Well, that's a lot of questions all rolled into one. So I think that I had kind of a fortunate timing in my life and that I was, growing up, right as the internet was becoming something that was starting to be used universally, and at the same time, I had kind of an interest in computers. And so in the nineties, I was learning how to program and discovering websites. When I was a teenager, I realized that I could make web websites for companies and charge money, and it was a pretty easy way to make some cash. I did it for very cheap. I was, like, 13 or 14 years old. I didn't realize that I should charge more than 200 or $300 for a website, but it seemed like a lot of money to me. So I was really popular with different businesses to get them online. And from there I got interested in kind of how the Internet and the World Wide Web worked as a whole because once you build a Website or Web application, you have to run it somewhere and and I started to kind of look into servers and databases and all of the things that happened behind the scenes. So that was really how I ended up kind of getting into a tech career. I actually was planning to study music and have a career in music somehow. But I just kind of started down the tech path and then continue to find more and more things that I was interested in. And that's how I got started, for the cloud, specifically, what inspired me and my co-founder Todd at the time is, Todd was a designer and Web developer as well, and we wanted to be able to build websites really quickly to get them online really quickly. And this is in the 2003-2004 timeframe. And at that point, you basically had two ways to put a website online. The first way was, by acquiring servers and installing everything that you needed to have on the server and then managing that server on a daily basis going forward, which was a lot of work and took a lot of expertise that not everyone had or the other way was you could go to what was called a virtual hosting company and, basically virtual hosting companies, they ran the servers, but they would put on each server as many sites as they could fit. And so you might be on a server with 10,000 other sites and so there were different problems with that. If someone else on the server was running a website and it had bad code, it could crash the server or slow your site down. If the server failed and the virtual hosting company wasn't diligent, then your site could go down, you could lose all your data, so those were really the two options. We felt like we had learned these techniques at Rackspace for building load-balanced websites with backups and redundancy, and this is the way that major corporations designed their websites and we should find a way to make that available to everybody. The inspiration came from the experiences that we were having, but also a desire to kind of improve the state of affairs for everybody who was still trying to build websites, build web applications, get online and kind of make the digital economy real, we thought that it was important that the infrastructure not be so difficult.

The elevator pitch was, "code it, load it and go". And we actually had several kinds of phrases or taglines around that, one of the campaigns that we did was, we said no more servers or the system beats the server because it was a hosting system rather than a server. So a lot of tie ends to basically running technology without running servers, and even today, here we are in 2020 and one of the big movements is serverless, right? You hear functions as a service or serverless computing like AWS lambda. And it's the same concept where people want to write their code. And they want it to run somewhere reliably and without having to be responsible for all of the hardware and the networking and storage and the system administration. So that was really what the value proposition was around was, giving them this capability to have reliable, scalable websites, but without having to take on the responsibility of managing infrastructure. And like I said, before that the two ways that people did it were by managing all that infrastructure themselves or by going to what was just going to virtual hosting, which was, really kind of a low cost and also, usually not a very scalable and somewhat unreliable way of hosting.

So there were kind of two, I would say maybe two phases to it that were both the beginnings, in a way. The first phase was, Todd and I was doing this as kind of a side hustle. While we had had day jobs, we would go over to his apartment and work on it. And, what we did is, we were able to get a couple of servers. I did all of the system configurations and setting up. I wrote a bunch of code to automate the setup of the sites for customers, databases, automate backups, like all those kinds of things. And while I was doing that, Todd was busy creating, our website, our marketing material, at the time we called it Site Lingo. That was the original name and so in those first few weeks, what happened is we actually, we lived in San Antonio, Texas, and through a friend, we had the opportunity to get a very large national brand running on our system. We needed to look professional so we were scrambling and working all night for a couple of weeks to put together a web presence that looked real and we printed out data sheets and put on button-down shirts and went and had a meeting with them and pitched them and showed them a demo and all this kind of stuff. And the customer ended up signing up and then, that was kind of how we got started. And we went along slowly like that for a while until we ended up basically selling it back to Rackspace. And that was when we relaunched it as Mosso. And at that point, what we were doing was really trying to prove out that there was more than just kind of a local business here. It had grown to a point where Todd and I were covering the bills with the customers that we had. But I think the Rackspace executives wanted to know if there was real market potential for it. And so one of the things that's great about the Internet is it's pretty cheap to produce things and throw them up and see what kind of response you get. And so we created a new website for this product, Mosso, that we're going to be launching and described what it would be and what it would do, kind of this next generation of what we had already built. And we put up a sign-up form and invited people to an invite-only Private Beta. The goal was to try to get, like 100 to 200 people to sign up and indicate that there was some market interest out there for this kind of product. And if they came through, then we would spend the next few weeks building it out and then, like inviting them to the beta and go from there. So we built out that website, we put it up and we posted it online and in a couple of forums and we ended up getting, I think something like 5000 people signed up so it was, 20 times what we had kind of hoped for. And at that point, I think, we were all like, wow, there seems like there really is a market for this. And so we got started building out the prototype of the next generation of all of those systems we invited in I think about a 1000 initial users to be beta customers and then went from there. So those were the two. Those were both kind of like starting phases and in both of them, what I think we were focused on was kind of, bootstrapping to an initial set of customers and proving that there was market interest and somebody who was gonna pay us for this concept we had rather than thinking about, how do we go spend years building out a product in secret and then launch it and see if there's interest. I would say it was very much that kind of lean startup bootstrap approach for getting it off the ground.