Ian Padrick | Ohanafy

ACEO-E04-Ian Padrick

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Amplified CEO with VC and serial entrepreneur, Richard Stroupe. Today's guest is Ian Padrick, CEO and founder of Ohanafy, an AI-powered platform, revolutionizing the food and beverage industry. Ohanafy helps businesses streamline operations. Leverage data-driven insights for smarter decision-making and maximize revenue from start to finish.

Welcome in. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming by. It's been it's been a little bit since we last spoken. How was the holidays? Holidays are great. We're fortunate. We have two little girls So we just make everybody come to town and come see us so we kind of stayed put and yeah You know just spent a lot of time with the family.

Had some good downtime. How about you? Yeah, it was pretty low key. We didn't really do too much. Yeah, I had two kids in college come home. So they spent several weeks Yeah, reacclimating to themselves. Yeah in the rooms and all their friends. We're at different stages there You know, [00:01:00] you you got him off in college I still got him and you know, you you think but like it happens in such a quick amount of time So you'll It'll be there before you know it.

Yeah, I believe it. It's funny. Cause like, even just over the holiday break, my wife and I are going through like all the photo things that pop up on your, your iPhone and you're seeing pictures and you're like, that was three years ago. Like that felt like it was like six months ago, you know, it goes by fast.

Yeah, it does. So you're, this is your backyard. Like you grew up here, right? I grew up in, uh, Surf City. , I went to Topsail High School. Cool. Um, I actually spent one year at Topsail Middle School when we first moved, , I grew up right up, up there, up the street at Topsail and Surf City and, , have just been in Wilmington ever since.

Now, your parents, are they from this area too, or? So, my father's side, my whole family on that side, going all the way back to my great grandparents, are from Wilmington. So, like, I think like 1890s stuff, like, you know, old school Wilmington. Yeah. Um. My father's [00:02:00] military, my whole family's been military, but my father's military moved away.

So I was born and, , raised until kind of right, right around the middle school time in Atlanta. Then we relocated. He, he wanted to move back home. So we relocated back here. And then just been here ever since. Was that because of , his jobs at like Camp Lejeune in the military? I think he was just ready to get back home to family because he had, he's lived all over the country, Colorado and California and he was Air Force, he was , Coast Guard and , just lived in a lot of places and I think he just wanted to get back home.

Yeah. How, how was it growing up in Surf City? , from a, from a Kids' perspective. Oh, I mean, you know, we were a bunch of, uh, hooligans back in the day. Grew up surfing and. , riding over the bridge, the old, the old swing bridge, they didn't have the big one now. Um, yeah, I mean, it was great. Definitely like very much, and I think it still is like very much like a locals type of beach town.

Yeah. Very [00:03:00] family, very family focused. And then, you know, summer hits and then it's just. Tourism everywhere and it's kind of chaotic, but it was great growing up there. Yeah, spent a lot of summers doing odd jobs and things. Oh, yeah, I spent my summers working 

I worked at restaurants worked at grocery stores fast food places All that stuff growing up up there. Yeah. Yeah. Now do they still live in this area ? My yeah, yeah, they're in scotts hill. Okay. Yeah around the corner from here. Yeah. Yeah You Between here and where I live and in Arden.

So yeah. Yeah, that's not too bad. No, no, it's easy We and you know, we love the area. My wife's been here. We met in college. My wife's been here a long time now So we we just we love Wilmington. She also from the Wilmington area too. She's from Charlotte, Charlotte so North Carolina, obviously, but No moved here in college and then she Took a job out of school here and we met in college and I took a job and then just, you know, why leave?

Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's such a, [00:04:00] it's such a great area. It is. It's just a family focused area and there's a lot to do. A lot of people relocating, you know. Yeah. Right now. Oh my gosh. I talk to neighbors all the time. We're like, Oh, I got friends from Chicago that are moving or friends from New York. A lot of people from, you know, North and out that way.

, it's an area that's just going to continue to grow for a long time. Yeah. So my mom and her husband lived in Myrtle Beach and we saw a lot of folks from all parts of, United States moved to Myrtle Beach. And then of course, people who are locals at Myrtle Beach were like, I gotta get out of here.

So I think some of them started to, you know, move north into Brunswick County and Okay. Yeah. I've been coming to Pender and Topsail since 2002. Yeah. 2002, 2003. Yeah. Is when we first Seen the growth. It's been crazy. Yeah. It's been absolutely insane just to kind of see what it was. In the early 2000s. I can't imagine what it was when you were growing up here in the early 90s.

I [00:05:00] was even coming in through Hampstead. , you know, I don't, I don't make my way up this way much anymore, but just coming in, I forget , you're driving by like that used to be trees and that used to be trees and that neighborhood wasn't there and that store wasn't there. It's just crazy how fast everything has grown. . More people I talk to are like moving to Hampstead. It's like, that's where the place to go.

Yeah. It's either for us, you know, cause like where we are and where our office is, uh, we're kind of centrally located, but we get people who are either moving out to the Leland side or they're moving to the Hampstead side. Everything's just pushing out. Right. You know? Yeah. So you just moved into a new office, right?

We did. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, it's, , it's right across from Mayfair, wherever Officer Tyler Drive, , back where like Megacorp and those companies are back there. , this is a great location, you know, a good part of town, , you know, selfishly for me, we're right around the corner from my place, so that's always great.

But we got a lot of folks who kind of live in that area, so it's a, it's a good spot. Right. And you, you had offices downtown Wilmington. [00:06:00] We did. For a few years. Yep. And what was it better pricing to move kind of like into the. The combination of things. I think like trying different locations, it's funny.

Cause you know, Wilmington's obviously such a small city, but if you go from like the beach side to the downtown side, you almost feel like you're in two different cities, like you're just so different, you know, , we, we love downtown and we were down there for a while and we were just ready to try something different.

We got a little bit lucky in the space that we went into, came up for a good sublease, you know, good pricing, good company. We knew some of the guys that were at that company coming, coming out of it. CloudWise was the company. Right. Um, I think we're just, you know, we love the beach too. We want to be closer to the beach.

So, Summertime comes you've got opportunities to do things with the company and like go head over to the park there Go ahead to head over to the beach. Yeah Yeah, we're just we love that part of the town. So yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah I love the culture that you've built and [00:07:00] we'll get into the the company side But I want to talk about you for a second.

Okay, and your background. So when when did you decide? At some point in your career that you wanted to throw your hat and be a founder of a company. I think pretty early, like you could ask my wife, you could ask my, my father, like it's, I've kind of always had that entrepreneurial, um, I don't know, muscle.

Okay. , even little things like going back to college, , I'd come up with little business ideas for, , how to make money on the side so that I don't have to just go work a nine to five all day but like start a little business that does this and find little, , niche areas that, uh, create value for people.

And my wife's known for such a long time that, , I've, and I've, I've been fortunate to work for some really awesome companies, some great leaders, learned a ton along the way. , but it was always just . There's always something missing and I think you'd, you know, you'd go to this company and they've [00:08:00] got amazing reviews and great leadership.

They're building this awesome product and you'd get there and you'd get this great job and, you know, great pay and all the things you could ever ask for. And then you still , you just, there's like this feeling of like, Like there's a, there's a hole, like there's something missing. And I think I learned after enough kind of moving around that it, it wasn't the job, , all of the jobs were incredible jobs and anyone would be fortunate to have any one of them.

It wasn't the, managers wasn't, wasn't anything except just you. Internally knowing that like there's, there's something bigger that I'm chasing and it's and even that thing, it's not about money. It's not, I think it's just something that if you're, if you're built that way, you need that thing to kind of help you have that level of fulfillment, you know, I'm naturally a problem solver.

I get bored easily if I can't solve problems. We have lots of problems to solve every day, , when you're, when you're running a business [00:09:00] and building a company from the ground up. And I think that, , yeah, I think I've known for a very long time. It just, you know, took time to get there. Right. So your first assignment out of college, was it consulting?

, so my first job out of school was with nCino, , here in Wilmington. All right. think everybody for the most part kind of knows their story, but, back then they didn't actually it's funny because I remember you'd walk around and you'd go somewhere you meet someone's was like 2012 2013 you'd be like, oh, where do you work?

And you're like nCino and they're like it say that again. Like what what is that? Like no one knew. Mm hmm And it's something I reflect on a lot. I talk about it with some of our younger folks Too is You almost, I think, a combination of like, just being younger, it being your first real sort of professional career, you know, job out of school, , plus like, just you're in Wilmington, North Carolina, so you don't think that some of these types of things exist here because you're not [00:10:00] in the Bay Area, you're not in New York City, , so like, you think, I think a lot about, .

You know how you almost in those days didn't even know how to fully appreciate what you were doing and the experience you were gaining and the opportunity that you had the privilege to be a part of. , and now obviously you can look back and see like, wow, that, what that company has done and all the success.

And, but you didn't know how to like fully appreciate it then. Right. You know, did they recruit you out of college? Is that how you found them? Yeah. Um, it was, let me think. So , my wife. Worked for Live Oak Bank pretty early on, you know, nCino was a spin out of Live Oak Actually met a guy At their Christmas party at Live Oak's Christmas party and back then, you know, the companies weren't the companies They are today So they would combine things and like have the nCino crew come hang out and I met some of the nCino guys at that Christmas Party I was still in school I had just [00:11:00] so happened to kind of Already been dabbling in some Salesforce stuff that I had found online, which back then it was very rare that you heard like Salesforce and Wilmington, North Carolina in the same sentence.

Yeah, it's pretty common, right? But in talking to those guys, you know, I kind of they're like, oh, what are you doing? And Oh computer science cool and I was like, yeah, I know you guys are doing stuff on Salesforce. I've actually kind of, and they were like, oh, you have like, wow. Cause like, we don't see anyone who does anything like that.

Yeah. So that kind of opened the door, took an internship for just a couple months. And then I think we were just growing and. had some conversations with their leadership and kind of approached me and said, like, could you do full time? Because we just need the help. It was interesting because I was still wrapping up school, but now I've got a full time job before I graduate school.

So that created a lot of interesting stories. So this was early 2000s. This was, no, I mean, this was 20, 2011, 2012. Okay. Yeah. 2011, [00:12:00] 2012. All right. So Salesforce, big CRM platform was just, you know, catching fire. All, all the companies around the United States using Salesforce to capture business development data and workflows and things of that nature.

So yeah. And CINO, were they, so they developed some solutions using Salesforce for financial institutions? Was it more like a FinTech? Yeah, I think, I think the story was, um, so Chip Mahan, their, their CEO, you know, started this bank, brought a bunch of smart guys over. One of the guys he brought over is a guy named Neil Underwood, who is more on the technology side.

And I think they were just kind of fed up with how bad the systems were that they were using to run some very key components of the bank. And so I think they're kind of issued this challenge like, you know, I, I need you to Whoever you need like you guys go go build us something go figure something out like there's got to be a better way And so they found Salesforce and this sort of [00:13:00] open platform concept that they were pushing and This was this was probably 2010, you know predating all all the other stuff maybe 2009 , and then they, they just started to kind of put some stuff together and get some things built.

And then I think after a couple of years, they had something that was pretty solid that they were using to run a lot of their core processes on. And then the idea kind of came out of that of like, well, you know, if we can use this to run our bank, I'm sure lots of banks could use this as well. And then they, everything kind of, , took off from there, like, okay, well, let's, you know, try and set up a company and get the right people behind it and figure out the technology pieces we need to keep building and, you know.

Yeah, I can remember back in the late nineties when I was graduating from App State, , interviewed at Bank of America in Charlotte and a few other companies that very similar to nCino. They were building services for financial institutions, but even back then I can [00:14:00] remember, uh, Lots of COBOL and Visual Basic and the, the screens and the workflows was pretty archaic.

And so when Salesforce came along more of a cloud centric. operation and, you know, the presentation layer looked completely different than anything that you could find at the time. So I imagine that was pretty exciting to, , to work in that type of technology in that, in that timeframe. It was, I mean, I think again, going back to just being much younger and, you know, having a lot less experience.

And now , I can remember sitting in, in rooms with some of the largest banks in the country and they've just being perplexed at how can this be, like, how have you guys been able to do this thing that we've been wanting for so long? Right. And , a lot of it is of course just due to the fact that Salesforce has, you know, You know, was the company that they were then, but even now the company they became, , but yeah, it was, it was a really interesting time to [00:15:00] see, you know, we were going in and talking to companies that they, they had folks still working on green screens and systems that were built on Cobalt 40 years ago.

And now you're coming in with this, you know, cloud first, and this was even still early days of cloud where. You had to get, you know, the IT teams and the security teams on board because they didn't really like this concept of not having systems on prem that they can fully lock down and control and you got to talk about, well, how is this secure?

Because we're a bank and we've got to be, you know, we've got to be really secure with customer data and information. So it was an exciting time for sure. And very exciting. Interesting time, I think, to be in software with Salesforce still, , being , a much smaller company than they are today.

Did you have any effects after 9 11 because of the replication of data and the fear of airplanes running into data centers and taking out customer accounts and losing data? I think that's stuff. How's that availability, you know, factor into [00:16:00] being more of a centralized architecture? It came up a lot. I mean, I think, again, to, to Salesforce's, , just to, to shout out what they've built there, they've thought of everything, you know, so we'd, we'd have conversations all the time with an IT team that would say, well, You know, talk to us about your data centers and the beauty of building applications on Salesforce is of course, you don't need to run your own infrastructure team, Salesforce takes care of that for you.

I think now actually believe, I think they've made the full cut over to all AWS data centers. At one point they were running, I think it was Oracle. I think now it's all AWS. , but you know, they've, they've thought of these things where they have disaster recovery policies in place. So. So if, you know, God forbid, something like that did happen, , you know, your, your data is being backed up and, and I think it was near real time then.

I think it's real time now to a data center that's at least like 2, 000 miles away. So it's always secure. And then [00:17:00] if that happens, well then it's automatically going to get backed up to another data center just because now that's the backup. That's the new backup data center, you know? So yeah, all those things have come up over the years.

, how many years did you stay at nCino? I was right at four. It was four years. And then from that experience, where'd you go after that? I went into consulting, um, staying in the Salesforce ecosystem. But I think, , we also got a lot of exposure working with consulting firms, , you know, through nCino.

And I think that gave me a lot of interest. Wanting to try something new. , I spent a lot of my time kind of being a consultant to a degree. , especially my last, my last year or two there. , and just built relationships with folks and had an opportunity to go try something and, , went and joined Accenture.

And, you know, still stayed focused on financial services and banking and fintechs and, , still did a lot of work with nCino behind the scenes, just on the other side of the table now. Right? [00:18:00] Yeah. Right. So you spent your first couple of years learning. Learning Salesforce and becoming somewhat of an expert in the technology and understanding how it can be applied to that financial industry.

And then took a job at Accenture where you're now professional service oriented delivery and helping organizations implement Salesforce. Yep. Got it. Yep. And how long were you at Accenture? A little over a year. That's a hard model. Like I, when I was at Oracle, they put me on an assignment in Atlanta for Bell South.

They were implementing Oracle 11i, which is a competitor to Salesforce at the time, ERP, CRM platform. And Accenture was there. So we had to interface with a lot of Accenture people. Um, it's 80, 90 hours a week. I mean, it's, it's heavy burn and churn. So, yeah, I think it, I mean, you, you had the nail in the head.

I mean, there were days where we would, we'd show up, we'd be there two, three hours [00:19:00] before anyone else at the company is coming in, you know, you're in there at six, seven o'clock and then you're there until eight or nine o'clock you're on the road. Monday through Friday. I mean, really traveling Monday through Thursday, but a lot of times not getting back till late Thursday evening or, or even Friday morning.

And that's just every week. It takes a toll. It takes a toll. And I think, especially if you're, I think simultaneously, we were starting to get to the point where we're thinking more about like, are we ready to start having kids and a family and, and those types of things took us a little, a few more years than that.

But, , you know, I think it's also. Um, for me personally, while I met some wonderful folks, people I still talk to from, from Accenture and I also worked for Capgemini in the consulting world, , just wasn't the right, , fit for me. , I think I've always, I've, it took me some, , kind of moving around and working for product companies and working for consulting companies to really learn that, you know, I think I definitely am more geared towards [00:20:00] the product company, building something that you can kind of pour yourself into and see that thing grow, , and just evolve versus, you know, consulting is just very project based.

You're working on this one thing. And then, hey, you know, next week you might get pulled off that to go work on this thing because I need you over here now, you know, it's kind of hard , for some people it's a great fit. , just wasn't for me. I think if you're young and you're single and you can make a lot of money, I mean, be young and make six figures pretty easily, but you're traveling, like you said, all the time.

, you do, get a stipend for your food, so it's sort of like it's covered and you can live out of hotels and, , it's, it's fun. I had buddies , they weren't married, didn't have a girlfriend, didn't really have anything holding them down to one place.

So, you know, we'd go, , to Miami for a week and they'd just stay there that weekend and fly out to the next city, you know, that, that next Sunday or Monday. They just kind of bounce around and [00:21:00] stay and travel. And yeah, you, you, you could probably definitely have a lot of fun doing it with the right circumstances around it.

Yeah. Yeah. So between Accenture and Capgemini, what was that timeframe? Was that two, three years total? Uh, all in. So I spent, I worked on two different sides of Capgemini. I worked on their financial services side and then their, they, they kind of outside looking and you don't see it, but internally they're, they're almost two separate businesses.

So there's a side that, , you know, focuses on all things FS and there's a side that just focuses on all things not FS. , so I, I worked on both sides of their business between the, I kind of count them as three businesses, even though it's really two. , probably about almost four years between those.

Wow. Four years. So I can remember when I was at Oracle, they said the average Oracle consultant non cleared because there's, you know, obviously national security, you know, you have a clearance and you pretty much work in the [00:22:00] DC area and you're, you're pigeonholed, uh, cause it takes two or three years to get a clearance.

But like, if you're, if you're working on the commercial side where you're basically being rotated, you know, one project to another all over the country, The average duration is like two and a half years. Yeah, I believe it. So you, you've made it almost double. Almost. Yeah. Yeah. So what was the, what was the deciding factor?

Why did you leave? Is that when you started your company or? No, that was, I had an opportunity to go work at Salesforce. , directly and, , I'd spent my whole career working in the ecosystem, working for partners, whether it was on the ISV side or the consulting side, finally had a chance to go work for the mothership, if you will, , and decided that that was, and it was also highly, highly, I think it still is, but just very competitive, , market to go work there.

Yeah. I think I had. Interviews to get the job that I, that I finally took there. So it was just a, it was just a really cool [00:23:00] opportunity to actually go work for Salesforce directly. And do they have a lot of benefits like training and things? Things you can't even imagine. Actually this, uh, so this was, We had Hurricane Florence come through when I was working for Salesforce.

, and we don't typically leave for hurricanes. , my family doesn't typically leave for hurricanes, but this one, you know, when we did leave, we, we went up to Charlotte. When we left, , you know, it was supposed to hit at like a four or five, really bad. And it, and it of course did turn out to be really bad, less wind, but all the rain and, and damage.

But, , , we left, stayed at a hotel for like a week, , family went up with us and. , I got a phone call, I think the day before we came back, just random phone calls, like Salesforce support number, I was like, huh, so, you know, you answer it. Yeah. And it was with their, it was one of their benefits, it was like their disaster services team.

I didn't even know this was a team. And they basically just explained how, , they have [00:24:00] support for. when their, when their employees are caught in, you know, natural disasters and things that impact their lives, they have support for that. So basically they said, Hey, keep track of every expense, everything you've, you've spent any money on and we'll reimburse you for it all.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Which was great. You know, obviously it was, it was very helpful, but yeah, I mean, everything from their maternity and paternity policies that they do are, are, you know, next level. I think, I think if you're a. If you're a Salesforce employee, I think you had to be there at least a year. I don't remember all the details, but if you were, , a mother, you got six months of paid, fully paid leave.

And I think you could take an additional six months at like 80 percent of your pay. So you get, , almost a whole year to be with , your new, , son or daughter for almost a year. What you would have made anyways, just working. I think even, , even Fathers got, I [00:25:00] think it was 12 weeks paid and you could get another 12 at 80%.

So you got, you know, basically six months. That's very generous. Yeah. Yeah. So just incredible benefits and, . All of that that comes with being that caliber of a business, right? Yeah. And most companies on the East coast, you don't see those type of benefits, obviously West coast, , if you interview for a lot of companies in California, where I think the government kind of influences some of those, , extra benefits.

It's, it's nice to experience some of that here on the East Coast. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you work remote here, but I, you know, I spent, , the team that I was really aligned to was out of, out of their, , their HQ there in San Francisco. So I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and fly out there. Felt like every other week for a while, , go attend all the different events and conferences.

And I worked on the partner side, so we would, I worked a lot with Accenture while I was at Salesforce trying to help build programs for, , you know, this was back when they were acquiring MuleSoft. They were [00:26:00] acquiring, they had already acquired Heroku, but, , they were still trying to figure out this like platform level play, , cause you had AWS out there, you had Azure, , and Salesforce has this incredible no code, low code capability, you know, platform with all the integration stuff, but it's kind of been pieced together through some acquisitions.

So. , our focus was how do we try and help partners, big partners, Accenture, Deloitte, those, those caliber, , consulting partners, how do you help them start to look at Salesforce as a true enterprise cloud apps sort of platform and environment where. If, , if you're a centurion, you're being brought in to look at like app modernization, , we've got something and that was built on Cobalt 40 years ago, we need to upgrade it.

What platform are we going to use? It was trying to help them remember, like Salesforce can be an excellent platform for those things. Don't just default to AWS. [00:27:00] Right. So, yeah. So it sounds like you had, you hit the nail on the head, like you, you spend some time in the field. Learning the technology, coming up to speed as far as the implementation from a customer side and a partner side.

And now you finally made it to the mothership, your words, , working for an awesome company with, with fantastic benefits. Something that most people never experience. And so you've, you've , you've made it, but something was missing. What, what was that? I think it goes back to the earlier point of just, , everything you could have asked for in terms of leadership and the business and the culture and the benefits and , the pay.

I mean, everything, it's just, I think it goes back to that, having that entrepreneurial spirit and knowing that. It doesn't matter where you work, if you're not doing that thing that's fulfilling that need and that, that, that itch, if you will, to, to build something and, and see it, see [00:28:00] yourself be able to try and go out and achieve the same things that you've seen others do.

Right. I think that, , I think it was that, you know, it's just, you still, there's something missing. Could it also be you had a safety net? Cause I, you know, you and I grew up very similar methods as far as our backgrounds and the way that we started out at a college and working for professional services and, , I mean, different industries, but similar, you know, facilitation of technology.

I've always felt like we had a strong. Backup plan, like, you know what? It, it is a risk, but it's not really risky because like, if you give it a shot and you fail, what's the worst that you could possibly do? Yeah. I've learned what I can and can't do. And now I can go back on my technology or I can go back to Capgemini or I can always go back to Accenture.

I've been certified in all this Salesforce technology and. You know, there's probably 15 other different industries that I could jump into to implement the same thing I did [00:29:00] for nCino or whoever else I work for. So the risk was relatively small. I mean, it was still there, but I mean, did you kind of feel that that was probably one of the things that kind of was driving you is like, I have to give this a shot because I feel like I've made all these key investments in my career, and if I don't try, , I'm going to regret it.

Yeah, I mean, I, I think, uh, I, I recall having pretty much that exact conversation with my wife, right? And, and as we're planning and thinking through things, it's, You know, there's always sort of been this wanting to try this thing and go do this thing. And if you don't do it, what's the odds that you're going to regret that for the rest of your career?

Probably, probably pretty high. Cause you're always going to think like, man, what if I had just given it a shot? And to your point. On the flip side, you know, hey, if it doesn't pan out, , at least you can go to bed at night knowing you tried and you, and you probably learned a lot along the way, which, if anything, makes you even more valuable and [00:30:00] more capable than you were beforehand.

And yeah, you're, you know, I, I was lucky to have built a great network of folks that I, , I know, and. , companies that I think you could go work for at any moment if, if you wanted to. And so, yeah, there, there's definitely a safety net to that degree. And some of that I think is also just the nature of.

, the ecosystem that Salesforce has built, , you know, because there's just such a, , the, the skills that you learn are so transferable and applicable in so many different businesses because of how, how much they've done and, and all the companies that they've, they've been able to impact and be a part of, , they need people who know Salesforce who can come in and add value and.

, I think that those opportunities always exist. So yeah, absolutely a safety net. Now that you've had this talk with your wife and now you've decided, I'm going to give this a shot, like, this is something I want to do. I want to create my own business. Cause I've had this desire for a long time. Walk me [00:31:00] through how, what was the aha moment of starting a Hannafi and how did you, how did you take these?

Technology lessons and, and key, success factors that you've created over your career and apply that into your startup. It's a great question. I think, , there's a few pieces to it. , very, very early. I think the first piece was Doing a lot of reflecting on what had I seen work and the companies that I had the good fortune to be a part of They all came from this sort of like team Winning background like it wasn't one person who did it who figured there's a whole team of people And so it was a lot of this thinking about okay.

Well to do this the right way I've I've got a trying to symbol the right team. It's not gonna be something I can just pull off by myself There's a lot of, you know, I know you do, I know I do, um, there's a lot of reading and [00:32:00] consensus that you can do around, um, successful startups and the likelihood of success if you're a solo, you know, founder versus if you have two, three, four people that are kind of coming together.

I think that was a big piece of it to start, but then, you know, when we, when we first got our original, the original founders of Ohanafy together, not knowing what Ohanafy was actually going to be, we were really just focused on like, Hey, look, we've got smart guys who really know this technology. They know this platform, they have good trust and relationships with one another.

, and we know that. We know that there's a few different things that we could go do, but we don't want to rush into it. We want to be smart, , and in the interim, we'll, we'll do some consulting stuff. We'll just figure it out, we give this analogy of building a house.

You've built a couple houses, um, and, and some, some bigger structures. So, so this one hopefully resonates [00:33:00] with you. , but it's like, you know, if you're trying to think about building a house and you get hung up on where every single stud and every single nail in every single stud needs to go before you say, okay, let's go build that nail and never build the house, right?

At some point you just gotta kinda know like, we're gonna build a house. Don't know if the window's gonna go over there. Or maybe we'll do a side entrance door over here. We'll figure it out. Right. Yeah. So I think we just got the right group together. And then this opportunity kind of came along where we started to explore, , this concept of manufacturing specifically in the beverage space, , a little bit deeper, , kind of starting with the alcoholic side, , breweries and those types of businesses I think as we dug deeper in trying to understand, like, what does that market actually look like, , you know, could you build a commercially viable business, , in that space as we started to understand, well, , if you can put together [00:34:00] systems and, and applications that solve, , needs across, , sales and inventory and, , warehouse management and all the things that we do now, if you can do that for manufacturing, you know, in the beverage sector, , well, I bet you could do it for the food sector.

I bet you could do it for the broader consumer goods sector, right? Especially if you were building on a platform that is as scalable and flexible as, , a company like Salesforce. And then if you can do that for the manufacturing side, well, I bet you could do it for the distribution side or even the logistic side.

And so I think the idea kind of spawned into, okay, well, , there's this more kind of narrow, smaller opportunity to get something started now. So let's focus on that. But remembering that there is a lot more behind that, that, that can come if we build things the right way. If, you know, it always boils down, I think, to execution.

Ideas are. You know, ideas are easy, execution's [00:35:00] hard. , but if you execute the right way, then yeah, there's a, there's a much bigger market. And I think that's where the idea for, , you'll hear supply chain automation. We kind of call it supply chain innovation is what we talk about. But if we could build this supply chain innovation platform and do it on Salesforce and then go after the right industries with the right applications that a lot of cases.

In a lot of cases, they are still running very antiquated systems, not too differently from banking. When we were doing this, , you know, 2012, 2013, you know, we, we felt like there was a really big opportunity there. You know, food and beverage is a massive industry. We work with, , like companies like the NAW.

The National Association for Wholesalers. If you talk to those guys, you know, they represent, I think the latest study was just over 8 trillion in terms of annual revenue that these businesses create for just in the United [00:36:00] States, right? So it's, it's a massive industry. , and I think when we put all of that together, we, we saw like, okay, there could be something special here.

You got to get started, but there's, there's something bigger to go after there. So we're really targeting modernization of business processes and organizations that may have. Created a more traditional type mom and pop shops that are using a lot of, , different desperate systems and perhaps even Excel spreadsheets and pen and paper still.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I can remember the hotel, uh, first one I bought here. We're still using a ledger for all of its receivables and payables. And I'm like, uh, we need to convert this to Excel so that we could start forecasting and analyzing. , it's surprising, right? Even in today's age, you know, with, with the availability of technology that, , folks just choose to use different systems that are not as efficient.

So it's great that you [00:37:00] targeted that area. So, I imagine early in the life cycle, you spent a lot of time in the field talking to these businesses and trying to understand. So what, what was some of the driving aspects where they're trying to. Increased profitability, or are they trying to become more competitive with their solution offering or perhaps save, save money overhead?

I think it's a combination of, of a lot of those things. , at least what we've seen and what we've learned is that a lot of times what you run into is, , they're, they're businesses that have wonderful teams and very committed people to what it is they're building. They're not technologists, right?

They're really good at, you know, if I'm on the manufacturing side, you know, the supplier side, I might be really good at producing this alcoholic beverage and, you know, we do things in non alcoholic to that whole segment, whatever the segment is, like, they may be really good at producing that product or [00:38:00] If it's on the distribution side, they may be really good at, you know, forging relationships and standing behind, , the things that they're supposed to do with their retailers and with their suppliers and making sure that, , products are getting from A to B.

And, , they may be really good at those things, but I think what we've, what we often see is, , it's a combination of, they know that could be a lot more efficient in different areas. They know that They can, a lot of times it's, it's leadership and ownership, , in these businesses who want to give their people, , access to better systems and tools to make their jobs easier.

You know, the number of times we've been told like, Hey, , , our folks go walk into a store and they have to pull up five different applications on their phone and they can't make sense of it. And it's really difficult for them. And then it's really difficult for us. Cause then we got to try and piece all that together.

Right. You know, it's, I think a lot of it is definitely focusing on efficiency. , profitability I think is of course a big piece of [00:39:00] it, , really the core of any, any business in general. I think that they know there's a lot of opportunity to do things like, Hey. Tell my sales rep, for example, when they walk into that store, what are the products that they should be selling that they're not selling and just use data to tell them don't, don't use gut, right?

Use, use true data driven analysis and give them a visualization to make it really simple to understand. So if I'm sitting there talking to the owner of the store, I can pull it up on my phone, my iPad, and I don't have to really look for it. It's just right there. And I know that those numbers are backed by the data that we actually have, so I can trust them.

, I think it's, you're seeing a shift to, at least in our core, sort of, , beverage focus today. You're seeing a shift of, Sort of this next generation of owners, you know, folks who are mid to late thirties, early forties that are taking over the business from, from [00:40:00] their, , from their parents. And these are folks who have , grown up in an era where like, like myself, they have kids now who.

Are already my five year old can work the TV remote and wants to take our iPad and we're not teaching her any of this She's just smart, you know, they figure these things out So these folks are taking over these businesses having grown up in this sort of like using Instacart to order groceries and Amazon drops a package off on your doorstep.

It feels like every day And so when they're getting in and they're looking at these spreadsheets and these clipboards and some of these systems are like, I, I can't use this. Like there's, there's has to be a better way. Yeah. So now that you've identified a need. And you've almost created your own market where you kind of sold this architecture and these solutions to this customer segment saying, Hey, have you thought about this?

Your, your business could improve and your lives could be easier cause you won't be working as many hours and let, let the data work for you. So. That sounds fantastic. And probably, you know, there's other [00:41:00] organizations that could use that today. , but what, at what moment did you decide to say, okay, we need to create a company and we need to build this platform and start demoing the solution to customers and actually have paying customers pay you for that?

Cause obviously . If everyone has an idea for a business, they still have to invest a little bit of their own capital bootstrap in building this MVP, so to speak. , and then actually acquire some type of attraction of, of, , paying customers. Walk me through that. Yeah, I mean, I think going back to the, the sort of the very early days and, and finding this opportunity, , starting with breweries, we had identified a handful of small ones that, , had shared pain points and frustrations and were willing to let us go look behind the scenes at their operations and jump on trucks and go out there and just see what they're doing and how it feels and give us a really [00:42:00] good idea of, you know, of if we're gonna go solve this problem, what do you need to, how do you solve it?

What do you need to solve for? Where are there opportunities to improve things today? I think having come out of probably a dozen or so of those types of meetings, you know, between riding around the trucks meeting with owners, doing our own due diligence and analysis, I think we just, we kind of had the the moment of like, okay, like we, between everything we've learned, the fact that we've got a handful that are willing to get started with us as soon as we have something to give them.

, and the fact that we think there is a much Bigger opportunity behind all this and that this is this is the starting point that that helps us get to all of those to the bigger opportunity We felt like yeah, let's let's get started And my background is I went to school for computer science.

You know tell myself. I'm pretty technical But, spent probably the first seven to eight months just [00:43:00] building the product myself, one of our other co founders, mostly building the first iteration of the product, getting partnerships in place, navigating that whole part of, , the business with Salesforce.

How are you going to. How are you going to actually have OEM and ISV partnerships that allow you to go out and sell this in the market? , and then, yeah, just rinse and repeat with trying to go through those iterations of building and showcasing and demoing and getting some feedback and trying to leverage the customer feedback loop there and just keep building.

That's probably one of the most important aspects of starting any business, especially a product centric business or even a consulting business to some degree. I mean, professional service, you can, , like you said, if you're trained in Salesforce or Oracle or Azure or AWS or whatever, you could start a practice tomorrow, just finding a couple of customers willing to pay you 

right. But from a product point of view, you need developers, you need coders to create this platform so that you [00:44:00] can take the concepts and go and sell it to these, these customers. And that's where I think a lot of people fail. is if they don't have the engineering background, if they're not coders or computer scientists, , or if they can't find a CTO or a co founder that's willing to, invest their professional time after hours coding a platform , it never gets off the ground.

Yeah, , you can look at some of the most famous companies in the world like Apple, right? Like Steve Jobs wasn't known for being like the technical guy, but he had he had to have that, right? Yeah, he had to have that, , that capability and that skill set or they don't go anywhere.

Yeah. Well, Larry Ellison, same thing. Yeah, you know, he was, he was Everybody thinks he, he credited, you know, creating Oracle, but really it was, uh, Bruce Scott , the engineer behind the scenes who's building the relational concept. And then Larry was selling it. Parker Harris with Salesforce, Mark Benioff, I think you look at a lot [00:45:00] of the success stories and there's that combination of like the business acumen and, you know, , the, the person who can kind of like go steer the ship and be the face and like get customers excited and help drive sales, but also needing, of course, the, the technical skills.

That's what makes you kind of unique. Cause you do both you have skills on both sides where you can sell and you can also. Have conversations and you can code. So you're like the triple threat almost. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, it was, it was also one of the things I think was unique for me in my last sort of years at nCino.

, you know, I worked on their sales team, not, not as a sales rep, but supporting that sales team in a very technical capacity. I think it was one of the things that helped me find success early was an ability to, , just effectively communicate, right, and like have that ability to not just be the technical guy in the room.

And, , I know some incredibly, , talented technical people that I can't hold a [00:46:00] flame to in terms of that, that side, that, that skill set. , but those folks are also a lot of times not, they're not the person you can go put in front of the CEO, COO, executive team at that business to try and, , win a deal or, , they're just, they're very technical and they're great at that.

It's kind of something I found maybe a little bit of a sweet spot. Was this ability to juggle, , having the, the right level of communication, , and ability to, to maybe win others over, um, and just talk, but also balance that with, You can actually do the behind the scenes coding and technical pieces that all need to kind of come together.

Yeah. Hearing you talk through that kind of reminds me of the movie office space where the one guy comes in and is like, tell me what you do. And he's like, well, I take the specs to the developers. Well, can't the developers Get the specs themselves from the customers. No, they can't talk to customers. [00:47:00] Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and, you know, I've seen that so many times, , again, some, some of the, the most, , impressive folks that I know on the technology side there, that's just not their, their cup of tea, keep me far away from the customers. Yeah. Yeah. Like the coders do not want to talk to the, In customers, like hearing requirements is like watching somebody, you know, scrape their nails down a chalkboard.

, different, different strengths and weaknesses and, , teaches in, right? You've seen the movie Office Space. Yeah. It's been a while, but yeah. Yeah. Still, still prevalent. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You can watch it. It resonates with us. Yeah. You can watch it today and it's like, it still happens today.

Yeah. So it's interesting how some things never change. No, yeah, they don't. And I think, um, I mean, to that degree, I think again, going back to some of the earlier questions, like where have we seen success? Why did we model things a certain way? Why do we do things a certain way? It's because we've seen those things work well in other businesses.

[00:48:00] And sometimes I think it's, you don't need to reinvent the wheel, right? If you, if you know that this is how it typically works well, then, you know, probably worth giving that a shot and let's see, you know. So now that you have a few customers willing to give you their pain points and you've understand how to document their requirements and effectively map it to new architectures and new processes, and now that you've built this system, walk me through building the team, like early on, how did you form the team and what roles did you have to fill and As far as funding, you know, where, where did that come in as far as like early bootstrapping?

And I know you did an early raise. We'll talk about that. , but walk me through now that you've kind of like taken baby steps now that you've got this, this company that's can kind of like take on itself. Walk me through that. , our first, our first ever hire was in the customer success side, you know, we, we kind [00:49:00] of, we've, we'd seen it so many times before that, , one of the best ways we could separate ourselves is, you know, while the product will always separate itself, it's just having great customer success.

So we actually hired a, a CSM, a customer success manager before we actually had like Contractual customers, , because I think we knew that that was just, it was going to be a big piece of how we, we just separate ourselves in the market. Were you still working at Salesforce at the same time you were kind of moonlighting, trying to create Ohanafy?

No, no, this is all after that. So you did a cold cutover where you basically saw them all in. Yep. So you weren't getting a paycheck. Nope. Young family. Did you have kids at the time? Yeah. I had one. So your wife was working, so she was supporting your endeavor. Wife's working, yep. Definitely, definitely big shout out to the wife and, uh, in helping us get off the ground.

, but yeah, , we, we made the full cut over. We're all in, like we're, we're going to get after this thing. I don't believe a lot of people [00:50:00] truly understand. What that's like? Yeah, because they're usually like a Venn diagram. There's overlap where you may have an idea and you can work on it after hours and try to get things off the ground.

But at some point you still need a paycheck because the bills have to be paid. Yeah. But at some point in the time, you're going to have to put more time in and you only have so much time in a week. But you decided to cold cut over. Yeah. You were all in. It's such a balancing act. Yeah. To all the, The examples you just talked about, you know, time and money, and bills got to get paid, and you got families to think about.

But at the same time, I think when you're finally ready, and you know, this is the thing that I want to go do, I want to try it, I think it's one of those things if you're going to commit, commit. , don't, don't just dip your toe in and say, Oh, I, I tried it. No, like jump in and commit. And obviously you got to, you got to have the right plans and you can't, that's easier said than done.

How long did you go without collecting a paycheck? Probably almost a year [00:51:00] before we started to pay ourselves. And see, a lot of people can't afford that, you know? I mean, that, that's, that's one of the barriers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So you went a full year without getting a paycheck. Yeah. Yeah. And there were others on your team that were experiencing similar.

Yeah, we, I think we, we had sort of a mixture of folks that had different needs and we, we kind of found this combination of, , between myself and some others kind of pitching in and helping kind of self fund things. You know, we, we, we had to self fund ourselves for, Probably about right at, right at a year.

Yeah. And then I think we knew, you know, look, if we can get, , something off the ground, start to generate some revenue, prove some traction, prove that there's really a market here and an opportunity here, then yeah, the next step is we've got to go look at funding and figure out how to start to scale and look at the next stage of growth and how this business continues to evolve.

Right. Now, how long did it take? Cause I believe when I first met you. You [00:52:00] had 11 customers. Sounds about right. Yeah. How long did it take to get 11? Was that the full first year? Was that working? It was probably that first full year. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Give or take. Cause you were still on that, that office off Randall Parkway.

Yes, we were. Ringing the bell. Every, every customer. You can't. Ringing the bell, still ringing the bell, but, uh, yeah, yeah. It was probably right at a year. I think it was a mixture too, for us then it's a combination of trying to, , You don't want to necessarily turn customers away at that stage because you need customers and revenue, , but also just trying to be methodical about, is this customer really going to be a great fit?

, and we still, we still deal with a lot of that today, even, , I think that it's something you've learned along the way. One of the lessons I know we've learned along the way is this concept of not all revenues created equal, right? Like sometimes revenue can be bad revenue, , if you're, if you're selling to customers [00:53:00] where they don't have a leadership team that's bought in and therefore you're going to struggle to get that executive level alignment to help drive adoption, , not to say it can't be successful, but it's, it's a red flag that can potentially cause issues.

Yeah. But yeah, I think, you know, going back to that, it's probably about a year. Ish when we had the 11 or so. So at that point you decided to do a friends and family round. Yep. Cause you were like, I'm tired of bootstrapping this. We've been, we've been, we've, we've worked at this for a year. We needed help.

Yeah. Yeah. If we need to scale this business, it's going to take a little bit more capital. And, and, you know, if I remember correctly, you've had a lot of folks that were very positively, , impacted by the business and. People want them to invest. Yeah. You didn't have a problem funding investors. No, we were oversubscribed on our first round, , our friends and family round.

I think it was, , we're again, to some of the things we've been talking about, fortunate in that we had myself and some of our founders had built [00:54:00] a strong network over the years. , so that always helps, you know, having folks that you can go to versus having to just try and go meet strangers all day and pitch them on this thing and they don't know you or, or your work ethic or any of that, you know.

So at the time you decided to do a friends and family. Tell me how instrumental was the startup community in Wilmington? Because I know it's relatively strong. , did they have any impactful meaning behind helping you raise your money or connecting you to investors or what, what were some of the lessons learned to other entrepreneurs who may want to start a business in Wilmington and find success in raising that, that initial capital?

You know, it's an, it's an interesting question for me because I, I think that there's, There's certainly a, a lot of help and support that I think some of the community, especially in Wilmington, we do have a great community around startups and technology. And, , you know, [00:55:00] there's various groups that are running, , meetups and things that happen all the time.

There's, , bigger companies, I know Live Oak has, they do a whole, Council where they're focusing on, like, how do we help continue to build this, , skill set and talent of technology in the Wilmington area? So how do we work with local schools and colleges and programs and work on internships and like, I think all those things when you're starting out trying to build a business, whether you're trying to get funding, whether you're just trying to get feedback and meet people and wrap your head around like, how do I do this whole thing?

I definitely think that uh, there's a healthy dose of it, but I think you can overdo it too. I think sometimes you can get caught up in The level of success that I'm going to see in my company directly equates to how many startup meetups do I attend? And they don't. They actually really don't correlate, I think, in a lot of ways.

I mean, yes, you may learn [00:56:00] things, you may meet certain people, definitely great networking opportunities, but I think a lot of it is, , If you take the same amount of time and energy sometimes and just pour that into what it is you're building, figuring out, , how do we make the product better or how do I get feedback from customers or how do I just learn more about the market that I'm selling into?

I think it's, it's, it's a balancing act, right? So for us, yeah, I think, you know, there were plenty of, , things in the early days. We actually are our very first, , if you want to call it our first office, we're out of the common desk building. in downtown Wilmington were, you know, co working space.

, so we, we were in there with, , a handful of other businesses. And I think there's some of that that in the early days when you don't have customers, you're not signing contracts, you're just kind of heads down building. A lot of that can help give energy. You see other companies doing things and it kind of gets you excited.

, we attended some various meetups [00:57:00] and did some things like that, that, , help just kind of, again, I think a, I think a lot of it is just. Finding the things that give you energy and trying to double down on that stuff. Did you take advantage of anything from the UNC Wilmington Center of Innovation, CIE or?

We're, we're part of the CIE. , yeah, I think we, we took advantage of a few different meetings and events and things that they put on. They do even, , different technology selection, , committees every year for like startups that they see that they like that are in the sort of Cape Fear area. So we actually won an award with them a couple years back and know Heather and that, that group down there.

Love those folks. , Heather's awesome by the way. Heather's wonderful. Yes. Shout out to Heather. I've tried to get her on this podcast. Hopefully we'll get her on. Well, you call her and I'll call her. We'll get, we'll get Heather on. But yeah, I think, you know, and our, , of our founding group, two of our other guys also graduated from UNCW.

Wellington folks, [00:58:00] UNCW folks, I think we've, we've tried to lean on the support and the network that you can get, , that comes out of that whole, this whole environment ecosystem that we're in here. Yeah. So it's a, it's a positive experience. There's a lot going on here for sure. And I think, , over time having more successful companies like yourself.

Prove not only the network is strong and beneficial, but the technology and implementation, we can create a little ecosystem here where you can recruit individuals and have them move to Wilmington. Yeah. And I was talking to Jim Roberts about, , possibly brokering a meeting with the governor's office about creating some innovation.

, ideas to bring more startups to this area, , because I think, you know, like you mentioned before, Wilmington and this area is, it's very appealing, , from cost perspective, , it's somewhat, , Reasonable as far as first time ownership of homes compared to other markets around the United States.

 Northern Virginia is [00:59:00] insane. You know, a townhouse now is a million dollars. , I can remember townhouse starting out about three 50, 400. Now, now they're over a million. It's, it's insane. It's insane. Real estate's gotten a little out of hand lately. Yeah. So if you're a young professional coming out of college, you know, similar wanting to, to, , do what we've done.

The time to acquire ownership is probably pushing into your early to mid thirties. Whereas, you know, we were lucky enough to acquire something in our late twenties. But yeah, yeah. I mean, I think on the, the Wilmington market piece, , we're, we're fortunate that I think we have some great companies that are here that have built a good ecosystem of talent and folks that especially, uh, You know, around core systems like Salesforce.

, you know, a lot of that exists, but it's not enough. , I think that there's a lot of opportunity here and there's a lot of companies that are starting up here. And I think Wilmington has a great opportunity to sort of be that East Coast tech [01:00:00] hub kind of city that you, you wouldn't normally think about cause it's just a small town, but we have, we have such a wonderful, you know, whether it's just where we live, the beach that we have access to, the city.

, I think that there's a lot of great things that could happen here, you know, but at the end of the day, we're not a big city like Charlotte or Raleigh, where there's just a much larger population. Right. , people are, going to school and relocating to the cities. Like you don't really see people typically like graduating and then relocating to Wilmington unless they're taking a job somewhere.

Right. , exactly. I mean, that's the reason I moved Northern Virginia is to take work. Yeah. So, yeah. So now that you've completed your first raise, friends and family, which was a 2 million. Okay. So you had some capital and you decided to deploy that capital on scaling the business. So you've, you've effectively created a model that customers would like.

And now you can sell. So now that you're building this company, [01:01:00] it's been now, what, two years since we've done the early raise and you've done a bridge between then and now. Yep. So looking forward to the next fundraising idea. So we had talked about perhaps doing a round. in the near future. , what are your thoughts about that?

And what's the timeframe? Are you still thinking about it? , absolutely. , I think it's definitely where our heads are at right now. If you look at, , the type of business that we're building, I think it's, we, we do, we're a big enterprise application. We touch the entire business, everything from purchasing through selling through inventory.

Accounting, right? And there's just, it's big and it's wide and it's complicated. , we, you know, we're, we're running the majority of the processes for our customers and our platform and our system. And I think because of that, , it just, it takes capital to build companies to the scale that they [01:02:00] need to get to, to go off and achieve the type of results and success that's out there.

So yeah, it's definitely. The plan is to focus on an A here soon, maybe 25, 26, 25, 26. For sure. There's no sense of urgency. Things are great. And just waiting for the right time, I think waiting for the right time and just really The right partner, right? You know, we've talked to a lot of venture capital firms and there's been some really awesome ones that we met with.

And then there's been ones that we just don't really align with at all, you know, and finding the ones that understand that it just takes time to build successful companies. I mean, to the ones we've been talking about so far. You know, it took nCino a decade to pull off an IPO, and they did it in a very different economy with very different access to funding, you know, during that sort of golden era of SaaS.

, so just trying to find the right partner that understands it's going to take time. Yeah, there's no one model fits everything. You know, I can remember a startup I invested in in [01:03:00] 2010, actually, it took them about 10 years before they really started to get, Capture and traction and take off and start doing the, the massive, , fundraising.

So it, it takes, you just let the market work itself out. So you, and you've been in touch with multiple VCs. Oh, we've probably talked to a hundred at this point. Yeah. So you've got a great network already built. So it's not like you can't find funding if you needed it. No, no. I, yeah. And we're, again, I think we're, we're very fortunate in that regard.

, Granted, it hasn't come without a lot of hard work, but yeah, I think that, you know, it's interesting. We talk about this all the time is these things, they just, it takes time. It always takes way more time than you think it will take. Right. What are some of the lessons learned for other people who may want to venture out into perhaps fundraising with, , angel investors or, or private equity VC type, uh, What's been some of the pros and cons, I guess you could say, if you can [01:04:00] give me a top three list of both good and bad.

Good and bad in terms of just the fundraising side in particular. Dealing or conceptualizing or dealing with those type of people. I think one of the big pros that I've always appreciated is it forces you to think about things that you might not normally be thinking about, right? , if you're, if you're going in to have a conversation and meeting with someone who's a professional investor.

And they know the things that they need to hear that you need to talk about. It might not be something that you've spent, you know, as a founder, as maybe a first time founder. Maybe you haven't spent as much time thinking, but you should. , so I think walking away from those conversations better prepares you.

I think one piece of advice I would give is definitely If it's your first or second time going to have that conversation, have it with some folks that maybe won't be as big of an impact if it doesn't go the way that you want it to go. Get some repetitions in, get some practice in, so that [01:05:00] when you do have the meeting with the one that you're really, really trying to get on board, it hopefully goes well.

You know, I think at the same time, , on the con side maybe, , it's, it's tricky because maybe it's not really a con, but I think you just, you get so many different people that come from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking, and if you're not careful, I think sometimes people can fall for the trap of just letting the money make bad decisions and not sticking to their gut and knowing, you know, what it is they're trying to do 10 years from now and that the choices they make today We'll have impacts on that.

So if I get the wrong people involved now, what is that going to mean? Right? I think just trying to Remember it's a two way street, right? investors and venture capital Need products and products need investors and venture capital and without both of them that doesn't really work [01:06:00] so While I think it's easy to get enamored by, Oh, wow, like this big VC or this, this individual that has this great reputation and this name and that, you know, they've got the money that we need.

, I think you just got to be smart and, and be able to ask yourself and be really candid about is, is that actually going to be the right decision for us? Are we letting that maybe, , force us down the wrong path and maybe make a bad decision we're going to regret later? You know? Do you find that some VCs are better than others as far as like their ask and how they handle their operations and what, you know, type of enforcement they There's a good mix out there for sure, at least, , in my experience talking with, with quite a few now, and I think it depends, , you get a lot of folks that are, they're more generalist, they have maybe focus areas, but, , you'll see, you'll see a lot of times, at least what I've seen is there might be an [01:07:00] early interest, but they don't really know your market.

They're not really aligned to your industry. So, And if, if they have a great conversation, then the next step is they're going to go off and do some research and some due diligence and figure out if they actually really want to get deeper. Whereas there are others where they are very deeply focused on your segment and your market.

And they know definitively if that's the type of business that they like to invest in because they understand that world and they see opportunity in that world. I think it's part of it. You know, people is always going to be a big part of it. I think that, , , on the one hand you want to, you want to enjoy the conversation with the person on the other side of the, you know, the, the phone and, and, and like what they had to say, but also remembering that at the end of the day.

You know, that person may not be the person that's involved forever with you, right? If you were to do something with them, maybe that person sits on your board and a year later they leave the company or they're [01:08:00] fired or they get moved to a different board. So, you know, there's a degree of that, but I think you also just got to look at the fit and are they aligned to the timelines that you're aligned to I think is a big one.

You know, if you if you kind of see a 10 year horizon Are they aligned to a 10 year horizon, or do they want to try and see you do something in three or four years, and then that's going to create, you know, stress and, and things that you don't really need if you're trying to build something successfully, and it's just going to have you make bad decisions about, well, hey, we got a triple our growth next year.

So we need to just hire like crazy, but then what does that do to our burn? And what does that do to our capital efficiency? Right. Yeah. And one of the things I find very interesting about your business and your model is, is not only your company culture, but your operation. You're very in tune with making sure that you, like you mentioned, your burn is in control and making some sound [01:09:00] decisions, hire slow, fire fast.

, and, and so being a technologist and transitioning into management, walk me through that. Like, how's that been for your career? , cause you know, when you, when you're a technologist, you, you love technology, you don't want to let it go, but now that you're running a business, now you're more of a manager.

Instead of coding. Yep. , has that been pretty painful for you? And how are you dealing with that? Definitely, there's definitely been some pain. , I think that it's probably maybe just going, some of this being advice again, you know, hindsight 2020, right? It's probably the thing that you underestimate the most when you start, you know, you have this idea, you have this experience and this skill set, and we're going to build this product, and we're going to sell it to these people, and they're going to, you know, they're going to buy it, they're going to sign a contract, and we'll get them live, and like, yeah, that's sort of the core piece of it.

What you don't necessarily think about, I think, is the 173 other [01:10:00] things that are going to happen in and around that to build and run a business, which has nothing to do with your product, right? Or building that next feature. , So for me personally, yeah, I mean, It has been a big learning experience, , and I think a lot of that is, , it's not all sunshine and rainbows, it's sometimes it's trial by fire and sometimes you have to make bad decisions to learn from bad decisions to try and not make bad decisions in the future.

, so I think for us, it's definitely been, there's been a lot of. , learning that's happened in different, , every area really, if it's, , our, our extreme focus on trying to be as capital efficient as possible that we have today, it wasn't always that way. It took us some time to kind of figure that out and, and learn a little bit more about why that's important and, and what does that mean?

When you try to go to that next round of funding, do you really have a good grasp on that? Can [01:11:00] you speak to that? Is there a plan of how you're going to go from this point to this point? And, and why, why does that matter? , but it's also things like culture and hiring. , you know, it's not a novel idea.

You, you hear, you know, businesses are a, are a blend of people, process and technology. We always talk about, absolutely agree, but it all starts with people, you know. You hear a lot of companies that will say things like, you got to put the customer first. I think it's actually, you got to put your employee first, and if you're employee, if you do that right, then the customer first thing, the process stuff, the tech, those all take care of themselves.

Those are a byproduct of that, and that's easier said than done, you know. It's always easy to say, oh, we're gonna take great care of our employees. But then what happens when this situation arises or they need this or this person who you thought would never leave They're leaving to go to that company because that company is offering them more money or some benefit or [01:12:00] they're gonna move to some new Area of the country they want to like And then navigating all those things is just, I think it's a combination of, you can sit down and, and think about these things and prepare, but there's, you, you can't, there's just no preparation that you can give yourself other than just going through it and learning and just getting good old fashioned experience.

Yeah. Exactly. So tell me a little bit about 2026 and beyond. Like what are some of the new features? that you're working on, , some of these customer enhancements that, that you've discussed before, what are some of the cool tech and AI focused things you're doing? Yeah. I mean, the coolest stuff is definitely the AI stuff.

I mean, , everyone's talking about it, but if you look at our industry in particular, there's a lot of, , focus on how do, how does some of these great businesses really leverage it. in a meaningful way. So not just a chat GPT wrapper that can answer a question, but how do I have it analyze my data and [01:13:00] compare that against a model and help me think about how we should be selling or purchasing or, , inventory control, things that really, really do move the needle for these businesses.

, we talked about it. We did our, our company kickoff a couple of weeks ago. It was probably the thing we talked about the most of where we want to make big investments this year is really doubling down on all of the great capabilities that we have around artificial intelligence.

, I think for us, what's really unique too is because we're built on Salesforce, , a lot of people don't know, but Salesforce has been investing in AI for over a decade. I think it was back in 2012, they started, they launched like Einstein and they started to roll out those features. , and they've just been buying companies sometimes very quietly behind the scenes and just building up that muscle and that capability and those are all things that we get to leverage through our partnership with Salesforce.

So when our customers are thinking about Hey, we, we want to, you know, we want to implement artificial intelligence and have [01:14:00] it really, , help us understand our business in a way we've never been able to and predict things and help us just drive better selling behavior or whatever it is. I think we're really one of only maybe two companies that can really do it in our space.

, at, at the level that, that they really need it to happen. And we have some exciting conversations going with some of the largest, , brands in our space that are thinking about artificial intelligence. And we're looking at some pilot programs of how would we roll out. , the solution, what's the data we need to bring in, how do we build the analytics around it, how do we plug that into the core product?

, I think it's going to be focusing on a lot of that stuff, but also just continuing to enhance our core applications and products that our customers rely on. And then I think the, we'll see, probably not this year, but we'll start to look at in the future. How do you scale into other segments, of broader distribution and [01:15:00] manufacturing, when the time's right?

Are you still hiring? Are you looking for new things? We're hiring a little bit. I mean, I think right now we've, we've got a great group. We've got a good core, , team. I think one of the things we're also trying to do a better job, going back to lessons learned and, , embracing technology ourselves is when we think about scaling efforts.

, you know, look at what, what are ways we can leverage artificial intelligence, like where are there tools and applications that we can, , bring in that make it easier for us to try and do all the other things that we want to do without always just defaulting to hiring, you know? So, , we've got a couple of roles open right now, , but I think the big focus is, um, How do we take the folks that we have here and put the right solutions and tools and processes around them to make their lives easier, to make them more efficient, so that you don't have to always just, you know, hire to fix everything.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like things [01:16:00] are really exciting for you and the team. They are, yes. Yeah. I hope, I hope to bring you back when, when you complete your a round and Yeah, I'd love to grow this business. Absolutely. And you can explain how you've, uh, accomplished, uh, completing such a massive, uh.

Fundraising cause a lot of people never make it to the A. Yeah. Yeah. That would be great. I'd love to come back and talk about it then. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks again for stopping by. Thank you. I really appreciate this. Awesome. Appreciate it. It's been good seeing you. You too. Thanks Richard. Thank you.

Amplified CEO is produced by Topsail Insider. Edited by Jim Mendez Puget and sponsored by Cape Fear Ventures. For more information about Amplified CEO Richard Stroupe or Cape Fear Ventures, please contact Christa at 910 800 0111 or christa at topsailinsider. com.