How do you turn a LinkedIn message into a strategic M&A deal?

Jason Kirby (00:03.37) Welcome back everyone. Welcome to Fundraising Demystified. Today we have Brady Nolan with us, co-founder and chief growth officer of Till. Welcome to the show, Brady. Brady Nolan (00:14.19) Jason, thanks so much for having me. Excited to talk. Jason Kirby (00:16.01) Now, I'm excited to have you as well. And today's going to be an interesting story as you talk about not only raising money for Till, but ultimately selling it to Best Egg and how you're currently operating at Best Egg. Can you give the audience a little bit of background on you and how you co-founded Till? Brady Nolan (00:32.794) Absolutely. Yeah. So I kind of have two phases of my career. I was an apartment developer and investor for 15 years, kind of on the institutional side of the market. So building big multi-hundred-unit apartment communities around the country, working with the big companies in the space to manage those properties. And I met my co-founder, as we were both kind of transitioning out of... the institutional rental housing world. He was the chief operating officer for one of the early institutional single family rental funds, think, backpacks full of cash on the courthouse steps in 2011, coming out of the great financial crisis. They bought a few thousand homes, and he had to figure out, how do we manage all of these kind of scattered site rentals? And so he and I both had experience in rental housing. had seen what was happening with the renters. Incomes were not rising anywhere nearly as fast as rent. So rent was becoming more and more of each renter's cash flow each month. And property managers on site had no tools to individualize how they worked with renters when that renter had a challenge paying that rent. And so that was kind of the problem statement that we had been living in the first stages of our careers. My partner went then, when they sold that fund, he went to work for a fintech fund that shared a similar investor to their rental housing fund. And so he was looking at the world through fintech, but with the experience of being a property manager. and starting to see like, man, there are some ways that we could use FinTech to solve some of these challenges that we were having and our renters were having at the individual level. And so that was really kind of the genesis of Till. Uniquely, we started this business with like, really without any idea what the products would ultimately become, but really deep understanding of the problem statement. And we kind of joined together and... Brady Nolan (02:58.294) started throwing some things against the wall to see what would stick in terms of products to solve that problem. Jason Kirby (03:03.89) No, that's awesome. And I'm glad you kind of shared the, you know, the, the back history there. And if you can kind of walk us through, you know, what you did with, with Till and kind of where you guys took it and why you ultimately raised money and kind of what that experience was like raising money. Brady Nolan (03:19.29) Sure. So we actually raised money before we had any idea what we were going to do. We raised money off of the problem statement and we found a really supportive, incredible investor both at that point to take a chance on us and very supportive throughout the journey of building Till, who said, yeah, I believe this is a big problem. And I think you guys are as good as any to go and try to solve it. And so we ultimately started playing around with products. We had this idea of a loyalty program to incentivize renters to prioritize their rent payment. And what we tried initially was we called it the rental loan. And it was essentially a loan of up to one month's rent and the associated charges. a one-time loan for folks that were already behind, already late on their rent. The alternative is a late fee charged by the property. Late fees are often highly, highly punitive and so often exacerbates the chance that the renters fail. We were trying to give the renter an alternative when they couldn't make that payment at the beginning of the month. Brady Nolan (04:45.33) on the first of the month, completely decoupled with how they get paid. So it's challenging for a lot of folks. The stats are everywhere. Half the country's paycheck to paycheck. More than half have less than $400 in savings. Rent is $800 billion a year in the United States. It's a really big, big problem. And so we started with this product. It could be repaid over up to nine months with no prepayment penalty. What we saw was really interesting. Most of the users didn't really want to pay us back. They were already behind. They were already delinquent. So this was a negative selection. It was a really challenging product. But we saw a subset of users who were performing really, really well and their behavior was all the same. They borrow, they applied, borrowed. One of the interesting things of our products is we pay the money right to the property. We don't give it to the renter. So we know that it's going to pay rent. and they borrowed, we paid their rent, and they paid us back in that same month, and they did the same process again the next month and the next month. And what that was telling us is these are folks that are just trying to solve this like intramod cash timing challenge. Rent again, due in full on the first, it's the biggest expense, and it drives the entire financial month for that renter. I have my car payment due right after, then my cell phone, then insurance, and all these other expenses. But the timing of when cash is coming in, when I get paid, doesn't line up with all those expenses. So let's break up that biggest expense that happens first to give us more breathing room to then make those other payments more reliably throughout the month. And then kind of everybody wins. The property management team wins because they're getting that rent in full. And so that's the product that we ultimately pointed towards and have been focused on since. That was, we started the business in... mid 2018 have been focused there since. Jason Kirby (06:47.682) And before we hopped on to the call, you had mentioned that you guys have raised about 16 million before getting acquired by Bestag. You had that early investor that was willing to bet on you, kind of at the idea level, which is phenomenal. It's always one of those things where a lot of founders are jealous of, where they wish they could have that, but it sounds like you were already kind of in the world of investment and capital allocation. And so it sounds like you had some relationships already kind of established, which is the number one. way of raising capital. But walk us through the fundraising journey. So you kind of secure the capital at the early stage, and then you kind of move on from there. Kind of walk us through the different stages of raising capital and how you deploy that capital. Brady Nolan (07:33.274) Sure, and maybe I'll be front running this conversation a bit, but I don't think that raising money so early was both a gift and something that we constantly had to manage. We're setting value early. We constantly had to live up to creating enough revenue, and so we go raise the next round. That hamster wheel started very, very early, but our product was and has always been capital. It's a line of credit, it's a loan. And so when our product was capital, we needed to have capital to lend out. We were so early in just trying to build some early learnings, proof of concept that we couldn't go and borrow. We didn't have a track record enough yet to borrow. So we had to raise equity capital in the form of a pre-seed round to then... have a very, very small team. I would say we were a lowercase F, lowercase, or maybe uppercase F, lowercase T fintech, like no tech. But just like, again, building proof of concept, and that proof of concept was we needed money to lend out. So uniquely for our product, we kind of had to, but it definitely allowed us to leave what we were doing to go take a chance on this. on this big, big problem statement. I think most importantly, it aligned us with this investor who ended up being incredibly supportive throughout the entire journey, which I think I've already said twice and will come more into focus as we have this discussion. Money is out there. I think when thinking about raising money... The other aspects of who is investing in you is probably even more important than the check that they're writing. This guy was incredibly supportive, incredibly strategic, and we would not have been able to get to the outcome we did without that kind of core flagship, early investor. Jason Kirby (09:44.894) And so, you know, in most cases, yeah, you didn't have the track record. So you couldn't raise like a debt facility, which would be more custom for what you guys had approached to, you know, with this model. But you guys, you know, got that initial pre-seed. How much did you raise in those early days? Brady Nolan (09:58.895) Oh, I think it was like a million dollars. Jason Kirby (10:01.258) Okay. And how much of that was used to turn over and provide as capital to your customers? Brady Nolan (10:07.054) Oh man, good question. Probably half. I can't exactly remember. But we, you know, our product turns very quickly. It's only outstanding for 30 days. So we're able to do a lot with not a lot of money, not a lot of debt to lend. We're able to service a number of customers and get a lot of learnings without a huge lending pool. Jason Kirby (10:32.49) That's awesome. And so you raise about a million, you get off the ground, you start cycling through that money. What ends up happening after in terms of, you know, subsequent rounds, you know, coming out and just kind of what's the overall performance of the business? Brady Nolan (10:51.414) Yes, we grew. Our product has always been a B2B2C product. There's always a channel partner between us and our end customer. The end customer is the renter. Initially, that channel was big institutional property management companies. And so we were growing really, really quickly when we have aligned on that rental loan as that initial product. In hindsight, makes sense. We are transferring the landlord risk onto us for no cost to the landlord. So there's really no reason that we shouldn't have grown that channel really, really quickly. And at some point, probably mid 2019, we went and raised a true seed. I think we raised, I don't know, I can't remember. five, $6 million, something like that, in a seed round. Because we were growing, we had great logos, the big known property management companies were working with us for us to offer this product to their renters. We were learning how to convert that channel into actual customers, how to engage the property managers to help us do that. And we saw growth really accelerating. And then we sat and saw that behavior I mentioned that we needed to rethink the product into a more recurring use to give those folks that were using it that way a better experience, not have to reapply every month, make this more like a true payment tool instead of just a one-time loan. And so in fall of 2019, we said, all right, we're going to build that product and we're We're going to, our product team, put the calendar together and scope the project. And we're going to launch that product, initial pilot in March, 2020. And great. So off we set and second week of March, the world shuts down. And all of a sudden we had never done any marketing. We had never, the only go-to-market was me calling property management companies. Brady Nolan (13:14.834) When we started this business, I'd never heard of a CRM. I mean, we're real estate guys kind of figuring this out. And we had probably 100,000 units of housing that were offering this through maybe 30, 40 different property management companies. And all of a sudden in a week, I had three and a half million units of housing operators call to ask us if we would partner with them. for the loan product, because they're terrified. It's COVID. They can't charge late fees. They can't evict. They have no idea what's going to happen. They're thinking that their collections are going to go to zero. And so they're looking to just transfer risk and mass to us. And so all of our risk advisors said, don't put any capital out. Pull the product back. And we launched the flexible payment product that I was mentioning. Jason Kirby (13:55.484) Yeah. Jason Kirby (13:58.635) Hahaha Brady Nolan (14:12.722) we launched it without a balance sheet. So we were essentially managing the payment plans for these properties who had to offer them because again, they couldn't charge a late fee and they couldn't evict. And so it was interesting. We didn't scale that product as fast as we could have if we still had the balance sheet component, we fronted the money, but it gave us a lot of learnings on how renters would pay in this kind of more flexible behavior. And collections were really good. And so in June of 21, we relaunched our balance sheet. We raised some additional equity in the form of a note and we went out and got a debt facility to support that. And like off we went growing again, like pretty rapidly through that property management company channel. Jason Kirby (15:04.642) Nah, it sounds like a great way to kind of be the right place, right time, solving a huge pain. Uh, it looks like he came out unscathed with, you know, the option of selling to the best egg. So let's kind of transition to that. So you kind of built this product, you grow, you found a couple of growth lovers, found some good channels, uh, for growth, which, you know, message all founders, find channels that work. Uh, that's, it seems like exactly what you did as a chief growth officer. So walk us through kind of the. the exploration of the best egg acquisition kind of before it culminated into the actual result. Like what was, what was going through your head? What was the relationship prior? How did you build that relationship? Brady Nolan (15:42.478) Sure. Yeah. So my partner and I, my partner David is our CEO and runs our business unit at Bestag. He and I, throughout the evolution, just lamented how challenging building a monoline consumer lending product can be. And at some point, the product should live inside of a much, much bigger scale lending platform. The onus of looking on when we started to look for... at that potential option was we were evolving our go-to-market strategy from distributing through the property management companies where there are about 20,000 that control the 25 million institutional housing units, rental housing units in the country into partnering with the major scaled software systems that offer the digital rent payment experience for the same 25 million homes. There's about eight systems versus 20,000 landlords. So each of those potential partners has significantly more scale. And we started to have those conversations because we wanted to offer this, well, we wanted to partner with them to access that scale, but offer it as more of an integrated payment option for the renters that were using the product. And immediately those systems got it. We had built, we have one competitor, we'd built together, this is a real thing. Flexible rent, flexible payments for rent was here and the systems wanted to offer it next to ACH and debit card and credit card as a way for renters to pay rent. And so independently, the, our scale was gonna go from, I think when we sold, we had 250,000 renters that could use the product. Pretty quickly through these partnerships, it was gonna be 10, 12 million with the first couple partnerships. We never could have navigated, maybe never is not, might be a bit too fatalistic, but it would have been extremely difficult capital markets challenge to navigate like raise a series A, go big, get a bigger debt facility, raise a series B, go get a bigger debt facility. That was even before late 22, early 23 when the capital markets... Brady Nolan (18:07.13) four early stage companies cratered with interest rates rising. And so we believe we're in these rooms with public software companies engaged in partnership dialogue with like at that point, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of cash in the bank as we're going to going towards like potentially raising an A. And it just was like became very clear that was going to be a... very difficult capital markets challenge. We had a bunch of partnerships lined up that if we went and exited and sold to build the company, build the product inside of that bigger scaled lending organization, we would solve our capital markets challenge overnight. And we could just focus what was best for the product, which is let's get it out. Let's make sure every, you know, in our mission of every vendor should have the opportunity to pay flexibly. And so, We had been engaged with series A conversations. We were engaged with one investor in particular, and it became again, clear that we were gonna, let's start to have some conversations and look into a sale. And we ran the process ourselves. And it was really like, we used our advisors, friends to kind of build a target list. And I like ran an outbound strategy, like literally ran it like a sales funnel. and reached out to about 40 potential acquirers that fit the bill of online consumer lending platform, best bank partners, scale to enable us to fit inside of it nicely and service this growth opportunity. Best Egg, I had not heard of them. They came through a friend of ours who was a... CRO of another large lending platform. And like hand to God, I sent a cold LinkedIn connection and message to their new head of corporate development. She had recently started, they had recently raised a lot of money in early 22. And I just like happened to hit her when she was looking on, she was on her computer, had LinkedIn up, timing is everything. Brady Nolan (20:31.842) we connected and immediately we knew that this was the right home for us. And it fit their initiatives in terms of raise some money to do some acquisitions, same mission, same customer profile, incredible group of people. So it all fit. Brady Nolan (20:56.726) I lost ya. Jason Kirby (20:58.822) A cold email message, sorry, cold LinkedIn, cold LinkedIn message landed you an acquisition to what appears to be a pretty great outcome for all involved, both for the company and kind of the future prospects of the company for everything you kind of mentioned as to why you explored an acquisition. But you're doing your prospecting and looking at opportunities, that right time, right message, you know, had... Brady Nolan (21:00.918) Not even email, LinkedIn. Jason Kirby (21:26.762) you needed or message best ag a month earlier, maybe it wouldn't have gotten the right person. That's such an important thing. But also, you had to have a company that was worth acquiring, you had to build something that was a real business and so on, but it turns out outreach, I do love these stories and hearing how these things ultimately come together and this definitely might be the tagline for the podcast, cold LinkedIn message gets you acquired. Brady Nolan (21:52.612) Ha ha. Jason Kirby (21:54.59) So let's, uh, let's kind of talk a little bit about this process in terms of, you know, helping the audience understand in terms of timeline. Okay. So you sent, uh, the head of corp dev newly hired, you know, a message on LinkedIn, you have a meeting, things look great, and you start marching towards a process. How long did that process take? What was involved in that process? And kind of what were some of the scary moments where you thought, you know, is this actually going to happen or not? Cause often that's the case. Brady Nolan (22:21.026) Yeah, well, the process was, I think, probably sent that message mid-June of 22, and the acquisition closed December 1st of 22. It's about five and a half months. I think the scary process was less so, the scariest part of the process was less so about things with Best Egg, it was more about the macroeconomic environment and the venture funding environment were cratering. Consumer credit in most cycles is always the first thing to go, and that is what we do. There was a couple of things that happened during this process. Jason Kirby (23:09.878) Yeah. Brady Nolan (23:19.066) to win, we had to focus on this embedded system partnership channel, which means we completely cut the property management company channel while we were going through the acquisition process. We were a lot bestseg bought into it, but we didn't have a... The deal wasn't closed. So I literally had to break up with about 80 channel partners. and probably 10 plus thousand users, we dropped. We took revenue to zero and we gave our product and tech team six months, nine months to build this embedded product. We had two partners that we negotiated while we were going through the acquisition. We'd been working with them. Brady Nolan (24:19.214) We told them about the acquisition. They obviously were excited about the heft of what we were to become versus what we were at that point from a financial perspective. We essentially negotiated our partnership agreements to sign concurrently with closing of the acquisition. Our product is unique. There's only 12 times a year it can be used to pay rent. What we call the rent cycle is highly operationally intense. which takes like 10 days of the month in terms of all the funding and money movements and enrollments and all that. So it gives our engineering team like 20 days out of the month to really work. So they love this cause they got six, nine months unencumbered with no rent cycles to work. And so it was really about, we had the confidence to make those moves because Best Egg was doing everything that they said they were gonna do. So in terms of what was stressful about the process or what was hard about the process, it was not from the best egg perspective. They were wonderful. There was a really well-run acquisition. They ran a great process. My partner who was our CEO, and we kind of transitioned the, I went and kind of developed the relationship. He kind of took it and executed the acquisition. All of that was wonderful. The stressful part was we're taking revenue to zero in an outrageous macroeconomic and venture funding environment. If this doesn't close, it was like a bet the farm moment. We were very open with our team. Everyone bought in and rallied around this as the rallying cry. Jason Kirby (25:55.534) Thank you. Jason Kirby (26:17.79) That is such a, like as someone that's been through M&A and helps companies found, you know, work through this process, it's such a scary thing to see founders kind of make this gamble, especially the market environment. But it's also, it's like, have you tried to straddle multiple options? You might not have had enough of a choice to succeed on it. Yeah. So it's like, bet the farm was maybe the only choice and, you know, it seems like it worked out, but. I often tell founders, as much as you want to work towards the outcome of the exit, if you have the resources and ability, keep your options open. But in this case, it seemed like you guys made the right choice for your circumstances, which is a very hard pill to swallow, especially in the moment. Shutting down all those partnerships and everything. Brady Nolan (27:00.19) Definitely. We built some really great relationships with some really wonderful partners on the property management company side. They were challenging conversations to have, but it was pretty clear to us that there was only one way that this product should be offered. I think there was some clarity in... in that decision-making process, our team bought in. And again, all of this, at the end of the day, boils down to people and the people on the other side of the acquisition transaction. We had built trust with them and they bought in. And so I think there were definitely some stressful days during that period. But when you've built that level of trust across your team with that potential acquirer, it made it a little bit easier. Jason Kirby (28:05.154) Yeah, as I mentioned often on the show, it basically always comes down to relationships and building that trust and openly communicating back and forth in real time with your potential partners or acquirers or investors and being transparent all along the way ultimately allows for these kind of bet the farm type moments to work out. So it's been over a year since the acquisition. You know, how was the deal kind of constructed? You're out, you obviously stayed on, you're still there. Uh, it sounds like things are going well, but kind of what, how, what was the orchestration of the deal? And in terms of just how, how did you guys march it towards the finish? I believe there's an earn out. Uh, and how has that worked over the last year or so? How are you feeling about it? Brady Nolan (28:53.218) We feel great. I mean, it is everything that Best Egg promised, everything that they built up in terms of the types of people that they are, the culture that we were joining has been true in spades. Just a wonderful group of people who care deeply about their customers. who have a mission to bring financial confidence to those with limited savings, it fits exactly what we're doing with our product. So we found 100% the right home. We immediately 10x the size of our debt facility. We were able to make people decisions that we couldn't make before. We had the resources to partner. We now have four of the eight major scaled software systems. We'll have those four partners serve 12 million renters. When we shut down the landlord channel, we had about 200,000 units. Now our partners have 12 million. We're negotiating three of the other four systems, only because we have the scale of Best Egg. and the support of the leadership team there in building this product. Our team is happy. I think everyone but one team member is still here by choice. And the whole goal was, again, this was instead of a Series A. So we sold early. And we sold to build, continue to build this product. Everyone who joined Till. there was a commitment to this mission that we're trying to capture. That mission has not changed as part of this transaction. There's a reason beyond, I want to be in an early stage startup or whatever it may be, there's a reason that everyone joined and that reason has not changed as part of Best Egg. Yeah, the deal was a cash-doc split. There was one earn-out hurdle tied to... Brady Nolan (31:15.434) an execution of a partnership that we hit in three months from closing. So everything that could be earned has been earned. And I think importantly, we were able to join a business that when you step back and look at its trajectory and where it sits in the market and the size of the market across all value, I think the upside potential is probably as good as it was when we were at that point in time with Till. And the risk profile is significantly different. So from a risk return opportunity, just a complete no-brainer. And so, yeah, I mean, all those, as we think about like why and structure and, you know, the incentives were there, the structure was done, was put together well. They've been wonderful post-acquisition from everything from like certain elements of the deal that kind of were still around to how they've supported the product in our team. So I... 100% the right move and I would do it again every time. Jason Kirby (32:47.498) No, it's not often I get someone that kind of rants and raves post-acquisition as much as you do. So, it's great to kind of hear these big success stories and kind of how they cultivate out of building something great, but then putting yourself out there trying to build relationships and like you talked about, a cold LinkedIn message leading to what turned out to be a great outcome. What were some of the mistakes or... I'm gonna say the word regret, because it doesn't sound like you have any regrets, but like, what are some of the mistakes or things you could have done a little bit differently along the process of either raising money or selling the company? Brady Nolan (33:22.69) That's a great question. I mean, we made a ton of mistakes. I'll kind of share, I'll share three quickly, two pre-sale, one post-sale. The first one is David and I, first time like tech founders had like very little experience with like, how do you build products? And we knew the industry very well, we knew the problem very well, and a lot of times, we just said, this is what we need to build. Where our product folks are like, no, that's not how you build product. We need to go talk to customers, understand pain points. This is the process we need. Here's how we validate. And like, no, we just want to run fast, like do this. And one, bad way to build product. And two, it's... frustrating for a product team. Then it was like we were part of the venture processes, we gotta hit revenue growth hurdles to raise the next round. And so we were constantly like making product related decisions for the wrong reason to like chase the next metric for the next fundraise versus like, what do we fundamentally need to do next to like build the product from the right perspective. So. Brady Nolan (34:47.878) When we kind of figured that out, we rebuilt the entire way that we operated the business, just like literally everything, tore it to the studs and rebuilt and became like pretty good operators by driving alignment and trust and clarity across all divisions of the company. In a system that we still use today and that part of which BESIG has picked up on some of the things that we've done. So that was one. You've gotta drive clarity and decision-making across your leadership team and put people that you trust in a position to make decisions and tell you what needs to be done. The second one was, I don't know if this was a mistake. I don't think this was a mistake with the information we had at that time, but something I would have done probably differently is, Our biggest competitor scaled faster during COVID because we pulled our balance sheet back and they pushed their balance sheet forward. So they were able to capture a lot of property management company growth. I think they got smoked on their, let me not say that. I think they had some delinquency challenges that year, which they worked through, but it enabled them the ability to scale really quickly when Jason Kirby (36:02.955) I'm out. Brady Nolan (36:13.07) the market was really nervous and really wanted a product like this that actually took the balance sheet risk. Nobody knew at that point that we were going to have $6 trillion of liquidity in the economy and that we had some delinquency tick-ups, but nothing like it could have been. Brady Nolan (36:42.178) because it really like significantly step changed their channel growth, where we were more conservative from that perspective. So kudos to them on that one. So that's something that I don't know what the trajectory would have been differently for us had we made the decision, but nonetheless. And then the third one, when we joined BESEC, I think... absolutely like holistically the right way to think about this. The CTO had been at a major tech company for a long time and done overseeing many, many acquisitions. And the best way to judge success is how many of the team is still there after a certain amount of time. And the biggest correlation that we saw was how quickly we tried to push full-scale integration. versus how we make the acquisition and then we slowly integrate. We let the company run as it was. We integrate the shared areas where we can and then learn and slowly integrate in. That's what we did. I think for the most part, absolutely was the right way to go. I think there were some places where we could have pushed some more integration quicker. Brady Nolan (38:12.578) but that's kind of a more nuanced thing. I ended up like people were happy and people have stayed. So overall like big success. Jason Kirby (38:21.522) Yeah, I think that's the most important part. It's, you know, it's always, you can always kind of do the Monday morning quarterback, but it seems like ultimately everything worked out and it's going in the right direction. And, you know, appreciate you sharing those insights and your experience. Yeah. I guess before we part, what would be some parting advice to the founders out there that you maybe have raised some venture capital and are kind of, it may be a similar boat where they have to make a decision to go back out and raise another round or pursue. and acquisition. Brady Nolan (38:52.79) Yeah, a couple of things. One is my partner David ran the board and the relationships with our investors at Till like so well. He was very open with challenges, very communicative, and it really engendered a lot of trust with our investor base. So the entrepreneurial journey is hard. and there's a lot of ups and downs for any company. But that really built in a level of trust when we needed to go to them for support when things were down. And so do everything you can to pull in your investors as much as possible. Make them a part of the journey and build that relationship with them because there will come times where you are going to need... your existing investor base for support. That is number one advice, no matter what avenue of continuing to capitalize the business you're exploring. And then two, every business and every business climate is unique. I don't have the magic piece of advice, but we made the decision to sell. because of the strategic value that a specific type of acquiring business could provide us. So it wasn't just about a payday. It was about how do we best... So we looked at it as a fundraising. How do we best capitalize this product for the next couple stages of growth? This was the clear... the clear most strategic way to do that. That's the decision we made, and I think that we got our team on board. I would just give advice in terms of what are your goals, and look wide at how to accomplish those goals for your business. Then I think you'll be very real with yourselves as leadership team. Brady Nolan (41:20.878) the solutions will kind of clarify from there. Jason Kirby (41:25.902) I'm glad you mentioned that. I think that's always what it comes down to in a lot of cases is good relationships with existing investors and nurturing them in the best you can and showing that you're doing your absolute best and taking on if you just share responsibility of driving towards the best outcome of the company and maintain that relationship with your partner, co-founder David. doing that and enabling options for you down the road because of those relationships. I think it's some valuable advice for founders to keep in mind as they consider their options moving forward. Brady, I appreciate you being on the show. Appreciate you sharing your story and sharing this amazing outcome that has seemed to create a growing relationship with your Acquire Best Egg and your team. Where can the team learn more about you? Sorry, where can listeners learn more about you and what you're doing at Best Egg? Brady Nolan (42:17.766) I am on LinkedIn, Brady Nolan, and I love to connect and build relationships. So anybody who's listening, feel free to connect and we'd love to chat. Bestag.com, there is a flexible rent page to learn more about our product. Those are probably the two best places. Jason Kirby (42:37.002) All right. Well, really appreciate it, Brady, and thank you for being on the show. Brady Nolan (42:41.55) Jason, you're awesome. I love what you're doing and happy to be a little part of it. Thanks so much. Take care. Jason Kirby (42:45.91) Thank you.