SPEAKER_01: Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's episode is with Jay Reno. Jay's the CEO and founder of Feather. Feather is a furniture subscription service. They were in the summer 2017 batch of YC. You can check out their furniture at libfeather.com, and if you live in L.A., S.F., or New York, you can try out their service. Jay's on Twitter at jjayreno. All right, here we go. Jay Reno, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. So you are the founder and CEO of Feather, which was in the summer 17 batch, and Feather is a furniture subscription service. So at the core of it is this idea that people don't want to own things anymore. How did you come to that conclusion and why does it motivate your business? Yeah, high level, I think I saw three things happening in my life.
SPEAKER_00: The first was I had moved seven times in the nine years I've lived in New York City, and that's just above average, actually. That's not too far out of the ordinary. And each time I've moved, I've had a completely different life situation. So I've lived with roommates, I've lived with a significant other. I then moved back in with one roommate, then I lived with two roommates, then by myself, then with a significant other, and then by myself. And at each phase of my life, I've had completely different needs in my apartment. So, you know, the space changes, the layout of the space changes place to place. The needs of the furniture needs in that space change dramatically. So for example, one roommate might have had the sofa we needed, but not a coffee table. He didn't have a bed for me, so I had to bring him a bed and mattress, etc. Then when I moved to the next place, that stuff might not have fit physically or stylistically in the next space. So it might have been like a modern apartment the first time, then I moved into a pre-war building in Brooklyn. And at each phase, you have completely different needs. And so, one, I realized that moving is a pain. It's just, you know, we've all experienced this so many different times. And two, the stuff that you have doesn't necessarily fit physically or stylistically in your next space for all the different reasons. Couple that with basically there being a massive problem of furniture waste in the US. So what people are doing to solve this problem today is buying, you know, IKEA, Wayfair, what you might consider disposable furniture that can be assembled once and set up once in someone's home and doesn't really transport very well. It's not meant to be disassembled or moved. And so all of that stuff might not fit in your next space. So you have to throw it out and then go buy new things. Then you move and you throw those things out and go buy new things to fit your space in your life.
SPEAKER_00: So I got my master's degree in climate and environmental science. I was asked to care deeply about some of these big world problems, especially as they relate to the environment, the built world. And realized that I think there's a big opportunity to solve a couple of massive problems. The third piece that's kind of interesting is there's a cultural shift happening, like you mentioned, away from ownership of stuff. And a high level where you see that going is, and we see that taking shape is in the American dream changing. So it sounds like such a big lofty thing. And maybe it is. But our parents' generation cared about getting a house and cars and having a white picket fence with things in their life settling down. And our generation cares about totally different things. We actually aspire to have something very different, which is freedom and flexibility. And freedom and flexibility allows you to experience the world. It allows you to maybe be bi-coastal or just lean into whatever feels right for you at a given time. Maybe that's a job. Maybe that's a hobby. Or where you live, what you're doing. And yeah, we value something totally different.
SPEAKER_00: So that shift happening, culminating with all these other problems. Would you attribute that to the dollar not going as far?
SPEAKER_01: And people being like, you know what, maybe I can't buy a house ever. Or maybe I'm going to push it back from age 30 to age 45 or something. Is that a main factor? What drew that change out in the world? Yeah, I don't think that's a main factor. I think that's a secondary factor.
SPEAKER_00: And you're seeing that happen. You're seeing costs of debt rising. You're seeing greater student debt. People are unable to buy and own lots of things. Maybe because they're not as careful with their money or they're not saving, etc. Or in the front end, you may not have been given much money by your family or anything like that. So that's certainly an issue. We consider that accessibility. So Feather does give people access to items that they may not otherwise would have purchased. Instead would have maybe purchased something disposable that's cheaper. But the reality is most people are using Feather and companies like us. Whether it's Rent the Runway or Uber or Lyft or Spotify, etc. Because they don't necessarily want to own things and have things tying them to a physical space. I found that really interesting because I was listening to a podcast with you that you had done a couple of years ago.
SPEAKER_01: And you were talking about the fundraising process. And you were talking to people at VC Funds who definitely have the means to buy something from, not crazy expensive, but like West Elm. And they were still buying IKEA garbage. And so what did the prototype look like for Feather? Did you just like sell to your friends? How did you ultimately figure out that this was the product?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. You know, we started as a rental business. So the prototype was, hey, ownership is the problem. Today, everyone buys their furniture and owns it. And that creates a lot of waste because they have to be fully responsible for their thing. So they end up buying things and throwing them out. And on the cheap end, that's, I guess, kind of what you end up doing. Someone like using VCs as an example, they've got even analysts, associates, principals, they've got pretty decent salaries. And like you said, they'll still choose to purchase the disposable thing. And a lot of people do this. And the reason is, is because it's flexible and it's convenient. That is what Feather solves today. And so the prototype that we created was, OK, let's create a simple solve, an MVP, that allows us to say, would people prefer to subscribe to or rent things rather than buying them up front and owning them and throwing them out? So I built that, yeah, by myself, just at my apartment and just tested it through friends. OK, so walk me through what it actually is, because people are so curious.
SPEAKER_01: They ask us about this all the time. Like, what can my MVP look like? How do I really test out an idea? Is a form for like one type of couch? Like, what was it actually? Yeah, for this to work, you kind of need to have a little bit of merchandising.
SPEAKER_00: You need to have a little bit of a visual aesthetic and appeal to see what furniture is, what the price is, etc. Yeah. I thought maybe a spreadsheet would work and that's just not enough. Didn't work. Didn't. But there are templates that exist to create web shops. There are a few, if not many companies that do this. I used Shopify. You know, I was paying eighty nine dollars a month, I think it was, for what was then like a premium plan. Yeah. So not that much money on the face of it and ended up, I have a bit of a background as a product manager. So I found a very inexpensive engineer who is living in India and, you know, she was being paid maybe 16 or 18 dollars an hour all in to just build the MVP. I decided that I felt comfortable investing up to like two or three thousand dollars. I don't know what it was of my own personal money. So I said, great, you know, this could go nowhere. I'm just going to build that myself in the confines of my home. And that's how much it took to create it.
SPEAKER_01: How much money did you make off of that MVP?
SPEAKER_00: It's really interesting. I had it running as a side project while I was working my full time job and just sent out a blast to friends on Facebook to see if anyone gave a shit. And it turns out some people did. And the first two orders were friends. The third order was a friend of a friend. The fourth order was a friend of a friend. And I was like, interesting. Yeah. Okay. That, you know, sample size of four doesn't give me all of the confidence, but certainly gives me some confidence that people who I have no idea about, I don't know, are actually using this thing. And how many products did you have? Oh, we had enough. Maybe we had four or five items per product category on the website. Okay. So as an MVP as well, the best way to test this hypothesis was to have the right selection of enough items. So it's not just one bed, one chair, one mattress, et cetera. Yeah. But to have just enough so that you can actually accurately test whether people care because that's ultimately what it needs to look like. And what I did was I put items on the site from a retailer who could ship me things just in time effectively. So when a customer would go on our site, they would place an order for an item or multiple items for their home. And I would then in turn say, okay, great. They're committing to this furniture for 12 months or whatever it was. Okay. I'm going to go buy it myself and deliver it myself. And they're going to, I'm going to own all this furniture up front. And I felt comfortable doing that rather than stockpiling everything up front and assuming that it was all going to go well. Okay.
SPEAKER_01: And so your model was based around the furniture earning itself out after one year? Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00: In the early days.
SPEAKER_01: Was there any margin you built in in the first year? No.
SPEAKER_00: Okay. I mean, you know, I wasn't paying myself, so there was no delivery expense or assembly expense. But I went and had one other person go with me who I'd usually find on TaskRabbit who would have the truck. Yeah. I also didn't have the truck. So I'd be like, hi. And lift the couch upstairs. Yeah. You lift the couch upstairs and also deliver it for me with me. I'll be your helper. Yeah. So I did that for the first number of orders. Okay. It was at that time that I realized it's important to kind of get feedback from the industry as well, not just consumers, as to whether the industry, who's by definition been in the industry, thinks this is a good idea or not.
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah. Because to be clear, I wasn't aware of this, but listening to podcasts with you, furniture rental is not new. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what's the history of that market?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So furniture rental companies are not new. You have a few legacy companies that exist and have been around for 40 years. Like, Court, for example. They're in all 50 states. You can get furniture rented and delivered to your home. One, the furniture is not for our demographic, for people between going to college and buying a home in urban environments.
SPEAKER_00: It's meant more for corporate relocation. It's super old and steely looking. It's like... Meaning like really high end or just like not the aesthetic or all the above?
SPEAKER_01: Not as much. All high end.
SPEAKER_00: They have a range of prices. But yeah, the aesthetic is not appealing. The brand is just not appealing to the demographic at all. The UX is very different. It's very hard to pay them. Separate conversation. Anyway, yeah. So this rental market does exist. But we came out and said they're not addressing the massive opportunity, which are people who are currently buying furniture thinking they want to buy furniture. But in fact, what they actually want is the flexibility to be able to subscribe to furniture. And subscription sits somewhere between rental, which is implying short term rental and implying you're going to return it. And purchasing the items, which is full commitment. You own it. It's yours. And it's your responsibility. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: We should talk about that nuance, which is super interesting. Because when you went through YC, it was rentfeather.com. And now it's livefeather.com. So it's like from the outside somewhat subtle, but can you go through that thought process and then how it actually affected your bottom line as a company? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: So we were rentfeather at the beginning because we assumed that rental was the correct solution.
SPEAKER_00: That ownership was the biggest problem, which in fact is true. That people don't necessarily want to commit up front. But it's not that they should never own something. It's that you shouldn't commit up front. You shouldn't commit to ownership today because you don't know what's going to happen in your constantly changing life. You know, you just moved to New York. You are in a relationship. Anything could happen. I mean, I am knocking on wood that that goes quite well for you. And you might think that this apartment is perfect for you guys for the next year, two years, five years. You might hate the neighborhood, though, and move to a different neighborhood because you like this new neighborhood. So you're going to have to move. So point being, committing to ownership of things up front is what we're really addressing. We're saying instead of committing, just pay monthly, have access to it. Your monthly payments on your furniture go towards owning the items. You never pay more than the retail price of that item. But if you don't want to own it, you can return it at any point. So the evolution of the company went from rental, definitely don't own, it's wrong to own, to hey, why don't you just make the choice later? And so we evolved the way we communicate that to people from a rental company to a subscription. Right. So you kind of just defer the choice.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And so how did that become obvious to you down the line? Were you doing customer interviews? How did you figure that out? Yeah, I mean, you have to talk to people. You have to look them in the eye.
SPEAKER_00: It's not enough typically to just do user interviews over the phone. Video is helpful. You can meet people in person or like I did, do the deliveries and see the people who are using your products, see the living situation they're in and see the furniture that they're choosing. You get a lot more. And so that, just going there, asking a couple questions, them not necessarily knowing that I was the founder of the company was quite valuable. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, because I always figured it was, I mean, because I met you right before you did your interview, right?
SPEAKER_01: And I always figured that furniture was an expression of self. And it doesn't seem to be for a lot of, I mean, some elements are, but like, can you just walk me through how you realized that? Because I figured, yeah, that was like core to someone's apartment in their life. You know what? You might think that and to some degree, the style of the thing is, but not necessarily the color.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So furniture, the overall majority of people purchase furniture and the overall majority of people purchase colors that will go well with the pops of color that they have in their art and their rugs and their pillows and their, the things that they got on their trip to Africa. Right. Or wherever they traveled and got a really cool thing. Yeah. Or from the, they're stored on the street. And so the furniture is like, it's an expression of you. It needs to be comfortable first and foremost. It needs to fit whatever the aesthetic is of your place and of your own personality. Yeah. So some people like, you know, modern and some people like mid-century modern, and they're quite different in aesthetic. And it says a little bit about a person, but aside from that, you don't actually really need to have so many different colors and shapes and textures. Where that comes through is in the little accessories and all that kind of, yeah, it was just really surprising to me because I've, you know, I browsed her side like two years ago and then I browsed her this morning.
SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh, this is very different, but also not like, it's not like infinite choice. It's actually like totally curated. Totally. And so it's not all that different from your MVP, just a much more legit backend. There's a lot in the backend that we've been building over the last two years.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So that's like something I want to talk about too.
SPEAKER_01: So you're in multiple markets and you're also dealing with physical products. What is it, what have been the key takeaways scaling something where you're delivering real things to people?
SPEAKER_00: I think there's two important points to mention. First is you have to respect logistics and respect operationally intensive businesses. And, you know, I think there have been a lot of venture backed companies that have very high demand that should exist today, but they maybe ran too quickly and didn't necessarily respect the logistics or, yeah, or the complexity of building an operationally intensive business.
SPEAKER_00: And in order to do this effectively, you just need to step back and respect it. I think the other point is for a business that relies on software, on people, on unique inventory management systems, on a complex reverse logistics process, you have to heavily rely on software. It's fundamentally a data problem that we're solving on the backend and the software that we've created over the last few years allows us to effectively deliver furniture to people's homes. You know, I think from the outside, you can look at a company like us and say, hey, well, I mean, in the early days, didn't you and your task rabbit just throw the furniture in the back of a truck and deliver it to people's houses? And yes, that's true. But those are probably negative margins. Those were negative margins. Those were proof of concept. Those were, yeah. We weren't optimizing our routes sufficiently. We didn't know how much revenue each product had generated. We didn't know which product categories were doing well or not doing well. Yeah. We didn't have the ability to have route optimization, which I said already, actually. There's just so much that you need to build on the backend. And so how much of your stack at this point, like several years in, is yours versus third parties?
SPEAKER_01: Almost all of it is ours.
SPEAKER_00: Really?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it doesn't, the software that our business needs doesn't exist off the shelf. Like Shopify did as the front end template. Like this furniture company did to help me get the thing off the ground. And does that go all the way down? Like, for instance, like warehouse, yours, trucks, yours, all the way down.
SPEAKER_01: Employees, full time employees delivering furniture. Almost all, yes. Okay. Now, how many markets are you in? We're in three. Okay, so New York, SF, LA. LA. Okay. Why not just dominate New York first?
SPEAKER_01: Good question.
SPEAKER_00: I think I was, so I got into YC, it was just me, the company. We, I flew out to San Francisco. We hired our first employee who stayed in New York. And then I said, you know what? I'm in San Francisco, there's a big opportunity to service a lot of the people who are in YC. And there'll be a very good use case for us to test and learn that is just there right off the bat. So why not effectively open that market with very low overhead? So I did that. You know, it was, I think it was a good move. Ultimately, we learned a whole lot. And it's a market that does very well for us. So, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: So just try, well because like with an operations heavy business, I think you could make an argument for the other side quite easily, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like we scale too fast, we want to own the whole stack. We fucked up and like went to San Francisco. And it was a total mistake. It was a total mistake. So in terms of learnings for you guys, how similar are these markets? That's a great. So we, this was two years ago that I flew to San Francisco with my suitcase to go to YC and had nobody on the ground there and decided to open that market effectively with no one on the ground there.
SPEAKER_00: Fast forward to today, two years later, we've only launched one more market. To your point, there's one, plenty of room to scale within the markets that we're in. Two, it's a logistically complex business and we wanted to make sure that we had that honed in in the markets that we were in. And we also felt it was really important for us to launch a new market so that we could effectively have a new market playbook that we had been testing and iterating over time and then launching. And so now that we're in three markets, we launched LA back in May, we have a very healthy playbook for growth. Okay. So now you've raised a bunch of money.
SPEAKER_01: You've scaled to a company of pretty substantial size. For other founders who are doing an operations heavy business, how would you order the employees that you hire?
SPEAKER_00: Depends on who you are and what you're good at. I think is really the first place to start. So for me, I know I'm good at selling, I'm good at operations, I'm good at building, I'm good at understanding the customer and I'm good at product. Early on, we brought on someone onto our team who was a very good balance to me. Didn't know it at the time, but then this person sprouted into becoming the CEO of the company quite quickly after bringing them on in a very different role. And knowing that this person was just incredible at the things that I was less incredible at, it was a very important place for me to put this person. I was also a solo founder, so I wasn't able to create the perfect founding team with the best, all the things that I don't have. It was just me in the early days. Now, I brought on some amazing and talented people in the early days. Our now CTO who joined me out in San Francisco for the summer, I needed somebody to help build and iterate on the product that I had very terribly put together with my engineer overseas.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_01: But arguably that's not the most important part of your business, especially in the early days. Right, I would agree. But all of the backend infrastructure to power the company was incredibly important.
SPEAKER_00: As you start getting to even a moderate level of scale and complexity in this business, which gets more complex every single month, you need very critical pieces of software in place to make all that happen. Yeah, totally. So what else has been, I don't know how else, but unexpected as you've scaled this company?
SPEAKER_01: Like you said you really like product, but now you're managing all these people. How's that going? Yeah, I think there's a balance of having to continue to learn on the job all the things that you were not necessarily good at or things you didn't even know at all to get better at those things, while also leaning into the places that you are most comfortable and do the best work.
SPEAKER_00: It's easier said than done. You're getting pulled from both ends. So my role now is still somewhat difficult to understand. A lot of what I do is I'm sort of like the snow plow out in front of a line of cars, getting all the snow off the road and saying, okay, cool, this is a good path. Let's go down this path. While also having to look back and be like, all right, let me work with all of our team leads, department leads to help answer questions and provide vision based on what I've seen out in front. Two totally different skill sets. But you either have to lean into both of them and get really good at both of them and continue doing both of them, or at some point pass the baton on to somebody who can do one or the other more effectively because you just have an infinite, or sorry, a finite number of hours in the day.
SPEAKER_01: But how does that, I guess what I'm most curious about is how does that make you feel as a founder? You've worked on startups before, before Feather. You've been on small teams hacking stuff together. Obviously, you hacked the beginnings of Feather together. What does it feel like to have this thing that you wanted to exist, you will it into the world and then it completely changes in terms of what you actually do today? What's that experience been like for you?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I've loved every minute of it. I've loved the first two years of just grinding and growing the company. And I think the first couple of years of a startup is all about heart, mission, dedication and grit and intensity. And once you start to hit product market fit, you have to, and your company is starting to scale, you really need to start focusing on process, on improvements in the way you lead, improvements in the way you do everything. And there are more things happening on your team that need addressing. You don't know what's going on at the company, so you need to be a bit more structured in how you're meeting with team leads and providing them value and also giving opinions. And so, yeah, we're right now at a very interesting shift in that trajectory of the company where we're sort of building process for scale while also shedding all of the heart, the just grit and get it done until it's done mentality.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, kind of that like shitty buggy code that you write in the beginning to get it done. Now it has to be functional and working. Totally, totally. Interesting. Okay, so in terms of scaling the company management wise, has any advice or any learnings you've picked up along the way been completely counterintuitive that you would be willing to share? Yeah, I mean, at least in the earlier days, you know, it's really important to focus, sure, to be very focused on a particular thing and drive towards whatever that goal is.
SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, in the early days, you need to be seeding as many opportunities as possible so that you can hope that one of those 10, 20, 30 seeds you put out into the world or a few of those 10, 20, 30 seeds you put out into the world will sprout.
SPEAKER_00: And become an opportunity. So for example, when it was just me, prior to getting to Y Combinator, I wanted to, like I was mentioning earlier, meet with some people in the industry to get their take on this as an opportunity. And I ended up cold emailing the CEO of West Elm, it's one of the people. He got back to me right away and was like, oh, this is fantastic. I love this. Do you want to come in and meet? And I was like, whoa. Yeah, great. And after two meetings with him, he said, this is incredible. We'd love to partner with you. I don't know how many millions in revenue you guys are doing or how many people you have in your team. And I was like, oh, yeah, no, we're great. It's going real well. We probably had 10 orders at the time. But because I planted all of the seeds, it got me into the position where I was able to get feedback from the industry that said, yes, this is a good opportunity. The day I left the West Elm meeting, I said, okay, now is the point where I believe that this company, I had conviction. I believe this company could exist, should exist. And I really want to pursue this. So I went online and I looked at applications to various startup accelerators. And the first one I went to was Y Combinator. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. And as it turns out, the deadline was that day. Not kidding. And I took that as a sign to sit down at a cafe. I was actually at a pizza shop and I was tremendously sick and fire out an application. But it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't spread a bunch of seeds in different places that could randomly turn into opportunities or luck that I could then grab onto and continue going. So just to be specific there, because I think that's potentially dangerous advice. It is counterintuitive advice. It is counterintuitive advice. But I just want you to clarify, like, how much energy did you put into planting each of those seeds? Because I know a lot of people like half-ass 30 things and do nothing because they've half-assed all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00: You have to be focused on what you're seeding. So you have to be clear and understand what the intention is there. They should be very high risk, but high reward. And assume that like a seed investor, for example, you know, only one or two of the 20 will ever even come to fruition. And if they do, then magic. Right. And so if you seed all of those different things with some of your time, not all of your time, yep, to be clear, it can produce something very magical in the form of opportunities or luck, whatever you'd call it.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think what's cool about Feather is like, it's basically the product you imagined in the beginning. It's basically, this is it. Yeah. Yeah. With tweaks along the way. Getting to know people, understanding what resonates with them, you know, how to message people and what they truly care about. But largely it is very similar to the way we conceived of it in the early days.
SPEAKER_00: And in terms of interacting with industry in the beginning, I think that's also counterintuitive. I know a lot of people who would advise you to probably not do that because they're going to say no to you. Did you get a lot of nos or did you like have to learn to tweak your pitch to get them to say yes? Like how did that process go down?
SPEAKER_01: Just a bunch of non-responses, which is difficult. And then most of the people I talked to really thought it was a great idea, which, you know, you normally hear that like people don't really get the best ideas. So I don't know where that leaves us.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And we're a terrible idea. But it seems to be working and people are very happy with it. And were you concerned that people are going to try and copy you immediately? Like, oh, West Elm is going to grab it and like do that. Not at all. Okay. No. I mean, understanding the level of complexity of our business and how different it is from everything that exists in the market.
SPEAKER_00: The software needs, the delivery and last mile logistics needs that you'd need to operate this business at scale. You know, I never, never felt worried that a big company would copy us. And to this day, no large company has even remotely copied us. Only small upstarts, people who saw us and decided to do the same thing. Yeah. Same deal. Yeah. Okay. So it is now August. We're about to have demo day next week. Yeah, it's super exciting.
SPEAKER_01: You're going? I am going. I will be there. I'm flying out in a couple of days. So for the founders in the batch, I know it's a tough transition to go from this like really cool group dynamic, tons of pressure, like with your peers, a clear goal in sight. They're going to raise money. Most of them. What is your advice to the founders who, you know, raise money at all? Like, you know, a month from now, demo days over and then they're just kind of on their own. Like, how do you prepare yourself for that? Totally. You know, I think especially within the first year after YC, you should keep that exact same mentality going, which is set weekly goals, maybe monthly goals.
SPEAKER_00: We set weekly goals and made sure we stuck to those weekly goals at all costs. That showed growth of the business. That showed that this was a clear opportunity. And if we weren't hitting our goal, we, as in our CTO and I, would stop what we were doing and go figure out how we were going to hit our 7% week over week growth goal. And every single week but one summer we hit it. It'd be like at the expense of building the software to power the business. But it proved that there was latent demand and that we were able to go find it.
SPEAKER_00: So, immediately post YC, definitely reset. It's a little like coming down from a high, I think. Where you're at demo day and there's so many people there and they're all there to see you and all of your batch mates and there's just so much buzz. And then imagine you raise the seed round that you were looking for and you're off to the races. Maybe you're in San Francisco or like us. We flew back to New York. And then there was a calm after the storm. And we sat there and we were like, all right, okay. Well, the energy is what it is in our office. It's just us.
SPEAKER_00: There's no longer this nurturing support system around us. We're in the real world. Coincidentally, I actually gave my graduation speech on this. On entering the real world and how different it is from being in the support system. And it's like actually the same thing as college, except like a condensed college. Like condensed startup college where you get some money. It's the opposite of college. It's like land. It's way better than college. It's way better than college. Yeah. And that first month was, you feel the blues a little bit, even though you might have, you know, we raised three, three and a half million dollars of funding from great investors and had tons of support. It felt a little slow or quiet. Take that time to just reflect and reset and set your strategy for your next six months here. That's my best advice. That's awesome. All right, man. Thanks so much.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01: All right, thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and video at blog, dot Y, combinator, dot com. And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.
