00:13:47 · Jason Wilk, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:13:47] S0: I'd say that's the one, you know, big benefit from going public was that the... My my shareholders gave me the... A different share class. And so my stock converted into, you know, controlling vote, which when you have that, it keeps a lot of the activist shareholders away or any hostile takeovers. It it would have been very easy to build a position in our company and, you know, try and acquire it. But the fact that I had the ability to approve any m and a through my control vote kept a lot of people, you know, on the sidelines. And so that was a big benefit of of going public and, you know, would recommend that for other founders who are going out. You know, it's it's in many ways in the best interest of the of the company. [00:14:28] S1: Alright. That's super interesting. And I think, like, Tiger at some point was was part of the the one, you know, like helping you to go public and investing in... When when you start the IPO, but usually these investors, they have some sort of, like, lock up period and they have to kind of, like, keep their shares for a long time. [00:14:47] S0: That's right. [00:14:48] S1: And in their case, I think they decided to sell at some point. Like, can you explain a bit like how does this work and how can an investor who has a lockup period is actually like able to do these kind of things?
00:14:48 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:14:48] S1: And in their case, I think they decided to sell at some point. Like, can you explain a bit like how does this work and how can an investor who has a lockup period is actually like able to do these kind of things? [00:15:00] S0: Yeah. So generally, have your your private investors leading up to an IPO, all agree to a sort of a standstill mockup provision, generally six months. But the investors through the I p... IPO process, do not have any sort of standstill, at least through the the process we want to go public. And so, Tiger and others were free to sell from day one. That didn't help us because, you know, Tiger had their own issues through April with a lot of people redeeming in their fund due to the market crashing. And so it was nothing against our business independently, but they just sold everything that was in growth. And to lose your anchor investor that quickly prior to a mock up when your valuation still has a lot of value appreciation from early people, which also put selling pressure on. It just led to sort of perfect storm of disaster for us. And fortunately for us, it was... Had nothing to do with our business. But from a just timing market landscape perspective, we were in the worst of every storm. [00:16:02] S1: And and as a company was... When it was at the very bottom and you knew that it has, like, tremendous potential, as a founder? Like, did you acquire more shares at that time? Or like, did you... I mean, is there a way, you know, like, to benefit from it in some way?
00:16:02 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:16:02] S1: And and as a company was... When it was at the very bottom and you knew that it has, like, tremendous potential, as a founder? Like, did you acquire more shares at that time? Or like, did you... I mean, is there a way, you know, like, to benefit from it in some way? [00:16:19] S0: Yeah. I mean, it's hugely beneficial actually. So we we couldn't afford, cause the valuation was so cheap to just give people, you know, better stock packages at today's price. But we did structure this performance stock unit structure, where people actually would re... You know, get more shares at certain prices, you know, all the way up to... I think the stock price got as low as about $5 post split. And the need for a lot of our employees was that the stock could reach, you know, $102,100 dollars worth of value, and that's like 20 x return. But it's amazing to see that everyone that stuck around and got those performance units have fully realized that. And we made more millionaires post IPO because of that drop than we did pre IPO, just from the amount of people that we hired and that that stuck around. [00:17:13] S1: Oh, that's insane. And for the for the IPO, I think you did like a a SPAC. Yeah. Can can you explain to people what it is and, like, how concretely does that work?
00:17:24 · Jason Wilk, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:17:24] S0: Well, a SPAC versus traditional IPO, you are effectively merging with an existing public shell whose sole mission is to go find a company to combine with. That public shell has no operating business. They have capital that they have committed from investors to go find a target. And the benefit of going public that way is that the shell is already public, and you're able to negotiate your valuation and how much capital you're gonna raise through your investor syndicate, well before your IPO date. Whereas in a traditional IPO, you don't really know what the value of the company is gonna be until you start to build your book right before the IPO process. So, there's a lot to like about the spat, and just there's a lot more certainty, especially for a young company. You wanna be able to count on the proceeds, if you're gonna go through the process that you wanna be sure is gonna succeed, not fail at the end. There's a lot of IPOs that go through a testing the waters at the end, and don't like what they see, so they pull back or they wait. You've seen that before with others. And so the big... Yeah. I'd say that the downfall of the SPAC came from the types of quality of companies that went public. Because a lot of them went out of business. Valuations were not based in reality. So SPAC's got kind of a bad name, but they're still a perfectly viable vehicle based on the reason I just explained. [00:18:46] S1: And why do you think it got like a bad press at some point, like the SPAC?
00:18:46 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:18:46] S1: And why do you think it got like a bad press at some point, like the SPAC? [00:18:51] S0: Well, it's too many companies that never should have been public, went public through that process. And that was just the environment of interest rates were nearly 0%. The market was super hot, and the appetite for underwriting companies losing significant amounts of money with negative unit economics was, you know, at an all time high. And so the... Just the challenge of all these companies that weren't great is what put pressure on the SPAC process. Had we only kept it to high quality businesses, which we believe Dave was one of them, then SPACs is still a great name, and I think it'd still be a very popular way to go public. But, unfortunately, I think, you know, the negative stigma is there. [00:19:33] S1: And what was your revenue, like, whenever you you did your, like, SPAC IPO?
00:19:33 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:19:33] S1: And what was your revenue, like, whenever you you did your, like, SPAC IPO? [00:19:38] S0: I wanna say it was around a couple 100,000,000 of a run rate at the time of the IPO. And I believe in 2022, we burned a 100,000,000. We raised two ten of of total proceeds. We had a decent amount of capital left. But if you were to just take a a run rate of our burn rate at the peak, you know, I I can see why some investors would say this company is not gonna actually, you know, make it through to the end. But, you know, we always knew that there was this pretty clear line. And once we started to get cleared towards that line, and could really clearly communicate to investors that once we reached 2,100,000 paying members, every incremental user was gonna be contributing to profitability, because they don't need a bigger team to grow the user base by, you know, the next 100,000, 200,000 members. And now it's just amazing to see. I mean, our guidance for 2026 is over 700,000,000 of revenue at the midpoint, and over 300,000,000 of of EBITDA. And that's just a $400,000,000 swing on earnings in just a few short years. And the investors that believed in us have made just tremendous amounts of of of return.