Club Conversation with Charlie Youakim, 85x Return in 3 Years

This is Club Conversations, powered by MicroCap Club. Our goal is to give our community access to the best minds and investing and business. I'm Ian Castle, founder of MicroCap Club. MicroCap Club is a private community of the world's best stockpickers. Since 2011, our members have profiled 1,500 companies and over 300 have turned into multi-baggers. That's at least one big winner every month for 14 years. If you enjoy finding great companies early, well before Wall Street pays attention, MicroCap Club is where you belong. I hope to see you in our community. And now a quick disclaimer. This presentation is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation to purchase or sell any security referenced herein. Planet MicroCap Holdings, LLC and MicroCap Club LLC are not licensed brokers nor registered investment advisors. We, our partners, contractors, members, subscribers, guests or affiliates, may or may not hold positions in one or more of the securities mentioned in this presentation and may trade in such securities at any time. We recommend you consult a licensed investment advisor, broker or legal counsel before purchasing or selling any securities referenced in this presentation. Welcome back to the MicroCap Club Podcast. This is a club conversation with Charlie Joaquim, founder and CEO of CESL, the buy-in-out pay-later company that now sits at a multi-billion dollar market cap. We talked about why he started over after being pushed out of his first company of CESL reached profitability with a fraction of the fundings, its competitors raised, his hiring playbook built around IQ and GPA and how he thinks about scaling a remote, common sense company in a textbook driven industry. Let's get into it. Charlie, you grew up in, let's say middle class, build passport, exit it as a millionaire, and now you are sitting up on a billion dollar stake in a company you started over again from scratch. Most people would retire after first exit, so what made you go again, I guess? Well, there's a unique story there. I actually had a co-founder conflict. I was pushed out essentially of that company and that conflict before I even had the exit. Then I moved on from that situation right away. Once you've basically built a company, at least for me, once I had done it once, I was like, there's nothing else I want to do. Basically the moment that conflict led to that, I said, look, what's the next project to work on? I knew payments. I reached out to call paratists, my co-founder, and I knew I wanted to work with them. We started talking about ideas and then that led to the founding of CESL. The exit out of passport actually came a couple of years later, but it actually has CESL hit payter. We basically hit the gold mine in terms of finding the right products to go after. We were scaling up. Then basically I just took my exit from passport and rolled it right into CESL as an investor, because I knew it would help fuel us and continue our path. Some of it wasn't necessarily choice. It was just the circumstances. I will say after navigating that monetary exit and seeing where we are as a company and just living life in the meantime, I'm a relatively simple person. I don't have a Ferrari, I don't have a Porsche, I used to have like 20-year-old Porsche. Drive a model Y test, which I love, drive a Cybertruck. You got a relatively normal house. Travel law for work, but honestly, I've realized this is not really necessarily about trying to have a traveling lifestyle. It's more about doing really cool things with your life and going after things. That's what it kind of realizes what drives me. It's being intellectually challenged, trying to win the game. I view businesses like a sport. If you play tennis or play golf, you want to go out there, you want to win. I view businesses as a sport. Like going out every day with our team, trying to win. That's really what drives me. No, very interesting for sure. I think it's very unique as well. Can you sort of break down a beat with Sezel, those sort of people that might not be familiar with the business itself? Yeah, we're a Binop Paylator company, but expanding beyond that in more recent terms. But Binop Paylator, some people can think of it as like reverse layaway, where you get the product upfront and then pay the installments back with Sezel. Where in the past you would have to wait to pick up the product. That's why I call it reverse layaway. It's a short-term product. It's a product that I think the customer views as a budgeting product as well. A little bit of a hybrid between a debit card purchase and a credit card purchase. It helps to consumer avoid using your credit card. A lot of our consumers have credit cards and they avoid using credit cards with our product. I think they do that because credit cards feel unsafe. If you build a balance, it can spin out of control and you end up with a bankruptcy on your hands or a potential bankruptcy, which really can never happen with Binop Payl. You could file for bankruptcy, but I see no purpose because if you're delinquent with us, the balance just stops growing and you just don't have access to the product. That's basically what happens across all the BNPLs. It's a short-term installment loan product, typically completed in six state weeks. Customers view it as a totally new type of financial services product that really fits an itch that must have been there for decades. Merchants, when we launched the product, they saw how it hit for them. We had small merchants that didn't even have to launch AB tests. They just knew that we increased their sales because sales went up by 15% the next day. They told their friends, their competitors saw it, they grew wildly with the merchant network. Consumers were in love with the product. Then where we've evolved over time is we've gotten more direct to consumer. We've moved away from not away. We still have the merchant model, but we've gone more direct to consumer with just offering consumers anywhere, premium products. They let them, I call them open loop products. They sign up with us. They can use BNPL everywhere. Now what I'm saying is we're a little bit beyond BNPL because we're starting to expand our services into more financial services, into more shopping tools, savings tools. A mindset is creating a product that helps this customer, this mid to low income, younger consumer, helps them save money in their daily lives, both from a financial product perspective and from a shopping, discounting, couponing perspective. Basically make a difference on their pocketbook. I'm definitely very interested about how you came up with this idea because it feels like it's a very win-win-win model. What do you think the model comes from and does this win-win-win situation come up to you right away or was it something you stumbled upon? No, one thing I'm really good at, David, probably is finding models that work in an industry I'm in and bringing them on board. I can't say I was the inventor of this idea. It was invented by a company called AFTERPAY. I knew about it because we launched an original product with Sezel call, or we didn't have an aim for that. It was a check out product that was designed to lower cost for merchants. It was a bank payment at checkout, which is a very low cost rail. Bank transfers are super low cost versus credit cards or debit cards. We weren't getting the pick up that we needed as a company. My prior company passport, we also launched the wrong product at the start. Got in the industry, saw what was taking flight, adopted that idea, which was mobile payments for parking, and then innovated and won the space. Basically what happened at Sezel is almost a mimic to that map, which was wrong product at the start, get into the space, which is retail payments. We saw AFTERPAY taking off in Australia. I had been to Australia for my last company. It was basically a USA self. If an idea worked there, there's a high likelihood that the idea works in the United States. When we saw that taking off, we were like no one's doing this here. It's very unique. Let's launch it. We pivoted to business. We launched in three months after the pivot in August of 2017. From that moment forward, it was a rocket ship. I had a prior company to compare it against. I would say there's only one detriment. Everyone came in at the same time with the same idea. There were a lot of companies. AFTERPAY came over the US. The moment we launched, they were aware of it. They started selling in the US as well. They launched nine months later. They were a multi-billion dollar company. We were a 25 million market cap private company. A company called Quad Pay and launched four months later. Two Australian multi-serial entrepreneurs. They were really talented. I saw them all those guys today. They're very talented. They had a good product. That's now a zip. Then Zips of Public Company. I have Australia. Clarina came a few months after all of this. They were a 40 billion dollar FinTech at one point. PayPal came in. Even Apple came in. Everyone diving in. If there's one thing I'm super proud about, Sezel, and I think is a key tell to how strong we are as a company as a team, is the size and scale differences that we had at that time for fundraising. But where we stand today looks pretty damn attractive despite that. We raised around 120 million funding over our entire lifetime as a company. The next lowest is over a billion in equity financing. Over a billion, that's the next lowest. So we have multiple companies that raise billion, two billion, three billion, plus in cash to compute in the space. And here says Liz today, our market cap today is 3.2, 3.3 billion. Clarins market cap is 5.55, 5.6. And that tells you how efficient we are as a company and scaling up what we're doing. And I think it's a testament to the team that execution. - How is that possible? I know you said team and execution there, which probably accounts for a big part of the success. But if you had to attribute to or specify a bit more, how did you manage to with such a low raise, get a better result, I would say than others? I think when you yourself is like resource constrained, it forces you to make tough decisions that also reduce distractions. So you tip your air all, you have to point in the right direction and you know you do. Where if you just have money flooding in, you don't have enough time to figure out where to allocate it all and you just spend a lot of it recklessly. And probably it's on the little, a lot of it in the wrong directions. So we were forced to focus where our efforts were, early days, those efforts were towards SMB merchants, which a lot of other players were ignoring. And they were very efficient to bring on board and to scale with. We had to change that model and Shopify launched a competitive product on top of ours and did diverted traffic from us. And then the next product we launched was the direct consumer model, which was hyper efficient in terms of what we were able to offer. So I think that's a really big part of it is the focus and forced efficiency as a company, which helped us do it. And I think it also kind of shows that just these massive lot of fundraising rounds that people do. Sometimes it's massively wasteful. I know I don't think we're really in that date anymore except for maybe AI companies of today. But in FinTech, I think things are relatively efficient. Yeah, I really do think it is a lot of it is still execution in your team though. We are very focused on what we do. We do throw, pick like four initiatives or five initiatives that we really want to focus on each year. And we really maintain the focus. We will make adjustments during the year if things have to change but we tend to maintain focus and just keep on paddling with the slow and steady. We're almost a little bit of impatient and patient at the same time. We're also patient, I would say, which I think is unusual for a smaller company. We will go with our gut instincts and the data. And even if we don't get a quarter by quarter reward from investors in the market, we'll stick to our thoughts if we see the results that we're looking for and keep on continuing on those paths. And what sort of big ideas or principles do you see yourself constantly repeating to the team internally or to the company? Because I know that a lot of founders I've met throughout the years are sort of trying to push the culture or at least build the culture that builds through repetition, I guess, a bit. So what are the key principles you try to push internally? Well, hiring standards is and using data during hiring is a huge one. I think if there's one thing-- What sort of data? Well, we have everyone go through basic IQ tests and we don't care what age you are. We ask you for your transcript from undergrad. And the reason we ask for both of those things and more. So we actually also actually do testing for your specific role, like data where we get data, like a number output of your skills in that area. But IQ, that's your horsepower. That's-- I also think they want to really smart people, work with really smart people. They don't get frustrated. Well, I think if there's sometimes there's mismatches, there's frustrations. We tend to have a very high standard on IQ in the company. GPA is, I think, is even more important though. Because GPA, especially undergrad GPA, if you're a top 10% tile, you had to do-- you had to complete projects. And why I say the reason I like GPA more than most is because in college, you had to complete projects you didn't even like necessarily, which happens in business. And you had to complete them and do a good job to get that A. So GPA is also important. But then for coding, we get people a codility test. We score those as well. We give the same thing for data analytics. We basically try to apply different tests. And honestly, you can delete the name from the profile. It goes right to all the data. And that's who we interview first. And that's who we bring on. So that's a big one. We do have the culture elements. And I think we do stick to them. We have five core culture elements that are very important to us, character and integrity, fun to work with. And I always joke, it's not like going to happy hours. It's like when we're in tough meetings, people watch in the meeting. They want to chat with you. They love your opinion. They love you. They love the energy you bring to the meeting. Good communicator, which is listening and talking. Driven to succeed, there's like the element of sports where you want to win. We want that for sure. And then act like an owner. So regardless of the role you're in, you're actually like an owner of a company. So we definitely look to those. And then I think the other one that's probably really key for us is stakeholder approach to business. Which is bottom line is important. And all the investors out there, I'm pretty sure I can see that we care about bottom line. But we follow a stakeholder approach, which is identify the key stakeholders for your business and create an A score card for all of them. So for us, customers, we need an A score card. They got a lover product. Merchants, suppliers, our team, investors, community. We want everyone to have a high opinion of Sezel. And if the viewpoint is being get A score cards from all those groups, you're going to win. So I think those are probably the elements that have really helped us quite a bit. I think we also reward the team really well. But we're also-- we'll actually let people go. We have a performance management that's important, but both directions. And I think all those things have really led to a very strong company with a lot of people that have stayed over a long period of time. A lot of talented people, which also helps. So I think all of that's kind of helped us create what we've created here. Before we get back to the program, I have an invitation for you. I'm Bobby Kraft, and I want you to experience our in-person live events. We bring many of the companies and guests you hear on this program directly to you in Las Vegas and Toronto. It's where the micro-cap community connects and great ideas are found. Don't just listen to the conversation. Be a part of it. Secure your seat today. Head over to planetmicro-cap.com right now to register. See you there. It's interesting that you put such a big weight into the GPA, because I think there was a trend that founders or entrepreneurs serve this miss school as it's not important or all these dropouts that build big tech companies. Why do you think you have a different view on that? Or I guess I'm not sure if you have a different view or not. But why do you think the trend went in that direction? And probably now it's going a bit more to a balance where people realize that maybe it's not exactly that way. Well, it depends on the scenario. I mean, Jillian Brackie on our team. He's our head of AI. He didn't graduate college. But he was an early team member. I heard him directly. And this is like when you're high beta. And you also have to-- you don't have the cloud to recruit. And you're going to be wrong. Killian is fantastic. But as you get more and more cloud to recruit, you can demand more of the applicant and not have to take his may, you know, pursue risks there. Because I feel like that example of the killing higher. I would call it high beta. You know, actually he was in college at the time. So maybe it wasn't that high beta. We already had this track record. But having someone that didn't go to college and say it's high beta. Super smart. Didn't go to college. High beta, I think. But you could be right. Could be an absolute home run. But I don't think we need the high beta return type of risk and reward in our hiring price. Because we have the cloud to require the best. So why take the risky endeavor that could lead to a very good result when we can just take the more standard route? Which you're right, less people are focused on, which-- [INAUDIBLE] That I always think that leaves more room for us. When people are kind of against these trends, we just use common sense. We use our gut instinct. We'll look at-- But we don't necessarily adopt a trend. If I think a trend is a dumb idea or our team thinks it's a dumb idea, we don't do the trend. We just do what makes sense to us. And here's what I know when I talk to people in the company that we're hiring. We're going to focus on this high IQ, high GPA, probably for five years. The amount of wicked smart people in the company that I talk to every day, I'm really impressed. And so that I love surrounding myself with this cohort of people of that kind of caliber. And I've seen it pay off. Another kind of analogy to that whole concept is credit score. We're in a lightning space. Credit score is applying for a home, applying for a car. is the cut. credit score, it weighs 100% correct? No. But there's a reason it exists because it's pretty damn good. But you can get a person that scores like a 600 credit score that could be an awesome payer and act like an 850. And you can get 850 that acts like a 600. But the data and the history and the continued path will show you that you're way better odds of having a good payer and the 800's and you are 600's. That's true too. So we stick with the credit score approach. No, it makes perfect sense. And I guess on average, you'll do much better. Exactly. And probably, you're right, that there is more talent going to you now that people focus more on the like soft side. And I think you mentioned in another interview that can you can always figure out the soft side after a couple of months of having the people on board. I've never seen anyone successful, including myself, figuring out the EQ soft side model in an interview. Not a chance. You got to get people under pressure, not plan pressure, but it just naturally happens on the job. See how they treat other people, you know, see how they handle it. See how they manage their own stakeholders. You can't figure that out in an interview. No way. Yeah, another interesting thing for such a young company is that you're very, very profitable. And so can you tell us the story of when you had to sort of pivot to profitability, I think it had something to do with a zip deal or something like that. It's not a type of actually what happened to us is we went public in Australia first because the investors not really understood the product. That's where we raised the 120 million I spoke about. But as we were public in Australia, I would call them archaic US laws, you know, SEC's act from the 19 early 19 praise. Instead of you have over 3000 investors, you have to file in the US queues and case, cordalies and anials. And I always joke around like when they wrote this in the early 1930s, they probably didn't perceive. They didn't put USA investors because they didn't really think that, you know, almost 100 years later, you'd be getting investors from other countries. But I guarantee that SEC's mandate is not to care about Australian investors, but whatever. So we had over 3000 Australian investors, the wording in the SEC mandates did not say USA investors. So we started filing in the US queues and case. But we weren't public in the US. We said, okay, my people go public since we're already doing all the work as a public company. When my people go public, well, the way you go public and back then we were burning money. We're like, let's fundraise. So backdrop, we went public in Australia in six months. US, we were already filing queues and case. I was like, this can't take long to go public. We did it in six months over there. We're already filing all the filings over here. We should be able to fundraise very soon. So we held off on all fundraising to wait, wait for the IPO because we didn't want the fundraising on Australian exchange to massive our fundraising on the US IPO. Well, the US IPO took forever. SEC is much slower than I expected. And it took almost three years to get final approval. We missed a fundraising window. We had probably like 13, 14 months of cash. And I like to run with three years of cash when I'm burning cash as a company. So we said, okay, we got to get the profitability. And this is before the zip combination. We're going through some M&A plans as well because we're like, you know, we have this troublesome issue right now. Maybe we should go, you know, looking at M&A as well as an option. We eventually chose the path to merge with zip. The idea being which was a valid idea. If we cut shared opX like overlap in op X, we could get the profitability right away. Again, the next problem was SEC. They were the next problem because we had to get through the SEC to merge the companies. And I already been through a process that didn't get completed through the SEC. So as we learn how those becoming a sticky wicked, we said, let's push apart all that time. We already kind of planning what we needed to do to get the profitability. And we did it basically moment we broke free of the merger with zip. We enacted all of our cost cutting, which was getting out of Europe, getting out of India, getting out of Brazil, doing a riff in the United States. But I would call it more of like a performance riff, but now cutting our team by 10% in the United States. And then after we did all that, we started launching some initiatives on the revenue sign. And within six months of our parting ways was zip, we were profitable. And that changed everything. So I was almost like David, it was almost like branding iron in the rear end that time period because I can deal with a lot of stress. I'm like co-founders can deal with a lot of stress. We dealt with it in the past. But that was the most stressful thing I'd ever dealt with in my life. Because I rather they're navigating. And it literally was like a branding iron on the rear end. And we never forget forgotten that time period. And then at that point, we decided we had a very low market cap at one point in the countdown, like 35 million as a market cap. Despite the fact that we were making seven million and growing and that income. So people were ignoring us. And we just said, feel the dreams like Lee's phrase, Lee Brady, our CFO's phrase was, feel the dreams if we build it, they'll come. We put our heads down. We just kept on building and growing. And that created a mindset of just growing profits, growing revenue, growing profits, profitable growth company. And I don't think we've really missed out on anything on the growth side. I think we've done everything we wanted to do. And we've done it very efficiently and very safely. And I tell you what, it helps you go to best. A lot of easier at night when you're making a lot of money because you can kind of ignore the market swings. And in some cases, when you have like company buybacks going on, take advantage of them. And you know, show your support for the company and show your support for other investors by implementing them by backs. There are so many places I want to take this conversation. Namely, how do you made it from microcaps to sort of graduating that space? And I think there's some interesting stories about how you made yourself sort of public to the funds and stuff. Maybe you could speak about that a bit. Or was it all like just focusing on the fundamentals and then eventually people kind of recognized the value of the company? What we did is, it was both there. So what we did is we kept on focusing on fundamentals and building a great business which we've never changed. Like that's maintained. What we did was we basically, my backgrounds in startup world. So venture capital rounds and seed round bridge rounds, a round, be round, see rounds. So basically we said, let's think of the public companies space in the US as like venture capital. So we said seed series A, where we had a 35 million market cap. We were seed. We were seed series A. So what we decided to do was instead of trying to do silly things like issue stock to get coverage to get exposure, there's, we said no chance in help. We're going to issue stock at these low levels. I remember investor bankers coming to us and saying, Hey, you should issue stock. And I was like, invest in banker, imagine you have a million dollar house and someone comes up on your lawn and says, Hey, I'll buy it for 25,000. What are you going to tell them? You're going to tell them to get the hell off your lawn. That's what we're telling you. Get the hell off our lawn. We're not throwing our house for 25,000 when it's worth a million. So we just said, let's put our heads down. And then what we did, we tried to go to conferences, tough to get an invite, but we tried to get to conferences to talk to people. I saw one of the first conference we went to in the US was KBW. And we only talked to one investor and he didn't even invest. And I remember that one. But and then what we started to do was just basically go, I would say like Ma and Pa high net worth individuals. So I live down in Puerto Rico. And there's a lot of high net worth individuals in my community. So we just basically started like explaining the company to members here, like team members, you know, club members here, I tell them about what I did and they'd be interested. And I'd say, yeah, you can download our financials. And they'd have awareness. They knew me. A lot of people down here in Puerto Rico started investing. That created liquidity. That created some growth in the stock price. Then in many apples, I remember we had a couple of early meetings with funds, some smaller funds. And I remember doing those meetings, you know, basically those funds were like so blown away by learning about our market cap and what we were accomplishing in our growth rates that they were buying like almost immediately. And and then basically what started happening is we started slowly walking up our market cap through these just, you know, venture capital like series rounds and that increased liquidity at the same time or having great quarterly results. So we have these kind of compounding on each other. We have the crease exposure. And then once you have these thing investors joining your company, just like happens in venture capital, they start telling all their friends. But you had the high net worth individuals telling their friends, you have, you know, these funds and many apples telling their friends, then we start going to more conferences. I say it was just like a virtuous cycle. Like we started going to conferences. These funds started introducing us to other funds. we started to get some coverage. We started to reach over a billion market cap and then just, it keeps on kept on going. >> Makes sense. And obviously, you had to sort of back that exposure up with fundamental improvements, which is always very important, of course. And I want to speak about Minneapolis. So for fast growing tech company, it's not very typical to be born in Minneapolis and just the head, I'm not sure if the headquarters are there or not. But yeah, does it have anything to do with the success or what sort of makes you different because of that? >> I think so. So my first company in passport was founded in Charlotte. Well, it was founded in Minneapolis, and then I moved down to Charlotte to my co-founder on board. So we scaled it up in another non-traditional city. And then Minneapolis was for Sassal. And I think, you know, sadly, in the venture capital space, there's a little bit of this club where it's like all the scraping, all the smart people live in New York and California. Just stupid. I mean, there's smart people everywhere. So our view is like more pragmatic. Like, there are smart people here. We can scale up a business here. And actually, once you get passed, you know, it might maybe you can, like, if you're having drinks out in California and you run as the right person, you can get a big fat seed ground check for $5 million, where ours were like, you know, we got seed ground at like 1.8 in Minneapolis, which is still pretty good for Minneapolis. I think that was the start of our efficiency journey. We were just way more efficient. As a company, we always thought about being efficient with our spending, where I think if you get trained on this like bigger check process, you have a big hard time going to reverse. And I remember seeing that like in what I call tech apocalypse in 21-22, where a lot of these non-profitable fintechs and startups were struggling is like, they didn't even know how to get to profitability. They didn't know how to be efficient. They've been so extravagant and they're extravagant in their spending that didn't know what a change. Where for us, when we went through that tough time period, we'd always been, you know, relatively miserably with our spending. And for us to get back to that was like, okay, we're used to this. Starting an episode from that perspective, quite frankly, we generally try to avoid hiring in the high cost areas in the States, California, New York, Washington. Because my view is that you can find talented people everywhere, but all you're doing when you hire someone in California or New York is paying for their cost of living, not a better result. So we generally avoid hiring in those areas. And I know you also hire like outside of the US. You think that's an advantage? And how do you make sure like the culture sort of travels with you to the places you go and hire? Yeah, so that's been a part of our journey too. So we do have a headquarters in Minneapolis. I wouldn't call it much of a headquarters anymore because after COVID, we went fully remote when I was at point, but the vast majority of remote. We still use that quarter for meetings, but not much else. I mean, I was there on Friday and I was me and one of the person in the office. It's not that much of an office. So we realized that no one's coming in for remote. Let's look elsewhere. We told our team, the United States, was don't take this as any sort of threat as like we're going to greatly off. I just don't play that. I think it's another benefit we have in the company. We're human beings. And I think you have social contracts with people that are unspoken, which is like, you're on my team. You join the company. You are on my team. Does that mean I'm going to have the higher than the next person in Minnesota? No, even though you're a Minnesota, no. But what it will do is if you help the company keep costs down, I can pay you more. I can give you bigger bonus. I can give you more shares because we're keeping our op-ex down as a company. And then we're creating a universe of sezlers that are not just in the United States. They're in Eastern Europe. They're in South America. They're in Central America. They're in India. They're in Indonesia. We can hire everywhere across international and the United States and Canada as well. But by doing so, we're able to keep our costs, structures lower, and then make all the sezlers, which is our country, our universe. We can make all the sezlers happy by keeping our cost structures lower, which is what we do. And in terms of culture, we have the same hiring standards. So if you're in Colombia, we still require top 10% intelligence, top 10% telecommunications, top 10% telecommunications, etc. And then English speaking, of course, which is maybe one of the more difficult things. But you tend to find people that have gone through good schooling in any country, they tend to English. And then it's just a remote world. And we get together. We had off-sites in Bogota, where a lot of the team members are based. We've done some events. We've done an event in Turkey. We go to events in Canada in Toronto. We do the same thing in Minneapolis. We do some off-sites as a company. We have get-togethers. And even the teams themselves have get-togethers. And I feel like we have a really strong culture. Like the teams they love to get together when they get together. They go out and have fun. And I think there's very strong camaraderie, which speaks to me. If you look at our, well, maybe we don't have public numbers on this, but I would just say like people's tenure with the company tends to be long. So you mentioned your fully remote at the moment. Yeah. That's so crazy. Like no, I know it makes perfect sense. This is from an up-ex perspective. But all the other companies reversed the COVID trend of remote. And so what do you think makes you special and why has it worked for you and not for others? We adopted it and embraced it. And then adjusted how we managed systems for it. And I saw the benefits. You know, I was living in Minneapolis and team members were moving to Texas, Colorado, Nashville, and asking for permission. And we said, yeah, it is what it is. We'll let it happen. That's why I figured me to move. I'm like before letting everyone else do it. I'm going to move too. I'll look for a better life balance sort of situation, health-wise. And then once we started doing it, we realized this actually works pretty well because you know, give me an idea. We have all the decent number of people in Bogota. Bogota's commute is brutal. Our hour and a half, two hour commutes. What a waste of time in life, honestly, stuck in a car. We saved that time for everyone in our company. And the basic to ask is because we're doing that. Can you basically share some of that save time with the company and share some of your personal life? And we got to win, win, win situation down here. And I think that's really worked well for us. Yeah, I don't know. I think sometimes other companies, and I'm a sound I second our industry. I'm thinking about this whole like back to the office thing in general. I think some of it is, I think these companies look for, they're not willing to do the hard things, like performance management, the hard way. So they look for other way less efficient ways to do performance management, which is like, we're going to force you back to the office and if you don't come back, you're going to lose your job. Well, the bad/stupid thing about that is the people that are the best in your company probably have the most likelihood of getting a remote job. And so you actually just made a decision to cut staff that might have cut majority good staff. And you kept your bad staff that can't go anywhere or your less lower performing staff, I should say, that can't go anywhere as easily as high performers. So I think some of those ideas are technically backwards. And I think they've led to bad results for companies. Do you think there is like, I have an hypothesis? I think it also might have worked well because you're sort of hiring for this criteria that you mentioned before, like GPA and grades. Usually, people are highly independent and they sort of don't like to, at least for my observation of people like that, don't like as much to waste time on stupid things, maybe small chatter and stuff like that. So maybe working from home is exactly what they want. So yeah, there's a little bit of that to get those high GPAs. They had to be independent. They had to be able to just put their head down and get stuff done. And in many ways, they were probably in the study carols and not chattering all the time and working at home works great for that. Very unique for sure. And yeah, so we spoke about the hiring process, the profitability, the fact that you're based everywhere, actually, not just Minneapolis. I want to ask you about which you have learned from peers CEOs and founders. I know you get along well with them, any friendships that have developed or just lessons you may have learned from competition. Yeah, I mean, probably the most interesting evolution for myself was when I was a founder of Passport, the first company. Yes, I was co-CEO there. And we had a mentality, I was younger, younger 30s. And I remember our mentality was just destroy everyone. Everyone was the enemy. We're going to destroy them. and we wouldn't talk to them. We wouldn't even like want to talk to the other companies. And I realized that for us, and I think one of the investors in our company at that point said it, he's like, you're not going to destroy the other company. They can only destroy themselves. You can outpace them. You can, you know, strategize and maneuver gain market share, but you can't destroy them. And I realized that was such a stupid way to approach business when I started Suzzle. And so with Suzzle, I basically put on the opposite viewpoint, which I think maybe for some of the other coast CEOs in the space was maybe unusual, but I would just reach out and chat with them. I was like, you know, we grab drinks or grab dinner and meet. You know, I don't do it all the time, but we do. I know all the other CEOs in the space pretty much are, you know, to some extent, some more than others. And more than willing to go meet them up and talk with them. And I think that's just smart because there's a little bit of an element where you're somewhat on the same team because you're in the same industry. And if your industry can go well, you're going to probably all do well, which is a little bit of that's happening in BMPL. But then also having really good relationships with the competitors in the space or even not just competitors, but other people in Fintech. I mean, it's really powerful. I learned how much powerful it is later because, you know, as you're hiring for roles, someone might have worked at their company. You can call them for a reference. And it's just because they're just like a contact acquaintance friend. And you can call it like, what do you think of this person? And then you can also, you know, there's like things you can all abandon against, like fraud. It's an enemy of all of our companies. What can we do to, you know, fight fraud together? How you guys handling regulation, you know, things like that. There's kind of universal concepts which you can discuss. And then eventually at some point, if there's ever M&A on the table, having great relationships is also helpful because that's like one of the scariest parts of what M&A is, you don't even know the other team or anything about them. But if you have a pretty good relationship, breaks through a lot of that. So I think for all those reasons that make sense. And then by the way, Yolo, you only live one life. Enjoy it. Like why why you have this like fighting attitude when you can actually have like, let's enjoy life, let's grab dinner and meet. Yeah. And definitely, like, it doesn't help if you're going to merge with a company that was sort of your enemy before. So that makes a lot of sense. And I want to take a step back because one thing that when I listen to you speak and how you operate, it feels like you operate from like common sense. But it's also a very intentional sort of way to go about things. The model, how you hire and how you think about culture and so on. So what do I need to understand about yourself as a person or as a kid or whatever influence might have built you that way to understand how you operate. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything like to put on for my child that are making me seem like common sense. I think I just learned it. You know, I've been in the battlefield, the arena of startups for 16 years now. You know, and first company, we took tons of lumps. Like we did a lot of things the wrong way, like riding a bike and you know, fill down a lot of times. And then Sazel, we got through a lot of items too. And I think just over time, you just you gain more and more confidence in yourself, know what I'm maneuver more. And more and more you go through some of these things. You do the non-common sense things a few times and you're like, well, that was stupid. I should have just done what made common sense. And then you just start realizing, I mean, David, common sense isn't as common as you think it is. I think it's one saying that's out there, which is true. But yeah, most of the stuff we talk about, we're like, this is not rocket science. We're not even the Manhattan project over here building an A-bomb. Like, this is nothing like that's crazy. Let's not try to act it like it is. Let's use our common sense. And let's act on it. And it tends to be the right way. Now, you're right. I don't know what I explain like anything like significant in my past that's made at the case. But I think it's probably just all like the wars we've been through as my two companies that have made me realize how much common sense just makes sense. Yeah, and common sense. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And why do you think other people don't operate that way? I don't know. I think, you know, some people like they get trained in this like highfalutin, like management society, like you are Harvard or Yale or something and this management textbooks tell you have to do A, B and C. And you better do A, B and C. Because that's what the consultant guide says to do. Those schools want to be accepted me. So I didn't have to worry about learning that stuff. But I think that we don't we don't really do that kind of stuff. We really just think about like first principles. You know, Elon Musk kind of calls that kind of stuff of first principles. We think from a first principles perspective on, you know, how to go about things. And I think some of the stress and strain we've had on the company from like lower amounts of funding have also forced us to be more kind of common sense thinkers as well. I don't know. I think those are kind of the things that kind of boiled up into it. And switching gears, what sort of inspires you going forward that makes you excited or something like that? Winning. Really winning. And winning our space, you know, because I've used like up to 10 likes like I want to I want to be the most dominant player in the FinTech space in the United States in five to 10 years. I was going to ask you to find winning. I guess it's a pretty clear definition. And then and then not just the way you get there is winning for the consumer. Because in the consumer, if you're winning, the consumers like telling their friends, why don't you have a zap? You know, like you're silly not to have a zap. You know, I do like a little bit of fun likes props, bets or whatever like Calishe. Calishe's kind of got that going on in like that space where it's like don't you have Calishe if you like place a bet on a game or something like that. So I think that's where I want us to be is like people mid to low income, hard of America, we can help them save money, we can help them with better financial products that make more sense for them. Or they're just telling their friends like bunch of sizzle like you know, almost like a no brainer. That's where I want to take this. If you do that, I think you're at the point where you have millions, you know, maybe 10 plus million active users. And then you're winning big. So that's like my mind, my goal and mission, what I want to let's do accomplish as a company. And what sort of things are you working out, working on right now that you think will move carry the most weight to get you to that intended destination, so to speak. Now we're working on cash management products, you know, base your customer mid to low income, getting more access to cash. That's an important one for us. We have a couple bank account products coming out, checking account with some cash management aspects to it. How do you say, cash management, what does that look like in practice? Well, for that checking account, it's the idea that you can go into overgraphs on the checking account. No, small amount, maybe $152. But like, basically, you know, you hit a pinch point in life, we'll let you do it. Where a lot of, you know, people don't realize this in the United States, there's like 10,000 plus banks. Some of these banks treat people horribly. We see it because we're on the other end of it, debiting accounts. You know, for example, we'll try to debit account, let's say $30 for their installment. The customer will call us and say, "Suzel, why did you try to debit me 40?" We're like, we didn't. They're like, on my bank statement, they sent it to us. On my bank statement, it says, "Nigative 40, Suzel." And we're like, "Really, look at the date. We're like, your bank told us they didn't have the money that you didn't have the money. We got no money from your bank on that date." So your bank didn't send us money. They charged you $40. And they put Suzel as the reason, trying to deflect the blame from them taking the $40 for doing nothing, for doing nothing. Because they didn't let any money leave their bank, they charged the customer $40 for a database entry. This is the kind of stuff that happens at some of these banks. We want to offer a cash product that into a bank account where that company, we would have serviced that. That $30 request, if you had ability to go into, you know, the overdraft side of things, we would have serviced that for you. We would have applied a fee for it, of course, but we would have actually serviced it for you to help you. So that's an example of that kind of a cash management tooling that we want to add into our account. And then we have a savings account product launching, which I think is going to have some really unique features that incentivize savings, which is really important for this customer base. We also want to kind of help, you know, Suzel up we've got in our BNPL product that helps reporting. It's free and optional, and it helps report to the bureaus to help build credit scores. We've also got a savings account product. I want to go into the details, we want to launch it, but we have some tooling in there that we think will incentivize this customer to want to save, which is a good thing for them. Yeah, that looks a lot to me again. And on the other hand, like, how do you make sure, like, these customers pay and how do you manage like how much they can spend so to speak? What's your criteria on that? Yes, we have a model that gets updated much more frequently than it had in the past. We just updated it last in August. It's updates planned in the near future for the next model iteration. But basically it looks at the date of the customer's interactions with Sezel and that's the key driver of how we adjust limits and access for the customer. And then in terms of how do we make sure we get paid back? Well, you can never make sure. But you run models with probabilities. And then based on those models, we adjust limits. The customer has available to them based on their performance again. So between those two elements that helps quite a bit. I would say the other element that helps quite a bit is the nature of the product. And what I mean by that is if you're not current on your Sezel payment payments, you can't make another purchase. So that makes the customer realize like I got to fix this because I like using this product. So I got to catch up and fix it. And then they fix it. They can start using the product again. So the nature of the product that thing helps the repayment abilities or what we see for repayment to. And what do you think is the sort of most misunderstood thing about Sezel from the investor side interest? It's always interest rates. They think that if interest rates rise by a quarter point, Sezel's damaged and some massive amount of, you know, at least you see it in the stock price. And I think people don't understand that it's a short duration product. A very short duration product. So and when you take an interest rate and annual interest rate, like let's say our duration is 30 days, which it's about you divide that interest rate change on the federal level by 12. So a 25 basis point change in the federal reserve is a two basis point change in our cost of funds. It's nothing. I mean it might affect it'll affect the DCF models more than it affects our our unit economics by far. But people act, they kind of group us with other lenders that have longer term nature where that does affect that lender more. But that's all not much at all. That's one that's misunderstood a lot. I think there's another element of like scale. I think a lot of investors out there think that because we're one of the smaller players that we don't have a chance because that's again this is like one of those Harvard Business School Yale Business School like textbook items that people, you know, instead of using their common sense they just go sizzle those have scale. They'll never they'll never make it. So that's where they you know that heuristic. I think that's another one. I think it's kind of silly when I write. Well your margins speak against that I guess. Exactly. Exactly. And there's common sense versus textbook. Right. Yeah. And I went to ask you a bit about the founder of mentality and and how do you actually scale something? What are some of the principles that have you have helped you scale the business as fast as you you have and what were some bottlenecks to scale that you you've found and sort of fixed. I think focus. I think sometimes management teams try to do too much try to accomplish too much at the same time. And we generally have the idea of we want to pick like one main product or two main products we want to focus on. Now with AI maybe do a little bit more because it makes it it does make it easier to launch products. But if you look at our history I think we launched anywhere in 2022. No, that was premium. Sorry. We launched premium in 2022 anywhere in 2023 on demand in 2024. You know, like we basically kind of like almost like one major product launch per year. So focus make sure you kind of nail product launches or initiatives. I think we're very good at that. I mean founder mentality. I think also helps you cut through bureaucracy which just it's always like a disease that's growing in companies is bureaucracy. And I think when you have like founding team kind of elements you can just slice right through it or not allow it to even get created which I think helps you get things done. I think there's also an element of like when you hire management teams to come into a company that already exists. I think it's always about incentives. And I'm not trying to knock these people but I mean I explain my situation. I live in a normal house model Y, cyber truck. I've lived a pretty normal life I think maybe a little bit nice but not like crazy. I'm trying to do this because I just think it's interesting exciting. I think sometimes you get a CEO that's hired into a public company that already exists and they're making five to ten million dollars a year which is the most they've ever made by 10X in their lives. They're running to run the business to not make a mistake. I'm running the business to win. And I think that's a huge difference in attitude and approach and what you accomplish and what you do when you have those two mindsets. One is protecting the kitty that's coming into your pocket and one is not giving a shit about the kitty going into your pocket and actually giving a shit about making something cool. I think you just described 90% of the public companies out there. Yeah you can't see some incentive alignment issues that create issues. Not about it which I get again incentives. Someone gets that kind of a payday. You can understand why they're incentives aligned in a certain way. And they'll never tell you that. But again, common sense will tell you that. Yeah. And how do you think about incentives internally? What sort of incentives are you trying to pass along? Well we want to make sure that the Jokers voice had us like with you know founding companies is we always try to layer in stock. We'll definitely like to make the stock kind of an element in incentive because the ideas of you succeed as a company. I always joke around you don't want to be like kind of the boat party by yourself. Yeah. Kind of a party is that. So you want to make sure that the people that at a hand in building the company is killing the company up. You're designing systems and incentives and rewards in a way that you're all having a party together at the end when the thing wins. And I think very there. I just feel like we've created such camaraderie at this point that even the team members that I have succeeded to a great extent and have had some of those big paydays. They still just like being on the team and coming to work now. So yeah, I was going to ask about about that. Like if you're too successful then maybe your employees will get to reach and then they won't they won't want to work I guess. There's some there there always can be that kind of a situation I think. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess it's a good problem to have. Yeah. That's a good process. Yeah. And if they hear that case, I love continuity. I love workmen's same team members. But if that happens, your price is successful. You probably hire someone pretty good. There's something opens up. But again, I love continuity. I love it, especially as well. We've had a good continuity. And what sort of metrics are you? I know your numbers guy. What sort of metrics are you using to incentivize people or how do people actually get the reward? You know, it's funny. We don't do stock based performance stock. I just feel like it's I don't like tying things to numbers for that. Because otherwise, I think you get people that like you might change an initiative mid-year and they don't want to follow along with the initiative because they're incentive aligns with the old initiative. And now you have to think about how to change incentive. It's like I think we are a little bit more subjective with that one. You have company overall initiatives like themes that we want to see people go after. We have initiatives within terms of goals. And we do look at that. We also look at feedback for departments from other departments in terms of like measuring bonuses. But we tend to like, you know, I think we've designed systems in a way that the team members and the company that do really good job. At least I hope they feel like they're getting a really good performance. You know, I'll put. But we don't we don't do performance shares yet as a company. And I've always been really hesitant to do it because it's just I think it's so trapped with potential problems. Right. Right. Makes sense. And I want to speak about AI of it. How are you leveraging AI? And again, what's most exciting about it right now in your unique business? Well, it's amazing. It's amazing. You know, I'm not a big believer in some of the BS initiatives that have been out there in the past like I call it Crap Toe. You know, it does no value to anyone I think in my in my view. Someone can convince me otherwise that they can show a use case. But the two errors in my life that I saw some really amazing things happening was the age of the internet. 1998, 99, 2000, 2001, 2002, holy crap. That was amazing to be part of. I was like young individual at that point. And then I think AI is the same. I think we're in the same like another goal in age. The tool is crazy. Good. And basically our view is that we basically mandating that everyone using the company. I don't think we have to really mandate too much because everyone's kind of understood how important it is. And we just support it and support it and support it and support it now. But software development team right now, why understanding? We're trying to do even better. tracking it this. My understanding is that 80% of the code submitted right now is written by AI and reviewed by team members and probably by AI again. So that's going on. We have a chat support bot that's diverting 70% of tickets and with a higher customer score, like success score from the customer than our human agents. Like because it just answers faster, answers more consistently, less, you know, overall mistakes. So like that's a pretty cool one. We have our shopping AI assistant that's launched. We're implementing AI and legal compliance to speed up processes to automate. We're basically just injecting it everywhere. And our view is that, yeah, I've seen some companies out there. I think another good example of excuse to do layoffs is AI. They, you know, companies out there uses excuse to do layoffs when they were just told in a mission bloated companies. And they didn't want to do the hard things ever. So they use an excuse to get away with it. I think our approach is completely different. Our approach is we're not going to cut team members. Our approach is that we're going to use AI to become incredibly productive and turn a team of four, five hundred into a team of four or five thousand. That's what our view is. Use as a tool to become incredibly productive. Yeah, there have been some views and reports out there that make like catastrophic scenarios of how AI may just break the economy because no one will have a job and stuff. I went to your yard take from firsthand. Yeah, founder that employees a ton of people and leverages AI. What do you think about that? And the future of the job market for software developers and yeah, overall the job market. I don't think it does any of that. I'm a optimist on this and I think we've seen this from our past technologies. I think actually what it ends up doing is as long as government doesn't get involved in a ruin it. I think what it does is it makes humanity hyper efficient. And we're able to like enter like literally like another golden age. I think internet put us in a little bit of a golden age as a say maybe not a little a real golden age. I think AI can do the same thing and I'm a big optimist on it. I think what's going to find is that companies just produce better high quality faster. Hopefully government agencies do the same thing. I saw Jeff Bezos talk on this once, which you spot on. It's like when you submit your plans for like an addition on your house or something. Why isn't that automated? Why isn't that AI just looking at your plans and checking against regulations and giving you an answer in five minutes? And what does that do? This speed sings up. And I'm able to hire the crew to build my project faster. Instead of waiting nine months, I'm able to hire them tomorrow. More people are getting higher. More jobs are completed. More progress. Faster. Faster. Faster. More innovation. And I think that's all it's going to do for humanity and that. I think it's just going to speed things up and first and do another golden age. And what sort of skills are sort of more protective from commoditization? Intelligence. Number one, I mean, just like I think AI is a it's exponential on intelligence. And there's other problems here because you know, there's this whole like wealth gap that's talked about. And AI probably is going to increase the wealth gap. There's definitely going to be that because but the reason of being eyes, I think that you have someone that's very highly intelligent. And I've seen the data out there. They tend to use AI even more, which creates an exponential result, which you know, further winds wealth gaps. So I think high intelligence helps you quite a bit. I don't know, just like I think it's a right attitude. I'm more than anything because I've seen this even in the company. Some people have like fought AI and say no, no, no, no, well, some of them are going to work with the company. And there's some people that like say like this is cool. I'm an embrace it. And I'm going to use it and it would be more efficient. And that's what gets high five to the company. And so I think it's the attitude of the individual as well. If you're the right attitude and become an embraceer of the product, you can advance. My first company was in the parking industry. My analogy and maybe it's a crude analogy, but back in the early days of parking, it was like there was just parking attendance that would take cash and give tickets. Probably fraught was fraught by the way. Think about it, person taking tickets and taking money and giving tickets. But the ticket spitter got invented. Automated ticket machines and ticket acceptance machines. You could have been the parking attendant person that was like, oh, that piece of junk machine over there. It's useless. It doesn't need a job, right? It's always gets jammed. Forget what a job. Yeah, I'm never going to lose my job. Or you could have been smart enough and saw, wow, that thing's going to take my job. I better learn how to operate on that thing and fix it and make sure it doesn't jam. I guarantee the latter person probably has a very high paying job in the parking industry, probably managing 20 lots or 30 lots for some parking operator. And the first person doesn't have a job in the parking industry anymore and they're working somewhere else. So I think it's all about a lot of it's about attitude. Yeah, the right attitude. And if I was a fly, sort of decides you, what ways would I see you using AI on a day-to-day basis as a multi-billion dollar CEO? I use it for like legal compliance questions before I bother someone. You know, I try not to bother people on the team. I, you know, I, that is people think it's weird, but I think that, you know, we have our initiatives, we have our goals and our themes of what we're trying to do. We try to set those and then try to get up people's way if we can. So, you know, honestly, I really try not to bug people. So if I can ask a question to AI, I want to do that before I try to bother someone, you know, Sarah Hill or had a product, she's super busy on all of her initiatives. I don't want to bother her. So I'll ask questions to AI about regulatory or legal or how we're approaching things to understand it better before I talk to her. Things like that, we've actually built an internal AI data like a knowledge hub. It's also helpful with that. So, basically, we've created a knowledge hub first where all of our data repository is in the same place, and we've created MCP servers to help the AI's interact with our data hub. And now I can actually ask questions like, hey, on our checking account products, how do the surveys look like to the consumers out there? What if consumers thought about this product? And we can plug in, I'm not sure where you're quite here yet, but soon to come, like ability to ask, "Clawed, Gemini, Chat GPT, all that same question, they connected the MCP server going to our internal knowledge hub, and then give me back thoughts and analysis." And I don't have to ask Sarah for that. Total distraction for her if I ask her for it because she thinks, "Oh, Charlie's asking, I got to go jump and do it. I don't want to make her jump and do it because she's got a lot of important things she's working on." So, if I can ask all those important questions to this AI knowledge hub, now I can understand it. I'm out of my answer. I'm done. I don't need to bother her at all. But then, even if I do have to talk to Sarah about something, and you know, I might have you bother her a little bit, I'm way more educated. So, now we're talking about higher level things rather than, hey, where's that survey? Did you do a survey? You know, we're talking about like, "Hey, I read the survey. What do you think about this? This is pretty interesting." And she'd be like, "Oh, yeah, I looked at that too, alignment." Okay, or no, we're different. We have to debate something. So, I think it just takes you to the next level type of interactions in your company and speeds up processes for me too. So, basically, AI becomes ever more efficient or useful as it has more access to your personalized, like, individual data. And so, how do you think about, like, security in those situations? Because, basically, AI has a bunch of data on your company. And I'm not a hacker, but if someone would hack into it, I don't know if it's possible or not, they would get a lot of information. So, how are you thinking about that for AI and access? Yes, we're working with, you know, obviously the top teams out there in terms of AI. But these ones I mentioned, they have enterprise solutions where our information in their design is walled off from the world. And, yeah, hacking is always a possibility of hacking and someone succeeds and gathers your data and puts it out there. But at the same time, David, I also do say like, we're not working on the, I was kind of an internal joke. Like, we're not working on the Manhattan project here. Like, most of the stuff is common sense. If some of the ideas that we had in the company leaked, we don't want to, because we always love the competitive advantage. But if some of it leaked, it's not a consent of the world. I don't think in terms of like, you know, because the things we're doing are common sense. We're running surveys. Look at the survey. This is what it says. This will do. I almost be like, again, like a sporting analogy. It's like, if someone saw your playbook or they heard you what the next play you're calling, they might have that one advantage for that little bit of time. But then you the closes and you're just running along. And again, I mean, I'm telling you, you're watching football on your side. or whatever you know the player gonna do. You still gotta stop it, you know, so. So I think some of us a little bit overblown, but that thinks that we do follow processes where we work with these AI companies that wall our data off. - And what's your ultimate competitive advantage with your competitors and maybe also substitute offerings like credit cards and you think you will ever displace the credit card in this fee? - No, only so. I think credit cards here to stay. I think competitive advantage for the company is our team, our inner hiring practices, our culture. I know that's like again, not a textbook answer from Yale and however, I don't care. I know it's competitive advantage for us. It's our attitude, it's our team strength. And then whether that's led to the product side is I think that we just because of this never ending drive towards improving the business and improving the product. I just feel like it's a race, it's an innovation race. And we're just innovating and pushing faster and harder than anyone else in our space. And with the right products and you keep on doing that over time, you're gonna create a really big winner. And I think that's all it is just time, pressure, smart decisions, compounded. And you do that enough, you're gonna have a lot of success. - Yeah, makes perfect sense. And again, common sense. I think that was a big theme for this conversation. And my last question before we wrap up, you're still very young founder and CEO. Actually, you've gotten younger. I've seen some of the old interviews and you look younger now. How do you think about your own stock? Like philosophically, how do you think about it? Do you ever plan on selling? Because you've seen your position, like your stake, grow from, as you mentioned, 44% of 30 million to 44% of 3 billion or something like that. So yeah, maybe you can impact that a bit. - Yeah, I would say never say never. But I just never had a big itch that I needed to sell. I have a loan out against my stock that gives me some access to a little bit of a more extravagant lifestyle. But again, like I said, it's nothing crazy. And I think it's just patience. Do I, I think that returns in the markets are non-linear. I think people, like I said, one of the things they say is scale. You might think you get the scale thing right 'cause you read a Harvard textbook a while back. But what is the scale solution? Tell about, you know, tell about Sezl doing the right thing for the next 10 years and having great returns where Sezl's scale in 10 years. And then now you're getting the scale benefits along with the returns and consistent returns. So I think it's not linear when you hold the stock and grow. I don't know, that's kind of how I viewed it. - And it's also not very typical to have a loan against your own stock. So why do you decide to do that instead of like selling a couple of shares? - Well, I think my viewers, there's undervalued. We're doing buybacks right now. I mean, how like, again, a common sense perspective. How backward would it look if the company is doing buybacks and I own 44% of it and I'm selling? That makes no sense, right? It's don't, you're walk the walk, talk the talk. We believe in the buybacks of these levels. Why am I selling? So there's some of that. And then from the loan size, it's like, a minuscule. You know, here's something on my mindset and how I think about it. My current loan amount that I can borrow up to throughout there, you know, filed document, 20 million. 20 million on 1.5 billion. What is that? 1.3, 1.4% leverage. I don't know, I thought I had super low percentage leverage. But then that's not how I look at it. I actually look at it as our net income numbers. So net income for the first quarter, 51 million net income. I own 44% of the company, 44% of 51 million. Is that 20, 3, 24 million? So I made 23 million pro-rata in the first quarter. I'm willing borrowing max 20. So I make more pro-rata to me than I'm borrowing, which I think is a very safe level. That's a very safe way to look at it. Because they'd say the world comes crashing down. The worst case scenario is we, something goes wrong. We stop making money. That's for sure, in terms of the leverage. But if the stock just comes down, we're still making money. We're buying back. - If you enjoy this conversation, I'm sure you'll love microcapital.com. And subscribe if you'd like to follow along. Thank you so much for listening.