#7 - The Hippie With A Billion Dollars

Then the Bebo story started, this was now January two thousand and five. It took only a couple of days to develop it and we went live and we had a million users after nine days. Bebo. Bebo. Bebo. Bebo. Find out Beb, Michael Burch. Buy low and sell high. Bebo which has 40 million global users. Media giant Time Warner is buying the social networking website Bebo. For$850 million. Right, I'm recording this. I just finished my conversation with Michael Birch. For those of you who don't know, Michael is a internet entrepreneur. He built a a social network back in the day when he s he competed head to head against Facebook. And although Facebook won the war, m Michael didn't end up too bad. That company, Bebo, if you've ever heard that before, sold for eight hundred fifty million to AOL. And when I met Michael, we got back together and we bought it back for one million. years later. And then we actually sold that again just now to Amazon. So uh I've had an interesting history. I've worked with Michael for six years. He was my boss

Um, then he gave me his job to run the company. Uh, he's my investor, he's my friend, he's a mentor, I've learned a lot from him from building companies to investing. I mean he's invested in Seventy five plus companies, things like Pinterest, he was one of the first investors. Calm, the Meditation app, he was an investor when nobody believed in Calm. And he's done all kinds of crazy things. He's built hotels, he's bought a private island off of Richard Branson, he gives tons of money to uh different charities like Charity Water that he supports. Uh he's a very, very humble guy. You guys are gonna hear that and you're gonna hear the humble beginnings when he quit his job as a You know, programmer at an insurance company. and made the leap of faith to build his own company. He wanted to work for himself.

He wasn't planning to become a billionaire, yeah that you know, that was a great outcome. He really just wanted to work for himself and not have a job. Wanted to work on things he was interested in. We talk about the years of struggle, the all the different ideas he had. Uh it's almost sort of in the weeds, but I think A lot of people have talked about his success with Bebo and the big sale, 850 million bucks. Uh very few people have heard the backstory. Before that about the different products that he tried to build, the failures, the learnings, all that good stuff before he had his big breakthrough.

You'll also hear him talking about viral marketing or viral products. And uh for those of you don't know, it's a method of growth where instead of doing ads or sales or paid marketing, you are um relying on your users to send send the product to other users. Uh so things grow through word of mouth just from one user to the next. And Michael was really a pioneer of this before people were even saying viral marketing. That's what he was doing. Because You know, like you'll hear him talk about, he didn't have the money and he didn't have the sort of sales skills that wasn't that wasn't fun for him.

So he really focused on um building products that would grow just via essentially word of mouth or user spreading it to other users, which is kinda crazy. So he's a he's a real legend in in the growth world for that. And so I think you guys will really like this conversation. Uh I had a great time doing it. Enjoy. Audience wants to know who are we sitting down with today, so just tell them a little bit about you. You're Michael and Sure. I'm Michael Birch. I'm a forty nine year old hippie.

I originally from a little uh island called England. I've been living in San Francisco seventeen years, been doing internet stuff since nineteen ninety nine. Just start ups early on and then went on to do a few and obviously Kind of culminated in selling Bebo eleven years ago in two thousand and eight, and then since then doing a lot of investing. So that's a very brief potted history. Yeah. Before I even met you, I moved to San Francisco for you almost. I was living in Australia. I wanted to come to the startup Mecca. I was like, okay If that's where all the action is, I just gotta go there. I don't know much else besides that, but might as well go where the action is and then figure it out from there. I had never heard of you, had never heard of Bibo before, but I l really liked the idea lab you had created, and so I started doing some research and there's not many like podcasts or interviews of you online. Do you like doing these? Are you doing this as a favor to me? Like'cause there's not much out there, but your story's really interesting. So what's the what's the catch? I don't mind doing them. I just sort of question w why I

often would do them. I don't do really any conferences now. So I don't tend to do a lot of talks. You know, I'm actually heads down doing starter. We'll talk a little bit about that later again. But Well you've done some interesting things. I know you did the like a BBC documentary, like what was it called? Like How to Be a Billionaire or something, right? Yeah, they didn't tell me well that we're gonna call that documentary until after Can't quite remember. It may have been called something like that. But he threw the word billionaire in it. And I'm like, Oh no, this is like not what I wanted to do. Yeah. I'd already filmed it at that point. You know, when I first looked you up, I was like, Wow, this guy sold a company for eight hundred fifty million bucks. Not bad. Like I wanna do something like that. I should just go work for this guy. Maybe I can learn something from him. So I think that there is something to that that spark or that initial motivation, even if you don't have much else to go on besides that.

I would agree with that. Did you have anything like that when you took sort of the leap of faith? Because if we rewind the clock, right, your story starts where I think nineteen ninety nine, your You're working as a programmer for insurance companies. Correct. As boring as it gets. Uh. kind of a low point in life, I think. It's hard to get much further than that. And how did you get there? Wha wh how did you even get into that position? So originally I did a degree in um physics at Imperial College in London, which

I found quite a few people in Silicon Valley seem to do physics for some reason, but yeah, I had no interest in doing physics. Like it's one of those subjects that unless you're the top. Like point zero zero one percent, it's probably not that interesting. you're doing boring experiments or something. And I definitely wasn't in that top even one percent. But I got a good degree and then I left college. At the time there was kind of a mini recession in the UK. So the job market was hard.

And my brother was working as a programmer. and an insurance company. And he said, Why don't you come do this? You'll love it. And I was like Paul.

It's fucking programming at a fucking insurance company. It doesn't get more boring than that. It's like one boring thing. On top of another boring. Yeah, it's like exponentially boring. And he said, No, no, trust me, you'll like it and I was like, Well It's not like I have a lot of other offers, so I'll go and again do the interview. And they had like a graduate intake scheme where they employ ten people at a time and they trained you on the job. And so I was like, Okay. So I actually wasn't one of the top ten, but one of the people didn't accept the job. So I was number eleven. I was like the back up guy. Nice. And I got the job. And uh and then I learnt programming COBOL.

Which is Like. Pretty old school. Main phone. It's the insurance company of programming languages. Yeah. And a little bit to my surprise, Ashy really enjoyed it. I didn't particularly enjoy insurance, I was

fairly correct on that one. But the programming side, I got into it. So didn't love COBOL, but I did like a six week training course and then immediately picked up a book and learned another language and started programming in that instead. So uh And I joined a data warehousing team so it was analysing data and I became friends with the uh chief actuary at the company and then started doing all this stuff with him and and kind of enjoyed it. Actually got into it. Um So then found myself a programming insurance company.

Somewhat enjoying work. And so That sounds all good. Why why switch? Why leave? Well my father Has always been an entrepreneur. What did he do? He was a botanist, so he did a degree in botany. worked for a company in the UK called PBI, sort of rose to like number two in the company, but would never get the top job'cause The guy was Not leaving. Still alive. Uh I think he may still be alive. No. He wrote I think he wrote the world's best selling paperback, non fiction paperback books.

Like gardening expert books. So he was the hard guy to replace. He did that for a number of years and then left and started doing his own insolvency, but was always like coming up with new ideas and inventing ideas. And he did one of the new type of dental floss that was made out of a special type of rubber, so as you stretch the rubber it would get thinner and thinner and go through very tight teeth and things like that. And so he took a a few products to market. He never found that like one big thing that you never found like the retirement money. So he always continued working, doing the agriculture, consulting, and running. And he was working from home and my bedroom was next.

to his office and there was like an interconnecting door that was kind of didn't open, but I could kind of hear everything. And so I'd always listen to him on the phone like coming up with the next idea and speaking to someone and and I actually found it quite intimidating, but at the same time. I kinda loved it. Yeah. Like I wanted to be able to do that. And so, you know, I went through a fairly normal childhood, very middle class, suburban family, again a little bit dull. Defies my early life. Although I had a great childhood. and went to university and then got this job and and then

I realise that It's very hard to be entrepreneur within insurance, for sure. I mean, not that you can't do it, but it's not exactly the world of entrepreneurs, right? Dime a dozen. Whereas computers were clearly evolving and becoming more and more relevant and the internet was like in its early days. But not when I s it wasn't really around. in any meaningful way when I started, but then as I kinda went on.

it was becoming a real thing. And I I thought well th this is it. This is my chance to kind of do what my dad did and be an entrepreneur and I don't even have to phone anyone up. I can just like learn a different language and start programming and Build a website. And so was there like A specific day you remember that you're like, Okay.

This is my last day of doing this, I'm gonna take the leap. Yeah. Pretty much. There was a guy I was working. I left insurance a little bit, work for mothercare, which is a retail chain in the UK doing data analysis. And there was a guy there building intranet stuff. And he was starting to show me HTML. And I was like, Oh, this is cool. Yeah. The good stuff. Yeah. And so I started like reading some books and

And uh doing a bit of uh development. And then uh my wife Sochi got pregnant with our first child. Yeah. was born. obviously nine months later, Isabella, and it was uh maternity leave time and she was gonna like leave her job and I was like

That's not fair. Well, she gets a deal at home. And so I pretty much handed him my notice like at the same time that I'm going to be. So you went the opposite way as most people. Most people are like, Oh, I'm having my first child, I need security Yeah. And you provide, you're like, No, I wanna be at home. I wanna lost to me. Yeah. Or her, in fact. Yeah. I'm sure she loved that. Yeah. I mean we were we're both from kind of these stable middle class families and We knew that It may not go well and we may run out of money.

But we also knew we weren't gonna be homeless. Right. And we knew Worst case scenario. I mean we talked about it. Worst case scenario. We go and live with one of our parents. Apply for another job. We'll get another job, we're young.

and we'll start working again and go back to our kind of former life. But It sounds silly. We didn't feel we had anything to lose by doing this. So was it like a negotiation like all right, give me give me X amount of time. I'm I'm gonna see if I can make something work. Yeah, I'd say three months. Oh three month. That's it? I recommend not saying that. So you you asked for three months. Uh how long did it actually take? It took three years.

And so were you just rolling being like I'm just three more months away? Or what happened? Pretty much. Yeah. You know, it's like waiting for a bus. You're like, you know, we're three months in. It's obviously gonna happen soon. Um And so the goal. Like when we left it wasn't even to make our first million like when I left to do My entire one hundred percent goal was to earn as much money doing my own thing.

as I was earning working for someone else. Gotcha. So what w that was that number? What's the target for you at that time? Well we were freelance, we were both working. Between us we were making about three hundred Thousand dollars a year. Which was great back in ninety nine. I mean it was really good m money, so it wasn't like super easy to get to that level. But also felt that that must be achievable. So that was the goal. And and then if I could get there I felt I'd actually be happy just doing that the rest of my life. Right. But then there would always be that opportunity that maybe

You go to the next level beyond that, right? Yeah. And so you were like okay, if I can make as much money as I'm making in my job, but doing my own thing, I'll be happy. And uh did you have an ideal already, or it was like First day at home, okay, time to think of ideas. So the first idea that we Started on. And I did it with a a friend of mine to begin with, the very first idea.

And it was called interview test. That's used some startups recently doing this. Okay. And uh The idea was uh if someone was applying for a job the a technical job, programming job, you want to know how good they are technically. Right. So you'd send them a link with a timer and they would answer questions and do some exercises and you'd find out how good they were at certain programming languages. I literally had someone pitch me this idea yesterday. He's like, You know, we need a screener, we need a a practical test. Yeah, there are I can't remember name. There's some startups now doing that, but this was twenty years ago and I think probably a little too ahead of its time and we pretty much developed it, never went live with it.

Came up with another idea, so we pivoted. Okay. So you didn't even ship it. You were like you got excited by something else. Yeah, basically. And so the other idea We we knew that was a hard one to market. Like it would be a slog. So the other idea was purely viral. And it was called Lemon Link and it was a self updating address book, so similar to kind of Plaxo.

type thing, but not software purely web based. So we developed that, did go live with it, and got, I think, by the time we close it down, a total of about two thousand registered members. Okay. Not the most vital website ever. At the time were you like, hey, two thousand? Not bad. Or were you like this is pretty bad. I mean th the it's funny looking back in the ninety like nineties, early two thousands, like a million was the holy g when w you know, your website the first million users rather than the first million dollars was kind of if you could get to a million users you were like You'd made it. Right. Internet land, yeah.

I mean th so that's that's why I picked million for this podcast, because I remember when I was young, all my hypotheticals like would you cut off your arm for a million dollars?'Cause I thought Well a million dollars that's like infinite dollars. That's all the dollars. Right. And uh when you're a kid it is. When I was a kid it was it was, right. And and I and I th and I think for many people still today they're like Shit, if I had a million dollars I wouldn't have any problems type of thing. So I think million is just this Fan you know, like this sort of fantastic number that exists in people's brain. Million users, million dollars. I know now it's sort of creeping into you know Tens of millions or a billion is the new billions of millions. Yeah, you need to add a coma nowadays. Yeah. But I'm I'm still in the million lens. So so you wanted Lemon Link to work. It's not working. Right. And you're just at home

But how are you feeling at this time? You're you're in a bedroom, you're working on this, you know, you guys have Isabella, you have your first baby. Yeah. Um, what's life like at this time during during this period? It was I'm a little bit stressful'cause we didn't have like financial security. But at the same time I was enjoying it. I was enjoying the learning process and you know, I felt I was creating things. It felt like a very creative process. And Yeah, our daughter was born sort of during the period of the early startup days. And so we entered parenthood and then came up with another pivot. Okay. Well new startup really, not really a pivot. And that was called babysitting circle. Ladies and gentlemen, if you want to make that first million, you've got to delegate responsibilities.

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Monday.com. That's who we use to organize things for the podcast. Highly recommend. Checking it out. Basically parents babysit for other people's children in a circle. And so you kind of exchange credits within the circle. Sometimes people use tokens. And so we kind of took that online and created a digital thing where you could find a local babysitting circle and and hopefully join one and do didn't really work. And what was going wrong? Is this execution? Is this in your opinion, all right, nobody knows, but is it you weren't doing a good job or was it the market wasn't there? Yeah. I mean that one again, I w now we've moved away from the viral thing. We thought it would be somewhat virile'cause parents all know other local parents and they would tell them about it and ask them to join, right? But it wasn't like

like ever gonna be exponentially vile. I don't know. I mean I think every start up every like new website we launched, I felt Oh I know so much. now that I didn't know before. You never know what you don't know. Right. And then the next one would be like, Oh my God, the last one I don't know have a clue what I was doing. Now I think I've really worked it out. And of course each time I was wrong. Eventually it became true. But yeah, it just went from one to the next. And this all happened relatively quickly. It wasn't like I was spending one to two years on each. You know, spending maybe six months. Yeah. And then moving on to another completely And what were the big things, I mean, I don't even know if you can remember now, but what were the big kind of like realizations? What were those big learnings when you looked back, you're like, Oh shit, I didn't know this or I didn't understand this before, but now I know. And part of it is just becoming technically better. So it's becoming a lot faster and

able to build more stable websites. And this is back in the day when there wasn't any kind of cloud hosting, so you know, your vacuum servers and doing the whole shebang on my own. So there's definitely a technical learning, but I think the The thing that I should have like insisted on and not done anything other than was Vokes and Vile. 'Cause the the problem that we always hit upon was I never tried to

raise any real money from anyone uh that would allow us to like have a real marketing budget. And so I was coming up with these ideas that then needed marketing and marketing was not my four day. Like I'm not a sales marketing guy. And so I was like creating products, but then unable to convince people to use them. Right. And didn't have the budget, even if I knew how to spend that money really wisely, I just wasn't gonna be very good at that. So I do a little bit of Google AdWords and like that was sophisticated for me. Right. So had I focused on Vile I could have you know, only becomes a technical challenge, right? But then you've got to focus on products that are inherently viable. So I kind of eventually

Worked out. You found your sweet spot, really. Yeah. We did one other website that was another you know pay to get m customers. You write your will online. It's called Fendly Wheels. Okay. Great name. Yeah. The Unfriendly Wills website never go anywhere. Sounds like it would be a good bar too, you know. Oh this is friendly Wills. We Will's the bartender, he makes great drinks. Yeah. So that one didn't work either. And then eventually We hit on an idea. And did you lose confidence at all during this time?'Cause most people would, you know

I don't know if you just don't have that gene. No, I'm too arrogant to these confidence. I mean a a little despondent at times. You know, I think my friends were like, Why don't you go get a job? When friends start having like semi interventions. But I mean the reality was I was enjoying doing this so much more than I ever was.

Like my last job was like just a hell of a miserable job. And I just hated it. And This was just this was fun. I was sitting at home. I was very self disciplined. I was working from a spare bedroom, but I would get up early in the morning and then take like a twenty minute lunch break and then work through to kind of early evening hours. And just loved every moment of it. Doing it. It was like creating something, learning, building that didn't have the financial success, we mortgaged our uh flat twice. So

it went up in value by about five to three. And so we took money out twice and basically lived off that. Okay. All right. So no stranger to risk. Um And so you I like the I like the way you're thinking about that because I've worked on projects in both fronts. I've worked on projects where I'm like This will be great if it works. And then when it doesn't work, which it's most likely not gonna work, then I'm bummed out and I'm like, Fuck, that was a waste, you know? But then Uh, you know, yeah, there's learnings, but like I wasn't if I wasn't enjoying doing it, A, it's hard to just wake up and do it every day. But B then success is kinda dependent on it working out. Right. And now

I've basically made it a mandatory thing where I'm only gonna do projects where I enjoy doing them. So at the very least I have a good time. Yeah, and I I would always prioritize enjoying work over any financial. I mean, obviously you do need to do something where you can afford to live. Yes. I I certainly spend a huge portion of my life working. So if I don't enjoy doing the thing that I spend more time doing than anything else. W what am I doing it for? S some later happiness. Yeah. Right. So and that's become one thing that and it's not always obvious because you're it's so easy to be like

Planning. Like it was the John Lennon made the quote famous, like Life is what happens whilst you're busy making other plans, right? And I just think it's such a such a true quote that it's so easy to say, Well, once I've done this and then that and then that Then everything's gonna be great. Right. And then I'll be happy and trap. Yeah, and the moment of arrival is is very finite. The journey is really long. So don't like optimise for that one moment.

where you're like, Oh, I'm ecstatically happy'cause that worked. Yeah. And then like, Well then what? And what do you do next? Something after that, you know. you finally stumble into, you know, that first thing that starts to work. Right. Uh Describe what that is and how you even stumbled into it. So the website was called Birthday Alarm. When we did one of our

early websites, Lemon Link. One of the options on that was you could enter a birthday. Right. And No one ever said anything nice about Lemon Link of the two thousand members. No one ever said, Oh, thanks for creating this, it's awesome. The only thing people ever commented on I think it was my cousin.

kind of commentated and for New Zealand emailed me and and I think we used to send out like a reminder to say it was someone's birthday. And so I think he might have got a reminder saying it's my birthday. And he said, Oh that's really cool'cause you know I didn't actually know your birthday. Um and then he sort of sent me a Nice email or an e card, I can't remember what. Nice. And I thought, Oh, okay, that's cool. So I just it just kinda stuck in my head that that was cool. Then um

And then we thought why don't we just why don't we try? Just say. If we can Now we're thinking viral vir. Like can we do a w a website and all it does is just remind people of birthdays. That's it. Super simple. Simpler than Lemon Link by far in many ways.

And We knew it were we thought it could be inherently vile because the reality is if you think about whose birthday do you really know by heart, you know, your like children's your parents, siblings You probably don't know your cousins. You may know one or two best friends, but that's it. Yeah. The vast majority of people you know in life, you don't know their birthdays. This is obviously before Facebook. Yes. Now you know far too many people's birthdays that you don't care about. So you have to in order to use it, you send an email and ask all of your friends to enter their birthday'cause you don't know it. A fair request. Not spamming your friends just saying, Hey, what's your birthday? I wanna keep track of it. I wanna remember it. This was back in the day when there weren't

A lot of email requests from websites. Like viral things weren't there weren't a lot of inherently vile websites or people even really trying to do it for some reason. And so you got this fair request saying, Hey, I'd like to know your birthday and be reminded each year. Can you enter it here? The response rate to that email was very good. And then the next question was, would you like to be reminded of your friend's birthday, the one that just asked you? Mm. So a lot of people would say yes. Well, to be reminded, you need an account. So you create an account. Do you want to be reminded of lots of other friends' birthdays? You only got the one on the calendar. Let's get everybody else. And so then you take them through the email flow. And at the time we did

copy and paste a link. So we had kind of a little you should all C C everywhere, but and like a very short email. So it was more than a link. It was like a pre can email and a text editor. Yeah. And just a one line. Hey I'd like to be reminded of your birthday. Can you click on this link and enter it for me. People would copy that into their address book and send it. And It didn't work immediately.

Day one, but we did some tweaks and then it we I remember getting up one morning and this was probably the most Excited. I've ever been. During the entire like Career. Yeah. Like more excited probably than any highlight of Bebo even. And So and I got up one morning, we'd done this little tweak. Do you remember what the tweak was?

Even around copy and paste.'Cause I think originally we had people entering like enter all your friends' emails. Right. Trying to do it. Yeah. And then we're like, Why don't we just do a text area? I think it's my brother's idea, actually. Why don't we just do this uh text area box thing and let them copy and use their own email client rather than us sending and getting blocked'cause our mail server's not Listed. Right. And so we got out the next one and let's see how it did. And we went in and it we had reports written so we could see how well things were doing. But because we had so few users, the one report we had was a list of names of those who had joined. And the timestamp at which they joined. Right.

'Cause you know, we'd get a few people a day. Yeah. So you're like, hey, Margaret. Great. And so we got up in the morning and then we w clicked run on the report. It pulled up and I was like. Oh Jesus, look at that.

And all all these names were listed, but they were like qu you know, within a minute there were a few each minute. Oh my God. And so I then had to write another report to actually count. How many users there were I think overnight we'd we'd got A good few hundred users.

And even then it was kind of ramping up. And so we we sort of jumped up and down and did a little dance in the uh office come bedroom. And kinda celebrate us like We've done it. We've done it. That's it. You know, three hundred users not gonna be great. But then we thought You know, this is ramping up. We could get bigger and bigger. And so we carried on working on it and we got it to the point through the copy and paste mechanism where we're getting ten thousand users per day. Wow. Which again back in uh well this was now two thousand. That was a lot of users. And so you're you this is like a sort of

magic bean stalk, it's like, you know, y you just wake up and you get users for free. Yeah. Every day. Yeah. And so and and and at this time there's no business model. No, I'm sorry about that. But you're like I'm over the moon anyways because people are actually using the thing I built. Yeah, I I was still living with this this number of a million users in my head. Yeah. Right. So if you're getting ten thousand a day. We need a hundred days.

And we're gonna get to that million, right? So we just have to wait a few months and not screw it up. Yeah. And we'll get there. And so what what happens from there? Well, we still weren't making any money, but We were in England at the time. And we moved. to the US April twenty second of two thousand and two.

So we'd been doing birthday larm for a while then and we had accumulated a few million. users and we were doing we were just doing through I think it was tribal fusion ad network. We were just putting ads On the pages. But It's not the sort of website where you come back to every day. Yeah. So we were sending a significant number of reminders. And we've started doing some greeting cards. We thought well what's the one thing you're gonna do if you know it's someone's birthday, you wanna wish them happy birthday. So send them a card. So we thought we'll combine, we'll use the viable mechanics of birthday reminders to grow and we'll use the greeting cards to one day monetize in a more meaningful way than we could for adds.

And so from the ads at that point we were doing ten thousand dollars a month in revenue. And that was You know, to pay for our living costs, the server costs. Yeah. All the business costs and everything. So we would

Living. In a very conservative manner. And we were just about breaking even on ten thousand a month. So We haven't reached a point where

We were used to earn. of kind of financial independence, as it were. Right. But not living as well as we used to. It felt like a win. It felt like a win. It felt like an a a meaningful milestone. Yeah. And so we moved to the US. I literally we had two servers. And you move because for work reasons or just life reasons you just so you choose from the East Bay family. Yeah, we always agreed we'd m move between countries. We both wanted to experience living in each other's country. Yeah. And so the time had come. We're like, well There's no reason that we can't move and you thought, you know, Silicon Valley may be not the worst place to do a website. And were you talking to other entrepreneurs, internet people at this time? Were you learning from them? Were you getting nobody knew about birthday alarm, nobody's getting pressed, nobody's I thought I'd proven nothing. I was not

worthy of meeting other people that did internet stuff. Okay. So it was literally myself and Sochi was uh was also a programmer, got a job at that same insurance company. So she was helping me on some of the programming as well. So the both both of us were doing programming in the early days. And she was doing it between children. We had another child born in the UK before we moved. But yeah, we just made the switch. So I packed one of our two servers in a suitcase. Checked it in. Flew it to uh San Francisco, when an active.

Yeah, I did pack your server, check it in. We're acting in a colo, I think we were down Uh synchronise the databases. I think we were down for like two minutes. Well say like flipped. Right. Over from from the UK to the US hosting. Uh probably violated all sorts of data.

Right. Thousands of birthdays lost. Yeah. Uh anyway, we uh we we made that jump and um And now we're in Silicon Valley, still not meeting anyone who worked in the internet space. And so where did things start to turn where you go from sort of the ten thousand a month to I believe you got to like ten thousand a day? What was that? jump the how how did you sort of ramp it up because birthday alarm the user base grew from, you know, zero to I don't know, where's that now? It's a

Fifty million more? I mean that I think we still actually home birthday. I think since its inception it's probably registered about two hundred million users. But incredible. Right. twenty years pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, we're coming up for our twentieth birthday. So it's a long time, obviously a lot of those are not active. We still haven't made the million. So we haven't got to that part. Yeah. We can end the podcast when we get there. Uh we

We were doing it we were still making ten thousand a month. We were living in Walnut Creek in the East Bay, rented an office, like a Tiny office. we could both just about fit two desks. We were sharing it with uh two lawyers. Well big office with two lawyers and an accountant. Uh one of the lawyers shouted on the phone a lot, which was always entertaining. He was a litigation lawyer. And so we were there, still not meeting anyone.

And then a friend of mine emailed me a link. guy called Morgan Soudin. Still a good friend today. E mailed me a link. Of

Friends though. And said, Check this out. I know so I clicked on the link I was like. Oh my God, that's amazing. This is really, really cool.

And was just kind of immediately enthralled by it. So thought Okay. So like I was like

copying the birthday alarm code base. You're like we're doing this now. Yeah. Change name and start you know, it was amazing, ninety percent of the code I I use from birthday alarm.'Cause we had all these like back end systems and so on. Customer support and so on. So started developing this new website and my friend so I did that with my friend Morgan who sent me the link. And my brother was also part of that. And he uh he owned a domain name called Ringo. Wingo.com, which he'd bought just'cause he could for fifteen hundred dollars, he saw it available. And he said, Why don't we use this name for it?

And so I think about two weeks later we launched Ringo dot com as a direct competitor to Frenzer. So it was an early early social network. Um And kind of applied everything we'd learn on viral marketing to that point. And I think within

Yeah, by the time we sold it we had about four hundred thousand users. But We started selling it. Three months after

The day that he sent me that link. From the day you heard of it We were selling our business and it was definitely a mistake to have sold it. We shouldn't have sold it. I still I didn't I was still only making ten thousand a month. This was now incurring way bigger costs because this thing was far more intense and computing power than the previous one'cause people were spending all day on it. So we had four hundred thousand users, but a lot of them were active. And so I spent six thousand dollars on a new database server, which was like A lot of cash to save up. I racked it and we outgrew it like the next week. It's like fuck. I can't do this.

And of course they should have gone and raised money. Right. But that wasn't even a consideration. Didn't really think about it. Yeah. Didn't even speak to a V C didn't pick up the phone. Right. And then I went to my we went Sochi and I went to our first ever Like internet networking event. There we'd ever been to And the founder of of of Friends, Jonathan, was there.

Uh on a panel. Talking about. Station airwagon, of course. And we were at this event and we're just listening and then uh we spoke to a couple of people and we said, Oh, we're doing this thing Ringo and then two people that night said, We wanna buy Ringo

Okay. Yeah. So one was iVillage and the other was a company Tickle. Yeah. Not wasn't like a formal offer, but it's like we'd love to talk to you about this. Yeah. So I had some follow up meetings with um ended up meeting the the founders of tickle. And ended up selling it to them. And it took about three months to close the sale.

So it took as long to close the sale as it did to start to come to build the entire business. Yeah. If you can call it a business. And we were making a tiny bit of money from advertising, but not. And how did you guys negotiate the price? Did you just have a number in mind and or did they make an offer? They made an offer. Yeah. It was mostly stock with some cash. So I think we sold it for very little. Again, still haven't got to the million dollar bet. Right. We sold it for I think in in consideration at the time, I think it was around seven hundred thousand dollars. Okay. And at the time to give some perspective. So friends had just reached that holy grail of a million users and we were at four hundred thousand.

So we were the second biggest social network in the world with four hundred thousand users. Right. And Friends had been valued at I think fifty million and we sold it for like peanuts, really. Yeah. So I totally should have gone and raised money. Yeah. And got some help on scaling it and some money. But we sold it. It ended up the tickle then sold later, so it ended up being worth two million dollars. Because the tickle stock was went up in value. And this whole time birthday alarm's still kicking off money. Yeah. And so I went to work.

As part of the condition of the sale, I had to work with them for a while. I can't remember, it was three or six months. I would work for Tickle. But I kept birthday alarm. They didn't buy birthday alarm. Um And whilst I was at Tickle, now I've f suddenly I was now meeting other engineers, other people, other entrepreneurs, right? And they were doing something which no one else was doing. Which was

doing the uh address book uh importing scraping. So there was no APIs for like Hotmailing Yahoo. Gmail was around then, but very small. So the two big ones were Hotmailing Yahoo. Right. So instead of copy paste this and send the email on your own, you say connect to Hotmail. Yeah. And it says import your address button. Here's all your email contacts, push send. Yeah. So they were doing uh Tickle did a um they were called emote and renamed as Tickle at the time that they bought us, but they they were doing these online quizzes. And so they had a famous one which was like your what type of dog are you? It went super vile. Tens of millions of users. What type of dog are you? Uh, I can't remember. I don't believe in that crap. Uh They were doing this thing and it wasn't

The funny thing was it wasn't really working for them. Like they put it live and it didn't really move the needle for them. And I don't really know why, but I thought it was very clever. And I hadn't seen anyone else doing it. So I think they were the first people to do it. So I went home one weekend'cause I'm still working for them. And it's like, I'm gonna put that live on birthday alarm.

So I work the weekend, put it live. Sunday night. And then looked at the data like twenty four hours later. And

We'd add it. A hundred thousand new members. So we were still adding ten thousand a day. And then twenty four hours later we just added a hundred thousand members. And I was sort of ecstatic and thought, This is amazing. But then I also thought they're obviously gonna cut me off.

It's not I don't think they had anything in their terms of use against it, but like all they had to do was block my IP address'cause it's all coming from one server and I'm not going to be able to do it. Well they're gonna send me a seasoned assist, right? And so I I was went live with Hotmail and Yahoo and then it just carried on working. And so the next day we added a hundred and fifty thousand. I think it peaked at just under two hundred thousand, but it stayed there And stayed at a hundred and fifty thousand for an entire year. Didn't draw. Today's the day. Yeah, and I cut the thing. And then every now and then it would actually stop working.

Because they change their code. Right. Well, so we're not doing it through an API. So I'd have to like log in, look at their HTML, work out how to delineate The different contacts and and then it's like oh now fix it. So I probably fixed it like a dozen times'cause they changed something. But every time my heart would think, Oh, they blocked me. Oh no they haven't, they just changed something. And so that was that was definitely like the turning point where We knew it'd be

successful and then during that period where I was working at Tickle, I went live, we'd done greeting cards on the website and I was like we need to start charging for greening cards. So we added his subscription was thirty ninety five for annual subscription Or you can send. Greeting cards.

And um So we went live with that whilst I think we're still working at Tickle. And then this was an uh everything's always a very round number in zeros for us for some reason, but the the first day we made ten thousand dollars. So we went from ten thousand dollars a month to ten thousand dollars a day. So financially this was by far the biggest transformation in our lives. And so

We never really did reach. The point. of what? the money we used to make in jobs we less went. Way over it in one guy. Yeah, that's how things tend to go, right? It's like things go from sort of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Right. To you overshoot because you've been investing in something that had more potential. Yeah. And so with that first year we made just shy of four million dollars, like the first twelve months of charging. And our expenses were the same. It was still Myself and Sochi in this little office, our colo costs were the same. Right. So we were still living pretty much on ten thousand a month, but we were making ten thousand a day. And that's when we we moved to San Francisco. We thought we can actually now afford San Francisco. So we moved into the city. Yeah, I mean we'd it we just carried on building birthday lawn. For a while. And then

wanted to go back to social networking. So we had to non compete when we sold the original social network. So we waited for that to expire. And In fact, before it even had expired. We

did another website which was going back to our first viral idea of Lemon Link and doing that again. And we called it Bebo and it was a self updating address book. And I was like, I'm gonna see if everything I've learned since we the same idea Yeah. But now better. But do it properly. And so we applied all of the viral techniques. Again, it was like You know. Birthday Larm, save as. Rename. Rename. All the vial mechanics, the scraping, all of that code will still valid. Super simple thing of just like instead of entering your birthday.

and to your contact details. I I love how you had two constraints. One was you basically between you and Zochi, you were the only programming talent you had. So you kind of just chose ideas that were somewhat similar. It's like okay, if I can reuse eighty percent of what I already built, great. Then I don't have to have, you know, weeks and weeks of engineering just to get something live. Right. And then two was Well I don't have money, nor do I really have a sort of sales and marketing background. That's not what I enjoy. So I'm gonna make products that are designed to be viral, where using the product invites more people to the product. Yeah. And those two constraints I feel like made your career. Whether you consciously chose them or or not. Those I mean those two things'cause if if you had had A whole bunch more resources, maybe you would have chosen other projects that weren't quite as in a high potential. And so I think that it's amazing how within those two constraints you found projects like Birthday Alarm, Ringo, Bebo that all were able to hit. Right.

Yeah. I mean the viral thing was we didn't hit on it in the very beginning, but it became apparent when we tried and failed at marketing. Right. And that's that's certainly stuck true for a long time, that we just focus on viral stuff. So the then the Bebo story started, this was now Uh January two thousand and five. We it took only a couple of days to develop it'cause it was pretty much the same website. And we went live and we had a million users after nine days of going live. Okay. It was the most viral website we've ever done by far, the the viral coefficient that

K factor, whatever you want to call it, was three point five. For reference, uh if it's over one, you've like. One is viral. One is viral. One is you're gonna win. Yeah. Three point five is like you're taking steroids. So every person who joined would get three and a half other people to join on average. And so I think on the ninth day we added three hundred and fifty thousand new members on one day and Bizarre, a hundred thousand of those. three hundred and fifty thousand were from Singapore.

So I had to look it up on a map. I looked up the population. I was like Jesus, we just like in one day got a meaningful percentage of the entire population of one country to join. Right. Yeah. Which was just bizarre. But as at the same time it was the most vile website we've ever done by far. It was also the least sticky. So I think two people came back. One of them was me. And then Naga again. She was back. Yeah. So yeah, I just didn't you know it was uh it was I kind of validated the original. Vile concept.

As I say, even when I started doing this, I remember speaking to Suchi about it and saying, You know no one's gonna use it. Like it's kind of an interesting academic exercise, but like self updating address books don't work. Yeah. I think they could work if Apple did it and build it into the f iPhone or if Google did it. But they don't work as like a standalone thing. 'Cause you end up getting Ten percent of your friends. entering their address book.

The contact details. But then they don't continue using it'cause who uses An address book with only ten percent of your contacts on it. And because they're not using it, they don't update it. So we ended up sort of calling it the non self updating self updating address program. So you realise that's not gonna work, but you're like Let's go back to that social networking thing. That sounds way more fun. Yeah, I mean it was kind of filling in a gap waiting for the an on compete to expire. Okay. So then we started adding photos to it. So we thought

Well, you you're not gonna visit and look up someone's address every day, but if people started sharing photos, so Flickr was a big hit around that time before that. So we thought why don't we use the virality of the contacts but make it also a photo sharing website, which then people may do frequently. And then obviously photo sharing becomes a big part of social networking. And so then that started working a little more, started getting some repeat use, some decent photos. And then we just I spent actually six months, which is the longest time I've ever spent. developing like a product. We spent six months actually developing the social network. We launched with a very simple social network, spent six months actually making it A social working, sorry, as opposed to social not working. Yeah, it took six months to go from like no engagement to really high engagement. And so paint a picture in people's minds so

Bebo at this time, is it like what we see kind of roughly with Facebook today or MySpace for those who remember that or Was there some core differences? If you think of early Friends and even early Facebook, it was kind of about profiles. And it was about posting on other people's pages and but you would post in like different widgets or different boxes. So you'd there'd be like a comment section or you could um you know take we we had quizzes you could take. So you would sort of engage on someone's page. There wasn't The concept of a newsfeed. So Facebook at the time didn't have the newsfeed concept, um, early Bebo days. What we did do was we did basically we did a newsfeed but as an email. So we'd send a daily email. We called it the ch changes.

You know?'Cause you know. He doesn't like sting. And so we'd send a daily email, we do all that. So that was a way of kind of pulling people back so they could see everything that happened. But I don't know why we didn't make that like dynamic. I think we just thought that would be really hard to do. 'Cause it was hard work creating this email in batch and working out all the differences, but we should have sat down and worked out how to do the actual newsfeed idea. But yeah, it wasn't dissimilar. Why did Facebook win? Because you had a great sale, but Bebo the product didn't necessarily like sort of become the de facto social networking site. So I think there's a few reasons. We we started a year So when we did our original

Webs so as you know, at Ringo we were probably six months before Facebook went live. So we were definitely very early. When we launched Bebo, we were a year. After Facebook. So we were always in catch up mode. They had considerably more funding. We raised we did one round and raised fifteen million dollars. They had considerably more funding. They were probably ten times the engineers. We were always in catch up. It's not like we had the lead and then they overtook us. But I do think they made some decisions that we didn't make early on, which kind of paid dividends. They insisted on real identities.

And we didn't. We were more sort of we were trying to be the kind of self expression of MySpace, but with the kind of product quality of Facebook and engineering of Facebook. That's where we were trying to kinda position it. And we thought that the middle ground would be the winning ground. Right. But it everyone enter started entering silly names. And then they'd enter names which had like hearts in it and like and then it was just all symbols for their name. And so you try to find a friend. A you couldn't remember what ridiculous combination of characters each friend had chosen to use for themselves. And then you couldn't search because I can't type heart in the search box. Not very easy anyway. So I think that that was one thing we we took off with a teenage demographic early on.

I I designed it for me and then realised obviously I have the mentality of a teenager'cause that's who it's resonating with. And it w I think it was hard then for the older demographic'cause it got it got branded as a teenage website. So it was hugely popular with teenagers. Like any like every single teenager almost bar none was in the UK and Ireland and New Zealand were using it. So I kind of called it playground vial. 'Cause fifty percent of our new users were actually just typing bebo.com in the UL and signing up. Right. They heard it they heard about it on the playground. They heard about it. It was true word of mouth marketing. And so it was very popular, but then we just we hit this ceiling and then we we grew in those other countries. We twenty percent of our page views were US based, sixty percent were UK uh sorry US based, sixty percent were UK based. And I think about twenty percent were Fifteen percent were in Ireland. We had these great markets that were English language and therefore easier to monetize and we didn't have to do the multilingual thing. We did later on, but we didn't need to in the early days.

And we But we just couldn't. In the end Facebook they kind of didn't care about other markets to begin with. They were very US centric. So they kind of left a little window open. So we launched and cared about

Bebo in the UK. I think they were just starting to do UK schools and colleges. And so we just took off there in without the the sort of threat and competitiveness of Facebook. But then eventually they started gaining traction. Right. And we could tell'cause they're talk people are talking about Facebook on Bebo. So we we could search and see, and people were like posting on their profile, don't use it anymore. on Facebook, here's the link. Right. And I'm like, Oh shit. And so you how did you come to the sort of realization or it's time it's time to sell? I don't I don't think from the outside people could see necessarily that it was

W was it clear for everybody or was it was more because you were in the middle of it you sort of knew before other people that it's time to sell? Well we I mean we had obviously we knew our own data, so We we've been growing for the first three years. of we've just been growing every month, like exponentially. Like every month was a new record. in every measure. And it was very exciting to be doing that. So we'd sort of we'd celebrate and have a champagne toast whenever we hit a certain milestone, but then we found we're doing it like every one or two days. And then it it tailed off. It started didn't always grow at that rate. And then for the six months prior to I think closing the sale we didn't grow.

We didn't shrink. But we didn't grow. And You know, you could tell publicly on something like Alexa that we were kind of flat. And whereas prior we've been hockey sticking.

And I was trying to get it far, like when I hadn't really spent any time on growth for a very long time. Because I didn't need to,'cause it just kept growing. But then we're starting like how do we get it growing again? And and it was evident that you know, as much as we could get someone to come in through the front door, someone else was leaving out the back door to go typically to Facebook. And so it was just evident that this is really hard to do this. Certainly hard to do it alone. And so we we ended up uh Joanna Shields, who was the company president at the time. I think did a presentation. She was invited to present to the Time Warner Board.

About. social networking. And so she's kind of shared her vision of of the social networking landscape and what was happening at Bebo and then they were interested. So it kind of stemmed from that. Then we uh appointed Alan and Co the bank. We ran a process, so we spoke to other people, other companies to see try to get the highest bidder, but it ended up going back to AOL. There's been a a sort of question mark of okay, it's sold for this much. Is that just a matter of market timing like You know.

Can't buy Facebook. MySpace already got bought. Bebo's sort of the uh you know, you're sort of the last girl on the dance floor. If if if if somebody wants if somebody wants to have a social network, you know, you're gonna have to pay a premium or what really caused How did it get to that number? How did it get to eight hundred fifty million? There's no like real formula for valuing We I think we were doing tw last year we did twenty million dollars in revenue, I believe. So it was a mordable of revenue it wasn't gonna work. It was all about the potential of what it could be. I mean you're right in your analysis that we we were kind of the only one you could buy. In many ways.

Like we were Basically we were the third place. Right. We were in the medals, but only just. There were other ones like Tagged and High Five that were not dissimilar and may have even had more page views, but they were far more dominant in markets, non English language, harder to monetize markets. Right. So Facebook at the time had raised

They've done a round with Microsoft. Everyone felt it was overvalued, but they valued at fifteen billion. So Yeah. They set the benchmark. Yeah. And we we were shooting for a billion. That was kind of the holy grail.'Cause you know, I like my zero's on the end. Yeah. Yeah. It's gotta be a round number. We didn't quite get there. But w that was the kind of the negotiation and it's like look, it's a really good discount versus Facebook. Right. And I mean the Hope AOL was the Aim was

A OL instant messenger. We're still a big deal. Like they had, I think, a hundred million users on it at the time. Like it was one of the big IMs. So the the the vision that they had was merge, aim and bebo and then One plus one equals three. Yeah, that was the hope. Yeah. But of course people already had their social network. So they didn't want this other thing forced on. So the reality wasn't in entirely flawed as an idea, but the reality was it didn't really turn out that way. Yeah. I see. What's it like waking up that day when it finally closes and you you hit refresh on your bank account and

You know, you see, you know, seven hundred million dollars there. Like what what was that like? Was it what was the emotion like? And you you surprised me with your answer. I can't remember what I said to you about that, man. Well, just like I mean, even now, like just thinking back, what was that like? It wasn't even a single moment of like Helly Yulia, we've done it. There was kind of this relief that would go through body is quite a stressful process of a cell cycle. Like which goes on for I think around six months for in our case. We're also unemployed the day of

closing. We were the only Sochi and I were the only two people not offered a job by AOL. Right. And so we were like, Okay, what do we do?'Cause we've been enjoying work, maybe not the sales cycle so much, but generally we really enjoyed the Beaver journey. The day it closed, I think we went to get some money out and saw the bank balance and it was like That was kinda funny. Yeah. I I just had uh James Hong from Hot or Not on and he said that he used to go to the ATM and just print the receipt. Like don't take don't take any money out, just be like, Show my balance and just be like, Yeah, I got a million bucks in there. That moment. We should have printed it and kept it. We didn't. Um We obviously transferred it out of the the single bank account. Account quite quickly. But I think we got a little bit of money out and then went to watch a um a film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Good movie. Good movie. We got the uh Madine ticket, which is a little cheaper than the evening ticket. Always good to save money. Always always thinking about that. And it was the most fun thing for us to do'cause we hadn't been to watch a film without our kids. for a very, very long time. Like probably some years. Right. And so we could go and watch a Radar movie.

Just the two of us without the kids. And and it was really enjoyable. We did enjoy doing that. Okay. So that was the first thing you did. Yeah. Great. And you used to work really freaking hard. This is what Lucinda tells me. She's like 'Cause I've only known you sort of uh after that Bebo journey. And so I always thought, Man, Michael's really laid back guy. He doesn't do any work. Yeah, he doesn't doesn't do a lot of work. He likes to do a lot of things, well rounded life. You like to travel, you spend time with your family, you spend time with friends. And uh she was like No no no, that's not what Michael was like back in the Bebo days. Like Michael used to like not go home. Michael was like, you know, obsessed. Is that like Fair? Is that a good characterization?

Yeah, I certainly worked. I've actually started doing that again recently, which is kinda funny. First time since selling Bivo, but yeah, I would work. Uh I don't. I think p other people to have work longer hours, I'd probably do seventy to eighty hours a week. But I'd also never really stop thinking about it. Like I'll go out in the evening, I have dinner with someone, I'd be talking about it. I'd socialise pretty much only with company people. And so you're always talking about it, you're always thinking, you're always brainstorming. I carried on coding To the very end, I think.

I was still spending fifty percent of my time writing code. All the way through to the end. Mm-hmm. I remember proudly checking in code on my last day. I'm gonna do another check in. Right. Probably boat the entire thing. And I enjoyed that that coding part. My favorite part of it was being

in the engineering team. And so we had an open plan office and I sat, you know. basically in the middle of all the engineers and you know, it's engineering product. That was kind of my passion in building the business. Right. You know, when this podcast comes out, there's gonna be people out there who listen and they say uh Michael seems like a great guy. Uh I loved your story. And they're gonna wanna reach out to you and all that stuff. And I always give guests you know an option. One A you can you can shout out a Twitter or some way that people can reach you if you want to be reached. So that's one option for you. And then the second thing is I ask, what type of people do you want reaching out? Because obviously

It's no fun when everybody just goes and asks you for something. So hey hey, invest in my company or that sort of thing. But some people who are full time investors love that. They're like, Hey, send me all your projects. I wanna I want deal flow. Um is there a type of person that you like being reached out to by that you actually enjoy when they when they reach out to you and you're saying Yeah, really talented engineers who want to come and work with me. Okay. And why why would a really talented engineer want to come work with you? They have many options on the table. What's the what's the pitch for them? Well, we're working on sort of getting the band back together. Employing Some of the former best Bebo engineers and close friends that I've worked with. technically in the past. So we're doing hospitality software. We opened a private members club in San Francisco called the Battery five years ago. It's kind of the biggest project I've undertaken since selling Bebo that was.

Time consuming. And we realise that hospitality software sucks, so starting writing our own software. So we've been I Started doing that six years ago and I wrote the code myself to begin with, prior to opening and a little bit after, and then got a co founder and sort of trundled along for a few years and then this year decided that we're really gonna go for it and build this out and sell it to other private clubs and hotels and

And so it's just just trying to build a a super engineering product centric business that's doing a very, very ambitious project because providing all of the software. Like not just things like point of sales and dining reservations, but membership and events and finance systems and you know, it's a little bit ridiculous the scope of what we've taken on. But the problem with hospitality software is most businesses use like five, six, seven pieces of software

And they try to integrate them and they don't really work. Right. So the only solution is one system. I think it's the The only way to do amazing things.'Cause once you have once you own the entire code stack, the entire You can implement features which are then cross systems. And so you get these kind of magic moments as we call them internally, uh where there's kind of the aha moment of like How the hell did that happen? What's an example of one of those? So

The point of sale system will be integrated with the membership database and knows when people have checked in at the front door. We have a uh we're developing an app for members, which is very community centric, but then it allows once we've installed the app to know through a beacons around the club where they are. So we know where members are not in a kind of stalky way, but if they walk up to the bar we know who just walked up to the bar. And there can be iPads behind the bar saying who's at the bar. The POS knows who's near the bar. So when you go to open a tab. So now you don't have to ask who they are, their membership number. Right. You greet them by name. You greet them by name you know. Yeah, all just paid you. So you like we do like a Guinness Michael. And then at the end they walk away and then they kind of Uber style payments. When they leave the club, we know when they've left the club then. And then they get an email saying, Here's an email we see of the money you spent and we've charged that card. So it's just kind of the like the seamless beautiful moments that you can have as they kind of progress through the cloud. Love it. And so and how does one of those engineers reach out to you? Facebook. Yeah. Michael Birch. Yeah. I love it. Anything else you wanna leave us with? Any other

Words of wisdom, any other any other any other things you want to say on the podcast before we we sign off here? Optimized for fulfillment. Mm-hmm. Well, like when you say optimized for fulfillment, to me that means You know, may maybe by default people are optimizing for something else. So like what do you think people are optimizing for, if not fulfillment? I think often of financial success. And so like where's a situation where you are like, I'm not optimizing for financial success here, I'm optimizing for fulfillment.

I think when I first started on the journey It wasn't The goal was never about. Money. So that I left my job.

because I thought I would enjoy this. I didn't like reporting to people. And I didn't Like To develop. crappy systems that they didn't care about and had no passion for.

So I think you know that's That very first step was What Entirely doing that. Mm-hmm. And you know, to begin with it certainly was a sacrifice'cause I went from

making good money to making zero money. So Yeah, there was definitely a compromise in that. Well, you heard it here, folks. Quit your job. Yeah. Everyone should quit the job. That's what we will leave you with. Mainly our president. Love it. Uh all right, Michael. Uh thanks for coming in. Thanks for doing this. I know you don't do a ton of these, so really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Cool. Cala, cala.

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