From $0 to $100M: The Truth About Capital Raising w/ Hunter Thompson 📈 EP102

0:00Like I said, I went from struggling to raise my first deal and coming half a million dollars short of my first raise to raising 100 million bucks from hundreds of investors. buying hundreds of millions of dollars of deals and I feel like I'm just getting started. A lot of my day is spent finding people that are very good at what they do and making them realize that to take it to the next level they have to learn about marketing.

0:28Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Money Mondays. This is a special edition because right now, right this second, we are in the midst of the world's largest toy drive. 10 cities over 16 days, but luckily we have this RV motorhome, which allows us to drive around and find guests like we have for you today. We have the creator of RaisingCapital.com. His name is Hunter Thompson, and I'm going to deep dive with him about all things money. Now, as you guys know, our podcast runs for about 34 to 38 minutes because the average commute to work is 45 minutes. The average workout is 45 minutes. So this will be 34 to 38 minutes for your listening pleasure.

1:07We're going to cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity, but with a bit of a twist because Thompson, Mr. Hunter Thompson has raised over a hundred million dollars. I want to ask him some questions about raising capital because a lot of you guys out there might be thinking about starting a company. Maybe you already have a company. You want to scale it. So I'm going to ask him all the questions around that topic. But first we're We're going to have Hunter do a quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money. What's up? I'm going to be here, first of all.

1:35Yeah, so name is Hunter Thompson. I have a background as being a slacker in college and not taking life too seriously. But getting into the world of business and entrepreneurship, I fell in love with it. And like I said, I went from struggling to raise my first deal and coming half a million dollars short on my first raise to raising$100 million from hundreds of investors, buying hundreds of millions of dollars of deals. And I feel like I'm just getting started. So stoked to talk about it. Awesome. Okay. So someone out there listening is considering raising capital. Is there a time that's too early?

2:10Like when they have the idea phase, is it too early? When they have the business plan, is that when they should do it? Should they already have a little bit of sales, 10 grand, 50 grand, a hundred grand sales? When is too early? I mean, I think when people think about raising money, I think what comes to their mind is like having a really good pitch or like not taking no for an answer or something like that. And like the reality is the question about like when you should start, I'm thinking like when you should start generating leads to have those conversations. Cause even if you know exactly what to say, it's like, who are you going to say it to?

2:40Maybe your friends and family, but then how far can that really get you? And even if you are from a family that's rich, even those families raise money, obviously. So like billionaires raise money all the time. So like there's no time that's too early to start digging the well, meaning how can I generate leads? How can I connect with people? How can I warm people up? Even if you don't have a deal yet, now you should be doing that. You said a really good point. Just this month, Kris Jenner and Khloe Kardashian raised$4.5 million to do popcorn. Khloe decided she didn't do popcorn. And so they raised$4.5 million from investors.

3:14Now, as you guys can imagine, Kris Jenner and Khloe Kardashian are very rich. and they have infinite capital and they make millions and millions and millions of dollars per month. Why? This is my question. Why does someone with that much money, that much reach, that much social media power still want to raise capital from strategic investors? Yeah, man. I mean, it's ultimately come down to leverage, right? So most people think of leverage, think of debt, borrowing money and stuff like that. But there's other mechanisms to think about leverage. Like what's a higher leverage activity? How can I leverage my business?

3:47How can I pursue high leverage things? And so for them, they've got money working for them, but they also want to bring in other money to grow something where they're going to profit on someone else's capital. And now that's what all capitalists do, including the investors themselves, is they want to rely on their brand, their reach to scale this business that, I mean, does anyone think that she's the best popcorn producer out there? Probably not, but she's got a huge audience. So I don't know the details of that deal, but I imagine there's someone that's really good at popcorn that reached out to her that said, yo, let's do this thing together.

4:18You go on social media. No one knows us, but we're good at popcorn. You're good at attention. That's the art and science of raising capital. Let's do this partnership together. Same thing with Connor, right? Same thing with The Rock. Like it's not The Rock and kitchen cooking up that tequila, but now they got a billion dollar valuation. That's why. Yeah. Logan Paul and prime Jake with W all these brands. Jake's the numbers on Jake Paul's W brand. I think it's like 55 million or 60 million or something the first year people are only figuring it out man like logan's prime is the fastest growing beverage in history like people don't realize the sheer magnitude of these influencer brands yeah connor got like 650 million dollars for that deal for the anyways um okay so someone out there is listening they got their business plan they got their financials prepared i do what's called and i recommend calling setting up shop you know a couple core things before you raise capital because what if you come to someone like hunter thompson or myself and say, I want to raise$1 million.

5:15And we actually like your idea, but you don't have a business plan. You don't have financials. You don't have the investor documents. What if we say yes, and you don't have investor documents? They don't have their corporation. They don't have their bank account. Like you literally can't even take money from us. And I've seen it happen so many times where people pitch me asking me for 100K or 250K or 50K or a zillion billion dollars, and they don't have a bank account. They don't have a corporation. And they literally don't have investor documents so that I might like your idea. You're like, oh, I'm going to sell Money Monday's pillows.

5:45That's a great idea. Can you send me the investor documents? They're like, well, I don't have those yet. When you don't have the setting up shop, when you don't have everything ready for us on a silver platter, you lose momentum, right? You lose excitement. People invest what I call momentum investing is. We get excited. We see the thing. Money Monday's pillows. That sounds super cool. We want to give you 100K. Hunter wants to match me and give you 100K also. So we want to put in$200 ,000 and you don't have anything set up. So now when you come back to us three weeks from now, like, Hey, my lawyers got the investor documents and then Hunter and I got to review it.

6:22And that takes a week or two. And all of a sudden we're months into it compared to when you present it to us, you're like, Oh yeah, I got my investor documents. I'm going to 40 my business plan. My accountant made my financials for me. If you already have all your ducks in a row, we are much more likely to invest with momentum. All right, Hunter, tell us the concept of raising capital.com. I'm like, where did that come from? I mean, it's an amazing domain name. My man. And I paid a lot less than most people think because I don't think people understand the opportunity in the space. I mean, people are only starting to figure it out now.

6:52Basically, the idea is what you just said is really important because like people make decisions based on emotional connection to the operator that they're investing in. So in your example, maybe you think, oh, like Dan's stupid if he's going to invest with someone just because of the emotional connection. It's like, that's what most people do. but then they go deeper in due diligence to make sure that you're actually gonna do what you say and already have your bank account so like what he's saying is super important because you can get that story you can tell that story in a compelling way but you got to be buttoned up on the back end but the story is the really important part we just assume you know what you're doing if you don't we're not going to give you the money what Hunter's also mentioning is it's not just us so you might get us emotionally excited but Hunter and I have a lawyer an accountant and typically an executive or a CEO.

7:39I have a CEO that oversees it. I call it the four horsemen. I'm a CEO. I have an advisor. I have a lawyer and accountant. If you can get by the four horsemen, I'm in. Yeah. Why are you to your pillow company? A hundred grand, a million, 500, whatever you want. I'm in, but you got to get past the four horsemen. So a lot of times people are like, oh yeah, I know this really rich guy, Hunter, um, raising capital.com. He's going to love my deal. You pitch him a hundred says yes, but Hunter has his version of the four horsemen that are going to look at the paperwork, the documents, and you to vet the deal.

8:09During the vetting process, you've got to be able to back it up like Hunter just said, because even though we might emotionally be excited by what you present to us, maybe you pitch us at an event, you pitch us at a nightclub or restaurant or a business meeting, or you catch us in an elevator and you give us the elevator pitch and we're like, yeah, that's exciting. We like your pillow company, but you now got to back it up and prove it. Yes. I mean, there's two sides of the equation. One, the people that just, they think their story is amazing. They think that they're going to present this deal and we're going to be super high buying and do it.

8:38Other people that are just so obsessed with the nuances and the details of their offering that that's all they really know. And they can't tell the story in a compelling and emotional way. For me, I was on that side of the spectrum. I got into the world of real estate at a really good time where, you know, post great recession, mobile home parks were for people that are knowledgeable in the space trading at 10 % cap rates. I mean, you could buy a property in cash and it would produce 10 % cashflow like month one. So this to me, I got in this world and realized how powerful that was and just was obsessed.

9:09That was torn property as I was meeting sponsors or operators. And like, I could see the writing in the wall, this niche was going to explode. And so when I get to pitch, the first time I went out to pitch, the language I was using was like, as if I was speaking to a bunch of real estate nerds. And the reality was I was speaking to like some friends and family, some dentists, some doctor, and they don't even know those term terminology. So like the story of raising capital.com is I bombed on that pitch, even though there was$30 million in the room, I couldn't raise half a million. And earlier I said I was half a million dollars short.

9:41Yeah. On a half million dollar raise. Like, so I was trying to raise half a million. I raised zero. I'm texting this girl. I'm trying to impress. Oh yeah. Like I'm going to raise a million bucks and then have to be like, Oh, like it didn't go exactly as planned. Like, yeah, you couldn't have done worse is what you mean. So that was my story. But then I realized like it's not about just like delivering this amazing pitch about the nuances of the details it's like how can I get people in the room that are already bought in how can I tell a story that will connect with their true wants and needs not what I think not what I want for god's sakes and so it was a long journey but that's how I kind of when I started focusing on that when I started focusing on if I'm talking to someone what are their pain points what are their problems how can I use the vernacular that they're more comfortable with and then paint them a picture of how they can move from where they are to where they want to go using my product.

10:33And that will work for mobile home parks, self-storage, buying existing businesses, nonprofits, you name it. If the money has to leave their account to go to yours, you've got to paint them that story. And so that's kind of what I built my career doing. So how does it work? Let's say someone wants to invest through RaisingCapital.com or wants to raise money through RaisingCapital.com. How does that work? So we don't like raise money for people we kind of teach them how to raise money and they can rate like we buy a deal in Phoenix We buy multifamily properties in Phoenix And so if you want to partner with us on a deal We can teach you how to raise money and it's effectively your deal that you're partnering with us on But then other people come to us and they're like, you know I've got this I've got this fix and flip business that I've raised a couple million bucks or a couple hundred thousand bucks But like how can I take this to the next level?

11:18and so usually that next level is us teaching them how to do things like basically marketing, attracting leads, nurturing leads, building a brand, attracting attention. Because you mentioned the example of the kind of Kardashian story, like that's the most pronounced example. And they've done it across multiple niches where you just take attention, interest, buy-in of clients and direct that to here's the bank account. Right. And so that's her first popcorn initiative. She raised 4 million bucks on her first go. It has nothing to do with popcorn. Right. And Mr. Beast Burgers has nothing to do with burgers.

11:55It's all about the attention. And so to answer your question directly, a lot of my day is spent finding people that are very good at what they do and making them realize that to take it to the next level, they have to learn about marketing, systems and operations of marketing. But it's a message that's lost on a lot of nerds. And I'm a nerd too. But that's great. It means you're in a good market, to be honest. So over the last three years, I raised$56 million through Elevator Syndicate. I have 970 investors that are all accredited investors. And I just text them deals once a month or so. And it's optional.

12:32They can invest if they want to. If they don't want to, I always tell them, say nothing. You don't say no, just say nothing. And we won't bother you again. And so we raised$4 million for this and$6 million for that. We do$3 million to$6 million per deal into companies that are doing$2 million to$20 million in sales. Okay. That's our requirement. Yeah. million 20 million sales it's mostly been food and beverage brands and consumer products so raise money for rice coffee blk water ever bowl cars and coffee icon meals creatures of habit and all the same ballpark range what's interesting is a lot of these investors can throw in 25k 50k 100k they don't have to put in a million dollars they can put in 50k 100k our average check size around 100k and then sometimes someone would put in 250k or 500k etc but for the most part it's a lot of 100k's but however at a 970 i only need like 30 to 50 of them right i need three to five percent to jump in so 30 to 50 of them to put in 100k average that gets me to my three million to six million dollar range and then what i do is called hand-to-hand combat once i raise the majority of it so let's say i'm raising four million and i'm at like 3.2 million then i'll text hunter like hey hunter i got 3.2 million in my four do you want to jump in hey ed milet hey hey, Andy, hey, John, Jennifer, whatever.

13:47I text them and say, I've got 3.2 million out of my four and that's called momentum investing. They feel much more comfortable because they don't want to be the first check. And they know that I've now got, let's call it 27 people to put in the 3.2. Now they're in, they're excited. It's been very effective because for the investors, it allows them to get into deals. Syndicate, what a syndicate is, guys, syndication is, you could do it for real estate, like Hunter's talking about. You could raise$10 million to buy like a$30 million property, for example. You could raise$10 million through Hunter's crew.

14:19They go buy an apartment building, for example, or storage units, whatever. That's a syndication. What I'm talking about is a syndication for private equity, for a beverage company, a food brand. You could do it for clothing. You can do it for a cell phone company, whatever you're thinking about. And syndications allow you to get a group together. I use a company called AngelList. AngelList does all the back end for me, paperwork-wise, lawyers-wise. they deal with all that part of it because raising capital can be expensive you got to make sure that you utilize a good platform whether it's raising capital calm whether you're doing it for real estate or for your business make sure that you have a lawyer involved an accountant involved or a platform that you believe in a trust in that has a reputation like an angel list like raising capital calm it's very important because you want to make sure that your paperwork is done correctly to avoid any legal headaches later just because someone's ready to give you 100k you want to make sure that you can receive it properly and then you're going to give them what's called updates quarterly updates preferably and you're actually going to follow through and send them their their paperwork along the way and hopefully distribution and hopefully an exit one day but most importantly is that you're buttoned up paperwork wise all right next section someone to raise the money now yeah they went to raising capital.com hunter helped them raise seven million dollars they got the money now how do they interact with their investors to keep their investors happy because deals take time yeah you raise seven my bucks, we're not going to exit for two years, three years, four years, five years, six years, or never.

15:45And so during that time, how should they be thinking about interacting with investors? So a couple things. One thing, like Alex Ramosi has done some excellent stuff, but one thing that he's done a really great job on that I don't think enough people have put enough thought into is the concept of time to value. Like the faster your clients can see results, the faster you can scale. And if you have a good product and you're getting good results, you should be able to get referrals. You should be able to get, in my case, repeat investors, things like that. But what you're talking about is that it's difficult to create those short, quick wins in the game of investing.

16:20Because if someone gives you 100K, like in our deal that we're about to close, they give us 100K and maybe for the first couple of years, they get like$4 ,000,$5 ,000. It's a low risk real estate deal, right? And then in year five, they can kind of see if they double their money, which is kind of our target, right? Not our projections, not our promise, but that's our target, right? So think about it. An investor to some degree doesn't really know if we can pull it off until five years. So we don't want to wait five years to like re-monetize that client. The velocity of your client's money coming into your business is imperative.

16:52So what we try to do is shorten the time to value. We can't do it by selling the deal faster because in my niche, that doesn't make sense. But like, what else can you do? Okay, well, I can call them the moment that they wire, right? I can say, congratulations, Welcome to the deal. Just got your way like that's an experience. I can send them a gift I can if we project to send the first cash flow check in three months, which is standard We can give enough buffer so that we think we can actually send the first cash flow check in 30 days But we project three months, right? So then that first check comes in It's not a ton of money, but they're like damn I was expecting this to be months So we bake stuff like that into our deals and you know Another thing is the first couple years or when the motions are highest and that skepticism is highest So like we really want to be conservative in that first couple months.

17:37So that first month we're beating projections. Second month we're beating projections. That's when the referrals start coming in. So like as I'm saying this, like maybe it doesn't apply necessarily to your business, but what can you do to be conservative so that you do over deliver, especially early on in experience, in calling them and sending them a gift and sending them a Christmas card and, you know, doing things like issuing distributions faster than you thought. Now the caveat to this is that when you start to do this stuff, you'll see that the numbers change if you're Creating buffer the returns are gonna be lower, right?

18:12So now it's a balancing act You don't want to make it so low you can't raise the money But trust me if you do the hard work on the front end of selling a deal where the returns are slightly down That investor is gonna be grateful in month two and month three and month four And all of a sudden that dentist you got that's making a half million year his 10 dentist friends start coming in and that's how your business scales in the five-year period. Otherwise, you've been having to wait. So hopefully that makes sense and it's applicable to other businesses as well. Under promise over delivery. In short, 100%.

18:40But think about it, whatever your niche is, if you're watching this out there, think about what way you can shorten time to value for your business. The quintessential example, even if that thing isn't something you can do infinitely, even if it's just something that only works for the short term, like an example that Alex uses is you know when people come into gym launch they would maybe put them on a crash diet initially to just show them if you do this it will work that doesn't mean you're gonna lose 60 pounds over the next two years but like if we can get you down five now I've got your attention I've got your buy-in and maybe that's not infinitely scalable but like at least I've got that quick win and so think about it whoever meditates on this the most whoever spends their shower time thinking about this concept more will win because it's a difficult nut to crack and no one is spending the time doing it because it's all about the customer, not about them.

19:32So in the real estate space, this is super important, guys. When you find a deal, you're going to be able to, as he mentioned earlier, leverage. Let's say you find a property that's$10 million. You don't have to raise the entire$10 million. You could raise$2 million or $3 million or$4 million and you can use debt with a bank or someone, a private lender. but typically if you're out there thinking about raising money for real estate you're not going to want to just do one deal unless it's some huge apartment complex which is hard to get to that point a lot of times you're going to be doing a smaller deal that's two million four million six million ten million twenty million etc there's not that many marquee deals outside of apartment complexes and you know huge commercial properties that are going to be tens of millions of dollars and from a risk factor and from a time factor a lot of times people don't want to just invest in one deal.

20:19I'd rather give Hunter 100K, 100K, 100K, 100K, 100K in five different deals than 500K in one commercial building. I would. I'd rather have 100K of his apartment complex, 100K of the storage units, 100K of the trailer park he's buying, an RV motorhome park. I'd like to split it up because as an investor, I like to have multiple bets and I'm still deploying the same 500 ,000 in the example. And so when you're considering getting into the real estate market, if you're thinking about raising capital in that fashion just think about not necessarily going for the whale like going for the oh my god i need the holy grail i'm gonna go buy like a 200 unit complex right out the gate buy fourplex get a 16 unit a 32 unit but get like two of them then three of them then four of them then five of them and when you do that your credibility goes up and up and up if you told me that you had six 16 units i would want to invest with you way more than you said you had one apartment complex i would because it's rinse and repeat i believe in you now yeah i believe you could do six different deals rather than one deal yeah to me as an investor i would feel more comfortable the sole reason why on the private equity side i raise money for companies doing 2 million to 20 million it's not that i'm like a startup company or i don't believe in and you know someone that's just getting going or just did their first million sales it's that if you're already doing 9 million sales well going from 9 million to 20 million is not hard going from zero to 1 million super hard like super hard very rare going from 9 million 20 million that's just gassing on the fire it's been fixing your systems fixing your processes adding more leads and ads hiring more sales team like if you got to 9 million there's literally i can blink my eye and get you to 20 literally but going from zero to 1 million i can't say that easy zero to 1 million is really hard and so going out there and buying your first duplex and fourplex and 16 units and things like that practice and getting through the paperwork and dealing with banks and building relationships instead of just skipping to what people see online like oh i want to be like grant and go buy a bazillion dollar complex no you don't you don't go literally go look at duplexes fourplexes and 16 units before you decide to go for the you know try to take down the whale anyways okay someone raised seven million dollars and they did scale their business they went from nine million to 20 million like we just talked about yeah boom things are going great but now they need more money sometimes that's confusing to people they go see these huge companies like why does fanatics need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars why does this company need to raise tens of millions of dollars why is uber and airbnb and all these big brands that are doing billions of revenue raising more money well scale is expensive and cash flow is hard let me give you a quick example i had my energy drink back in the days we were in 55 ,000 retail stores and I was in Costco I was really excited for Costco but their order the first one was only for a couple stores which is still six figures because their stores are big and they buy it by the truckload their next order was 2.2 million dollars that means I need to come up with a million dollars so let me give you guys a real example let's say they ordered 2.2 million dollars on January 1st that order is for March 1st or April 1st delivery it's always going to be 90 to 120 days out i still have to pay 1 million ish out of the 2.2 million to make the drinks and another 50k to 100k in shipping and storage to get the drinks delivered there it goes there march 1st or april 1st let's just say march 1st to make it even easier it gets there and now they have net 30 or net 60 terms to pay me and so now let's say i get they're march first they don't actually have to pay me until may 1st but wait there's more what if my drinks do well and i sell through at like an 18 rate and they're like oh we're going to give you a nationwide order we're going to expand to a seven million dollar order sounds cool right hunter except they haven't paid me for the first one so now i'm not due payment till may 1st right five months from the order was janitor first so i've been out this million dollars for five months i've been spending money on marketing to help it sell well there another six figures i spent 50k to 100k on the trucking all my staff to travel people setting up the displays displays and merchandising and all the stores may 1st isn't even here yet now they want seven million dollars that means i need to come up with three million dollars more capital to manufacture for the seven million dollar order what am i going to tell costco no if i say no they're going to be okay well we'll just buy monster or rockstar forget you this is a real life example by the way i went through this and so if you have a brand or business and it's going well, you need more money for cash flow.

24:54Because you are going to go through this real life. You have a clothing brand, a product brand, a food brand, a beverage brand, whatever. That's a physical product. Your cash flow will be very, very tight. Because you're always going to get paid on net 30, net 60, or God forbid, net 90 terms. And that is very hard, especially if you do well. So Hunter, that person that raised$7 million, took their business from$9 million to$20 million. how do they go back to their old investors? Or should they be looking for new investors for their second round, for their Series B round? Yeah, good question. I'll tell a quick story.

25:27So I was an investor in a company called Thrive Market. I turned them down and I shouldn't have. Damn. I was supposed to put in 25K in the very, very first round. You know, well, yeah, that would have been really good. What's a billion dollar exit? Go ahead. Yeah, exactly. So my story with them, I actually knew the founder, Nick Green. and he's a co-founder with Ganar. And the reason that they gave us the opportunity to invest is that they got said, they were told no from basically everyone, right? They went in there like, we're going into the grocery niche, we're going to take over. And all the VCs were like, whatever, margins are thin, like get out of here.

26:06Like Amazon's going to eat you, you know what I'm saying? And I just knew Nick, he's a smart guy. He got a perfect score on the SAT. I liked the niche and I was like, whatever, here's the money. And I feel very fortunate about that. Now, I'm not going to go into the details of how the deal was structured, but the point is it was structured by a convertible note that is a discount to the next round. So I write this check and I'm like, let's go, baby. They launch it. This is my first time investing in a startup. You're going to start laughing where this is going. As soon as I send the check, they had this soft launch and start taking off like a wildfire.

26:34But my round hasn't been established yet. So they're ripping in revenue and I'm like, uh-oh, they're going to have to be the next GoPro for me to make any money. Now they ended up doing very well But the point is they ended up doing a very large series a one of the most largest in California and then a very large series B now is it that they blew all the money and didn't do well? No, they were taking off like a rocket ship And so because of that you've got this little fire. You're like this little seed fire This is when I invest and now it's turning into a freaking raging thing and you're sitting there with gas And the gas is cash and you just how much can we pour on this thing?

27:11And so that's what they were doing. And so when they went back to their investors, you know, there's an important distinction between like the people that invest in seed deals. Like you just mentioned, you don't typically do that. There's people that's, that's all they do. Right. Then there's other people maybe closer to you where they want to see multi seven figures in revenue. Then there's other people that are like, I only want to see a hundred million or more. Right. So like sometimes it's a profile thing, but usually you would want to go back to the people that made that early investment for a lot of reasons.

27:39And sometimes it's contractual. Sometimes it's just relationship. Hey, listen, you're the one that gave us our first 25K. And so that typically happens. But in the world of like private equity, usually there will be lead investors. And those lead investors usually have like a profile based on revenue or EBITDA, which is kind of like net profit. And so that's the story of Thrive Market. And now they're on a tear. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they IPO'd eventually, you know, at a multi-billion dollar valuation. They did a really good job, but the margins are thin. So it's not like they didn't do well.

28:09They can turn it off at any time. But that's kind of like the story of any business when you're trying to offset taxes, when you're trying to buy employees, you're trying to hire an onboard for the next year's growth. Now, sometimes what can happen is you implement an aggressive strategy like that and that growth doesn't happen. So you're going up, up, up, up, up, and you bring a bunch of people on, take a bunch of software risk and then that growth stops. You can BK a company and be net neutral in revenue by trying to be aggressive like that. And I've learned some lessons like that where I'm just like, let's go for it.

28:41Let's take over the industry. There's a reason I own RaisingCapital.com, right? That's the initiative. We're going to take over the industry, right? So I take risks like that. And we know, though, that balance sheet is an indication of health. So you've got to use that thing appropriately and then raise money when you have to. All right. So the final chapter. They raised the$7 million. They did the$9 million sales. They scaled to$20 million. They did another round for another$12 million. They've got real money. Why should company founders have their employees, staff, or brand have some sort of philanthropy attached to their brand?