00:19:38 · Jason Wilk, Guillaume Moubeche
[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. [00:20:49] S1: And how do you, like, plan for it as a founder? Because we see a lot of people, you know, raising, like, a lot of money and saying, like, hey. We're gonna reach that point where, you know, like, things become, like, profitable and we have a great business. Like, I mean, you hear this story a lot. The truth is, like, very few people manage to do it. So how exactly did you plan for it, and how did you manage to to really succeed?
00:20:49 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:20:49] S1: And how do you, like, plan for it as a founder? Because we see a lot of people, you know, raising, like, a lot of money and saying, like, hey. We're gonna reach that point where, you know, like, things become, like, profitable and we have a great business. Like, I mean, you hear this story a lot. The truth is, like, very few people manage to do it. So how exactly did you plan for it, and how did you manage to to really succeed? [00:21:16] S0: Plan for what, specifically? [00:21:18] S1: Playing for, like, planning for, like, the the profitability, like, points that you would get to.
00:21:18 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:21:18] S1: Playing for, like, planning for, like, the the profitability, like, points that you would get to. [00:21:25] S0: Well, I think we knew what we needed to build our our platform that could scale. And to us, that was the 300 people we needed to to build the core systems. It would be hard to think we could do that with significantly less people than that. And so we sort of drew our line in the sand that this is the amount of people we have. We we did a hiring freeze. We didn't do any any layoffs. We just said, here's... We're gonna keep it steady here. That only do backfills of people that leave, and just really kept our heads down, avoided all distractions. Any new products that weren't core to achieving profitability went on the back burner. And a lot of our our work went around just margin improvement, renegotiating contracts, adding more users, driving more CAC efficiencies, improving onboarding conversion, and underwriting efficacy. And it was just a real big push across the company to turn profitable. I even got my CFO a hat that says EBITDA on it for his birthday. And he was, you know, really driven. Kudos to him, because he was really the driver of all the, you know, profitability initiatives within the company. And we we succeeded in it even more so than we could have expected at this time four years ago.
00:22:39 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:22:39] S1: And as a company, like, and as a CEO, you know, like, whenever you raise funds and you're, like, nonprofitable, and you're spending a lot on, I don't know, like, hiring, on acquisition, on all of these things, like, the vibe in the company is a bit different versus when you're bootstrapped and you're looking at, like, how much you should spend, so you're always, like, profitable. And for you, like, you also went from, okay, we have money, we spend it to we're prof... Like, we're profitable, and we need to stay profitable. So how exactly did the the company, like, culture kind of change with that change?
00:23:17 · Jason Wilk
[00:23:17] S0: Well, it's it's tough depending on what stage of the business you you are at. You know, I'd say we, you know, in our later... You know, potential later rounds, the fact that we were a profitably growing company mean mean... That meant that we didn't need to raise more capital. But also, have we raised a lot more? We probably could have grown quite a bit faster. And so, to attract some of the best and biggest venture capital investors in the world, they like seeing the heavy burn. Right? Because they wanna put more capital to work. And so we have lost out on a couple of funding rounds of competitors who were burning three or four times as much as we were to chase user growth faster. But ultimately, that wasn't the kind of business we wanted to run. We had really healthy growth while maintaining profitability early on. We took the business to running at a loss to to build the platform of which we believe was needed to build for the long term. But it's really a matter of of preference on the founder. Know? Do you wanna raise a lot of capital? Wanna raise a bunch of pref? I never liked sitting behind a lot of pref personally, because it just becomes a a dangerous game of having to clear that pref stack in an m and a transaction could be quite challenging. We still see a lot of our smaller competitors who thought they were worth a billion dollars. They raised several 100,000,000 of venture capital, and it becomes a curse at the end. And so I think for businesses that really need it, like these AI hyperscalers, there's no other choice. But I say for some founders, you gotta really look at this VC money you're raising is is like very high APR debt. You know, I think about the effective APR we paid our series a investor. You know, it's worse than any loan shark in the world when you really take a step back. I mean, if I had that much confidence in the business that early on, I wish I did that $10,000,000 round as as venture debt in the business, giving away very valuable equity in the company, which is worth, you know, so much now.
00:25:14 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:25:14] S1: And what's like, would you say is the the the biggest challenges for you, like, in the in the coming years? [00:25:21] S0: Biggest challenge for us, you know, we are becoming a multiproduct company. We just announced our our new credit card. We're excited to to scale that. And, you know, it's always ever easy for companies to build multiple, you know, go to market leading business business units. And we're really excited about that as as the future of the company. And I think that's our maybe biggest challenge is, you know, proving out our ability to have multiple things working at scale. [00:25:50] S1: And on your side, like, how do you decide, like, to launch a new product when you have something that's already working, already growing? Is it because you want to get, like, more growth? Is it because you want to get better retention? Is it a bit of both?