Carvana's Ernie Garcia on near-bankruptcy in 2022, same-day delivery, and why AI fits their vertical model

Speaker 2: We love story

Speaker 1: time. And our guests.

Speaker 2: We have our next guest here

Speaker 1: in Of the show.

Speaker 2: In the studio live in person. We have Ernie Garcia from Carvana, the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for stopping by. Please grab a seat. How

Speaker 1: you doing? I'm doing great.

Speaker 6: How you doing?

Speaker 2: How's business?

Speaker 6: It's good. It's very good. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Walk me through I mean, maybe we should start with the very beginning, but the thing that I'm most interested in is the the the the journey throughout COVID, post COVID, all the crazy rocky times in the market, how you got through that, where the business is today, what changed, what didn't, all that journey.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And and and yeah. The context here is typically our interviews are very much focused on the present, but the first time we have someone on the show, we like to give people some context. Awesome.

Speaker 6: Yeah. For sure. Well, let me start with this. These gongs are awesome. For every car sale that we had for probably the first two years, maybe three years of Carvana's history, we had a gong that was percent that big. Amazing. We'd

Speaker 2: hear That's huge.

Speaker 6: Huge gong. That's great. It's funny to see those. What's your guys' story with the gongs?

Speaker 2: Just to announce like fundraisings, big milestones, I big don't know how we landed on it. We just thought it was a funny prop and and then

Speaker 8: It is.

Speaker 2: Just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

Speaker 6: Surprisingly fun. Then it catches on.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Basically maxed it out. Yeah. This was like the largest gong we could find.

Speaker 2: You have to go like fully custom after this and it gets Yeah. Really crazy crazy.

Speaker 6: Yeah. Ours was a little smaller than that one.

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Speaker 2: What was the first car you sold? It So

Speaker 6: would have been probably so we launched in January 2013. I think it took us like two months to sell our first car. Okay. But, yeah. Mean, maybe I'll try to give like a high level setup. I think the goal with Carvana was to try to build a different supply chain, different cost structure, vertically integrate so that customer experiences could economically be simple. I think there are many dealers out there excuse me, I'm fighting a little cold right now. There are many dealers out there that I think, you do a great job with what they've got, but I think buying a car is not the most beloved customer experience in The US. And I think the reason for that is just there are so many dealers doing things the same way the share cost structure and I think the economic pressures mean you have to maximize the amount of revenue you get out of that back room. Mhmm. Customers don't love that experience. So the idea was can we build a different kind of customer experience with different costs and, you know, more vertically integrated that, you know, maximize revenue is in a better way

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: So the customer experiences can be really simple. We launched in 2013. We had to build a ton of stuff to do that. We got a totally different supply chain. We buy cars from customers. We ship them to these large locations where we recondition them. We put a thousand dollars of parts and labor in every car. Mhmm. We have our own logistics system. We deliver from that location to the customer's door. Our website is fully transactable. Today, have 50,000 cars. So customers can go on there. They can get financing. They can get a trade in value. They can toggle a warranty on or off, and then have the car delivered to their door. Sure. So really different experience, but it was it was a lot to build because inside of that, we've got a retailer, we've got a remanufacturing company, we've got a logistics company, we've got a finance company. So there was so much to build and I think as a result of that, we had a really volatile time. Mhmm. So early on, you know, took us a couple months to sell our first car. We got

Speaker 1: all the infrastructure was built and you were just chasing your first sale? Or was more like you were kinda getting off the ground?

Speaker 2: Google Ads? Like, how did you get the first customer?

Speaker 6: It's it was it was all kinds. Yes. It was Right. I mean, auto trader back then was like a big part of our advertising just because customers were already there. Yeah. But, yeah, I I would say early on we had the the experience that the customer went through felt, you know, 60% similar to today. Mhmm. But it was, you know, like duct tape and bubble gum in the background that was making it all happen, and it was just at a really small scale. But customers loved it. Once they got over the skepticism, the very first delivery, you know, I went on, and the first thing the guy did was he literally opened the hood to see if an engine was in there. Because he was kinda like, you know, he got in arguments with his friends about whether or not, you know, the car would

Speaker 2: It was

Speaker 6: looking even actually be like the real car.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: So I think they loved it if they got over that fear. Then, you know, building the rest of the business at real scale and Yeah. Moving through all of those customer concerns.

Speaker 2: But you gotta finish the story. Was there an engine inside?

Speaker 6: Was there what's Was there an There was an engine. Okay. There was So the good news in this case, was an engine. That's generally the case. So

Speaker 1: So so the the pushback in the early days, I can imagine a lot of people maybe on the investor side is like, cool idea, but you're not gonna have a business selling cars at scale sight unseen. Like, was that was that some of the pushback? Because like personally, growing up on on the Internet and I I've probably bought five or six cars over the years sight unseen where they're out of state. Maybe they were on bring a trailer or some I just found a spec I liked at some dealer or whatever. Facebook not yet, but You're big on

Speaker 2: IYKYK deals. Right? You get that?

Speaker 1: No. No. But for me, when I would buy, you know, I'd buy cars some random state, get it, it would just show up at my house. It was, you know, amazing even if it was some third party logistics provider or whatever. But I would have people tell me, you just bought it? Like, you never even saw the car? And I was like, no. Dealer or whoever it was seemed seemed legit. And it's worked out every time. But I can imagine there's maybe a generational shift of like people that have just grown up super used to buying everything online. And so the idea of buying a car online is just kind of feels normal already.

Speaker 6: Yeah. I think that was the primary business model concern and the primary unlock Yeah. Because I think it's a totally reasonable question, like, will customers buy a car side on scene? Mhmm. I think your experience points to many will. And, you know, there's like an interesting stat. At least as of the time we went public in 2017, 30% of customers didn't even test drive a car before buying it. So they might not have had your experience, but an experience somewhat like that. Yeah. But I think that was the primary question. But if you could resolve that question and we kind of solved with a seven day return policy, which we think is better for most customers

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Then you unlock a completely different supply chain because that's what enables you to no longer have to have the cars at the point of sale and distributed around the country. So you can instead replace that kind of real estate with the logistics network and you can give customers access to tens of thousands of cars and you can deliver to them less expensively. Yeah. So that was like the primary, I would say, business model question. And I think once we sold kind of like a 100 cars and went on those deliveries and got a feel for where people were, we felt pretty confident that was gonna be okay. I think another question that was asked is what about like investors? And I think at that time, that was kind of like the height of, you know, like Airbnb and Uber and it was everything was gonna be a marketplace.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Is this

Speaker 2: like the unbundling of Craigslist a little bit?

Speaker 6: Yes. I think to a certain degree. And then I I just think at that time, yeah, it was like every everyone wanted to be the marketplace layer. Yeah. Everyone wanted to just kind of connect to preexisting supply to demand and kind of be that asset light layer.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And I think we were trying to suggest that to give customers the experience that we thought was best.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: We were in need to own inventory. We're gonna have to have our own logistics network. We're gonna own real estate. We're gonna have a finance company.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: And that was a mess. So Silicon Valley did not love our pitch. We we did not do well there.

Speaker 2: Wow. What was the logic behind IPO ing so fast? Was this just the company was growing and made more sense? Because We

Speaker 6: couldn't raise money. Couldn't raise money. We're we're yeah. Basically, what I would say is I think, especially at the time Yeah. Our business model did not match what Silicon Valley was looking for. Sure. And there wasn't private capital at scale Mhmm. Outside of Silicon Valley that we felt like we could get access to. Our business model, I think, given how different it is from the status quo, it surprisingly though, like the economics and and the underlying business itself are very similar to something that is highly scaled.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: So it worked better in our pitches with more of like a New York style audience Sure. Than with kind of a, you know, Bay Area style audience. And so I I think we basically were forced to go there because that's where the money was.

Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. What what was the

Speaker 1: What did the the if I'm if I'm remembering correctly, eventually you had plenty of support on the West Coast. I'm thinking of like Neil Mehta and Green Oaks. Did he one of your big advocates and big believers?

Speaker 6: No. Didn't. So we went public in 2017. We are a four year old company. Yeah. And I think, as far as I'm aware, I'm not positive this is like a precisely correct stat, but I think in terms of like first day, first week, first month performance, we were like the worst IPO of 2,017. We barely got out the door. And we kind of bounced around for a while. I think around 2019, we started to to really make progress. And then in 2020, you know, COVID was actually an incredibly scary time for him because we're a transactional business Yeah. And a distributed transactional business. And so when transactions go to zero and you have this big cost structure, that's like a real problem. So it was a really scary time for three or four months, and then it turned into, like, all of a sudden everyone was just saying, oh, Carvana is like a a COVID story. Because it was like we we kind of answered that moment. And so I think then we were really popular for, you know, eighteen months. Everyone thought we were smart. And that felt cool. But then '22 came around, and I I don't know if we wanna hit that in, a separate segment or whatever, but everyone told us we were dumb again. Very clear in the markets. Very I think, know, overall, it's been it's been it's been a really fun and very dynamic journey, I would say.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, to to talk about post IPO, the workforce, the incentive structure, how everything changes as you take a company public that early. What what does it take to keep everyone sort of rowing in the same direction?

Speaker 6: I think it's less of a change than than maybe I even would have imagined ahead of time. Like, I think it's I think we told everyone exactly why we're going public. You know, it it gave us access to capital that was hard to get otherwise. It also because we have a finance company and we have inventory that we own and so you you finance that.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 6: It gave us better access to other capital markets. Sure. I think there's a perception oftentimes that kind of like the IPO is the end. Like you that that's like what success looks like. Yep. And we were doing it so early and it so obviously wasn't the end. In a way, was kind of like helpful, but I do think there was like a little bit of an internal narrative for a second there of like, did we do it? Like, are we done? Mhmm. But we quickly turned that around, just kinda said, now now we're a public company, gotta be a little bit more careful about making sure we disclose information the same way to everyone. That's like the biggest change. But otherwise, you know, here are 10 examples of companies that have multiplied by a 100 Yeah. After going public. And that's what we wanna do. So, you know, let's just march down that path.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Be being more somewhat mature or complicated on the financing side, was were you very aggressive about hiring, like, elite young finance talent? Like poaching from Wall Street banks as opposed to, like, Stanford CS departments or both? Like, what I did the shape did the did the structure of the business financially change the recruiting profile?

Speaker 6: Yeah. I think we we wanted hunger and horsepower, I would say. And I think I think experience is something that is necessary, like, on a scale from zero to 10 in experience. You want like two or three so you don't make really dumb mistakes. Mhmm. But I think if you've got seven or eight, you oftentimes just think things have to work the way they've always worked. Mhmm. And so I think a lot of the people that we brought in were you know, somewhere between zero and four or five of experience. I was probably more experienced than most in the finance area in particular. Our our CFO, just you said, CS.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: He was a a PhD in econometrics from Stanford. And you know, just basically is a he's someone who has absolutely incredible horsepower and throughput Sure. But understood that world pretty well. Yeah. And I think a lot of times recruiting is about do you have people one, you have a relatively flat organization? Because I think people like working in flat organizations. And then two, do you have people at the top that actually understand what the work is and how it works and how it impacts, you know, the user and the business. Yeah. And if you have that, I think a lot of times the most aggressive people wanna work where they have visibility all the way up to the top. Yeah. And so I think in finance, in particular, we were really lucky to have Mark.

Speaker 2: What was the early expansion path? Like, where did did you do you think about opening up specific markets, certain channels? Like, mentioned auto trader. Was there like a okay. We're doing a big, like, social media marketing push for the next leg up, or is it like we're taking the West Coast?

Speaker 6: It was more like city by city. City by city. Atlanta was our first city.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 6: And then we did Nashville, and then we did Charlotte. And it was kinda like we needed because we were we have like a logistics element of our business. Yeah. We needed to get enough density to make the economics work Yep. Kind of in each, you know, like part of the network. Yep. And so, yeah, we went city by city, and that was kind of the way we did it through probably 2020, give or take. Mhmm. And, you know, now we're nationwide, and so we're kind of growing across the country in all the different

Speaker 2: Yeah. When and what was the the strike team for expanding a new market? Are you actually setting up an office or sending out some, you know, like, of your most dynamic employees to go hang out in a WeWork type of place? Like, what's the philosophy behind, like

Speaker 6: So

Speaker 2: the ground game?

Speaker 6: We call the last mile logistics market ops. Okay. So we have, like, a market ops SWAT team Sure. That would go out and kind of launch these markets.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 6: Now, what's nice about our system is all of the logic is deterministic. All of the merchandising and everything is happening in a kind of global way.

Speaker 7: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: So everything except for the car getting, you know, unloaded off the the the nine car hauler Mhmm. You know, at the location and then delivered to the customer

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: Everything else is kind of already standardized. Mhmm. So really it was like that last leg to the customer Yeah. That was the functional thing that was happening. And then it was just absorption of any issues that happened anywhere else in the system. Yeah. So it was very much like dynamic fun people that were unexpected to delivering cars to customers that gave them an experience that was awesome. And I think that was that was kind of how we rolled out market by market.

Speaker 2: Is valuation deterministic? For For vehicles?

Speaker 6: Yes.

Speaker 2: Because I imagine that there's probably some mistakes where you get you you acquire some car and you wind up being, oh, this is a rare one. It's worth more than we bought it for or vice versa. And I'm wondering about the how how like, the process of tightening the your book value to the actual real world resale value based on market fluctuations, but also just like, yeah, we didn't notice the the seats were a little more scuffed than we thought.

Speaker 6: Yeah. So first, a like practical answer to that, which is so we do when we pick up a car, we'll run it through a process including an OBD two scan, which kind of checks the date on the car. And in a small percentage of cases, if the variation is large versus our expectation Mhmm. We will reprice the vehicle. But for the vast majority, well over 90% of customers, they're gonna get exactly the value that they saw. Now I think like, you know, more like fundamentally, the the problem there is can you be as good at it digitally and from a distance Mhmm. As other people are in person. Mhmm. And I think that that the answer to that question I think was surprising to people. Like that was another area that I think people thought it would be a major business model problem. But we ran a test super early on where we basically looked at a pre run list of a bunch of cars that we're gonna sell at auction.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And we said, okay, like, we're gonna have physical buyers go out. So buyers are what the industry calls people that go to auction and buy cars. They put hands on the car. They open it up.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: Turn on the AC. They check everything. They buy the car.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. And and these auctions, you're talking about industry oriented auctions. Somebody trades in a car to get a new car at a traditional dealership and then the dealership doesn't want the car, so they're auctioning it off to other dealers and so there's dealers there. Correct. Is that right?

Speaker 6: So it's like a wholesale auction consumers wouldn't see that dealers go to all the time. Yeah. So we had a bunch of buyers go around and on a 100 cars, they said, here's what I think it's gonna trade for. And then we built a model and we said on those 100 cars, what do we think they're gonna trade for? And then we calculated the absolute average error of those two processes. And the the buyers were off on average by about $1,200 and we were off on average by $1,300 in our gen one model. Yeah. And so we were like, with with very little data feeding it and and very little specific data about the car. So I think early on, we were pretty confident that while it's hard to be exactly right, it wasn't gonna be that hard to be as right as the market we were competing with was, that's what mattered. Yeah. And so it is deterministic.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yep. We talked to a lot of founders that are when you look at their roadmaps and what they wanna do in the future, it's very like product oriented. It's like, we have to launch this new we have to launch this new market or or the best example of of is like in defense tech. It's like we need to land this program of record and then we need to fulfill that. It feels like with Carvana, it's like you just need to get better every single day at buying and selling, cars and then you just need to kind of do that forever. I it's hard for me to see you guys, like, entering, like, the luxury, you know, super upmarket category, like, being at a like, Car Week, which is, but it's very easy to see just owning more and more and more of the of the of the of the used market. But how do you think about that? How do how is it different motivating a team around just getting better at what you already do every day versus, like, a bunch of like net new sort of product oriented Yeah. Innovation?

Speaker 6: So first of I I think I think hopefully we succeed in both of those dimensions, but I think the observation's very right. And I think like the motivation part is also an interesting question. I think different people are different. So in in this like way of categorizing people, I would say I am more the product person. Like I'm more the person that gets really excited about what can we build, what can we change, how can we make the system more efficient and better than it was yesterday. And then I think that, you know, generally what I would call operators are people that wake up in the morning and they're really excited about getting, you know, a quarter percent better every day. Yeah. Which will compound to massive differences. But just having that constant feedback of improvement is more what motivates them every day.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And I think that where the business is today, we're in this like interesting spot where we've built a customer experience that we're super proud of, that we think is great. The business model, you know, even at the relatively small scale compared to the market that we're at today is producing returns that are two to two and a half times kind of what is normal in the industry. But then we're only 2% market share. And we find that kind of as we build more cars, we sell more cars. So I think we've made it to a spot where we don't know exactly what the total scope of the demand is, but it's more than we're able to produce cars today. Yeah. And so there's a lot of value to just make sure you make the machine a little bit, you know, better and bigger every single day. Yeah. And spend less of your energy on all of the dramatic changes Yeah. That could exist. And I think honestly that's that's a hard thing. I think like in a business, finding a way to focus on where you get the most leverage is really really hard. And I think a lot of times the people that are best at inventing businesses are really bad at focusing on the things where you get the most leverage. And so I think I think learning that lesson the hard way, which is part of, you know, what I would say happened to us in '21 heading into '22, is I think what helps us try to manage that balance. But then I also think we definitely have people inside the company that have enormous dreams and wanna build big beautiful amazing things. And so we also have a lot of product we're really excited by, but there's no question in the position that we're in right now, like what is going to matter to our next five years of economic performance is gonna be how well do we execute in making that machine a little better and a little bigger every single day over and over again.

Speaker 1: Yeah. What does the future you guys buy acquire a car. What is you know, looking out maybe ten years, what do you think it looks like to acquire a vehicle? How much, how much can robotics play in basically taking a car that was just purchased from somebody and making it ready for another person to acquire it.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Go ahead. I yeah. I basically have all these OEMs are investing in robotics, then there's all these automotive shops. I'm sure you guys have your own process, but it it feels like it feels like we'll get to the point where there will be something like a lights out factory where a car goes in one side and it comes out the other side, you know, fully restored. I just have no idea how long that'll take. Yeah.

Speaker 6: I think we're rooting for that to happen in many ways because I think it would make us the the thing that today constrains our scalability the most is reconditioning cars. It's putting the Yeah. Thousand dollars parts and labor in. So I think that would be very exciting. I think the problem that OEMs face is more simply automatable than the problem that we face because every car is getting the exact same processes done to it. Yeah. For us, you know, the car is coming in, you inspect it, you figure out what the car needs, and then every car is getting different processes done. So it's it's a process that is likely to be automated more slowly, I would say

Speaker 1: traditional Yeah.

Speaker 6: Manufacturing. But we're definitely paying attention. And I think there will be elements of it like, you know, changing tires, things that are highly replicable

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 6: That probably happen faster. Today, most of what we're

Speaker 1: doesn't seem like that far away to having systems that could fix up little nicks on paint and things like that in an automated way even though every car is gonna have different rock chips and things like that.

Speaker 6: Agreed. I I think all that stuff right now the assessment of those things is getting better all the time. I think automating the workflows for like what does the person who's doing it need to do is getting better and more automated all the time. And then I think the actual physical work so far, like in auto manufacturing facilities, it's they generally have those big robots that look like an arm. You know I They're not like a general purpose humanoid robots that can do Yeah. Anything. And I think it is it is likely it'll take a little bit more time for the work to be fully automated. But we are paying a ton of attention. And if that explodes at the same rate as, you know, like all of the LLMs Yeah. Then who knows how quickly that can happen?

Speaker 2: Is current AI useful in any particular area? You can imagine AI search, but also back office tooling. Like, what's the shape of the impact? Where is it actually working well? Where it's like, it's a little bit earlier

Speaker 8: for that.

Speaker 6: No. All I mean, all over the place. I think maybe two big buckets. One is consumer facing and then one is like, what are we what are we doing to try to move faster as a business and everything we're trying to from a product perspective.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: But I think on the consumer facing side, the more complicated the underlying transaction is, the more value there is to simplifying it. Okay. And so for a customer who's buying a car, they wake up in the morning and they want a car, but they have an old car's payment, they have some cash's payment, they have some finances payment, they don't know if they want a warranty or not. There's a lot of complication in that transaction.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: They in order to get the car and get it registered, they're gonna have to change over their insurance. Right? They're gonna have to sign contracts.

Speaker 2: They're gonna

Speaker 6: have to upload documents for verifications for finance and for title registration.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: So the more complicated that process is Mhmm. And the more that our systems are designed in a way where all those processes are deterministic, so there's no human negotiating each underlying economic item, the more that you can use AI to string that together and give people really simple experiences. Mhmm. So I I think there's a ton that we're doing already that's like really fun and interesting. And because we built it in a way where it was it was pushed through a wire already

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: With no kind of, you know, f and I agent sitting next to the customer. Everything we've built is like in our it's like a service architecture. Like, every everything is separable and deterministic. Yep. So it lends itself very well to then you can dump that into an AI. A person can ask a natural language question, and we can give a super complex and super complete answer to their questions. Mhmm. So I think that's fun. And I think what's also fun is I think in any of these things, you know, going back to valuing cars even, what what matters is how good of an experience can you give your customers compared to everyone else. Mhmm. And in the world of automotive retail, we're not competing with other players that have vertical integration, deterministic systems, or automated systems. And so the quality of answer that we can give relative to our competition is very, high. Yeah. So I think that's a really fun area for us right now. And even like the types of products you wanna build, I think change when you have systems that can string together so many deterministic processes, but also overlay it with discretion that you can trust. Mhmm. That even changes the the realm of things that can be automated. Mhmm. So I think we're doing all kinds of fun stuff there. And then internally, like every other company, we're trying to move as fast as we can. Mhmm. And the tool set is changing so fast. It's it's super fun.

Speaker 2: Are you coaching or answering stressful calls from any sasspocalypse victims? Because I feel like you've been on a particularly wild roller coaster ride where I've never seen a stock chart where it's so clear that the I don't wanna talk too much trash about the investor community, it was like they got it wrong.

Speaker 6: We got it wrong first.

Speaker 2: They got it wrong because it's just this this gap in the in the chart and you're like, okay, well clearly there's something wrong here. But it feels like a lot of a lot of SaaS company CEOs are sort of going through that. Many of them are already out of that trough. But what advice do

Speaker 3: you have?

Speaker 1: I think the advice is like build a highly distributed business with tons of physical inventory

Speaker 2: Is that the advice to the real world?

Speaker 7: Real world.

Speaker 1: Like, because you guys you guys are in a perfect position. You guys feel like a flight to safety now because it's like, hey, like, yeah, try rebuilding Carvana with AI. It's just like it's you know, we're we're at least twenty years away from, know.

Speaker 2: Where do you get the demand? It's a the liquidity is what is so much of the value.

Speaker 6: I mean, I I I think there is a lot of truth in that. I think if I were to try to give advice though Yeah. I think what I would say is it's just the themes that are popular in markets will change.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: And they change every couple years and they oftentimes change dramatically. Mhmm. And generally, the swings are more violent than they ultimately prove that they should have been. I think that's probably true in most cases. So I think that what you wanna try to do if that's true is just set up everyone inside the company to know that's gonna happen sometimes. Mhmm. So it doesn't feel like I think many people inside of a company have this perception of investors that they're like all knowing masters of the universe. And when the stock moves, it's because something deeply true and fundamental changed. Mhmm. When, you know, in reality, they're really smart people that have, you know, a huge set of observations they've made over time, but they live in a world of pressure with moving stock, you know, charts and with LPs that are putting them under pressure and changing themes Yeah. Someone's reading about.

Speaker 1: There's an incentive to sell even if you still believe in the company, but you think a lot of other people are gonna sell.

Speaker 6: Exactly. You get you get into that thing. And then I think it's just like we've we've made it look harder than it probably had to look. But I think most successful stories you go through periods that are really hard. And I just think that for us internally, like the way that we went through 22 and that was a hard period is

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 6: We just talked about like, okay, so this is this is our moment where we publicly look dumb and we gotta ride it out and go through the hard thing. But most companies that we really respect, if you look back in time at their stock charts

Speaker 1: That's true.

Speaker 6: They had their moment too. And so you have to go through that at some point. Like at some point, every six or not every, but the vast majority of successful companies are gonna go through a period that's really hard. Yeah. And that's kind of the moment that matters washes out the mercenaries. Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, you get people and people get fired up about that. Like, okay, cool. This is our hard moment. That's like something you can rally around. I love it. I think, you know, every company will go through that and you just gotta keep getting up, I think.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Congratulations to the team on so many back to back quarters of incredible execution.

Speaker 6: Oh, well, you.

Speaker 1: Amazing to watch.

Speaker 2: And same day delivery now.

Speaker 6: Yeah. Exactly. Big move. Another announcement.

Speaker 2: But it was fun to just get the whole story and and and go all over the place. We'd love to talk to you again soon.

Speaker 6: Awesome. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6: See you. Was great. You.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Cheers.

Speaker 2: Let me tell everyone about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Alex Edelson from Slipstream Investors. He's the founder and GP and we'll bring him in to the TBPN UltraDome.