So I started a company in college. I think I was 21 or 22. It was just kind of an opportunity that fell into my lap. So I think the alternative for me at the time is probably to get a job at Olive Garden. I was young and inexperienced and I started working for this company somebody got me involved. And I went back to the investor and said, Hey, this thing is losing you money and I can't make any sales this thing's a dog, it's a crappy company, why don't I just take it over and run it as I can and get your money out of it? And the investor agreed to do that. So I packed it up from Salt Lake and moved it down to school in Provo, Utah, where it was going to school out and shifted my classes to online and night classes at the time and just started working the business and as I got into the details, I met with customers I figured out what out of value to them and started to grow that company and went back to the investor and said I think here I could make this work would you be interested if we did some buy-sell agreement. He threw out some large price I thought was astronomical of the time and my wife and I lived off rice and beans and every dime that we made into that business we put it into the payment and paid it off earlier in my thought. So that was my background and just slowly and organically grew that company and bootstrapped it and had it for 12 years. It did really well in our niche, and it was rare. We lost deals and so we had it to a point where a larger company came and knocked on our door and made several offers to buy us and we agreed on one and ended up selling the company. That's really my path and what started out as maybe an alternative to olive garden grew into this entrepreneurial path that I'm on today.

The first company that I did was opportunistic, and I kind of stumbled into it. I didn't have a lot of thought. It was just better than my alternatives. Then when I said okay, I want to start something else it took me a while to know and understand that I'm a builder and creator, and I want to go down and be an entrepreneur and start something else. I was a lot more thoughtful the second time around, and so I came up with a list of five things of what I was looking for in the next company that I started. Every idea I bumped him up against the five and so my five were, one I needed to stick with B to B services I know that I don't know anything about consumer products. I don't know how to start to build a shoe company, for example, but I know B to B services, and so it needed to be with what I knew. It needed to be a software tech-related SAAS that's where my passion is and what I get excited about. It needed to have recurring revenue that was the third. I wanted it to scale outside of the U. S. and have international customers and have that experience. Then the fifth was if I could nail this and it was the ultimate is I wanted to solve a problem I personally face to dealt with as I ran and built a company prior. So that was my list and any idea that I have that met two or three of the five I threw it out and waited until I had four or five of the five. When I had the concept for Grow.com this kind of touched on all five points and that's when I knew I needed to go and start and build this. So I left the company that had acquired my company. I left with a couple of ideas that met for five of my list and spend some time whittling them down and got to the concept of Grow and started building that. The first thing that I did was I had to go find a technical co-founder. I'm technical enough to architect and think through logic and rules and work with engineers, but I don't program myself I don't write code. So I needed to go find a technical co-founder. That is a harder task than I had thought. It took me about three months full time, like a full-time job trying to find a technical co-founder. I think if you're in those shoes or looking at something like that, you want to go start something and you're not an engineer then you've got to go find a technical co-founder. The mistake that I made is that I painted the vision and talked about Hey, you're going to be the CTO and you'll build a team and rules building scale in this company and I had a lot of nose and was surprised. I finally got frustrated at one lunch meeting, and I just said, Why are people turning me down like I'm paying more than they're making at a current job giving them a slug of equity I've got a track record, I've got an idea that I think it's that's proven and I'll make this successful. And somebody said you're just putting way too much pressure on and nobody wants to do that. You got to dial that back. So my next approach was like, Hey, I changed it from this selling this big vision to I need help with a project, and just like that immediately it changed the reaction I had from engineers. Engineers would say, Oh, yeah, I absolutely can do that. It just opened up my field there. So that's a lesson in trying to find a technical co-founder and found one after three months and we started architecture. So, once I hired him, he and I sat in a room for maybe two months solid. Every day we go into this glass room and we architected the application and hashed out a lot of the logic and documented it. We spent two months doing that before a single line of code was written and that helped us think through the problem and the challenge, and how to solve it really well. So those were the early days of the company. The other together part of the early days is we needed office space, and so I was looking around and stumbled into an office, and there was already a tech company there, and they had a couple of employees small, and I was an investor in other tech company so all three of us came together these little office days. You had three tech companies all starting off and that literally saved the company. All three of us have grown and have been successful in kind of flown the coop, and we've left to go build our own cultures and offices, but having us all there to kind of celebrate each other's wins and in the early days, I think made a significant impact for our start-up and helped us be successful.

So as a SAAS company it was me and five engineers building for about a year before we launched. Before we hired anyone else. So me and five engineers and I think that was the right call to make.