Yeah. No, he he was great. And uh he came on as just a salesman, right? And he would sell against us and we'd compete against each other. Oh, you verse him. And I always had that thought like I can't make him the VP of sales because he's like our best salesman. Like you just don't do that, right? But we came into a fork in the road where we had to to make Yeah. company was growing. We had put on really good salespeople um and sales people that actually started to outsell Richie and it was like a really good time after about seven years and I think we could have done it a little bit earlier but after about seven years we made him the VP of sales and it was perfect. Before that in year two and three we tried to hire on a few VPs of sales from Qualrix and from you know these bigger companies and it just didn't work. This pattern by the way I do a presentation now on this exact pattern people should follow. I did it at the annual meeting of our venture fund to the portfolio companies if you remember. But let's go back to these first two years. So the two years you're growing and things are going pretty well. You identified this need, brought in a head of client success, okay, and all that. But then the ticker was going on this. You did your 200,000 actually in convertible debt. And so convertible debt for listeners and viewers that don't know is a mechanism of where it's a loan, but the loan's really not going to be paid back. That's not the intent. The loan is that someday it will convert to equity, an ownership in the company with a trigger event. And the trigger event is usually the next real round of investment that is equity. So if you got a qualifying equity investment in the future, that 200,000 would have converted at that same rate. But in the first two years, it was coming up on two years, and you had no equity investment. And so then it was where at the 2-year mark, which was a two-year note, you might have to pay that money back. And you really didn't have the cash to pay it back. No, we did not. So, what happened? How'd you handle that? Like, take us. I I believe it was December of 2013, it was coming due. Oh, yeah. Cuz you were the note holder, you know, December of 2013 coming due. And about August, September, you guys were getting nervous with the due date of December. What did you do? Yeah. Yeah. So that was the worst Christmas of my life by the way. But but anyway, so this notes come in due. But the the biggest problem was is one of the investors put in a stipulation in the very beginning, right? Kind of. And we accepted it because we were new. But basically said that if you don't raise another round of 500,000 or more, your valuation will drop from 1.5 to 500,000. Yes. And that's what it'll convert at. And so which would be 27ths yeah of the company of which whatever 27 says there but but at the time we were doing good and we didn't want to raise right it's about 30 something% and basically they're like no we're not moving the timeline so we went out so I want to back up and say because I was involved so I kind of was bullish became the largest investor and gathered and got the other people interested but a couple of the other people I brought in kind of took over the process and finished the paperwork up and they got some unusual things into this, right? Like that they call that a maturation valuation. They put it really low. Yeah. Okay. And they had a couple other interesting things in there we'll talk about in a second, I'm sure. But they also got board seats on your company. I did not. Right. And I didn't want I didn't want to. I didn't think you needed us on there, but they did. And so you got on there. Okay. So, keep going with the story. So, you were getting nervous and what happened? Yeah. So, we're getting nervous because we were doing well. We didn't need to raise a round, but they were pushing us to raise a round. Well, this clause in the convertible note was pushing us to raise another round. So, we went out, we got two term sheets. Uh, one I I won't disclose the names of those guys, but um, one of them was just out of just it was a terrible deal for us. So, we just did not want to do it. and the other one almost went through, but one of their interns killed the deal at the last second saying, "Hey, I've done enough, you know, uh, research on the golf industry. This is not going to be a good play." So, they backed out last second, right? And they're like, and then when those don't happen, I remember then you actually went to the investor group, all of us. Yeah. And said, "Hey, can we just extend it by a year?" Which is a normal thing to request and a normal thing to grant. Yes. But unfortunately, and I was willing to do it, and I think some others were, but the major board did not. Yes. Um, and so we were freaking out and then finally we were going through the docks and we Yeah. Go ahead. I'm going to tell you cuz here's what happened. You guys actually were hitting like October, November, and getting very nervous. Yeah. And then one day about mid Novemberish, I said, and you guys were coming to me. you came to me a lot for mentor and I said okay I'm gonna read every word of these documents before AI do I don't know if you remember do the thinking for him he had every word and then I read every doc and I found a very interesting paragraph and I emailed you guys and said hey you might want to look at this paragraph in your documents and per that paragraph I'm notifying you of my intent to convert right now you remember that I did that and then and then go ahead what was and what was in that paragraph and what did you So the paragraph said if you are not notified by mail by your investors of them wanting to convert into shares of the company basically in layman's terms right uh then you have the right I think only on one day five days it's like 5 days before the note converts then you have the right matures matures yes uh then you have the right to pay them back with with interest principal plus interest which was like 10% or something like that and you guys had not ever been aware of that. But we had another problem. We had no money in the bank account. We only had like 20,000 in the bank or 30,000. So how much did you So you owed 200,000 plus whatever. So So as an investor and as somebody who's kind of pro- entrepreneur friendly, I definitely did not want to get paid back and be out of this great company I saw being built. So I instantly after reading that that day in mid November notified you. I hereby am notifying you by this email that I intend to convert. Okay. and and then and then uh and you may want to read the paragraph I'm referring to. I kind of just push you to read it and you might want to think about things. Okay. And then what happens? So, so now we're in this predicament, right? Like we're short like 220,000 or whatever, right? Because we still have to run operations and everything. And so we're like, how do we get this money? You weren't having you you weren't having to pay me back the for No, no, no, no, no. Oh, yeah. So 180,000 something like that. So miraculously we're in talks with another company that wants to acquire us and we tell them about this note that's happening and they're like, "Oh, here." And the founder of it says, "Well, I've got money. I'm going to give I'm going to give you a loan of 180,000. Just pay it off so we can acquire you." And I'm like, "Okay, yeah, let's just do that." And at this time, we're like, we're so down, right? We feel like we've been beaten up so much and we just we're frantic. We don't know what to do. Because you were also hesitant about we're hesitant about that loan. We didn't we weren't sure that we wanted to sell to these guys, you know. And also, one of the other stories surrounding this was that when they said, "No, we're not going to extend it by a year," they said, "Let's just talk. It's getting late in the year. We're getting the holiday season. Let's talk about it in January, which was after the due date, which the repercussions there were they were trying to put you off for a month and a half. Well, and also what would happen after that? That means they could foreclose. But anyway, keep going. Yeah. Anyway, so uh Yeah. So, so the owner of this company that was trying to acquire us said, "Hey, I'm going to wire you 180k. Um, go ahead and pay them off." So he wired us the money and we right away wrote checks, sent them off, got some pretty nasty phone calls, right, when they received those checks in the mail. But we gave them their principal plus 10%. Like it it wasn't a loser deal, right? Plus 10% over two years. Like that's not horrible. The guys that threw in 5,000, I mean, it's a little bit of interest, right? But but anyways, so now we're in this predicament with this business owner because he wants to acquire us and we draft up the docks. We're ready to sell and we get to the table with him and this is like a few weeks after we're getting all these calls from our investors. We're like, "Okay, yeah, we're going to sell this guy because he's offering us." And it wasn't it actually wasn't a bad deal, right, for where we were, it wasn't terribly exciting. All the investors were gone except me. Yeah. Right. Well, now they're gone because you paid them off now. Exactly. Yes. And so we're sitting there at the deal table and uh and we're ready to sign with these guys, right? I'm fast forwarding a lot here. Of course, there's a lot of negotiation talks about this. And for some reason, he's like, "Guys, I don't know if I feel right about this." And we're like, "We don't either." Right. This is like right before we have pen to paper. Yeah. And so we call off the deal right there on the spot. And we walked out and it's like the world lifted off our shoulders in a sense for that moment, right? Luckily, fast forward like a year or so, that company went out of business. So, we would have gone out of business with them because the deal was basically all stock, right? So, thank goodness we did not sell to them. Um but but but yeah, going back like a few weeks after uh you know, saying, "Hey, we're not going to do this deal with you." And him agreeing, um he gave us a call and he's like, "I want my money back now, right?" And I'm like, "Okay." So, he just gave us 180K. like, "How do we pay this back?" Now, he's like, "You guys have two weeks to pay me back that loan." Oh my goodness. Just like, "Oh gosh." Like, "What do we do?" So, I had to do the hardest thing of my life. I called my mom. She wired over $30,000. I called my brother. He wired over $30,000. I hate doing business with family, just so you know. And I hate loans from family. Like, this is like the last like desperate move, right? And then my father-in-law threw in 100 grand and we got up to 180K somehow and we paid it off and my stomach was just churning because like that was the last thing I wanted to do. But that was the only thing the only option we had to get that paid off and to get going. I had confidence in the business. I knew we could pay you know my parents back and but losing my family's money was like the worst thought ever. So that was kind of Did you structure that as a loan too or did they get a piece of the company? Uh no, we just structured it as a loan. Okay. And you eventually paid them back. Yeah. My my brother kind of says, "Hey, you dork. Why didn't you give me stuff? He still gives me crap about that." By the way, hindsight's 2020. Yeah. At the time, I was like, "I just want to pay you guys back." And by the way, at the time, I bet you all that those friends and family would have not wanted this stock. Yeah. They would have wanted money back. Yeah. So, okay. So, there's more to the story from my side, but I'm not going to tell it. That's for another podcast. Okay. So um but let's segue into a fun history that still everybody knows about around this. So during this time when you're doing all that also it came down to me though because I converted I did have the right you know to convert at a certain valuation and my right was to convert at a very low valuation. Right. Yes. Oh that valuation still kicked in on the conversion. But if you'll remember I actually came to you guys and I'm I'm not trying to tout myself. I'm just saying I actually felt bad that I that valuation like you just said earlier was so low I said this is not right. It shouldn't be this low. So we got to decide what it should be at. And so then I started you guys started negotiating with me. Uh you guys we got you wanted up here. I was down here and I came up. We came up we came up and we just couldn't get together and it was a $50,000 gap. Remember what did we do? Tell the story. So John actually had the upper hand because he could have converted at half million huge percentage of the company but we felt like our company was worth here but we knew we need to give like a little bit of a discount to to John because just of the situation and and we literally we literally just didn't have the upper hand in any way like he could have just taken you to the cleaners taking me to the cleaners right but I knew John was a gambling man from golf and pickle ball and things that we've played in the past. And uh and I knew he was good at chess and and I knew I could hold my own. Um but you first said, "I'll play you golf for it." He wanted to play golf to see if his number instead of my number will be the one we use. I was like I said, "You're a scratch golfer. I'm not playing you golf." A three handicap versus a 20 handicap. Yeah. So I was like finally I was like, "Okay, John, this is where we want to be. This is where you want to be. Let's play a game of chess." And you know what I thought into my head? Do you know what I thought? I go, "Okay, this guy's really good at golf, really good at tennis. He's good-looking. He's got a good-looking wife. He's everything going for him. There's no way he's good at chess." And so, what happened? So, anyways, I I make this proposal to John and he literally says, "Come over to my house right now." I'm like, "Crap. I don't even have time to prepare for trust.com or anything. I have to like I have to like go right now, right?" So, I drive over to John's mansion. And then he lets me in. The door opens. I'm just like, my heart's pounding, right? And he's like, "Come on in. Go ahead and go downstairs." Right? I go downstairs. There's this chessboard, two seats, and a lamp that's sitting right over it. And I'm just like, and a chess clock. I'm like, "Did you guys play time?" And meanwhile, my co-founder's like, "Evan, you better win this game. You better focus, right?" And I have like all these people texting me. I'm like, "Guys, guys, like he he's a really good chess player. Like, I'm going to do my best, but come on. Give me a break. Let me like focus here." So, first game you win. Oh, yeah. First game I won. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I've got a chance at this." Oh, you guys played best of three. Second game. Second game I lost. And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, my heart's pounding." Right. We get into game three and John, it was close match. John made just a little bit of a blunder, took advantage of it, and just closed it out. And I just I just wait the world just left off for a moment. And how much did that cost me? Just that little bit of where we the $50,000 equity difference. You kind of like to remind me how much it cost me. It was close to 400 grand. Yeah. There we go. So anyways, so the $400,000 chess game. Yeah. $400,000 chess game. But anyways, so that that's a fun story. But that's that kind of went down in legend in your company, didn't it? Yes. People still talk about it to this day. So So basically the company was happy. Yeah. And where did you go from there? So after you took care of all that loan and that convertible note and everything from the founder, you got 180K from, was it just growth from there? Was it just like literally to the moon? I wouldn't say it was to the moon. Like our growth was like pretty gradual. We were never the type that like scaled really quickly, right? We just couldn't. The point of sale is not the type that just scales like in two seconds, right? It's just a different play. But there is one. Yeah, we had gradual growth. Um but we had consistent growth, right, that we felt confident in and um we were able to get ourselves to profitability. We were able to pay my family back which was I mean I remember writing those checks. I'm like these are the biggest checks I've ever written. You actually started accumulating cash in the bank. It was really good. It's amazing. Now, here's what happened though. The next big thing in that company to me was they came to me and said, "John Joel Hopkins, their tech co-founder, self admitted, which is a classy classy thing to do, that this company's kind of outgrowing. He needs help and needs more technical power in the company that you guys all decide that together." And Joel's there and you came to me and um like you did for a lot of things, right, all along this history. and Tyler and I had found this incredible software engineer and that's a whole another story we told and you can go see it and that software engineer is Brendan BBE who's been on this podcast so go watch the Brendan BB podcast episode to hear this story of how we found him but we knew how good he was and we recommended him to you guys or no I actually what happened you heard about him because of us and you went and tried to poach him from where he was working well he was working with me with Tyler at another company and you went to poach him. And then he called me up and said, "John, I'm working at one of your investments right now, but another one just came and wants me to move and go to their company. What should I do?" And so Brenda and I went to a Mexican restaurant, had this conversation, and I basically told him, "Hey, the one you're working for now, that CEO shows up about half the time and is not really committed to the level for success. the ones at Forup trying to recruit you away from there. They're all in and they're some of my favorite entrepreneurs I'm invested in. What do you think my answer is? And I didn't even have to say it. And he goes, "Okay." And then he accepted your guy's offer, joined you, and I remember seeing you 30 days later and you said it turned everything around and you then went on a rocket. Was that was that a inflection point? Was that a tipping point for Forup like getting Brandon in the CTO role? It was. It was. And to clarify, um, one of the mistakes we made on the story, right, is Joel Hopkins, we real So Joel Hopkins was great to get the company going and build fast, right? That's what we needed. Build fast and dirty. Joel was amazing at that. Joel's one of my favorite people. But we got to a certain time frame in the business where it's like, okay, we need more stability. And we had too many bugs and everything that was going on. So, we felt, hey, we probably need someone to like take that role um as CTO. And our big mistake is is we started interviewing behind Joel's Oh, you did. back. Yes. Joel would have been okay um with us. It was more of like us afraid of telling him, right? It was nothing like out of malice or mal inent. If I could have gone back and did it, I would have been I would have involved him because that was hard at the same time. He had he he accepted it. No, no, he Yeah. So, he accepted it. He was a bit hurt that we did it like kind of behind his back and we didn't like confirm it until we confirmed it with him, but we he just didn't like that we went behind his back, which like I completely get and we were in the wrong on that side, but Joel took it so well and he actually stayed with the company. Oh, big time. He was a huge till the very end. Oh to and he was like the glue of our company. And what what it is by him accepting that a lot of people would not be as classy as Joel handled that. Yeah. And and and all that. And that's what I give super credit to him because that's even on the business side, not just the tech side. Sometimes you got to realize the company outgrows you and you need to bring somebody in that has more skill at what the company needs at that time. And that's just the way it is. And so we and anyway that was so we kind of did it wrong but Joel Hopkins he's the man and he took it really well. We figured things out and it was the right move. Brendan Bevie was amazing for the next step and Joel would tell you that to this day like he was the right person to take the company till acquisition after. I think that's a really good piece of advice for everybody listening though. It's it's like when you're having these sensitive conversations or doing things that involve people and emotions and you know it's like be upfront as a founder. be upfront in whatever you're doing, whether that's how's our how's our timing. I'm worried. Whether that's financially or within roles or whatever it is, it's like let's just be upfront. That I think that's a lesson learned cuz I I see that all the time too. Even with startups that we're helping right now, it's like, oh, I want to replace this person or do this thing. It's like, okay, have you talked to that person? Have you made them aware that they're on the rocks or they're underperforming? They're not doing what you need. Have you had those conversations? Have those kind of conversations. All right, so let's move to kind of this incredible run. So four-up goes from after the first couple years and all the tumultuous things we talked about which is normal for a startup. Yeah, people don't understand that's normal but still tough to go through. Then you went on this nice rocket ship and things just grow. Every year is better and cash was building customers were signing up. MMR ARR everything's going incredible. And then and then um even as we hit COVID, you're building these beautiful new offices, right? As co's coming in and nobody comes in the office. All this stuff's happening and going really great. And then we go into the zany venture years of 2020 and 2021 and you guys are just hitting it on all cylinders in terms of revenue growth and everything working. You're into the thousands of golf courses using your software and you just Evan as a CEO, you know, just hit it out of the park. The last few years the growth rates were huge. So just kudos to you, but I want to get to the end because there's some lessons here. So then all of a sudden you got offers from multiple companies and you chose an offer and I just want to teach one interesting thing. This was nine or 10 years into your venture, right? Yes. Yes. And so in 2011 start to close of the sales. So to our viewers and listeners, uh Evan and team pulled off something that is amazing. First of all, they only raised $200,000 of equity investment, a couple loans to pay off some of that because to buy them out, uh, and the equity investment was actually convertible debt, but really your working capital was all was only about 200,000 that you ever brought in the company and you built it to 10 million in revenue basically uh offer for a huge exit and in nine years and then also had the incredible fortune of being past five year holding period for this Ccorporation stock. And so when this exit happened, all of us, including myself, who all made a lot of money, the first 10 million for each of us, was taxree. Taxree. Yeah. How amazing was that experience? You don't realize it until it actually happened. I mean, it kind of feels like you're cheating. It does. But go a little bit into the acquisition story just a little bit like the offers, how it happened, how it came to be, what happened, all the work that went into it and and then the end the end outcome. So to be honest with you, I wasn't looking to be acquired. Yeah. I don't think anybody that's when you get the best offers. We were on a rocket ship. We were humming. Our culture was amazing. Same for Tyler Dev Mountain. Yeah. I I literally thought that it was going to be a cash cow that I was going to be there for 40 years. Literally, that's how you feel. But that when things are good and when things are clicking, you want you want that to be the case, right? You're not looking for acquis but that's when acquisitions come. That's when offers come. And so it it was crazy because everything was going super well. Yeah. And then all of a sudden one of our partners came in and said, "Hey, we want to buy you and here's the price." And I looked at it and I was like, just straight up cold turkey. Yeah. Well, he'd been warming us up for a while, but he finally came to the table with an offer. gave a number and I was like, "Dang, that's more than I thought we would ever sell for." Yeah. And but but I knew I couldn't I couldn't tell. This was this was late 2020, early 2021. Top of the market. Yeah. Top of the market. But they had positioned themselves so well the previous 10 years, right? To be at that point. Yeah. So, I mean, I looked at it and I didn't show my eyes, but I was like, "That's a really good number." Like, I could do that. I mean, wow. and then your mind starts turning like oh I've been working all these years right like I could be living on a beach but but then again you know I've known to never take my first offer so uh of course over the years you know we had received spam emails from like VC companies and private equity companies but we had met some private equity groups that had wanted to talk to us in the past so I was like I I'm just going to put out some feelers there so I reached out to a handful of them and we started getting numbers back right because I would talk to them I would to say, "Look, this is what our revenue is." And I give them some just, you know, just important data points that they needed to know to give us like a valuation. And I would just say, "I'm actually not really looking to sell. We just been given an offer. And like, if you guys are interested, these are our numbers. Um, give me a ballpark valuation of where you would be, and if I like that, then I'll entertain another conversation with you." Yeah. So, I did that to multiple um private equity groups and I started to see the valuation ballpark valuations that were coming in and I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, way more than this offer." And it just kept going up and up and up and I'm just like, "This is amazing." Right? And so, finally, yeah, I mean, to make, you know, long story short, we finally landed on one. But in every one of my conversations, I was like, "Just so you know, this valuation I'm not retrading. If you try to retrade on me, I'm done. And also, I'm not doing like the it's going to be cash upfront and that's it, right? Like just so you know up, I'm not going to waste my time. We're killing it right now. I'm focused on sales and operating this business. Our turn rate was at 5%. Like we're so focused on a customer. I was like, I'm not dealing with you unless you can agree that this these are the terms on this valuation, right? And all of them said yes. Right. So that's kind of how it went. Then we went through due diligence, which was hell to be honest with you. So, like we've talked before and I like to bring this out. So, just so listeners and viewers know, we won't spend too much time on it, but when you go into that process, it's like a second job. And the due diligence is excruciating detail. Did you get a due diligence checklist of like 300 items? I had to pull contracts from like known accounts that I had from like It's basically like a full audit. Yes, it's a full audit. What about the legal back and forth? the attorneys talking to attorneys and it would take two weeks to tap. Did you use the attorney I recommended? Yes. Yeah. He's he got a lot of jobs for me cuz he's the one that you guys used. I referred them. They used too. We use the same one. They should send you a nice gift. They were pricey, but they got the job done. But I you know that uh David Carlamine used them too for their seller company and last minute their buyer tried to pull kind of some high jinks and that law firm saved them got $2 million more dollars back out of the buyer. So I mean that pays for the fees, right? So So but anyways, yeah. No, it was it was two months. You eventually landed on the highest offer or where did you go with with all those offers coming to the table? It was the highest offer. Yeah, of course. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it was the highest offer. But I also evaluated the company and I was like okay I did a lot of reference checks like will this company be good to take and and this was a private equity firm kind of trying to consolidate or aggregate in the industry do you want to talk about any of that at all because I'm going to say from my standpoint as somebody who lived and breathed for up right alongside with you in many ways we were kind of glued at the hip as far as investor entrepreneur do you agree with that statement I'm very disappointed with what happened after the acquisition in terms of the spirit of of the company. Yeah, it it's it's hard. I mean, I can say that. You don't have to say that, but I mean, do you want to share anything about postacquisition life? It it's just it's different, right? Because once you sell and you know, Battery did a good job on keeping me on, you know, with you know, stock and everything else, but when you sell your baby in a sense, right, like company you've been working on, like there is a piece of you that kind of goes, right? And it's like hard to be as motivated as you were. And I think everyone knows that, right? But you don't really know that until you're in that actual position, right? And and when you're bought by private equity or any company, like any financial institution, it's just a different like play, right? Like their job is to please their LPs, right? Like that's who they're trying to make money for. And so they're very much focused on different goals than you as an entrepreneur, right? and uh you know it's a little bit more numbers based and so forth. So I get you know why they do the things that they do and and focus in different areas than an entrepreneur. Um you know I can't argue against that. It's just it wasn't the way I saw things or or you know wanted things to go. It's very very common. Yeah. Very very common where the founders don't like the environment after the acquisition and the way things are going and the company starts doing worse. Yes. And all three of us sitting here have done multiple companies. We started we can all point and we're acquired and it went worse. The company started flatlining and then going down after the acquisition. Can we all three say that? Yeah. Yeah. That's just the way it is. The way it is. Yeah. I don't know numbers today, but I just I just know culture is different. Um it's just a very different landscape and and it's not just like any company that's, you know, bought by private equity. It's just it's a different playbook and a different landscape. Right. So bes besides the company itself, the health of the company, the morale and the actual team and the the environment of the company, h how is postacquisition life? How like outside of forup and you know you've taken you've taken your baby and you sold your baby away, but at the at the same time I want him to answer but let me tell you what happened. A few months into when he actually quit and retired from it because you stayed there a while but then left. Few months after that I got a random call on the cell phone one day and he goes, "John, you told me many years ago that what can happen from starting my own company and going through it and that you know the proverbial being on the beach in Hawaii with an umbrella drink in my hand and I'm on the beach with an umbrella drink in my hand right now and I wanted to tell you what you said came true. Thanks, John. So yeah, you did do that. Yeah. No, when I transitioned out in January 2023. Yeah. Um I'm not a big winter guy. So I was like I talked to my wife. I was like, "Babe, let's just take the kids and we're going to Hawaii." And we're going to Hawaii until the snow is out. So we're going from January till April. And so we just packed up the kids and we just planned out we're going to homeschool them in Hawaii and then we'll put them back in public school when we get back. We flew out and it was the most amazing thing. I remember the first day we woke up. We went to the beach. It was like a Monday morning and I was sitting there. I had no access to Slack. No emails coming my way. And my kids are just playing in the waves and it's 75 degrees and I just came from a freaking snowstorm in Utah, right? And I'm just sitting there with my wife and we're like, is this real? Like, is this real life? I don't know if you called me to say thank you or to say na na na. That was definitely a It was a thank you. I would not say na na na na. But um it was so good that we uh we've done it the past few years. So we've done it three years in a row now. This last year we went to New Zeal or this year we went to New Zealand then Hawaii. But it's just been such a great experience for our family just to grow closer together to get away and and you just came back to Utah. You would have been one of our first podcast guests, but we had to wait till now because you were busy in Hawaii. He's in Hawaii. New Zealand. Yeah. So u so definitely you know but look at what entrepreneurship can do, right? Like that's the thing. That's the pipe dream that everybody wants, but it's real and there's real stories. And I've said this before and you probably heard it in my classes and this is you're sitting here now 15 years later where I said there's nowhere greater than entrepreneurship in America where somebody can go from nothing and put out an incredible product or service that enriches their customers lives and opportunities plus also get handsomely rewarded for being the entrepreneur that does that. and you've lived that dream. But but also there's a lot of nuanced like things there that are like you can do it bootstrapping, right? You can do it grinding and being frugal and you don't have to go this massive VC route. You don't have to go raise tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to get that kind of exit, right? It's like it is possible. It's living proof sitting in the room. So that's what I want to say. I got a thing for Jordan to put up that Carta graphic that I just posted about this morning on my socials that I sent you that you sent me, right? And it shows at each stage what the founders percentage how it changes and they did a massive data thing. Carta putting it out and you looking at that would go, "What the heck's going on?" Because by the time they're around E, not even an IPO, the founders are below 10%. In aggregate. Well, they what they did is they did think they doesn't that shock you? They they just they pulled, you know, founder ownership and the equity that they have to sell by stage. Yeah. By stage. And it just shows that, you know, typically each round you're selling like around 20% of your company away. So, if you're going through all these stages of funding, Yeah. you're basically you're selling a massive part of your company away and by the end in round A, B, C, D, E, whatever, you're left with little. But yeah, sure, your company's worth a lot, but isn't it just better to go the bootstrap route? Well, well, here here's the biggest benefit to it is that when you're bootstrapped, right? And you can kind of argue this both ways because bootstrap is really hard, right? And there are so many obstacles that, you know, you have to get over to like make it actually work. But the important part is is that when you take on money, like you answer to people. Yeah. Right. And a lot of times that puts pressure on you to get the financials right and to and to really focus on driving those numbers up where I get how that's important, but when you're bootstrapped, there's just a different mentality. You're focused on your customers because your customers are the ones that are paying the way customer funded. And so you're like building your product and you're getting this free R&D and in a sense, right? And you don't have any like financial backer like pushing you like where are the numbers at? What's going on? And you don't have to make any dumb decisions that defocus you from the customer. Just like you felt it when you sold the company with private equity, when you sell the company during your ownership of the company via VC, via venture capital, it's still the same thing. It's someone trying to manage the company from a spreadsheet 2,000 miles away. That's the biggest difference. To give you guys credit, I know because now I'm an investor in a fund, right? So, kind of going against that. Um, but to give John credit, he was our only investor. And not once did he push us for financials or anything like he was always there to help. And we do not do that today. We still when you had a problem, who did you come to first? We we went to John, right? And that's the type of investor that you want if you're taking on investment. The ones that just require financials and updates constantly and push you in bad directions, like those are the ones or even try to manage you in that direction, right? It's like they can demand those kind of updates cuz I we want to be apprised and and know what's going on with all of our portfolio companies, but we're not dictating or managing them in regards to that. It's like you are the captain of the ship. We know that this is you. You you will make the best decisions for this company. Go and do it. We kind of view ourselves as entrepreneur friendly investors. So, by the way, thank you. You're on our limited partner advisory committee with startup initiation ventures and investor in our fund. Um here I want to maybe end and first of all thank you for everything but yeah this has been a great story. Yeah but what's interesting is uh I want to see if you agree with it like we constantly paint this picture for entrepreneurs saying there's really two forks in the road when you're startup and you're now investable. Are you going to go get massive capital and massive growth fast and you know and what comes with that is massive dilution for the founders or do you want to take a more pensive approach where we're going to really nail the model down, get our customer service down and focus on customers, maybe get a little bit of capital and then go slower on the capital raising and get the customers funding your way more. And maybe in this path A, you sell for a billion dollars, but you only have 4% of your company. Okay? Or do you want to sell for $100 million and have 25% of your company or 40% of your company, whatever the number ends up being. And my question always is this. I can promise you that path a chasing that, you're dealing with a lot of people and competing agendas and unintended consequences that you never imagined. And over on path B, the one you followed, you keep and maintain much more control and sanity to your life. Do you agree with my statement there? 100%. I mean, man, I wish we had so much more time, but we do have to wrap this up because it's literally been running forund uh not 100, an hour and 20 minutes. So, we apologize to the listeners if you think this is a long episode, but hopefully you're enjoying it. But let's close it down. But that literally is a good note to end on because I really think Evan's story is a powerful reminder. You don't have to raise big capital to win big, right? So many of my lessons in the boot camp and in our ecosystem emanate from the Forbes. And the flip side of that, I think, and I'll let I want to let you end on whatever you want to end on here, but it's like success literally comes from understanding your customer deeply, iterating often, and like just staying humble and frugal the whole way so that at the end, that's when you benefit. That's when you reap your rewards. Right? It is a grind. It sucks. It was 10 years of just weight on your shoulder. You I think you use that phrase like five times through through the story, you just have the weight weight of the world on your shoulders. But once you can lift it off and actually get to the acquisition, like that's when you're paid the big bucks, right? You know what I'm excited for? Evan Tashima's future because he is one of the greatest cos in the state of Utah. He's living the good life, but I know he's going to do something else and I can't wait to see what it is. Yeah. But Evan, any last parting words, last parting advice? Anything else for the listeners? Again, we have a ton of budding entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast. How can we wrap this up? Yeah. So, just to go back on what you guys were saying, um you know, there there was a company out there that competed against us, came a year later than us, raised $40 million. 40 million. Had a fire cell. Yes. Yes. So, that just goes to show, right, that's who we were competing against. And uh it's not about money. It's not about the money, right? Um, you could go either way, but you know, at the end of the day, when I was sitting in John's class, I couldn't like after being in that class, I couldn't imagine myself going to like a nineto-ive job. Yeah. Like that just sounded so boring to me. Yeah. The the one piece of advice like no matter where you're at, and I tell all entrepreneurs this is enjoy the journey because you are learning. So I am so much better of an entrepreneur now from going through 10 years of being bootstrapped and going through all those war stories because I you learn best through experience, right? So even though you might be going through the worst moments right now, maybe from tariffs or something that's going on, like you're learning and just enjoy the journey because one day you'll look back and you'll be like, "Wow, those were really good times, right?" Like I actually miss those days. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if I actually want to go back to those days. But like I cherish and miss those days. Like no other. The climb up the mountain is actually better than achieving the summit in many ways, isn't it? To wrap it up, he wants to go back to the moldy hotel room. All right, take us out, Tyler. Yeah. So, thank you to Evan. Thank you so much for joining us. I I like we have to have him back again. I I literally went through one segment on our agenda just to let you know. There's there was four or five. So, we have to have Evan back. So, he will be back on the podcast in the future. But thank you so much for joining us. We're going to wrap it up. We're going to call this an episode. Follow, subscribe. Yeah, follow, subscribe, list, hit us up anywhere. We'll answer your questions. We'll get Evan to answer questions. Um, thank you so much for joining us. But this is it. We're wrapping up. Thank you. Rock bike next to Rock.