Recall Sessions: He Built the Software That Runs 1 in 6 Laundromats in America | Alex Jekowsky

24:14Interestingly enough, I did not believe early on that customer success should be in the go-to-market function. I did not want a transaction-based and economic-based relationship with care and the customer early on because I didn't want them to feel like when they're getting on their customer success manager, they're going to feel like they're going to be upsold. That was the beauty of an all-in-one pricing. All-in-one pricing enabled us to have CS that was largely a support and care-driven organization, not a product demo and expansion because we were just early. I didn't have a lot of stuff for them to expand to, and everything they had was in product.

24:51So we really focused on an ops-driven CS function with Sivan, who is now our senior director of product operations. She ran operations and what was the CS team underneath that in the ops because it wasn't supposed to be revenue generating. And early on, we weren't thinking about sophisticated comp plans and retention metrics and all that. We were just like, build a great product and kill yourself for the customer. The rest we'll figure out over time. But, you know, especially I see on a lot of podcasts and a lot of interviews with different founders and a lot of the angel investors, advisors I have, you realize that the more time I spent with other companies, the more I realized ours is unique.

25:35And the more we tried to be like toast, like Olo, like job or like, like slice, like whatever, the more we realize like, man, we're, we're breaking trying to be other companies. It really, like this stuff is just way simpler. If you build a great product, you price it in a way where you're, where the cost is less than the value that it generates and you have amazing support and customer success. It can be a no brainer to a lot of the customers. And over time you just need to have that same thing that scales. I, I meet, I meet, I meet like founders all the time that, are always coming to me and saying, hey, I'm starting this, you know, I want to build a product or a service targeting a specific industry.

26:17And I say, oh, you know, I kind of give the advice that you share, which is, hey, you got to go pound the pavement, find your first 20 customers, and you got to do it yourself. And, you know, they come to me and they say, it's hard, you know, it's hard to get these SMBs attention. What do you what would you say to those founders that are listening that are, you know, in, in the zone right now and just like struggling, they get one or two and they're like, how do I get the next 18? What do you think they need to do other, other than just like grind their way through it? I mean, look, something should be hard.

26:48The hard thing should eventually feel get easier. Uh, I think like you want to do the hard things first. So you understand like this, the journey is full of pain, um, and sacrifice and, uh, you know, It's a dark tunnel until you can see the light to a certain extent. But I'd say, one, there's an interesting metric that over the last 30 years, the survival rate of businesses has not increased on a cohorted basis. It's because whatever advice me or a much larger company, a much larger CEO, our experience is going to just be different because we are different people. Our strategies, our ways of the way that I think is different than somebody the way somebody else thinks.

27:29and people have built way more successful companies than since in a completely different way. And so you have to figure out what is innate to you in the sales motion. For me, I love to get very deep in the industry, understand every nook and cranny about it and go into operators asking a ton of questions and just trying to build a relationship as much as possible and just spending an enormous amount of time with them. Other folks wanna build a team and be very technical. You know, it can be, I can't say there's one right answer other than if you can't do the hard things well, then you don't deserve to do the easy things.

28:03And I think in our business, we do the easy things quite poorly. We have barely no product marketing. We have no in-product upsell. There's a lot of things that a lot of younger, smaller companies do way better than we do because that was their focus. Because candidly, that's the easy shit. The hard thing is can you build a durable go-to-market motion in a vertical where you either have a ton of competition or barely any. Both actually have their own unique challenges. My other component is if your customers want your business less than you want your business, it's a tough position to be in. A lot of people want to start vertical SaaS companies and they care less about the impact they can have on their operators because they're saying, I know this is a pain point of theirs.

28:46Well, if you can't sell it to them in a way where they wanted more. And they, I had a customer on a podcast say that sense was, they felt like divine intervention because they've been praying for a business that would do now. Maybe that's a little bit absurd. I'm not saying that everybody has to have that, but like, if you can't get that kind of reaction from customers, even early on, you got to think deeply about what is the value prop and what is your product market fit? Um, even in the earliest days, the, uh, the, the thing that I, I, as I've gotten to know you over the years, like, I know that trade shows are kind of huge in your industry.

29:23And generally just events and being out there because it's hard to get in front of these buyers, you know, that, you know, a lot of these technology oriented founders are like, ah, you know, I'm looking for scalable ways to acquire, you know, doing the, you know, send 30 ,000 emails and so forth. Like, what, what did, was that a conscious decision to be like, Hey, I kind of like, we got to be where they're at. And cause it's not normal, you know, for a lot of early stage companies to invest in event-based marketing as a strategy to acquire customers. But maybe you can talk about that as a, as a strategy that you kind of explored and how you are doing it today.

30:01Yeah, I think SMB is definitely could be different than enterprise or other, other motion, but But we knew when I was in person selling, 99 % close rate. All of our, whenever we had somebody go in person to an operator, we pretty much didn't lose. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And so we tried to build a field sales motion. Toast has a huge field sales motion. We learned a ton from them. Realized super hard to scale, really, really, really costly. And there's opportunity costs that you have when a rep is driving around places versus sitting at a computer and doing demos. And so we didn't have the money or the resources or the market to really effectively, because our operators are not in the business a lot of the time, to go door-to-door to laundromats and really win from that perspective.

30:44You could do that in dental offices. You could do that maybe in self-sorting. That's because the operators are not physically there. They're just physically not there, and the attendant is not always sophisticated enough. Some of them are unattended, but English is a second language. They're not sure if they should actually give you the owner's information. And so we realized, okay, we can't really do, we can't pound the pavement in that way. Scalably, I can do it personally, but it's not something that scales in every market. So the events became big for us. Now in laundry, it's not like money 2020.

31:14And then there's dream for it. It's not the same. You have the clean show that happens once every other year. And it happened, we launched in 2021 as a company. And then the first clean show is in 2022. And we had raised our series a, and we decided we are going to have the sickest booth at this show and we are going to sponsor every tote. It is going to be the sense show sponsored by clean, not the clean show with us as a sponsor. And I mean, it was unbelievable. The reception, because what, what I think SMBs love is the in-person connection and they like to be wowed. They like to feel like something is cool and that they're in the presence of that.

31:50Was that a scary investment? Was that like a scary investment? Because I can imagine, you know, for most series a, you know, you just raised series a, it's probably a fairly costly effort, but you're like, let's go all in. I mean, there was probably some ego in it of being like, I want sense to be the thing here. So it was less scary. I also just think we had, we had, I mean, our sales motion was ripping and we just felt like we knew the payback, what it would take. And we hit it in the first day. So I think that, I think that the early momentum gave us a remarkable amount of confidence. But I also think that there was just some naive, we can do anything to make it happen where I didn't even really think about it.

32:36I mean, I kind of was stopping at the urinal cakes to sponsor, but like everything else, I was pretty bullish on getting a return from it. You would do it. I mean, it was everywhere, but we also knew this doesn't happen every year. Right. So we got to like really nail it. We just had one in 2024 in Orlando and we have the best booth. It is, we actually had a speaking series with a, with a podium and stage that was jammed. I mean, I brought, I bring 30 people and there's no bandwidth. Nobody has bandwidth. We're having people drinking honey in the back because their voices are gone and it's, it's a high in a rush, but again, it's because we know the in-person motion works.

33:16And the other side, should tell a lot of, at least in SMBs, like distributors in your market are critical. We sell tens of millions of dollars through distributors of all of our hardware. We don't sell hardware directly. We only sell it through distributors. Is that a regulatory thing or is that just a strategy that you guys are executing? It's generally, you can't buy a laundry machine, commercial laundry machine from a manufacturer. You have to buy it through a distributor. So if they're already selling the steel, they're already selling the machines, might as well also have them sell the hardware that needs to be drilled into them.

33:49And so we went from zero distributor shows in 2023 to 67 in three months of people there with booths and banners and all of our products there in a three-month period in 2024. And 2025 was even more. And then we had the clean show. And so I'd say the in-person events, even if there's 10 people there at a holiday inn in Iowa, or there's the clean show with 10 ,000 plus people in Orlando. Those are the best ways that we can do field sales. Because at least it's a sponsored event, it's bringing people there. You know, founders are scared about that spend. You know, how do you how do you talk to a founder that's like, man, I, I feel like, I feel like I need to be there, but I don't know whether I'm ready.

34:41How do you know when you're ready? I mean, is this just back to gut? I unfortunately operate on the GD scale, as one of our investors says. I am way more on the G scale than the D being data. I am way more on the gut scale, and I'm working on the other as much as possible. But you did say that the sales motion was ripping. For sure. The momentum. I mean, you feel the momentum. I think the most important thing is just being intellectually honest of where you are. And after you have an investor, you don't need to sell them. Like it's the whole thing is let's be as honest as humanly possible because we're having this baby.

35:19We're doing this thing together. So I think early on, now what I did in my last company when we had no money is I'd go to Best Buy, buy computers, return them after the conference. I wouldn't hire any setup people. I'd bring everything in two suitcases, set up myself because the unions charge a fortune for any kind of setup. And I did it as cheap as you possibly can. or I'd go and just wear a shirt and give flyers and not actually have a booth and a table. And the first clean show before we were even full-time on the business, we were just learning and understanding what people were doing. Now in different markets, they're more competitive and things can be more expensive.

35:54And I think that we were lucky where our booth was like, we spent a lot of money on it, but in context of a normal conference, it wasn't insane, but in relativity to the other vendors at this show. We had a pretty dominant size and experience on that. But we just knew like this past one, we've almost just have to do it because of the size that we are in the industry, because it's also the best form of brand marketing. It establishes us. I found out the channel that the distributor strategy that you guys sort of doubled down on, which is, I guess, necessary in the context of how hardware was distributed in your category.

36:39Was there a lot of competition? I mean, imagine, at least in channels that I've explored in other markets, like people are, you know, they have their friends and they're like, hey, you know, you might be a superior solution. How did you approach that in tactics? Yeah, I think this goes back to, you know, this is where investors missed it completely early on with us is investors didn't take the time to learn about the different mechanisms of how we can sell in this space. They put you in a box and they say, well, our portfolio company over here sold like this and they're doing really well, so you should do that.

37:15And frankly, I'm not definitely not blaming investors. This was our idea, but our just hand-to-hand combat on sales, we didn't spend time understanding how important the distributors were in this market. If I found that out earlier, we actually might have gone faster, further, easier if we spent time understanding the actual vertical and not being obsessed with our own ability to sell. Now, the discomfort with distributors is they control your destiny, right? So what we've kind of threaded the needle on is we have our direct sales motion for our software products that distributors have never sold.

37:49We then train distributors to also sell those products and they get their commissions if they sell those products. The software products or the hardware products? The software. Hardware, we've always sold through distributors. We sold like in the very beginning directly just because no distributor would pick up our hardware because it was brand new. But then we really sold through distributors. I think we could have done more. And actually today, if we bring a deal, if we get a deal for a hardware customer that we could sign, once they're ready to buy, we loop into their distributor. So we even cultivate the leads and then pass it on to somebody who's done nothing for that lead and for that deal and pay them anyway.

38:24Because it's just worth it to build the relationships with those distributors. But we do ensure that they don't control our kind of universal destiny on a go-to-market perspective, but we invest heavily in it. We pay more to distributors on commissions than any other company in our space. We have distributor programs of diamond, platinum, and gold with different incentives. And now we're training them to also sell a lot of our software products. But again, I'm not saying that a distributor motion is the key to everything. And I'm not saying that direct sales is weak. In fact, the both together present something really unique.

39:01But overall, I don't know every business and every market and what's important where, but there are channels that existed before all of us vertical SaaS people where operators were buying things from. There weren't always companies with big, sophisticated, Salesforce-driven account executive go-to-market motions. And so leaning on that also gets you better buy-in from the industry overall. How did you get your first – I mean you made this comment around people didn't know who we were in our hardware. And like did you have to get to a certain kind of a scale before the first distributor kind of said, all right, I'm willing to start putting you in our sales sheet?

39:43We have an atypical way of doing this. Our acquisition of LauncherWorks was huge in that. I mean, when we bought Laundriworks and we wanted to go to a distributor show that they hadn't been to from a distributor that was selling a ton of Laundriworks products, one of a company in the space, they wouldn't let Sense team members there, just the Laundriworks team members. They didn't know Laundriworks had seven people in it, and none of them had been to a trade show. But they were worried, and I think this transcends industry in the S &B market. Distributors and operators are worried about big tech screwing them over, either being unreliable, cutting them out of deals, taking their data, and doing things that are of the benefit to the software company and the venture capital investor and not beneficial to the S &B or the distributor.

40:31And I think that that sense as the only company that has raised venture capital is the only company that wasn't either family owned or started by an operator just had that perception. And I think that we did not lean enough into the commitment to the current industry principles. The only way you can, the way we view our business is we want to help operators digitize their business, create optionality in their operational workflows, and then earn the right to innovate. And it's the same with all the relationships we have. We want to help distributors engage, actually pay them more, and then find ways to innovate together.

41:13I think software companies are so desperate to innovate their SMB market and be innovators and revolutionize whatever the hell. I mean, it used to be the cover of our deck was revolutionizing laundry. It's like, I don't even want to use the R word too much because these industries were fine before we existed. We have to earn the right to drive innovation through partners that are supporting the vertical. Would you say that? I mean, I guess what you're saying is that, you know, the LaundraWorks kind of acquisition kind of immediately built trust into the distributor kind of ecosystem. I mean, I guess if you didn't do that, it would have been a whole different challenge.

41:51I think we would have gotten there for sure. But I think Launchworks is the best hardware product in the space. A family-owned business. They did one thing. They built this one hardware device for 10 years. That's all they made. They didn't really care about software. They didn't care about payments. They just made really great hardware. And it was a family-owned business whose legacy and everything was built on building things at work. And I think that the distributors in the space loved the family-owned story. They loved the close connection to the owners, and they loved that they were selling something that just worked.

42:22It's not the sexiest. It's not the most feature-rich, but it is the one that works the absolute best. And distributors don't want a bunch of service calls and all that. But they had six to ten years of working with LaundraWorks. They had one to two of working with us. So part of it is this is a relationship-driven industry, as many SMBs are, and you got to have time and you got to be out there and spending time with these distributors to really build that relationship and trust. And the first six months of owning LaundraWorks, we didn't make any announcement about the deal. And all we did was sit with distributors and have office hours and let them know whose sense was, what our intentions, what our goals were, be as transparent as possible and further our commitment to them.

43:06LaundraWorks went to zero trade shows, we went to 67. Wow. Just to support the distributors. Was there a distributor relationship that kind of went wrong and that over the years that you're like, man, probably could have done something differently? I think two of them, one was going wrong and turned really great. One was the one that didn't invite Sense to a show, but invited Launcherworks. Now, Sense and Launcherworks, they're one of our biggest distributors because they just didn't trust. They trusted one thing. They didn't trust the other. So we're like, we're not even dealing with this. And it just was about spending time.

43:40There's another distributor that Sense had sold products to their customers directly. And I don't think we really spent time breaking bread and spending face time with people. I think we were just, things were moving so quickly. We were raising capital, buying companies, trying to scale the software side. And we didn't slow down to appreciate the relationships and dynamics and impact of some of our move quickly and break shit attitude. The thing with distributors and so many SMBs is they just want the FaceTime. Slow down, be honest, communicate. They don't care if you have bugs in your product.

44:15They care if they have bugs and you didn't tell them about it, or when they call you and have bugs, you say, okay, I'll fix it tomorrow, and it doesn't get fixed for a week or a month. They are the most patient with good communication. They are the least patient if they feel like they're shouting into the ether. And so that's, I think most of the customer issues or most of the distributor issues that we've had is our poor communication or assumptions on a level of either understanding or appreciation of like a macro situation. I want to switch gears. You know, we were talking about go to market early days, getting customers.

44:54We talked about hardware and then the acquisition of LaundraWorks. I know that when we talk to all the listeners that are building vertical software platforms, everything is AI these days. You've had an interesting sort of fundraising journey. I can imagine a lot of learnings along the years. When you think about the last five years of being out there telling your story. What has been the biggest learnings around finding the right sort of partners for you? How did you deal with questions like, oh, Tam's too small kind of thing. Like, did you just say, fuck it? Like, you know, I'm not gonna spend time with you.

45:38Were you trying to convince investors around what it was? Like, how did you approach all of those conversations over the years? Yeah, two pieces of advice I got from Kent at Bessemer early on was one, if you feel like I would be, I'd look at an email response, I'd write to an investor for four hours. Like I'd be so nervous to respond that one thing or say that one thing or ask that one thing or something like that. Cause I thought it would kill a deal. And Ken told me if something feels super, super, super fragile, it was probably not meant to be for the beginning. And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

46:10I think there were afraid to just have like direct conversation, authentically, honestly. A lot of my negotiation strategy today is just like radical uh, radical relatability and transparency. It's like, here's exactly what I'm thinking. This is why I like this idea. This is why I don't like that idea. Like, what would you do if you were in my shoes or, or why are you thinking the way you are? Like, let me help back into the, into the solution. Um, and so I think that, so that was one piece. And the other piece that, that Kent told me early is if somebody continues, continues to continues to question you on Tam, them.

46:42They just don't get it. And that's okay. Not everybody needs to get it. Every company has missed good ones and, and hit on, on, and invested on them bad ones. So nobody's going to get it all the way right, but you just got to move on. I think like if you feel like you have to sell them soup at the time where they should be the most excited to participate, you know, you get that feeling. I mean, there's so many investors that passed on us that I would go convince, sell, put all this information together. And that would actually build my own excitement that I feel like they're digging in. In reality, I should have known they just didn't get it to begin with.

47:16And they're asking because they're interested in getting it. But all the investors that actually participated spent the time to understand. They didn't say, hey, I don't understand your TAM. Can you give me a bunch of information? They spent time talking to customers. They spent time doing their own research. They asked me more questions to help deepen their conviction. And I think that's the different. I didn't appreciate that buying sign from an investor early on, I thought any follow-up question they had was a fixable one or solvable one. In reality, every investor that invested spent the most amount of time with me.

47:48Yeah, love it. Love it. One of the things that you mentioned is this, you know, using Toast as a kind of a, you know, people knew Toast and it was sort of an anchor, obviously, Kent's being, you know, one of the investors in Toast. Like, you made this comment of like, don't try to be the Toast of X. I know I see a lot of founders try to find kind of relative comparison points to just use as a, as a way to sort of make sense of how you fit in. Do you think that's the, do you think that's a good thing? I mean, now that you reflect back on some of the storytelling you've done with investors and pitching lots of folks.

48:27I think it's, look, it's helpful. I mean, I remember we, I, if somebody came up to me in a bar and said, Hey, what do you do? I'd be like toast for laundromats, right? It's like, it's an easy way to build a relatability on what you're doing. The way our kind of comparison story evolved to the investor is, you know, it helped that we had all the founders or C-levels of these companies on the cap table, but it's like, we're like Toast, we're like Olo, we're like Slice, we're like Jobber, we're like X, but we're not them. We just take the bits and pieces that we have the greatest conviction in and how they operate, and we apply them to our business.

49:04There's an element of like Olo's focus of APIs and Rails and Slices kind of mission for local and obsession for local and aggregating local data to kind of champion the importance of local. Toast's point of sale thesis and overall hardware and product thesis. And there's all these kind of elements of these businesses that we love, but we are just not singularly one of them. We have a completely different go-to-market motion than Toast does. There's some similar elements, but very different. But we tried to model it completely off of Toast. And we couldn't be more different than Olo because it's all enterprise deals.

49:41So there's an element of it that matters. And also even in the orgs, like product rolled up to the COO at Olo, it doesn't here. And so the product vision and strategy is completely different. There are so many things that make all of these businesses remarkably different if you actually pull back the curtain and look at them top to bottom. And also like, you know, I tell other founders, like, do you want to raise$900 million? Because that's what took toast. That's what it took toast to get to where they are. And now they have to go beyond restaurants and other verticals and go public. And like, if that's not truly your goal and your story in your market, then you have to operate it differently.

50:19So I think it's valuable to make the connection, but I would actually say, we're like this business for this reason. And here's how we're different because you can't be toast. There hasn't been another toast and toast isn't square or micros or touch bistro or any of these other point of sale companies, similar, some similarities for sure. As is, as does sense have similarities to all of these companies. And that when we, when we, when we started to think like that, it changed our perception of, of MNA versus organic growth. In some cases, it changed our perception in in in our poo and attachment rate it changed our perception of how our business should grow and how we should forecast so that's just how we think about it well how are you thinking about ai and all the ways you think about sense whether it's the customer value proposition how you're thinking about how ai can create a more efficient um sense organization tell me about how ai fits into your strategy today and and what you're excited about uh in the next 12 24 months Yeah.

51:18I mean, separating it from internal, the way we're leveraging it internally is just like as much as humanly possible. We went from like 15 % employee adoption of AI to 80 % in two months, a month and a half. Like we are just pushing it as much as possible internally in so many ways. If I talk about from the customer side, I talked about this at Stripe Sessions, where it's basically until AI can help my operator golf more, they don't care. And the operators don't care if it's AI or a ton of people offshore. They just want to spend less time having to work in their business. And so AI can be a great flywheel for that.

52:01So we launched a phone system. It was the first product we launched of an AI native infrastructure. We didn't even call it an AI phone system. We called it a contact center powered by humans and enabled by AI or whatever the nomenclature was because we actually had hired people in the Dominican Republic to pick up the phone on behalf of our operators. And from a routing perspective, operators could choose that and pay this, or they could have AI be the first layer and then have that be routed to either our support team that we spun up or to their phone. Because we didn't think that operators were ready.

52:34And frankly, that AI wasn't ready. If AI works 90 % of the time, it doesn't work enough. It needs to be perfect for an operator to not want to churn, for them to get the full value of it. And so our real view on the value of AI is from an agentic perspective. I think we're going to get chat fatigue and having to go into an AI product to ask it to do something is work. So it isn't really that valuable. I mean, the difference of asking AI to tell me about my revenue on certain days when I can go to my dashboard and do something very, very similar, it's very cool because we're watching something happen in a way we have very novel.

53:09But the real value in our view of AI is you don't ask and it does. that's where operators really get value. And so we're building marketing agents. We're building accounts receivable agents for commercial laundry billing. We're building all of these agents to be able to take the action on behalf of an operator. And I think until that happens, it's not like this amazing, crazy thing. And I know I should be saying that because everybody wants to hear it, but I think investors want us to say it more than our operators do. And again, everything that we do in our business, and I think everybody should do is build for your customer.

53:43If it's not valuable for your customer, don't jam it down their throat. Wait till it has the value and make it happen. And I think until true agentic is possible, it's cool. And we use it. And our AI phone system is awesome. It is the highest attachment rate product we have from an upsell standpoint. So it is really powerful. But again, why? Because it's taking action on behalf of an operator. Instead of them picking up the phone, the AI does it, transcribes it, and answers the questions, contextualize with all the data. which is, you know, the key to all things. If you don't have, that's every product we have is designed to try to absorb as much data as possible because that's what enables contextual AI and agentic AI to really be, be powerful.

54:24So I don't know if that answers your question, but love it. Love it. I know we're running out of time here. If like a lot of founders are starting vertical AI companies, which, you know, like it feels like the new rebranded vertical SaaS, you know, if you had like one piece of go to market advice, you know, for their first, you know, three, six months, what would it be? And what would you advise those folks? I would advise don't use AI BDRs or SDRs or CS or support. Like if you can't do that early on, and you're trying to farm that out to gain efficiencies there, that's where you learn the most about your customers, you build the deepest relationships, you get the highest retention, and you should not be looking for remarkable efficiency gains in your go-to-market motion early on because that's your learning.

55:08We knew so much about the laundromat business because I talked to more goddamn laundromat owners and helped them more with things that weren't working than anybody using AI would be able to do. Somebody's saying, well, AI will parse all of that data and deliver it to us. It's like, no, it won't. Not in the way where you hear the tone from the operator in their frustration or excitement. It is like, that's not where you cut the corners, in my view. And even in our business, we love Spotify, but people still buy records because we love, and I think in a world of AI, we're going to want more analog and in-person experiences as much as possible.

55:45And I think small business owners are the last to be really happy that when they call the customer service line of a company they just invested$40 ,000 in or$5 ,000 and moved from a system that was working to a new system and they have to talk to an AI agent because the company's not gonna make time for them. You know, until you're a$40 billion company like Toast, like maybe earlier than that, but like don't skimp or sacrifice on support or CS and even the sales motion. Like that's where you learn, that's where you gain, that's where you build the trust. And I see a lot of people trying to like take the easy way out of getting, saying, getting fuck you on a phone call that you're trying to sell them.

56:26Like we're going to yell that by a customer or something like that on the phone. I just think that's the most important learning you have in the first call, even four years. Love it. Love it. Get in front of your customers. Don't automate everything. And face-to-face is still, it means a lot, especially in the early days. So absolutely, absolutely love it. Alex, I really appreciate you taking time and sharing your story and tons of learnings here. I'm going to have some rapid fire questions to to end this, end this, uh, uh, chat today, uh, and just go from your gut. So, um, toast or square toast service, Titan or pro core service, Titan lovable or cursor lovable.

57:10Wait, why lovable or cursor? I mean, I don't do a lot with cursor, but I like being able to, I mean, we use clock code. So, uh, but I mean, a lovable, I just like, maybe lovable or replet and maybe i'm using replet more than lovable um at this point but uh let's see bootstrapping is it brave or stupid uh it depends in what market and for how long and in what context but even if it's stupid it's really brave you uh you've been building this company through covid i think is that is ff i recall starting covid you know now that you're you know, five years, six years in office hybrid or remote for early stage?

57:51Oh, I mean, I would say in person, not even hybrid, but we have to live in a hybrid environment. So I'd say hybrid and if, uh, in, you know, in state or in city, if you hire people outside, you know, remote, remote works, but definitely hybrid, get people in person as much as possible. Hire fast or hire slow? Hire slow. Tell me more. We've, we're, we're behind hiring now. I've never been able to hire at the frequency, at the quality. We have a probably higher revenue per headcount than most companies outside of Anthropic. And part of that is we generally, it happens, definitely happens, but we rarely miss on our hires.

58:34I probably was 50 % under headcount in our hiring plan in Q1. We're trying to do it faster, but we won't ever sacrifice speed for quality in our headcount. It's the greatest. People are the main de-risk to execution. And the reverse of that is like fire fast or fire slow. Notify fast, pip fast, give visibility into the reason that they're failing. We've had people fail and it wasn't because of their caliber. It's because they're in the wrong position in the company. So identify the reason they're failing and then cut them quickly. If you've given the notice and given them an opportunity, generally we hire well.

59:13And if somebody is not succeeding, we first say, is it something that we're doing as a company? Are they in the wrong position? Are they matching our guiding principles? If they aren't, or they're really, you know, there's usually a reason and rarely should anybody be, I don't think anybody's ever been fired here surprised. So maybe pit fast and then fire fast. Um, is there, is there a founder, uh, in this world right now that you're, you're admiring right now? I would say Chase Gilbert at, uh, built technologies, um, is one of the best founders I've ever met on his view of people. So much of my view on hiring and our guiding principles has come from him and they built an amazing business with an unbelievable team in a, in a difficult market and has weathered a lot of storms and has some of the best investors and best people, best alumni.

1:00:02Um, and I think threads of needle between an exceptionally tactical day-to-day mind while being a visionary and a high level five, 10 year strategic plan. Um, and not, not many people like that sample are a jobber, uh, another excellent case. I mean, probably more I admire than, than I don't. Um, but those two are pretty exceptional. Uh, I think I know the answer to this question, but I'll ask anyway, AI agents, is it hype or real? Valuations, unsure. And liquidity for people investing in these businesses, also unsure. But Agentic AI is freaking real. When applied in the right way for good value, it is 100%, 100 % real.

1:00:45And having, you know, you can plead the fifth on this one, vertical SaaS multiples right now, too high, too low, or about right? I mean, we just raised, so I'd say about right, the price that we got. It depends. Like it's, are you, we have 99 % customer retention, you know, we're growing really, really well. Like, you know, that should achieve a different multiple than a 10 or 15 % grower or something with a, with a lot of churn. Um, what is the ARPU grow? I think vertical SaaS now people are drilling way more into the metrics that matter and the unit economics, um, than they were before. Uh, and so I, I think they're probably about right.

1:01:23Um, I feel pretty good, maybe on the low end, maybe on the high end, but I think they're, they're about right. Well, hey, Alex, I appreciate all the time today. Congrats to you. Congrats to the Sense team. Congrats to the hard work building an amazing company. And I know you're just getting started. So congrats and excited to continue to watch the Sense movie. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. Always love chatting with you. And hopefully we get to see each other soon. All right. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.

1:01:54Hey, this is Ben Kaznoka, co-founder of Village Global. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Village Global podcast, where we go deep on all of the biggest topics in tech. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can check us out on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to see you for the next one.