How Imprint Is Reinventing Credit Cards for Modern Brands | Daragh Murphy

23:38But it's actually kind of helpful today, because growth equity investors are saying, I can invest in this AI company at a massive valuation, or I can invest in this non-AI company. but this non-AI company is not like these other companies because AI isn't going to destroy their business model. And so that's actually been helpful to us in a weird way. And so that's how I'm finding the silver lining in not being as highly valued. Have you noticed when you recruit employees, this really took me by surprise when I joined the venture side of the world. I always thought if you're an employee, you want to join a company with a lower valuation.

24:11Obviously, right? Your strike price is lower, your 409A is lower. but human psychology tends not to work that way. Yeah. Meaning like if you, I don't know if it's the press or publicity or what it is, but if for some reason you, let's just say you're valued at 600 million today and then you're valued at$6 billion in five years from now, I'm not sure it would be any less or more difficult to recruit people, which is surprising to me because like right now they should be joining. You know what I mean? Yeah. Have you noticed that? I think you've got to separate people into different camps. You just end up hiring different people at different stages of the company.

24:50And for some people, the$6 billion isn't that. They're not thinking about long-term return. They're thinking about, like, this will be better than my corporate job, as even most$6 billion startups are, in terms of ability to move quickly and take ownership and learn a lot. But I'm not potentially going to have to turn around to my spouse and say I can't help pay the mortgage. Or I'm not going to turn to my parents and say, yeah, I was double Harvard and used to work at Google, and I traded it all away for this company that then went bust. And I think depending where you are in the risk aversion, you're making a choice based on that.

25:22And so I think, and it's important when you're recruiting as well to look for the people that are going to match where the company is. Like, we barely have HR at Imprint. If you're, when we do have HR now, right? But like, it's a last six month thing. If your laptop has a problem, you go fix it yourself. There isn't IT that you can talk to the help desk and wait for. And of course, we're investing in those things now as we get bigger. But in reality, there's one IT person that can help you, and they're probably busy on something else. And you want people who are going to say, that's opting into that, which is a little less structure.

25:57It's hard for people when they come from pure technology at the same stage to us because we are in a regulated industry, and we are dealing with credit risk, and KYC AML, and a bunch of different regulations. And so we do have to slow down in places that other companies don't. But I think on average, for people who come and want to be at this stage, you want to make sure you're finding those people and type matching correctly. Yep, that's fair. And in many ways, like on the valuation point, when the macro got hit so hard and fintech got hit so specifically hard, having the series A valuation that wasn't obscene gave you the flexibility to bring on your laughing like a I think it was obscene right like I remember moving telling me it was like just like you should close this deal this is a great deal right well to be fair every great company feels very expensive yeah like if you ask my moon he's going to be like all of my best companies always felt very expensive yeah but it was still a series a meaning it wasn't like done at a billion dollars right and it gave you the flexibility to bring on an amazing partner at the B at a not horrible down round, like a flat round to your point.

27:12Like, as opposed to you're a$5 billion company who got valued in 2022, and now you're like barely growing, bunch of money on the balance sheet. It's tricky. You just like lose a lot of optionality. No, for sure, for sure. And we're fortunate, you know, at any one time, this is the whole envy thing you're talking about. Like, I don't want any one time you could be looking around and saying, I wish I had x-ray, I wish I had y. I think we've been fortunate in the way it happened. And that's all luck, right, or timing rather than skill. Because I often joked last year that if we were growing at the pace we were last year and this year, and it was 2021, we'd be a$4 or$5 billion company, right?

27:51But that would be unhealthy. And it would be a lot of work to grow into it. I think we're marginally undervalued right now relative to our success. but that's just fine because the great thing we've had is, and this is something I've learned along the way, you want people to come invest and feel like there's upside the next day. Because if they don't feel like there's upside the next day, their human nature is that they're going to start to worry. Did I make a bad investment? And then if they start to play tight around their investment and they're checking in and how's it going? I just put my reputation on the line with my partners for this.

28:22Our LPs are watching. Then that starts to infect your behavior too. Whereas I feel like I'm really fortunate because one of the things Keith told us after the series C was he came to the first board meeting and goes, this is great. There was no surprises. Which is rare. Which is awesome because suddenly I'm like, okay, I don't have to worry that Keith is worried. I know there's tons of value and upside we've already created for him. And that's actually been a very healthy thing for us, especially given how paranoid and focused on the success I am. It wouldn't help me to have partners around the table.

28:54That are breathing down your neck. And I think the other thing is like, it's been great to have a Mamoon or a Keith or the guys from Ribbit because they've made a bunch of great deals. They're way into their career. They're not so worried about every deal that they're paranoid. And I think you have to be careful about who you bring into the cap table. This isn't their make or break deal for their career. Totally. And you have to be careful who you bring into the cap table, both in terms of quality of fun, but also who the partner is and what's the dynamic at their place of employment too. Are there other partners breathing down their neck for performance because this is their make or break deal?

29:28And are you sniffing that out when you're figuring out who to raise from? Only because we learned it through the cycle, right? It's funny, when Ribbit invested, they hadn't done a deal in a long time. It was the middle of FinTech winter. And so when we were doing the Series B, we got to know Nick Huber, who led the deal. And we got to know his partner, Justin, who took Nick's seat when he started his own fund. But we also met Nick Shalik over there. We also met Mickey Malk over there. And so, you know, that's great because they all underwrote the deal, right? And they're all bought into the success thereafter.

30:00And you have that like multi-part relationship, which has been helpful. How brutal was that time, that period of time between the A and the B, when everything was just getting absolutely destroyed? To your earlier point, fishing in the wrong ponds, you're like going after the wrong types of customers for your business. How brutal was that? Those voices in your head must not have been very nice to you. You know, we were lucky because we needed a little capital and our investors stood up, right? Like Mamoon stood up, right? And like Bridge Rounds were the thing that kept you alive during that time.

30:32And I remember like Mamoon and Thrive stood up and they were there for us. So that was helpful. It gave us a little breathing room. I still remember Mamoon saying like, it feels like this dog can hunt. This is the money to prove it though, because like, Like, you're on your last breaths otherwise. And what happened was we launched two partners that were both big relative to where we were, and all the metrics just went like this. And luckily, when that happened, we still had six or eight months of runway, and we'd been in conversations with Ribbit for a while. The hard thing was it was the middle of my honeymoon, and we're trying to raise the round.

31:08And thankfully, my wife gave me, like, enough time every day to have those conversations. We were in Italy. and I still remember I got the cough call from our Series B investors when we were like driving between two vineyards as I'd worked all morning and it was amazing right like suddenly like weight is lifted at least for the next 18 months. Yeah, a nice bottle of wine after that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Did um do you like in those moments where you're like on your honeymoon? Yeah. You're like six months of runway is not a lot. Totally. Like that's like red alert you know like that's close. You're not sure if you can raise.

31:44You're not sure what they're going to come back with. You have no idea. Yeah. And you're like in a very special life moment. Totally. Do you feel guilty in those moments? How do you process that happening? Like when you're waking up, do you wake up earlier? Do you try and get stuff done before your wife wakes up? Like, are you like, all right, I'm going to skip today? Like you can't really skip a day. How does that work? I'm fortunate that I have a... My wife Lauren is incredibly conditioned to this, is probably the first one, and then also very gracious about it most of the time. It's funny, we did our series A right around my wedding.

32:21We did our series B. Don't have kids. We did our series B. Wait a second. We did our series B as we were on our honeymoon. We had one vacation planned last year, and it was in the middle of closing the series C. and, you know, it's mostly, we have a son coming in September and that's going to be a great time to raise Series D. Congrats, man. Thanks a lot. That's awesome. Thanks a lot. When you were living here as a broke kid in New York City, you moved from Ireland? I moved from Ireland to Chicago for a summer. Yep. At the time, you know, it's pouring rain here today. It was like this almost every day in Dublin, even though it's a great place to be.

32:58And it was also the middle of the Great Recession and it hit Ireland really bad. And so when I went to Chicago for a summer, I was like, this is awesome. The weather's beautiful. I got a job with a small law firm as a paralegal. They treated me super well, and I just didn't want to go back. So I ended up staying from there, went to Duke for a year, and then moved to New York when I was 21. That was 10 years ago? No. Unfortunately, it was 14 years ago. 14 years ago. And when you're like 21 years old, living in New York City, it's both the most exciting and probably scary thing of your life, you know?

33:35But you're like looking at all these high rises thinking like, I want to be on the 60th floor one day. But your reality is like, I'm sending Venmos to cover my rent check back and forth. Why did you choose to live in New York? Like you could have stayed in Chicago where the cost of living is easier and you wouldn't have been like literally month to month. Yeah. Well, New York was a choice because it was the only place I could practice law. And so I didn't have a US JD and law degree, and New York would let me take the bar. And if I got a job, I could become a lawyer here. And that was awesome because I was 22 or 21st of my first day at a law firm, and everybody else was like 28.

34:16And I worked at a great law firm that mostly fished in the Harvard pond. I remember how intimidated I was on day one to turn up in a pretty cheap suit from Macy's and all these kids who come out of Harvard and Yale. The nice thing was everybody was very nice to me. The only feedback I got early on was clients would pay$400 an hour and I knew nothing. I hadn't even passed the bar and they're still paying$400 an hour for my services. And one of the partners said my accent was so thick, they probably couldn't understand me. And so I needed to pull back a little on the Irish accent, which was actually helpful feedback.

34:49I wish I still had more of it now today, though. I feel like I should just stop. That's awesome. Yeah. Can I ask you a few questions on kind of how you think about hiring, like where you are today versus where you want to be? When you think about like, okay, right now you're probably maybe gone through, I have no idea, but wave one of executives and now it's like wave two of executives. Is that fair? I don't actually know. 100%. And if you look at the leadership team today, we've reconstituted it over the last year to set us up for the next, from where we are today to a billion dollars of revenue.

35:25When you were hiring leadership group one versus two, is there anything that has surprised you in what you want, what works well, what doesn't work well? Group one, when you're so early, the thing that surprised me is you actually have to treat people the same all the way through in a certain way. And so group one, you just get lucky, right? Like, who are these people that are silly enough to come and join us on this quest, which it's not even a business yet. And it's really important with those early joiners to treat them as co-founders effectively. It is our company. It is not my company. I might get to do these cool interviews and talk about it publicly and spike the football, but it is truly our company.

36:07And I think if you don't find people early on who buy that and you also give them that ownership, you're going to fail. Because you can't be everywhere, and you have to have people who are going to propagate that culture. They're almost certainly going to be more as much doers as executives early on, because you can't hire managers of managers. It just doesn't work. What we've reconstituted the company, the thing I've noticed is the people, you get it wrong. I think somebody told me one in two or one in three executive hires are going to fail at high growth companies. And we've certainly got it wrong once or twice.

36:39The thing that's interesting is the people who stick and have been successful now over the last few months and years as part of wave two, as you put it, they have the same ownership mentality as group one. They might have more scale skill set. They might have operated at a higher level. They might have run teams of hundreds or thousands of people at bigger organizations. But they want to feel like they're co-founders just as much as group one. And that's actually been a trait then that I've been looking for in these people. Like, is this going to be their baby as much as it is mine? And that's been a huge learning for me along the way.

37:13The other difference between group one and two is just like the scale at which people operate. And I'm sure group two would have been great earlier on. But for sure, there's some people in this group that wouldn't have been as effective as player coaches in group one. And on the, like, let's just call it pride and ownership. How do you know until they're in the seat? I think you can get a pretty good sense in the interview process by figuring out what makes people tick. You've asked a bunch of questions about me growing up. It's really helpful to spend a lot of time with people and get to know what makes them tick.

37:49One of the things I'll do is, in the first or second interview with people, I actually will say, I just keep saying, ask me all your questions. And it's helpful because I get to know what they care about because they reveal their preferences in the questions they're asking. Versus if I jump in and I start selling them on imprint and asking them a bunch of questions, like it's too contrived versus I want you to just run out of things that matter to you and show me your preferences through all the questions you're going to ask. The other thing I always do is like try and go and spend time with the person over dinner, over lunch, but in-person is really important because you can kind of get past the barrier of an interview or a Zoom call and start to pick apart like, you know, do you have children?

38:31What's your partner like? Like, where did you grow up? And those things matter. And you talk, your podcast is called Grit. That's how you start to figure out, like, does this person have grit? When you're like spending unstructured time with them, when do you feel like you have to sell? Yeah. Versus when do you feel like you have to interview? Do you have a sequencing around that? So the classic way I'll do it is The first question I'll say when we first meet, you know, with a small talk, I'll say, do you want me to, is it helpful for me to give you an overview of imprint, right? And then I'll probably take 10 minutes and say, you know, here's my overview of imprint, but then I want to really leave a ton of space for you to ask questions.

39:08And that way I've sold up front, but you probably have a sense of the company at this point, because the people who care, and this is one of the things they're going to reveal early on, is they'll have listened to the podcasts, they'll have read the articles, they'll have downloaded the product, and now you're starting to get a sense of ownership, right? Like, even though I'm the CFO or candid for the CFO, I cared enough about products and all these other things to spend time up front. And so you're already starting to find stuff out. Then answering the questions is also how you're selling, right?

39:38So you're both understanding what they care about, but you're also, it's almost like you're playing poker and their deck is open. Not to say that it's that manipulative, but you can see the things they care about. And then you can say, sometimes I actually will say, you know, the things you're looking for are not the things we're going to be able to give you. because even though you might have a great resume, if it's going to fail, it's going to be such a drag. Execs that fail is just such a drag on time and effort and relationship building, and it hurts the team too. And so you'd much rather both play with an open deck, so to speak, about what matters to you and what we can provide.

40:12What's hard for me is I grew up in Ireland, and Ireland was coming out of Catholic autocracy. when I was in 1990, when I was born, everybody in Ireland still went to mass, right? Everybody was Catholic. And the thing about the Catholic church in Ireland was like, it's super oppressive. And I find compared to Americans, like, I really don't want to share. I like want to bottle up the emotions and I'm like not open. And Americans are just so open. And what I find is like when I spend time with people now, what's helpful for them is when I start to talk about who I am, right? And where I come from and what makes me tick and what my insecurities are.

40:52And when you're going to spend that unstructured time with execs that are going to come join your team and who are, in many cases, going to be the people you spend the most time with under the most stress, revealing that to them helps them let their guard down and let them reveal themselves to you too. That's well said. Do you have your now wife meet them? I'm always ashamed to even talk about it. I was at WeWork for a hot second. And you watch the WeWork documentary and people are always saying, it couldn't have been that crazy. I'm like, no, twice as crazy as that in real life. Like they missed half the good stories and or more than half of the good stories.

41:26And it always felt a little cultish because there was so much of like, I have to meet your partner and you have to meet my partner. And so I'm a little averse to that. Interesting. Right. Because Adam was always with his wife. It was just weird. Yeah, that makes sense. And I just find that's a little too, you know like people used to say like companies are families and it's like that's not true because you know i've had fights with my families and they should disown me and i haven't shown up for them and they should disown me like that's just not how companies run totally right like we should have a community we should care for each other but like we're not promising each other that we're like family and so i just think some distance is a good and healthy thing too right but i'm always excited when somebody joins to spend time with them and their other part their partner like Like, I love when people are in New York and bringing them over to our place for dinner, for drinks before dinner.

42:14Like, that's really nice because you start to be able to make relationships beyond the person in front of you. Having your spouse interview them just feels like so far beyond the pale. Totally. Right? That's a funny, like, allergy that you've developed, though. I have a lot of them, but that's one of the ones in particular. I don't actually care as much about the story of WeWork, but maybe more about the shame or guilt that you feel about it. Why do you feel that way? Like, you didn't know that it was going to, like, blow up, right? I feel like, so I was very close to Adam when I was there, and I helped a lot with the fundraising.

42:51At one point, Adam wanted me to be his chief of staff, and I was like, I don't want to be your chief of staff. Yeah. But if you really want a chief of staff, my brother's an investment banker in London, and he'd love a new job. And then my brother became his chief of staff, right? So like, I was pretty close to a lot of it. And I look back and think, you know, the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, but none of us were either, right? And it was a crazy time. It was like pretty much Zerp or it was Zerp. Money was everywhere. You had these great logos that had invested, like Benchmark in the Series A.

43:20And can you imagine Benchmark investing in the Series A of a property company ever again or having ever done that? And you had all this like validation, But like being sober today in 2025, like I feel like we were all making bad decisions. And so I have shame around that because it feels like intellectually not rigorous and the opposite of who I think I am. Right. Just like that personal narrative violation. That makes sense. Yeah. But what an interesting learning. Totally. Was the come down. Were you there? I got let go. I've never told this publicly. So, right before the IPO got pulled, so we were working night and day on the IPO.

43:59There was probably a squad of like 25 of us that was my team, which was, I don't know what you'd call it, like strategy investor relations effectively. There was the finance team, there was the legal team. And we'd been working nonstop over the summer on the IPO. It was clear the IPO wasn't going to happen. And I remember I went with Adams, the head of his family office to Adams' house. And I said, look, I don't think Zipio is going to happen. I don't think the bankers have the stomach for it. I don't think the market's going to take it. And I think the board's probably going to move against you at this point.

44:31And Adam was like, you're crazy. Get out of here. And so I went home to my wife. This was a Thursday. And I remember telling her, I was like, I think I just got fired. I'm not sure. I have dinner with friends tonight. I'm going to turn my phone off. And I went to have sushi with friends. And the boys were like, let's go have a couple of pints, especially if you just got fired. And I would turn my phone on walking between the sushi bar and the pub. And Adam called me. He's like, I think you're right. Like, can we, like, gather the troops? And I was just like, I'm probably done with this. I turned my phone off again.

45:02And Saturday came, and there was a senior executive who used to work at Amazon. And he called me, and he said, what do you think is going to happen here? I said, pretty certain. We need to restructure the company. and he's like, okay, I think I can be the CEO. Can you, do you want to work with me on restructuring the company? Can you put a plan together? And he's like, sure. So I start working on a plan and he calls me back and he goes, can you send it to my Gmail? I was like, this is starting to get weird. And so we put a plan together that's like this eight page deck that I still have. It was like, we're going to restructure the company and here's how we're going to do it.

45:33And we're going to sell all these non-core assets. And Monday morning rolls around and the exec, Sebastian, calls me and says, okay, we're going to go meet the SoftBank board members. and show them the turnaround plan. So we go meet the SoftBank board members who show them the turnaround plan. What I didn't know was that there was a competing executive push from the CFO at the time for him to become the CEO. And Tuesday rolls around and I get a full call from my friend who's the general counsel. He's like, hey, they made co-CEOs. And part of the agreement is they get rid of everybody who backed both of them over the weekend.

46:06I was like, well, I didn't back anybody. I was just trying to help. And on Wednesday, they were like, hey, do you want, like, we don't think there's a home for you out of here anymore. Do you want a severance package? And I was like, please give me a severance package. I'm out of here. And then on Friday, I got engaged. Come on. Swear to God. Come on. Yeah, we had already planned, had like a whole thing for my friends set up. So my wife is totally conditioned to pull a full circle. Were you down in the dumps or were you relieved? I think I was shell-shocked. I don't think I had a full, I hadn't fully processed any of it, right?

46:39And then I was fortunate because I had this severance package that gave me six months of pay. And that's when I could start working on a startup. And that's when you were ideating on imprint. Ideating on imprint, yeah. Super interesting. Is there anything maybe like in your personal life, like how you live, like the way you structure a day that has changed from Dara the lawyer to Dara at WeWork to Dara at series seed or A imprint to now, like have you evolved in how you think about the way you literally spend a day in your calendar? Totally. I think when you're a lawyer, it's very reactive. And that was also true at WeWork, because I was so close to Adam, and he had no conception time.

47:17So just totally reactive to how the day comes. And similarly, at McKinsey, you don't really own your day like your client does. I also didn't have a spouse, wasn't expecting children. It's just much easier to be reactive. I think now what I've learned is structure is important to me before I even get here. Because, you know, some days you wake up and you're just like not feeling great, right? And if I turn up like that with that attitude at work, it propagates for everybody. And so I'll find that like getting up in the morning, going for a run, going for a workout, you know, spending 50 minutes with my wife and dog.

47:53And then as best I can, walking to the office like changes the whole complexion of the day. And then when you turn up, it's really about how we structure the week rather than how I structure a day. And trying to be very thoughtful about how the cadence of the week for the team goes and how we check in on the business on a Monday, exec team meets on a Tuesday, and then we can propagate that through the week has helped a lot. And it has meant that I can stop having the whole business in my own head, and it forces me to share more of it across the team. That makes sense. This day and age, you were saying that not much keeps you up.

48:29If there was the short list of things, what do those things look like now? It's not money. The company's not just going to run out of money. We hope not. Fingers crossed. That would be like a Herculean effort to do that. What is it? We're a fintech lending business, right? And we feel really good about being a fintech lending business because you can look at companies like Affirm or NewBank. And there's massive businesses to be built here because lending is the profit pool for every bank, particularly credit cards. And that's great, right? And it's an awesome, huge time. It would be hard to get the valuation of these AI companies, but I think we can have a company that's so big that we'll have valuation, right?

49:09Our multiple won't be the same, but overall valuation can be the same. We're also a lending business, though, right? And so the macro environment is something we have to worry about because things will get slightly worse as unemployment goes up or a recession comes around. That's a good thing in a weird way for our business too, because businesses like ours that have been tempered in the flame of a recession get a valuation boost on the other side. Nobody worries about Capital One now, 30 years in, that they don't know how to manage through a recession. In fact, you'll see Flight 2, Cap 1, as a recession comes because they really understand it.

49:43And so for us, first of all, like being set up well for whenever a session comes and then having to manage through that is probably the thing that keeps us as a leadership team most focused every day. And then the other thing is, you know, all the good that happens here is downstream of hiring really good people and keeping them happy. And I wake up most days thinking, how are we hiring really good people and keeping them happy? Right. And, you know, we are demanding and we have a high bar and we push really hard. but there must be a world where we could do that and keep those people happy and attract more really good people to deliver on all of the downstream things.

50:19One more question on the AI front. The product is not an AI business. However, you're probably getting a lot of interesting efficiencies internally. Totally. You know, we were talking about hiring support people. There's probably a lot of juice that you can get enabling them with some of these new technologies. I also imagine that in a fintech business, there is a lot of leverage that you can get. I don't know. How do you think about that? So we couldn't agree more. If you look at the end of next year, if we do our jobs medium well against our growth plan, we'll probably have like$250 million of cost in the business that should be massively lessened by deploying AI.

51:01And so one of the things we've done is we've taken a senior product manager and put engineers around that product manager and said, that cost line item is your mission. And that's mostly in customer support, customer operations in our business. Like when you call in and you have a dispute, that's a pretty manual process to handle and across risk. And in those three buckets, we think we can save hundreds of millions of dollars next year just through using AI. And that'll be a really important thing for us is we want to go public because we want to say, yeah, we make money like a credit card bank, but our whole P &L is optimized on top of our technology stack, inclusive of AI.

51:37And so this is a much higher return on equity, more profitable business that should set us up for the future. And that's like one of the dividends of being able to build now. If you've been a company that's been around for 30 years, it's basically impossible to re-architecture yourself. We get to be on the forefront of this technology. And we're not an AI company, but we can be a company built on AI. Yeah, similar to like, I think it was Toby at Shopify's memo. Yeah. Like every tech CEO has read that at this point. and now what they're doing at Duolingo similarly, are you taking it to that extreme, which is like basically the point of the memo is prove to me before you hire somebody else that, hey, I can't do this job basically?

52:13In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. The no is it's more important for us right now as a company that's scaling this quickly that we deliver perfectly for our brand partners that have entrusted us with their relationships with customers and for those customers. And to be like pedantic about the marginal head when that's more important would be silly. And so we're not going to do that today. That being said, we are much more likely to approve additional headcount if they're engineers to support your scaling than if they are a person to do a manual process. We won't say no dogmatically. We'll have open ears, but we have a similar mindset.

52:51I think Toby's business is amazing, and I hope to one day have a business as great as that, but they're also slowing down, right? And so they have the ability to look internally and have a more dogmatic approach. Toby's an amazing leader, and I'm sure Shopify still feels somewhat like a startup. They're also just so big that you kind of have to get more dogmatic with people too. Totally. So right now, there's like this big hype curve around, oh, we're going to build$100 million companies with 20 people or whatever. And Parker at Rippling's counterpoint is always like, look, that sounds good in practice or in theory, but in practice, what ends up happening is then you have a competitor.

53:28that competitor raises a bunch of money and hires like 10 times as many engineers and go-to-market people as you. And then you're going to go do that. Or you're going to lose. Totally. Or you're going to lose. Totally. I also think sales is an interesting one. Yes, we have a Gentek AI making buying decisions for micro stuff, but are they going to be buying$100 ,000 ACV or$500 ,000 ACV enterprise software? Like, the AI probably isn't going to be empowered to do that. And I find it unlikely that a human is going to want to buy from AI, too. Yeah. Also, if you're telling me that you're going to have max 15 to 20 customers, I can basically guarantee you that you're never going to put some AI between you and the customer.

54:13Like, you're not going to send the AI Dara to HEB to, like, help you. Nobody wants another one of me, so there won't be an AI me. But the way I would think about it, like, the great thing for us is we have a four-person BD team. to do this because it's hand-to-hand. That's wild. And it's amazing average, right? And that's part of the reason we can have such efficiency on revenue per employee, and we should be able to scale. We go back to the AI thing. We're also a lower margin business, so we have to be more cognizant of it than an AI company. I'm thrilled that we got to do this, and I'm excited for what's next for you guys.

54:45Thanks a lot. Are you hiring? We are definitely hiring. We're particularly interested in anybody in engineering who wants to come and build with us. We're opening an office in SF, and we have a new CTO joining us there, and we're hiring around that especially. When you hear the word grit, what comes to mind? Waking up every day and just keeping on trying. That's effectively how I think most companies get built is you just wake up every day and try and move the thing an inch forward, and it'll compound over five years, and you'll turn back and move it a long way. It doesn't feel like I got a ton achieved yesterday, but I'm sure I got enough done And yesterday, if I put 50 yesterdays together, I'll feel really good in 50 days time.

55:27And I think that is the secret of building a company is you just got to wake up every day and move it a little forward. That's it for now. If you liked the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production and I'm Juven. Thanks for listening.

55:53Thank you.