Adam Edmunds

I do think you have to be psychotic to be a good founder. You do? But what Podium pulled off in SMB takes everything coming together right. Yeah, I mean to go from one to 100 in four years and burn through like less than 40 million bucks to do it was insane. Insane. It was It was near perfect product market fit. There was a year we had 90% quota attainment by rep, overall quota attainment of 107%. Like it was nuts. What's normal in a software company is about 40% of reps are hitting quota. Yeah. And that's that's what that was the secret sauce of Podium. And I was in an emergency room at 2:00 a.m. in Mission Viejo and I was like, I'm going to be rich and dead. Yeah. And that's just like I'm I'm not doing I called our partner Miles at Excel the next day. I was like, I'm out and not like in a few months, like now. That day. And then I flew here and kind of told the crew and I was gone. Took a year off after Podium and it kind of forced me into figuring out like who am I, what am I going to do next, like what do I like to do, like what do who who do I actually want to be? And I spent like nine months kind of riding my bike and going through it was like a tough mental health year for me like everyone during COVID but trying to figure out like what do I want to do next. So Dave comes to you end of 2020, tracks you over to Entrata. I came here cuz I'd never been a part of a generational business that would last decades and this one I knew immediately I'm like, this company will be here in 30 years. And those are rare like So you that puts the valuation of Entrata over $4 billion. I think I think that's public information. That was announced with the announcement, right? So that's insane. Welcome back to the Startup Ignition podcast. Thank you so so for watching the last episode and I teased this episode a little bit by saying who maybe our guest was going to be. So we had a little bit of guesses online and within our community, but today we have a very special guest. We're old news. We're John and Tyler. We're the co-host, the founders, CEO and managing partners of Startup Ignition and Ventures and everything within our ecosystem, but today we are joined by Adam Edmunds, the current CEO of Entrata, but your background and resume goes much deeper than that, but it right now you're claiming Entrata, your full boat, all in on Entrata and it's going super well. Yes, sir. Yeah, but I have a little bio for you and I I tried to pass it by at Adam before, but he's a busy dude, so I hope I get everything right here, but I used AI to help me write this bio. So let's see how AI did for me, okay? So Adam Edmunds is CEO of Entrata, the leading operating system for the multi-family property industry since stepping in back in 2020. That's what AI said it was. Adam has helped lead Entrata to raise over $500 million and you just raised another round from Blackstone, right? $200 million back in February? April, close to April. Okay, I knew it was a few months ago cuz I saw that I actually commented on your post on LinkedIn saying, "Adam, this is awesome. You should come on our podcast." And then it happened. So thank you for coming, but so you that puts the valuation of Entrata over $4 billion. I think that's public information that was announced with the announcement, right? So that's insane. A $4 billion valuation Entrata and a lot of people think that Entrata and a lot of these companies like um you know, Ryan Smith's Qualtrics are like these yesterday born companies. People don't understand that these are 20-year grinds that have been going through the ringer to get to where they're at, but that's not it. I want to go beyond Entrata in this bio. So you've also were at Podium prior to Entrata at helping them ray raise, but also get to an amazing ARR. Um you also were the founder of Allegiance, which sold to Merits, which then rebranded to the Merits CX that we know today. And then and on top of that probably all the way back to when you knew him, you were doing your own startups and awesome startups even back as a student like Silent Whistle your LinkedIn claims all the way back then which sold as well, right? in 2009. 2009. So, this dude is an amazing entrepreneur, also a very close friend and awesome supportive of what we're doing. So, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and I just can't wait to dive in. Do you have any comments before we start? Adam and I go way back and I I remember the first time I met him. We'll talk about it. Okay, let's talk about it. Hey, but before we do, I do icebreakers on this podcast. So, with every guest we start out the podcast with like a 2-3 minute thing just to loosen up and get to know each other and so our audience gets to know you as an entrepreneur and who you are and who Adam is what's behind the scenes. Even though we love all the business insights that are probably going to come in this episode, let's do it really chill with an icebreaker really quick. So, I'm going to do startup hot takes with Adam Edmunds, okay? So, these are popular hot takes that are opinionated hot takes and I want to know your take on it and your take on it, too, okay? good. Okay, here we go. So, this is the first one. AI isn't just replacing tasks, it's redefining entire job categories. Dario from Anthropic, which is the the makers of Claude AI, he says he's warning up to 50% of entry-level white-collar and blue-collar jobs may be gone by even as close in 3 to 5 years. So, he's claiming 50% of white and blue-collar jobs are going to be replaced by AI by 2028. Thoughts on that? What's your take on that claim? I probably know the white-collar world a little bit better. I think a lot of those jobs will be gone, but I really think the better way to say it is they'll be changed. Like, AI impacting what you're doing? We We bought an AI company in Tel Aviv last year. So, you think of our industry, we sell to apartment communities that are trying to nurture and get new residents to move in. Yeah. And those residents have lots of questions. That's That's a really easy problem for AI to solve. Yeah, just just conversation. Maintenance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we're We We have a product we sell and then we use AI internally really, really extensively um in our our R&D teams and our operational teams. Like, it's been a big push for us for the last year or so. And yeah, it's causing people have to like either, you know, get on board with it or kind of get left behind. I do think a lot of jobs as they exist today are going to be modified pretty dramatically. What do you think? And I I agree with that, but it's the timing issue. So, I've been around a long time. They call me the OG, which is supposed to mean original gangster, but I think it's just old guy. And so, um what is interesting is the timing. So, for instance, like when microwave ovens were invented, it took 19 years Yeah, it took 19 years for them to be in everybody's kitchen. Um everything takes longer. When I disrupted the Yellow Pages industry, which is my background, people thought the internet was going to make Yellow Pages go out of business in two years. They said in two years there won't be Yellow Pages. It took 20 years. Everything takes a lot longer to really change society cuz humans are resistant to change. They aren't Like, some humans love to adopt change and other people resist it all the at any cost. And so, I believe it's true, but the timing will be much longer. Yeah, okay. So, it's not going to be three to five years, it might be five to 15. I was showing in our Startup Ignition Bootcamp 10 years ago a video called Humans Need Not Apply, which is a great video on the internet, and it was making all these predictions things were going to happen with robotics and AI. Like, 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. and it still hasn't fully happened yet. Like, let's just even take a look. Taxis aren't gone even though Uber's a much better experience than a taxi, okay? Just And now we've got Waymo. How long before taxis are truly gone? Probably another 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's the first hot take. I have five of these. We might have to trim it down to three. Okay. Next hot take from Reid Hoffman, okay? LinkedIn founder, right? He said founders who who pursue balance, like work-life balance, aren't actually serious founders. Is that like a harsh reality or do you guys agree on that take or not? So like he's saying you have to be almost psychotic to be a successful founder and just have no work-life balance. I do think you have to be psychotic to be a good founder. You do? But in good ways. But no, I actually probably disagree with most of what Reid Hoffman says. I I read this. It was one of the Andreessen folks who said I saw this tweet maybe two or three years ago and they said there's four aspects of life and if you want to be a founder you have to pick two and be really good at them and abandon the other two. That's family, career, community, and friends. Yeah. And so for me that really resonated cuz I chose family and career and I ignored the other two completely and that worked for me. Um yeah, I don't think you everyone has to be Elon Musk. If you want to build a trillion-dollar company you probably have to be Elon got to be you got to be psychotic. That's a good way to look at it and you know I teach this in the boot camp. This is a very important topic cuz I like to teach about how to keep your head on straight and you know live a good life. But I do say and it goes back You know Steve Gibson? Steve Gibson taught me many years ago a statement saying entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like nobody else will because it's so hard and so demanding to live the rest of your life like nobody else can where you have the choice and freedom to choose what you want to do. Cuz they're so rewarding. tell entrepreneurship is not become about becoming a workaholic. It's about, you know, three to seven years of being out of balance. You're going to have a car with one tire overinflated and another tire underinflated and it's going to be kind of a clunky ride for a while, but it's not forever. It's a You tell your life partner, you tell whatever, this is how it's going to be for so long, and this is the goal and what we're after, and that's how you manage it. And that's how you build real wealth. So, so that is that is going I agree with part of what he says. Things are going to be a little out of balance, but at the same time, it's a defined plan. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to cut it to three. So, here's the last one, even though I had five planned, cuz I want to get into Adam's background and story, not just chill on this icebreaker for 20 minutes. Okay, here we go, last one. With your background of, you know, going to these billion-dollar and leadership positions at Podium and now at Entrata, and, you know, obviously building your own startups as well, and going from zero to millions and millions of dollars, and obviously billions of dollars in valuation, I thought this was really relevant for you because Paul Graham's founder mode, I don't know if you're familiar with, is uh article in where he came out and he said, you know, founders need to stay deeply involved rather than delegating to get to those oversize and outsize outcomes, you know, those billion-dollar unicorn situations. Mhm. And he said, "Founders have to stay in the weeds, right?" And this is essential not only for true innovation, but true valuation and progress and success. What do you think? Do you agree with Paul Graham on that statement where founders should be taking this thing from zero to the moon? Or, cuz I know that you've come in and you've done amazing things in your positions where the founders might have you might have replaced those founders, right? Yeah. Thoughts? I feel like I know and I've worked with some of the best founders, and some founders, very few though, I think can go from zero to the moon, like a Mark Zuckerberg. Most start to It's the the personality traits that make really good founders are very different than those that make really good operators. I always wanted to be the cool founder. Like, I wanted to When I was 23 or four when I met you, I wanted to be Mr. Cool Founder Guy, but I'm I'm nuts enough. Like, my My two shards were like, "Okay." Yeah. They weren't great. Um you know, founders are obsessed with everything and they are a little psychotic and they're perfectionists and they're micromanagers and they do stay in the details. I'm more about like financial metrics and go-to-market metrics and I can run board meetings and raise money and I can communicate really well. So, I've I've said this on a couple podcasts. I'm like one of those boring operator guys, but I do agree with the statement you got to stay close to whatever you're really good at that you bring to the table at a company. If you're if you're an engineer that's running a company, you got to stay close to the product. Um I try to stay close to customers by staying involved in sales deals and that kind of stuff. So, I do think that is important. Um for any leader. Like I had a I had a CRO ask me recently. He's like, um what makes like good reps that turn into good leaders versus good reps that don't? And I said that. The one it's the ones who stay in the deals. Yeah. Those are the ones that become good leaders. Right. Cool. Thoughts on that? Just real quickly, I'll just add that I completely agree. There's very few that can go from zero to the whole distance. Very few. In Utah here in our ecosystem, we've got a few that have done it and they also depends on what's what's the distance, right? It's like, are we selling for 20 million or are we taking this thing to 4 billion, right? And I think that's the difference is like I do feel like founders in their idea taking it to scale and growth and getting to a decent-sized exit, they can. But it's like, yeah, maybe if you're getting into working with Wall Street or taking it to IPO, yeah, there's different characters for different jobs. Steve Blank, the father of Lean Startup who has a great quote. He says, "If you want to go from zero to 800 employees, there's a little secret that you need to learn as a founder and that is operations. You need to need to understand financial statements, ratios. You need to understand HR. You need to understand business MBA Like what's your LTV to CAC? management. Yeah. That's just what it ha- happens to come with it. If you don't pick up those skills and learn those skills and absorb that as you're a founder being around your board that you've attracted that are you know experienced business people. If you're not absorbing that knowledge like how did you become what you become? You start hanging around a lot of really good business people and I believe you absorbed and assimilated. My observation of you meeting you at the very beginning of your career, right? Is that you just were really good at absorbing business skills and talents from been there done it people. Yeah. Would you would you agree with that statement? sure and that's why I think I became a pretty good operator cuz I don't have like I think the stuff that makes a good founder you're born with. It's a little bit more genetic. Um are a little bit crazy and Ty and I will go you know some of the best ones are a little bit They're a little nuts and you know and that's what makes them really good founders makes them kind of poor operators cuz like good exacts don't want to work for crazy micromanagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's why the in between thing like one last comment on this is Bill Gates. Bill Gates look what he did. Bill Gates was a good technologist but he was actually a genius business person. Mhm. He was even stronger as a business person, a marketer and it would in the first 10 15 years of that company maniacal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and that's a lot of what the way he is now where he's so subdued and all that is not how he was from age 18 to 30. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And those that can make the transition I applaud like I think it's amazing if you can like rub like smooth out some of those rough edges and learn. It's It's tough though. It's really tough. think I've said this like three times on previous episodes of this podcast like if you don't have basic financial like prowess like just basic things you're not going to be a good entrepreneur. You're not going to be a good founder. You have to know those things like the operating type things. Yeah, you can't you can't just be a crazy wild man. You can't just be like an innovator. You have to you have to start understanding once once there's numbers and not just zeros on your financial statements you got to understand what they mean. But that's a good that's a good transition point. So, thank you for the icebreaker and for those hot takes and for both of your opinions on it, but you going way back, I saw that you are a masters of accounting. Yeah. Is that That's what you studied. You were in the Mac program at at Brigham Young University. Yep. Yeah, and you went and got a job at KPMG. Or no? Or an internship? a job. Yeah, you accepted a job. And what I want to tell the story because my cuz you went and did something Cuz I remember this so clearly. He was a Mac student at BYU. Who did we just have on this podcast that was a Mac student? I can't remember right now. Oh, it was Phil. One of our venture friend portfolio CEOs was also a Mac student. He just came on the a hot He's one of our investments. Hot company was doing well last one right before this. You should Shout out to Baton and Phil. 100,000 to 7 million revenue quick. Okay. So, so with that though, he's a Mac student. Walking the halls of the Tanner building business school BYU, and he runs into me and says, "Hey, are you the guy that helps students with their businesses? I've got a little problem." And I go, "Yeah." And I go, "Well, when can you do it?" I go, "Let's go in this room right now." And he proceeds to tell me what he did. I don't even remember the mistake you made, but you you took $50,000 investment from a man who was basically buying a job for his son. Yeah, and I didn't sign any documents. You didn't do any documents at all. his check. Yes. And so, I sat him down and the first thing I said was and this is just a good story cuz this is really important to understand this part. I teach this in the boot camp, too. I said, "Okay, let's start here. Let me see your cap table." And he goes, "What's a cap table?" And he's a Mac student, a masters of accounting. And that's where I discovered cuz that was my first year or two at BYU, and I said, "Why are they not teaching cap tables in the accounting program?" never heard that term before. That's insane. They do that now, for sure. And well, they do that cuz I but I instantly said we I told everyone, "We've got to start teaching cap tables, not just income statements, balance sheets, and cash flows. You If you're going to have people do businesses in in the business school and they encourage student entrepreneurship a little bit at least, right? And so anyway, we got him straight out. There's a long story to that and everything we did there to straighten that out. I just want to say real quick to everybody listening, do not take money and or cash a check without documentation around that money. That is a big no-no. Yeah. But Adam did it, but it's okay, but But I will those of you who don't know my nose I noticed something in Adam the first minute I met him. I said, this guy is going to be successful. He does. He had an idea to take advantage of a new law in accounting that was coming out at the at the time a policy and accounting standard. And he did a list he had he made some mistakes there, but what happened was he was very teachable, very humble. He would listen from been there done it people. And he's still he was very decisive. He's the perfect thing. Decisive, strong, young guy, but also teachable and you'd listen to advice from been there done it people. And I think that's been Yeah. helped you a lot along the way. I had no idea what I was doing. So I grew up in a really blue collar family like next to my grandpa's farm in South Jordan. Like I grew up like shoeing horses and like I don't even know what you call cutting the tails off sheep when they're like that's the kind of stuff I did grow up on. Wow, that's crazy. Um not saying I'm like was a cowboy or anything, but like um like I remember when I was 14 or 15, Bruce Hough like Derek and Julianne's dad, they were neighbors. He taught me what the stock market was when I was like 14 years old and I was just like, what? So, you know, I was going to be a doctor my whole life. I go to BYU and I'm majoring in business, kind of get sucked into that public accounting track mostly just because accounting was easy for me. Like numbers are it's just kind of my thing. Um and then I took a class from Larry H. Miller and he's like he just he told his story. That was the class is Larry Miller just saying this was my life. And I um one day he said if any of you want to start a business do it now cuz you don't have mortgages and you don't have kids and your parents are paying for braces. And if it doesn't work out, you have a degree, go get a job. Mhm. And I just bought into that. Kind of came up with this idea for Silent Whistle, but I had no clue what I was doing. I didn't know anything about business, about tech, about anything. So, probably the best thing I did is while I was still a student, I took advantage of people like him. Mhm. And then he introduced me to Josh James. And because I was a student, anybody would meet with me. Yeah. And so I got to the CEO of Franklin Covey, and I got to the CEO of overstock.com, and the CEO of Ancestry. And they all started to buy my product even knowing it was fake because they just felt bad for me. Um but that was that's probably how my career launched. built yet by saying it was fake. It's It was It wasn't real. It was just a presentation. A couple lessons in that first thing though. So, can I share some of the story from there? So, so they the um he'd taken 50,000 didn't do the paperwork. It was a gentleman that really was wanting just his son to work with Adam and get a job and be involved in it, right? But it wasn't right fit. So, we got Adam out of that 50,000. The guy had to be paid extra, and he got out you got out of that. And then um you also went into a the next deal for money to get that. And uh you signed a no shop with a known venture capitalist. I'm not just going to say that. Do you remember that? And so he signed a no shop, which I also don't like people to do. I say don't sign a no shop if you don't have to cuz then for 60 45 60 days he couldn't talk to any other investors. Startup Ignition Ventures, we don't have any we don't have a no shop. Yeah. And so he does a no shop, and then the investor actually didn't do anything for that 45 60 days to help him. He loaned him the $50,000 to pay this guy back, but didn't do anything. Mhm. And so then Adam had to go to his parents to get help to pay that guy back. And so this is the kind of stuff that you want a mentor to help you through this a little bit. But after that was done, then there was one thing I noticed. Adam was actually doing something really cool, and I knew about this company that one of the professors was involved with, Gary Rhodes who's worked with us, and I knew these companies should be together and one day I came in and I said, "These two companies need to be joined together." And I made them go talk about a merger and they didn't want to at first and I actually forced them to do it and it ended up happening. And that was kind of interesting cuz you guys took their existing company and made it run so much better. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't know how to run the company. They started it with an idea as a professor and of kind of old guys that were working on business and you came in and just sold the heck out of it compared to that. Mhm. And that's your first idea merging with that idea. Yeah, those always stayed separate. They never like they never became like married to each other. And so yeah, Silent was what we sold in 2009 and Alいたegiance kind of kept running. We sold that to it in 2014. Yeah. Um But what what's cool though You have good memory. Those are These are all pretty accurate. Yeah. A lot of them I forgot. Yeah, yeah, I know you cuz you've had so much but the thing is is there's good lessons in here and what it is is just that um also I great story people are going to love to hear is that he went on and entered Adam was smart. He went in and he had graduated and he did accept that job at KPMG but he goes this entrepreneurship thing is going to be better and he turns down the job with one week to go. Oh, I was in trouble for that. Yeah. And BYU freaked out. Yeah. And I had to I run defense for you. Do you remember that? Yeah. And because it's not cool to accept one of the big four positions and it's a cut He got a He was so good at declining the big four. so good at accounting he got one of the coveted jobs in Salt Lake So BYU graduate getting a Salt Lake City job at KPMG was coveted. And Adam got that job. But one BYU counts a success by probably placement of those jobs. Yeah, well that's a big deal for there that's a big deal. One week before starting the job to say I'm selling my BMW, I'm selling my house and going to do entrepreneurship and I'm not taking the KPMG job. First of all, his wife had to handle that. And then number two, be quiet. He said, "What are you doing?" And then what And what How it got noticed was he was actually graduated, but he wanted to enter the competition for entrepreneurship, but he had to be a student. So, he signed up for 6 hours of online credit classes to qualify as a student. And you remember I don't know if you know, but I was there with you the whole way on this. And then And then he wins the whole thing and gets a big prize. It was actually like $12,500 for first place. That is 10 grand. 10 grand. Not bad for a student, right? No, it was awesome. It was amazing. He got 10 grand. And he won this prize, but then they were saying, "He didn't take the KPMG job, and then he sneaks in with these credits to get that." And they were all over you. And I said, "Guys, knock it off." want my money, so I think they're over it. I think they're over it. Isn't that crazy? I said I said, "This is our whole motto, learn earn and return. This guy's going to go out and earn. You're going to want him to return someday. You better be nice to this guy." But anyway, that he was just You were a great student entrepreneur. I I I think you did some really intriguing things. about that one, too. You forgot about that, too. But you did that, and that was really cool. And entrepreneurs do what they need to do to survive. But the funny thing is is the story there is that you had You could have gone down a traditional working-for-the-man role and had a great job being a great become partner at KPMG, had a great life working for the man. There's nothing wrong with that. Mhm. But 1 week to go, you chose entrepreneurship. call it working for the man, there There's some insinuated problem with that, but yeah, sure. Working for the man. Okay, that's an old statement from my old days. Okay, anyway, that's that's kind of my beginnings with it, and I won't talk so much later, but I just I really enjoyed being part of I invest in your first three rounds with Silent Whistle. But yeah. So, what happened with Silent Whistle then? You said that you sold it in 2009. Um so, Silent Whistle was like because of that law that was passed in 2002, Sarbanes-Oxley, it grew really quickly. We went from zero to like 4 million of revenue probably within like three or four years and it was super profitable. It was probably kicking off like one and a half of cash. But then I kind of became pretty excited about this kind of customer experience space that was starting to happen. Like I remember talking in 2008 or so to Gartner. There was one Gartner analyst that kind of covered the survey space and I remember him telling me he said there's 200 survey companies all under 5 million of revenue right now. But like it's clear I was like this is going to become a massive industry. So sold Silent Whistle at like literally the downturn. It was like September 2009 when nothing was happening. Again, part of the reason we had to do that is I couldn't find cash to go raise. No one was investing. Like people think the last few years was bad, it was nothing. The Great Financial Crisis was Oh, oh. 10 times worse than this. Really? We've talked about a lot to people. And it it 2008 2009 it was all You're just saying as far as venture activity? Everything. It was brutal. Yeah. Half half of venture funds died during that time. They couldn't raise new funds. venture funds are dying right now. I mean their portfolios are zero. There were literally about three to 4,000 venture firms in the United States in 2007. By 2010 there were about 400. All right, I'm looking at it from 2021 to now, how many VC firms? Not 2021. He's talking about I know I'm want to say I want to compare it for you know it's back up to about 3,000. That sounds that's seems right. I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, that was a horrible time. I can't believe you sold it in September 2009. Yeah, I didn't have any other way to raise cash at the time. I tried to buy Qualtrics. I remember talking to Scott Smith. Like I I wanted to get into this space and we ended up called me? I don't know if you remember. You called me up and said, "John, I think I can compete and beat Qualtrics." Turns out I couldn't. To skip everybody the end. So I bought a company down in Austin, Texas called Inquisit. Okay. Um with the money that I sold uh Silent Whistle for and then we went off and and build Allegiance and that company was hard. That was a tough space. We like immediately went and tried to sell enterprise clients and we did which is probably the worst thing we ever could have done. So like JetBlue and American Express and like massive companies. red ocean competition? Uh yeah, it was we were taking market share from market research firms. And uh we just got it was hard. Like everything we did was hard there getting leads, selling, you know, nurturing leads, selling new deals, implementing deals, renewing everything was hard. Um and you know, I started my career this 23 24 year old kid that everyone kind of liked and thought was smart and whatever and so I kind of had thought I was pretty good at this thing. And then Allegiance was tough and meanwhile Qualtrics just took over. SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics and Medallia just went took that space over. Um and it was like a real brutal awakening for me like maybe I'm not good at this. Maybe I'm just a fraud. Like I actually don't know what I'm doing and that actually the kind of my end of my time there I ended up hiring a new CEO cuz I'm like I don't know what else to do. Like I've changed every other variable in this equation except for me. Um and then we ended up selling that company in 2014 to Maritz Research out of St. Louis that became Maritz CX. Um but yeah, that was a that was a tough business. That's actually a lot of folks that were at Allegiance have gone on to do really big things at other companies. Yes. And that's where we all learned it. Yeah. Like you'll I think I would say any of us would say we learned way more there than like a Podium. Everything was easy at Podium. Like I went and did all the same things that I did at Allegiance at Podium and it all worked where none of it worked at Allegiance. So that's where you know, I learned a lot at that company. It wasn't like a big financial win for any of the investors or anything. Um I was 3x. Okay. All right. So some 3x is a good single or double. So it was yeah, it was okay. you. It was okay. Yeah. Most of all I got a good friend. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you have a really interesting enterprise track record, right? Because I think even with our venture fund and a lot of the mentoring that we do within our boot camp ecosystem and startup ignition and just curriculum and content for entrepreneurs and startup founders, like a lot of people want to enter the enterprise arena, right? Where they're just like, "This is enterprise SaaS software." And, you know, they start trying to get into that arena and sell and they get their butts kicked, right? Yeah, yeah. It's like, they can't They have a great product or they think they have a great product, but they just can't sell. They can't get traction. They can't do. Like, I feel like your whole your whole life has been based around enterprise sales and even particularly in SaaS. So, it's like Um I've kind of done both. So, Allegiance was total enterprise. Podium was SMB. That we were like selling individual dentists and car dealerships and stuff, but we grew a pretty big enterprise business there during that like kind of 5 years that I was there. Um Like a product line geared towards enterprise? up market and selling six and seven-figure deals. And so, that's a that's a healthy business um at Podium now. Take Take me before we get to Podium too much though. I cuz I think we've got your history really good up to selling Allegiance to and it becomes Merit CX, right? And then you went to lunch with me and I know you were on a self-discovery tour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you you even asked you wanted to maybe mentor some other up-and-coming CEOs. You wanted to get mentored by others. You wanted to be around. So, that's where I'm fogging what happened from SaaS. you getting joining Eric at Podium. What year What year was this? What year? 2014. 2014. So, I sold Allegiance in 2014 and I was I had to stick around for a year and I literally had no direct reports. I didn't have anything to do. Mhm. Um so, I took a bunch of just advisors to lunch and people that I hadn't seen in a while and my message was like, "Hey, do you like have anything I can do? Someone I can mentor or a board I can sit on?" And so, John was one of those. Um and two two others that I took to lunch during that time was Sid Krommenhoek at and Gavin Christiansen at Kickstart. And they both said the same thing that like we just wrote a little check into this little company called Rep Drive. These two young guys and they need like someone like you. So, ended up meeting Eric and Dennis and I don't know if it was late 2014 or early 2015. I kind of just served as like an advisor board member for the first like 6 months or so in 2015. was going hot and heavy when Eric had left to do that. That's right that timing. Um and then I was like kind of that fall is when we start talking about like what if I just came and did this full-time with you guys cuz my year had come up I think in November and so I started with those guys in December and it was like off and running. I think there was like eight or nine people when I went there and that thing everything worked from the beginning. We went from like a million to 100 million of ARR in like little over 4 years. It was crazy. Yeah. Is that So, why? What what what why did it just work? Product market fit. They just had a product that no one in the market had never seen and it was just working. So, I remember our first board meeting they had one sales rep, uh Chase Richardson, shout out to Chase. He um he was closing like 100k a month by himself. And I remember seeing their financial projections in July it dipped and I'm like, oh is this a seasonality thing? And they're like, no Chase is going to Lake Powell. Like it was literally one person. Hey Chase, I'm going to Lake Powell in July too. See you down there. So, but what the reason I got so excited about it is every time they added a rep and this was the key during those 4 years is when we would add a new quota bearing sales rep by month three we could get them to full quota. And that worked from the beginning and that was my one question I had as we started to scale that thing. I'm like, how long will this last before we start cutting, you know, smaller pieces of a bigger pie cuz when you add a quota bearing sales rep you need to be confident the pie is going to grow with it and you're not closing the same business with more people. Yeah. And Podium from the beginning we could onboard and get reps ramped really fast. from outside looking in. You know, I'm a kind of, you know, know about a lot of this stuff and I also kind of think academically around the patterns and the templates. So, what I saw, first of all, this is just a huge industry because review management and managing reviews became that was the era where, oh my gosh, our business is going to live and die by my reviews. Tyler at DevMountain, their review site was called coursereport.com. For the boot camp industry. We lived and died by that. If you got less than a five-star on Course Report, it could hurt dramatically your revenues. So, if they ever got anything less than a five, he and his co-founders and that whole company went on Defcon 5 to correct that four or three up to a five and do whatever they could. And that's what you're doing generally for all these SMBs, right? At Podium is helping that problem. But this is huge cuz you had There were one or two competitors bigger than Podium, I think, at reputation.com was there. But that what I started realizing is they flew by both those companies in a couple years. Yeah, but as I watched Podium grow, I'm going, this is a big industry. There is a lot of big players here that are getting fast growth. And you guys, I know when Zoom but that So, it just tells you that this Podium tapped into a societal change of where you bet with the up-and-coming millennials and Gen Z and all that, you better not have a bad review. But it's cool that you point out that metric of that sales that that, you know, you can onboard and get a salesman to or person or woman to quota, you know, within three months or whatever because I remember a ton of my acquaintances and friends got sales jobs at at Podium and I I I remember one time back in what however long ago it was, like, yeah, there's like 300 in our sales department. I'm like, 300 reps. I'm like, this Yesterday, this was a startup. What are you talking about? 300 reps. But it's because of that metric right there. You're just like, put it on. Let's go. The word on the street is that you guys were geniuses and I don't you and Eric and whoever came up with it, but I heard that you really got also started breaking the sales reps into being special in the SM it's for the our viewers and listeners, it's really hard to do a startup and you go in and tell investors or other stakeholders, yeah, I'm going to go after the SMB market. That's usually investors run away from that because it's so hard High cost capital. But that's why everybody wants to tackle enterprise. We see so many companies coming in I'm enterprise SAS. I'm like, are you enterprise SAS cuz they want to be enterprise SAS. But but the SMB what I've heard Podium's genius was and you I want you to tell me the story if this is correct cuz we never had a chance to talk about it, but that you started breaking like 10 people would really know one SMB vertical super well and they focused on that. Then this pod of people you like broke them into pods. Is that right? It was all sold by industry and then it would be SMB mid-market and enterprise, but they would become specialists because in that world since we weren't the system of record, we had to integrate with the CRMs with the systems of record. And those were like really long tail lists of companies and so they needed to become experts. So if a car dealership said, oh, we use CDK, they knew immediately what that was. you had a you had one or more sales reps all they did was go after car dealerships. Your car dealerships in these three states and your car dealerships in these three states and your HVAC in those three states and your medical in those three states. When I heard that and I don't know where I heard it from, but when I heard this I go, yeah, that is the that's how you have to tackle SMB, but you have to be a SMB's hard. Make the viewers and listeners need to know what Podium pulled off in SMB takes everything coming together right. Yeah, I mean to go from one to 100 in four years and burn through like less than 40 million bucks to do it was insane. Insane. It was It was near perfect product market fit. And then once you have that product market fit, then that gives you the luxury to start to building new products and that's what happened there. Like communication tools and scheduling tools and you know, different automation tools along the way and so it was it was crazy. So how how do you know as an operator and something that you're obviously very gifted at it you know, looking at an industry or your your metrics or your product or your startup or your business model and you're saying, "Oh, we need to press here." How do you discover for the all the entrepreneurs out there like how to like how did you come across that sales metric and how did you know, "Okay, if we do X, we will get Y, right?" Um you have every founder out there has to be a go-to-market metric assassin. You don't have to be the best sales rep in the world. You don't even know how to hire sales reps, manage sales reps, but you have to understand the metrics of your go-to-market motion like to the Like for every dollar I'm putting in, I'm getting a dollar back. what you're getting out from a marketing, from sales, BDR, whatever it is. And we were really good at that. If you're looking for resources, Bessemer put out a lot of reports on this. Like they invented Actually, do you remember the magic number? That was invented actually by Omniture here. Josh invented the magic number and ACV and they were like a kind of the first to start to use these SaaS metrics of like, "Okay, if you put a dollar into sales and marketing, what comes out the next quarter?" And that was the magic number. Yeah. And then Bessemer took that and they're like, "Well, but not all companies are created equal. Some have They have different gross margins. So, let's adjust for gross margin." And that became CAC ratio. Yeah, the CAC. Yeah. Um Footnote, this is why viewers and listeners need to understand they need to understand what gross margin means. So, keep going. So, wait, like the LTV to CAC ratio wasn't around hasn't been around for that long? new. No, Bessemer started coming out with all that stuff probably about 2010, '11. They started putting papers out cuz they were the they were investing in every SaaS company. So, they just started to venture out with metrics. taught LTV to CAC it at Brigham Young University. Well, you graduated in 2012, so the last couple years, yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, it's We were starting to talk that language too, 2011, 2012. Yeah. Yeah. Um cuz before then like when Omniture went public, that was probably what, 2007 or eight or something. 2006. It was ACV, TCV, and the magic number. Yeah, and they called it the magic number. They called it the magic Josh James named it. It was the magic number. And it was sales and marketing costs divided by with growth the next quarter. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. So, metric You're saying you have to stay on top of your metrics. Like, how quickly reps get to quota, how quickly like rep retention metrics. Um but like I don't know what they I've been there I've been gone 5 years now, but like there was a year we had 90% quota attainment by rep, overall quota attainment of 107%. Like it was nuts. Like I remember hearing Qualtrics and um what what's normal in a software company is about 40% of reps are hitting quota. Yeah. And that's that's what that was the secret sauce of Podium is the way and I would don't want to take all the credit. Nico was He's with me now at Entrata, but Nico did the ran marketing there, and then Van Hancock who ran sales at Podium and still is there. He's the chief sales officer. And then and the the the financial team. We had a really good FP&A team, Colin Robinson and a bunch of guys that they were like that thing was a it was a machine. So So, I don't know if you have anything to I follow up for that, but to to take me then now from that cuz you keep saying I do have one So, I I want to do this. So, you know, Eric was also a student of mine. I mentored him a little bit when you came around and the rep drive idea made its circles and we did the speed dating with investors and stuff and gave feedback and and and he's talked about a little bit. So, that was back in that day. But Eric's pretty strong personality founder, okay? And then you come in afterwards to kind of bring some more mature operation skills. That's how I'm viewing it. Is that accurate so far? Okay. So, and you know, and you you said, you know, Album and Sidna and even in Kickstart Seed Fund with Gavin, they kind of recommended that. So, you come in. How did that dynamic work between you and Eric? Cuz you were president, he was CEO, right? How did How did you make that work? Because that's not going to work for a lot of people, but how did you make it work? Yeah, I think it took both of us. Like, you know, we were attached at the hip for several years there and I Were you co-CEOs? No, no. No, you were CEO from day one. No, no, no, no. I was the president. You were president and cuz I was like, yeah, I remember Eric always having that CEO title. So basically you were kind of COO president and he was CEO. Yeah. Yeah, the way we kind of the reason it worked well is we had we had some complimentary skill sets and we were both really good communicators. Um I think we both were pretty likable. We I think both like knew how to like interview and culture and that kind of stuff was all very, very similar. He's he was really good on the product side, the design side, the UX side. Like I remember hearing a quote about Mark Zuckerberg of someone saying, Mark just knows what people will use. And what Eric was really good at, his dad owned tire shops growing up and Eric just had this like innate ability to know what an SMB would use. Yeah. If we'd look at like, okay, here's what we were thinking for this new product or some improvements or enhancements or whatever, he'd be like, they won't use that. That doesn't make sense. just knew. And he just knew like they won't use that and he he'd say like, my dad would never do that. He would never use that. And he was right. It's probably he always had his dad as a use case in the back of his head. Like, would my dad do that? No. Yeah. Um and then I bring in like this kind of like operational math and a big network. And I so I could like add a bunch of executives to the team and had kind of like a fundraising network and I'd raised money before and done a lot of that stuff. So, yeah, it worked out well, but it takes it took both of us and it's still tough. Um then I ended up getting pretty sick at the end of 2019 and and left and took a year off after Podium. Um yeah, I loved that I loved that place. Yeah, what what what anything you want to share about that? Was you just had a rough year there? Cuz I remember you we haven't talked about it. You don't have to talk about it here if you don't want No, I talked about it with Clint Betts on the Silicon Slopes podcast. I was I just kind of lost myself. Yeah. And at the end of 2019 I I remember going to the Christmas break thinking like, if I can just like recharge, I'll go down to my place in San Clemente, and if I can just recharge for a week or two, I think I'll be okay. And then I ended up in the I got like bronchitis and influenza B and some bacterial colitis, something weird, and I was in an emergency room at 2:00 a.m. in Mission Viejo with a someone coming off a drug overdose in the room next to me screaming at the top of their lungs, and I was like, I'm going to be rich and dead. Yeah. And that's just like I'm I'm not doing I called our partner Miles at Excel the next day. I was like, I'm out. And not like in a few months, like That day. And then I flew here and kind of told um the crew and I was gone. Like it was a Was that Was that a hard of pill for them to swallow? Like did Was that impactful? That I mean, they had to have And it ended up being even worse because And it ended up being even worse because COVID hit 2 months later. I was just going to say, this is 2 months before COVID. COVID hit 2 months later. Yeah, that It's taken me a several years to get over the guilt of how quickly I left there. Yeah. Um And yeah, but that but that year was really important for me. Yeah. 2020? Uh-huh. Um I was The world kind of stopped and gave you time to think about it. Yeah. Well, no, I I lost my identity like talked about this with Clint last week, like Allegiance was so hard and not super successful. I kind of became that negative vision, like I I attached myself to that, like the badness of and the failure that I perceived failure, like But wasn't Allegiance was going off, and Well, you know, but my problem was I was comparing myself to everybody. Qualtrics was taking off, and amateur, and Domo, and Pluralsight, and Entrata, and I'm like, I I'm a fraud. Like I don't know what I'm doing here. Oh, that's horrible. I'm sorry. No, it's right. And then I had the reverse problem at Podium. Then all of a sudden it's like, oh, we raised money from Excel and Google Ventures, and everybody likes me again, and this is super awesome, and I attached my identity to that. The goodness of it. And then I was shocked when I stopped working in uh early 2020, my phone stopped ringing instantly. Texts gone. Slack deleted. Email like it was really eerie how quickly everything went away. And it kind of forced me into figuring out like who am I, what am I going to do next? Like what do I like to do? Like what do who who do I actually want to be? Um and I spent like 9 months kind of riding my bike and going through it. It was like a tough mental health year for me, like everyone during COVID, but um trying to figure out like what do I want to do next? Like and that's where I figured out I don't know if I'm a great founder. I don't really I was actually going to try and start a business, but then I ended up coming back to Utah and talking to Dave, and he's like, "Hey, here's this business, and I don't necessarily have the energy to take it to the next level. Why don't you come and do this?" And so he was, you know, like that's a job I probably was not qualified for. It had 2,500 employees, and when he first brought it up, I'm like, "That's the last thing I want to do is go run a 2,500 person company." Uh but he must have he probably saw something in me that I didn't even see in myself. Um so yeah, I joined at the end of 2020 there, and So you took from like February of 2020 all the way till when you joined Intrado? I just joined Intrado in December. December. Yeah. Wow. And how what what did you discover in that I I I want to hit on that just for a second. What did you discover in that time period? Like what did you cling to? What did you do? What how did how did you get back to a spot where like, "Okay, I can't go back to this operating role." What did you do? Cuz I I kind of felt that a little bit on a much more mini scale when I sold my company back in 2016 and had all the success, and I found that once I was the it boy there for like a six to eight month period where everybody wanted to talk to me. Every article wanted to, you know, interview me. Every podcast wanted to have me on there because I was like the fattest thing. And then after that, like it was the same thing. Like text messages died down, Slack messages died down. I left that company and I was like, "What am I doing next?" And and it was a hard period for me. Not maybe as much as yours. I I feel like yours is a lot. But what did you do? How did you overcome? We should need to figure out how to prepare people for it. There's a documentary Michael Phelps did with HBO about this with the Olympians. And Olympians from young ages have like they're told what to eat, how long to sleep, how to train. They have every resource in the world for them. And the second they're not useful to the Olympic team anymore, it's gone. And they they all struggle with depression after this. Here is the old guy coming out of me. I'm telling you this is in every field of endeavor. It doesn't matter. Even even people in ecclesiastical settings, they're super important, then they're not. Business setting super important, then they're not. And that it's called the blue period. And there's a blue period you go through. And it's a weird weird period. And I've had that in my life. We've all had that at different aspects. it's very common in the startup startup ecosystem because yeah, you're riding high and people want a piece of the pie. And once that pie is done and it's run its course, it's like, "Oh yeah." Like you do tie yourself to that identity. really During that year I was like was I because I was just a buck to everybody. Yeah. Or a job. of feel that way. Yeah, like But so so how did you overcome? What what what did you What did you do? Um For me for me it was very much so family vacation time, un you know, not clinging myself to business antics and business type motivation anymore. It was like, "What am I doing in my inner circle? What's my relationship with my spouse? What's my relationship with my kids?" Cuz when I had my very first child is when I started that business and I grew it all the way up to acquisition. And I kind of missed like the small younger years of my very first child. And so I kind of recognized that. And so I spent a ton of time just like, "I'm going to focus on just being a dad." And I know that sounds really cliche, but it was like that's what I missed when I was in the business world. And so family kind of gave regave me that purpose. But like for you I'm not saying is it family or whatever what was it? No, like I said if there's those four categories of life, the two I picked were family and career. So I I was a really present dad, like I coached AAU all growing up. I was at football practices, like I tried to be there for my kids, but outside of that I I kind of lost myself. No, like I'm a person I learned this from an exact coach about five years ago. She said these words to me after kind of interviewing a bunch of people around me and she came back and said, "Your currency in life is relationships." And I just lost track of that for a long time. And so like good friend like I haven't talked to John in 10 years. Like I've like I have good friends I haven't talked to for a long time and that that's kind of what I've been doing the last two years is realizing like and that's why I went back to work again. Is I realized that year off is what I really like is just doing something special with people I like. That's what I liked about. Yeah, so relationships came with the business. Yeah, like some of my best friends came from all these companies and whether the company successful or not. And your builder glory your builder glory. This comes back to a lot of basic things about humans just humans male humans generally not everything's the same. They get a lot of their sense of value self-worth from building and growing things, right? And and and then also relationships play into that. So and and it's kind of funny it's business is weird the you know, I I went public went public and dealt with a bunch of New York crowd and all that and I didn't really like it. What we do Adam to let you know about us we've we we actually teach a lot of entrepreneurs you don't have to go for even though you're involved with the unicorn and your operate skills are incredible and what you've done and Intuit has been amazing. There's also a lot of people there's a lot of pressure to go from zero up to that like what Dave did to go from zero to a billion is hard and there's a massive amount of pressure and if you're going to be that founder it can really make your life go into a weird places, right? It's why when like Jensen Huang was asked, "Would you start Nvidia again?" He said, "No." Yeah, I know. That He's like, "No, I would not." And I bet if you asked Dave, "Would you do Entrata again?" He'd probably say, "No." No. You know, I helped from square one, Pura, with Bruno, okay? And uh he he uh one time, you know, like in year five or something, I go, "Yeah, fun still enjoying?" He goes, and then I could as and he literally told me, "If I had to do it all again, I probably wouldn't start this company." But now it's 200 million revenue, worth one two billion dollars, whatever it is. I mean, but I guess what I want to say, what we kind of espouse and are helping a lot of entrepreneurs find out, and there's a new thing they're called elephants, like versus unicorn versus elephant business, right? Where, you know, it's okay maybe to not go for complete unicorn and have a decent company that still makes you wealthy, but your life is not turned so upside down. But and it's everybody's got to find what they're good at and what they want to be and what they like. But I do think a lot of people that get their self-worth from their net worth or is a self-worth from building a unicorn, and then go up, you can get lost a little bit in that chase cuz not everybody really can be a unicorn builder. It's really hard to go from zero to unicorn. Well, that's the that's something that I've just learned about myself in the last year, probably, is I even had a hard time differentiating the journey from the achievement. Yes. And from a little kid, young age, I learned very quickly I had skills and talents that allowed me to achieve things that made people like me. And that just continued on all the way up into my 40s, but now I've learned like it's actually the journey I really like. But I was so focused on being the BYU Entrepreneur of the Year and being whatever CEO of the Year and raising money and selling, like I became so obsessed with the outcomes. But it's actually The building process, yeah. No, but it you Ty- Tyler, it's so funny. We have these The climb up the mountain is way more fun than being at the summit. Yeah, and that lasts for 1 second you're like, well, the wire came in. I was just about to say, Adam, it is fun to refresh your bank account and see the digits come in, but also my fondest memories is in the building phases, not the second I refresh that bank account. that's happened to me, I'm like, all right. What do you guys want to have for dinner? Yeah. Like it's literally like it's not that cool at all. Okay, I have a story. I have a story. Do you remember Steve Jenkins? Do you remember that name at all? Steve Jenkins? Windows95.com. This is forerunner to you as one of the great BYU student entrepreneurs. Go way back before you. That's like 10, 15 years before you. Mhm. Steve Jenkins said what happened to him. He created V Servers and um oh gosh, what's the the the chip company? Micron? Micron bought V Servers for 45 million. And so he It was two founders, and so they each made, you know, in the you know, 10, 15 million, whatever the number was, right? And the wire the money comes in and the it wasn't over the phone and there's it was a fax comes in confirming the receipt in the bank account, right? Yeah. So he's at home with his wife and the fax comes in and the money's there and he goes he goes, yes! I'm the man! I'm the man! This is incredible! And he takes over his wife and goes, look at this! This is incredible what we achieved! She looks at him and goes, great, take out the garbage. My story is very similar to that where I when I sold DevMountain and I got my first million in a bank account, right? Where it's like, okay, wow, I'm set, I'm good to go. Then I really heavily start getting in invested in angel investing, right? And writing checks and helping support the next wave of entrepreneurs and doing a lot of the father-son investments that we did for 6, 7, 8 years. And I remember one of our angel investments turned into something really fruitful and like it was a big deal, but at the same time the money hit my bank account and it was just like, I made more than what I sold DevMountain for and I was like, "Okay, like yeah, literally what like what's for dinner?" You were first investors in Route. Yeah, it's just like it's crazy when you do it the first time how impactful it is and then when when more starts coming in how little it means to you because I think you do need to start distancing yourself from the outcome and more focus on the journey and the building of everything else. worth is not your self worth." And you got to find really it So, and Adam, I think even though we haven't seen each other a lot in the recent years, I just you know, I think I got to know you pretty well and you definitely are pretty you like being around others and being engaged in a good cause of building and growing something that's meaningful and changes people's lives for the better and brings great product and service to the market and you like being around the people and doing that. I I know you enjoy that and and I could see how you could fall into that blue period afterwards when you kind of is over and now what are you going to do next? That's a tough period, but it is for every Tyler came to me afterwards and he after the company goes, "Dad, I'm not as motivated now. I don't feel as motivated to do things." Because there was nothing left to do in that and he in matter of fact, the people that bought him, they kept him on and kept the founders on, but didn't give them any equity. So, it was just a high-paying job salary-wise and I go, "What he I said, 'Tyler, that's how it is. There's nothing like the startup phase and that building and then your friends are by you and you're building something cool. That's the feeling." And or even what you're good at, you you're so good at large operations now. You took a company from 1 billion to 4 billion and you took I don't know where Podium was when you joined, but you took it up to the heights of done. You're good at what you do and I know it's that building that's giving you that sense of value because that's what it That's why by the way, if you look historically, when men retire, they die really quickly after retirement in a lot of ways unless they're fitness gurus or whatever, but if you just work work work work work and you love that and then all of a sudden you retire and you go, "What do I have to do?" and they just give up. Yeah. That's something you can do. You don't want to be that way. So, Dave comes to you end of 2020, tracks you over to Entrata. How is that process? What's like you come in and Dave's like, "I want you to be CEO." Is that that's what the conversation you had with Dave from the get-go? Was your involvement was to be CEO? Was Dave CEO at that time? Dave was the CEO from And he handed the reins over to you and was like, "I want you to take this thing and go." 2,500 employees, what made you want to do that? Yeah. The universe said, "You're doing this." That's how that happened. Um So, it was I'd never done anything at that scale. Podium was almost a thousand employees when I left. Um So, it was uh I mean, there's that much there that much difference a thousand to two thousand employees? What what was really different about the two companies is so Podium got built from the ground up as like a modern SaaS metric-driven business. I had any metric at my disposal at all times. And then I go here, and this is an 18-year-old bootstrap business. Dave raised a million bucks the last round in 2005, and then just built everything at break even. Um like I mentioned to you this before, it this this company should not exist. A BYU student should not have been able to build this business. Like it's it's crazy. But it was run still like a just massive startup. Like I asked, you know, when I'd ask, "What's our ARR?" They didn't We didn't track that. What? Um what's our gross retention? Like none of that was tracked. And so, but asking some questions, I was like, I think this is like a hundred sixty million dollar ARR business that's profitable, and I'm pretty sure the net retention's probably close to 120. And so, I knew I was like, "There's something here." So, yeah, joined, and that's a that's a trippy thing to go enter that big of a business with an established culture. Yeah. It like like that was probably the hardest part That was the cultural side of like easing my way in while wanting to kind of like change some things and modernize a few things without sending the message that like you were doing it wrong. Yeah. There's but there's there's another way to do some of this stuff. So Yeah, it's it's just cool. I got to tip my hat again to Dave though. Dave Bateman he got to about a billion valuation still own 50 to 60% of the company. You know, I mean that's really hard to achieve in today's world. Mhm. Really hard because you're going to need to raise a lot of capital and give up a lot of equity usually to get to something like that. prior to your involvement coming into Entrata, Dave had only raised a million dollars on it? Looking at that, he raised a little it's called angel round. Now you call them seed rounds from Gary Williams and Craig Earnshaw and those guys. yeah. And then Nobu put in a bigger check a few years later. Yeah. That was it. Nobu's Nobu's still on the board. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And then but now I I feel like I read that Entrata's raised 500 is it now 700? did a we did a minority round in mid-2021 after I joined. It was crazy. When I when I went there, nobody knew I didn't know what it was. I actually worked at Entrata. Do you you may not remember this. I worked at Property Solutions in 2003. You did? And that's I don't remember that. Dave actually that So I worked there and he was the one that was like you're good at this go do something and that's when I went and launched Silent Whistle. So I actually worked there for about four months. I did not know that. Um So and even watching it be built I didn't know what it had become. Like what I my thought was like oh this is like some cute apartment app thing where people pay rent. Like I had no idea and I don't think anyone really did. But the investment community definitely knew what was going on there cuz when I went when I joined it started to get out like oh maybe there will finally be an opportunity to put money in here. And we probably got we never even raised and I got I we probably had 15 term sheets. I had one texted to me by a number I didn't have in my phone. Yeah. It was insane. Yeah. Um and then Ryan Smith and Todd Peterson, you know, they were long-time friends um and knew the company well. They were They were like, "Hey, we uh and uh Silver Lake had just spun Qualtrics out of SAP to take them public. So, Ryan's one that's like, "Hey, this feels like an um a Silver Lake deal. Have you Do you know those guys?" I'm like, "No, I've never talked to them." Um We opened We gave them the data room and within 24 hours Silver Lake knew that business better than we did. It was really, really impressive. Wow. So, they led that minority round of 500 in mid-2021. Dragoneer came into that. Um Steve Young's firm HGGC came in. Yeah. Uh then Ryan and Todd put some cash in and then we were off and running. And then that same group of investors about 6 months later ended up buying the founder out. And so, that's still who who's there now is kind of Silver Lake, Dragoneer, Nobu, HGGC. Uh then we just brought Blackstone in for 200 million just a a couple months ago. Wow. Yeah. What a What What was What a roll call that is. What was the I just Real quick question on that fundraising. What was the decision-making on that fund raise? Did Dave, you know, kind of been bootstrapping it, taking minimal funds? Like did you come in and collaborate with Dave on that decision and say, "Yeah, Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And what what was that process like? Was it like, "Hey, we you kind of metric-tize the the whole Entrata, you know, dashboards and got all of the metrics in place and you're like, 'Wow, if we pour gasoline on this fire, we can take this thing to Yeah, the the company was The company was pretty data-driven, but it wasn't data-driven in a way that like an outside investor would want to see it. Mhm. Like, I had to like help build our first like uh customer ARR file. Just simple things like that. So, it was more just like I didn't really necessarily bring much new. It was more like building a translation layer from like the way it was run to like what a Silver Lake would want to see. You saw You saw Basically, this company was a solid company that with some kind of more formal financial Mhm. uh human brought to the table, it could go to the next level. Yeah. And that's And Dave recognized you could do that for him. Yeah. And then we needed it needed an exec team. So, that's the other thing I We have This is the best tech exec team I think ever assembled in Utah. They are so good. They're all way better at their job than me. Katherine Wong, long-time Omniture Domo. JT came with me from Allegiance. He was with me at Podium. He came over. Yeah. Nico, our CMO, came from Podium. Well, you have a career to pull from and you have an all-star team now. They're really like every exec man I'm like, "Why did you guys all come work for me? You're all amazing." That's awesome. You're the Pied Piper. They follow you. Okay, so what's the future of Entrata? Like you announced this round, you achieved a $4 billion valuation on that round with Blackstone. Where are you guys going? What are you doing? What's the future? What's the next 3 to 5 years look like for Adam Edmunds? Um so, for the first time in my career, I'm not looking at the outcome. Like this is literally the first time I haven't been like, "Oh, now I got to go public." or Caltrics sold for 12, so I need to sell for 12.1. Like I don't actually care. Yeah. Um we're just going to keep This thing is I My goal actually, the reason I came to Entrata would probably love that $12 million exit. on the cap table. He'll be good. Um I came here cuz I'd never been a part of a generational business. Yeah. That would last decades. And this one I knew immediately I'm like, "This company will be here in 30 years." And those are rare. Like as big as Novell was, gone. WordPerfect, gone. The only one we've really had here Entrata in tech cuz like Larry H. Miller, there's other companies. But in tech, it's really Omniture. Becoming a the Adobe campus. Yeah. That I think will that Adobe campus will be there in 10 or 20 years. And that this that's what this company will be. And I And how well Adobe did after buying Omniture. I've heard the numbers. It's incredible. I want all the viewers and listeners hearing Adam I want you all to know Adam was a student starting off just like any of you. And the career path he's had and he's you know captain of industry now and all the things you're hearing. This is what's great about America, what's great about entrepreneurship and what you can do and what you can build and it's not just about revenue and wealth creation and all that. The products of your companies made people's lives better. Yeah. You you you've helped companies and people do things better, have richer experiences in the way they do things and in their life and in their business life. So, this is what's great about entrepreneurship and you know, I met you at square one and look at where you've gone and what you've done and that's what's possible and I've had the pleasure in my life of scores and scores or even hundreds of people I've had the same stories with like with you and it's just been so rewarding and I'm super proud of you Adam for also you know, going through that tough period and then finding yourself and knowing what you're good at and what you like and what you want out of life. That's important, too. And I know that your advice has been enjoy the journey not and not look at the outcome so much, but like go back 20 years. What What are you What are you telling yourself? Like what what What are you What are you telling this budding entrepreneur? Tips from Adam. What's a budding entrepreneur need to know? So, someone asked me this at the Silicon Slopes podcast recently, someone in the audience, what do you tell yourself when you when I knew you, 2003. And I got super emotional. We We went really personal with it, but I would go back and tell myself don't lose yourself. Yeah. Like um it's already going to be hard enough. Don't compare yourself to others. Don't worry about like the obviously anyone who goes into entrepreneurship I think's doing it for the financial aspect. Yeah. That has to be there. Yeah. It's a super important part of it. But um don't lose sight of those relationships. Like that's really what you carry from this cuz I can promise you in 30 or 40 years when I'm not working that's the only thing I'll remember. Yeah. I won't remember the LTV to CAC ratio at Podium and I won't remember the net retention rate at Entrata, but I'll remember the people that I did it with. but but the the success does aid those relationships, right? It allows you to make core memories. It allows you to do things and have things, but also that's not the end end-all say-all goal. It's you can have those relationships without the wealth creation or without the success. best relationships were at Allegiance, which was not like super successful. It's kind of like we we went through all these hard things together and like you know, you stay connected for life. war stories stick with you the most, yeah. Yeah. So I and I when I start somebody off on a journey and I routinely say to them, Tyler has heard me say it a thousand times. I say, "You're going to learn things from me that'll help you become wealthy. You're going to be able to build companies and be a company builder and create wealth, but I want you to know that more than half the time some of those people have some really hard times after they create the wealth and tough times can come and you've shared some of yours that you've had and you have to keep your head on straight and you have to realize that people and relationships are more important and that's what really brings the richness in life. And so it's it's just it's really good lessons and I'm you know, sometimes we have to go through tough things. So you know, I'm sorry the tough times you went through, but at the same time you're you're also and also one of the things that we have to remember, too, you're creating jobs that help people have good lives and buy homes, put roots down in a community and make a nice life. That's what entrepreneurs main thrust is is helping society have people with good jobs so they can be great contributors in society and that's a super important role that government and everybody needs to remember and we have to remember in our laws and our taxes, everything to make sure that we make entrepreneurs lives as easy as possible build these great companies. Like Entrata is now is it over is over 20,000 right around the same. 2,500 employees, but 2,500 employees every day of your life the company you're sitting at top of is helping them have a great life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I on our previous episode we had one of our portfolio company CEOs come in and we sat down and talked with him and he was like, "Yeah, I asked him how many people are at your company?" He's like, "Yeah, we're like 60." You know, I know that's on a smaller scale, but he's like, "It's cool to like have a company meeting and be like, wow, like this business my startup is paying, you know, for their lives. It's their livelihood. Like the it's supporting this many people, their kids, their activities, their life, right?" And it's really cool even though it's on a not a 2500 person scale, it's still cool to see that growth and he was mentioning the same thing like it gives him fulfillment, right? It's important I think for founders to realize that your the folks who come to work with you are just inherently probably not going to care as much as you and that's okay. Yeah. Like you've seen a lot get really they set these expectations that Oh, yeah. you need to care about this as much as me and like I've you know, I'm providing all this for you so you need to you know, build it back and it's like no, they want to like be soccer like some of these folks just want to be soccer coaches. They want to do whatever and I I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that that's where you got to yeah, founders can't take that at too. That's great advice. Adam, it's been so great having you here. Good to see you guys. Adam's journey is insanely cool. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for making time. I think we can probably wrap this up into enjoy the journey. Don't look at the outcome so much, but also be my maniacally obsessed with metrics and that's what makes good founders, leaders, executives. A healthy obsession because we all admit sitting at this table that some of the best are psychotic, but be healthily psychotic, right? Not obsessively psychotic, right? All right. Okay, so next time. Thank you so much for listening, tuning in. Thank you for watching. Like, subscribe, share. Adam's story is one worth sharing and we are so grateful for him coming on the podcast. But, that wraps up this episode. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time.