00:09:40 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:09:40] S1: And how long did it take you from, okay, I think we should IPO to let's ring the bell? Like, what was the the timeline?
00:09:48 · Jason Wilk
[00:09:48] S0: Well, the market was ripe for IPOs. You know, we actually... We were marching our way there. We thought we had a a great opportunity to go public. Decided to wait a little longer to see how the the market was gonna continue to play out. And ultimately, decided to go public in January 2022. The market looked a little soft when we went out, but we had a great IPO. I think we were the best performing stock of the first couple months when we went out. Valuation got to over 5,000,000,000. And then, the market fell apart. The interest rates went up, which led to fintech being a bad name. Anything being a lending, being a bad name. And then with growth capital effectively coming to a halt, if you were a company that was losing money with the expectation you had to possibly raise some more, people just underwrote your valuation effectively to zero. And we went from being a $5,000,000,000 company to a $50,000,000 market cap company, within a matter of nine months. And we were trading for less than our cash value for a good amount of time. It was a really challenging place to be. But ultimately, we loved our business. We knew that all we had to do was grow our way out of this, which was not a really great narrative at the time. But our plan was to keep burning capital until we could actually cross the user threshold required for us to reach profitability. And to us, as an already lean business, that was really our only pathway to success, because we couldn't cut our way there. Like most businesses could do that. We were a very lean team. We're still a very lean team with only 300 people at the company today. Actually, a little bit less than that. And just... We kept our heads down and and and got there. And here we are today, nearly 4,000,000,000 our market cap. And, you know, team's team's happy. Investors seem to be pretty happy, and we think there's an auto room to run from here.
00:11:42 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:11:42] S1: Yeah. I mean, I've looked at the the stock. I think it's it's quite insane to see, like, the the growth you guys are doing. So congrats. I'm I'm actually, like, curious to understand, like, when your stock start, like, thinking, like, how exactly does that affect the company from a day to day operation? Because you still have your customers, you still have, like... I mean, you're still generating cash. It's just basically, like, a valuation that the public market is giving, but does that affect you, like, from a day to day basis, like, in in, like, bad ways? Or
00:12:18 · Jason Wilk
[00:12:18] S0: Well, the only way it would really affect us if we needed to raise capital, we were dead in the water. I mean, imagine trying to raise $50,000,000 when your valuation's 50,000,000. That wouldn't be a really great place to be. And so, fortunately for us, we didn't need more capital. We knew it didn't need more capital, but that would have been a really tough place to sit, you know, should we needed that. But, like, taking a step back, you wanna be a public company because you have public currency. You can give away to employees for valuable stock options. You want currency for m and a, and then you want the ability to tap with what is what is an easier way to raise equity capital. And the challenge we have being a public company with such a low market cap, you can't take advantage of any of those things. So, really, it was like a waste of time and money cost, at least a couple years ago, well, close to $10,000,000 just to maintain being a public company. And so you wanna have those benefits. Otherwise, there's not really much of a of a point.
00:13:12 · Guillaume Moubeche, Jason Wilk
[00:13:12] S1: And from, like, from your side, like, because when the when the valuation of the company is, like, at a certain... Like, is getting, like, lower and lower, does does it does it make the company, like, a target for acquisition potentially? Or, like, you know, because if you see a company that's actually, like, valuable and you see, like, their stock going... Their stock price going down, you might want to acquire it, you know, at a much lower price. Like, is it something that, you know, when we talk about hostile IPO or this kind of thing, like [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.
00:13:47 · 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?