- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JH6CR8JXEAB8KRQ5WWGZ15DJ (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Eric Stark: Hey, Ben. Hey, Eric. How’s it going? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Good. Ben Ornstein: How are you? Eric Stark: Sorry for the delay. All good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All good. Ben Ornstein: Doing well. How about yourself? Doing good. Eric Stark: Doing good. Feels like the first real week where kind of everyone’s back. Yeah. Both at our company and at other companies. So it’s kind of nice to feel like the momentum again of that after a good break. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, it really is slow until this week. I felt the same thing, that momentum pushes back, so. Eric Stark: Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah, totally. Ben Ornstein: Well, thanks so much for taking the time here. How much context do you have for this call? Eric Stark: I have a little, but I feel like I used to have more context and we pushed it back. Times due to me and it would be great to get a refresh. Absolutely. Ben Ornstein: So I work with a founder named Michael Hauk who started a Hauk’s newsletter, an email newsletter. Have you’ve heard of it? Eric Stark: No. Okay. Ben Ornstein: Well, so he was also the co-founder of Launch House, which was basically trying to make the more modern Y Combinator. And anyway, he left that company, started an email newsletter of at peak, it was at a hundred thousand subscribers. It was all founders, VCs, aspiring founders, etc. He wanted to create another resource that was specifically for fundraising. And we kind of figured, you know, what better way than to do this than by actually speaking with founders who have done it themselves. So, that’s what this conversation is. I have a list of questions here, softball questions that you’ve either answered or at least thought about and, you know, nothing crazy. I have to read AI guy in here because I turned the transcript from this call into a text-based document that goes to our premium subscribers. However, you still get access to the entire list and exposure to that entire list. Every Saturday when we upload a new case study, we tell the entire base which new ones were added, so you still get that exposure, um, to the no list. Eric Stark: Cool. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Do you have any questions? Eric Stark: Um, so it’s, it’ll be a written, it’ll be a transcribed basically like interview and will it go on like the website as well, or it’s a, it’s a closed subscription. Ben Ornstein: It’s a closed subscription behind a paywall. Um, and, oh, and After we do this and I put together the first draft I’ll send it to you for review before and you can review it before We post it so you can give the go-ahead. Eric Stark: Um edit things, uh, yeah, etc Oh, yeah that works Awesome. Any other questions before we get going? Ben Ornstein: No, I don’t think so Cool. Eric Stark: All right. Ben Ornstein: And yeah, obviously this is pre-recorded So if there’s anything you say you’re like, oh actually you don’t want to add that, you know, that’s fine You can just shout it shout out in the middle. All right, sounds good Okay Eric, could you please uh briefly introduce yourself and your startup? Eric Stark: Yep. Yeah. My name is Eric Stark. I am co-founder and president at slate Um, we’re a social media Or we’re let’s I’ll start that over We’re a content creation platform built for social media teams So we founded in 2019 and at the time I was actually working for the NFL as a digital and social content creator. And my co-founder, Michael, he was a video editor and video producer. We both worked together at the 49ers back in 2013, 2014 time. So we really come from the world of content creation, short form content creation and programming content for social media accounts for big brands. And we really felt like it wasn’t a good tool out there. That was focused on the way brands create social media content. And that’s sort of all-in-one creative platform for social media teams specifically. So we set out to build that. Going a little deeper, we really felt like there were pro tools, tools like Figma and Premiere and Photoshop that designers and video editors would use to create content. And then there were consumer tools, CapCut and Canvas of the world, which do have some sort of team functionality, but really at their core were built for consumers and for total kind of non-content creators to quickly produce content. And we kind of look to fill that space in the middle of professional social media teams and professional social media managers who really need to be content creators in today’s social media world and giving them a tool that makes it easy to do so in a way that’s new for social, but also true to their brand and helps their team collaborate. Ben Ornstein: That’s awesome. Awesome gap that you filled there. Can you talk a little bit about the fundraising journey? So this could be, you know, how many rounds you raised, if you’re comfortable, but of course, no pressure, what valuations you raised those rounds at, how long and how long these rounds took to close? Eric Stark: Yeah. So we, In total, we’ve raised what we call a $5.5 million seed round, but that's a combination of a few different rounds that we've raised over time. The first round that we raised, we closed right at the start of 2020, at the end of 2019. That was basically a pre-seed conversion. And we actually had gotten our product off the ground and had revenue and traction, specifically within the sports world before starting the fundraise. And we ended up, our first two investors in that pre-seed round were Wise Ventures, which is associated with the Minnesota Vikings ownership group, and Titletown Tech, which at the time was kind of a newer venture group associated with Microsoft, but also a lot of other companies. Green Bay Packers. So both of those, both of those teams were customers of Slate at the time. And that kind of helped us in those conversations with those two early investors, which have been, you know, great partners ever since. And, you know, we kind of continued to raise kind of multiple smaller rounds over the next kind of three years. And really, our biggest kind of round was led by by Charge Ventures, and that was in, we kind of closed that round, I guess, technically in mid-2023, but it was like a later close, and that was more of a 2022 sort of raise. I think each round's taken us about four-ish months, I would say, from start to finish. There were a few kind of bridge, like a bridge kind of in between, pre-seed and that official seed, which was a quicker sort of deal. But yeah, I'd say four to six months has kind of been the timeline, which is what we would expect if we were to start raising again. But we haven't really dove into that process since really 2022, because we've kind of always been balancing not over-raising and trying to be a pretty efficient company, even though we're not fully bootstrapped. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Yeah. Approach. Ben Ornstein: Um, so when you were raising this funding, what did you plan ahead of time to use the funding for? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Eric Stark: So, I mean, really it's always been kind of two, two things for us. It's, um, being able to build up our engineering and product team to keep delivering, you know, we're, we're, Competing against really big companies with in a product category. That is fairly complex, right? You know, there's certain certain software I think where You could get away with some things whereas like design and video editing you really can't cut corners, you know Like it's it needs to work to a certain level Versus you know So things that are more based on like spreadsheets and data, you know, I just think there's a different level of expectation when you're a content creation platform. So we've always needed to make sure our engineering team was, you know, lean, but able to support that. So that was a big thing, you know, as we've scaled to like a native iOS app, native Android app, and building a web creation studio and kind of all the AI tools we're now building on top of that. We've always kind of used the investment to scale that and then of course like scaling our sales operation. We aren't a product-led growth company and we've always been sales-led. So, you know, building an outbound motion and an AE team were kind of some of the early things that the investment got for us. Ben Ornstein: Awesome. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. When you were deciding which investors you wanted to bring on board, how did you kind of decide they were a good fit? Eric Stark: Yeah. Um, good question. I definitely think an understanding of kind of the space that we're playing in and, uh, like some sort of connections to that space that we were looking to kind of work with bigger brands and So we kind of started mid-market and up, which is kind of a different place to start than I think most startups do. So it's always been helpful and important to us when investors have kind of a network in that area, you know, and kind of understand that area of entertainment, sports, media, content creation. And then obviously just kind of their pitch on how they could partner with us, the resources they would provide in terms of in terms of consulting, hiring, and just general support across the things we're doing in the business. Honestly, sometimes, though, it is just, hey, this is a good investor with a good track record, and they want to invest money. And we don't need every investor to be super active in the business. And we have a few that have been really active and really helpful Which has been awesome and some that you know, we don't hear from that that much which is fine, too It's I don't think every investor needs to kind of Come to the table with all of those things But obviously kind of the main investors of those rounds you look for more than than just the money 100% I like that. Ben Ornstein: I like that way of looking at it some sometimes money is good money Yeah. That's all you need. Eric Stark: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: And how did you get in touch with these investors? Eric Stark: So I honestly probably should have brought my co-founder Michael onto this. Cause he was a big part of a lot of these rounds. I think a few things, I mean, one is that the first round is always the hardest, right? Don't have sort of the network or the connections, but there's always just enough sort of connections and network to get a few calls on the books. And those will kind of lead you to the next calls, right? So a lot of them were sort of mutual referrals and that sort of like builds on itself. Once you have a few investors, then it's pretty easy to have a really long list of VCs and angel groups that you can get in touch with and pitch with both from like their network and also just from kind of being in the market. So the first round is where you're really like scrapping more to, you know, hit up the one guy, you know, who was in Y Combinator, who did a thing and, you know, try to get intros to investors. Again, some of that stuff came from our customers, right? Where we look towards like, okay, which one of our customers have groups tied to them. And you just kind of pick up that momentum from there. And some of this just straight cold outreach. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Well, that goes right into my next question of, you know, if you think about how, if you think about the process like a funnel, in all the cold outreach that you did, all of the referrals that you got for first conversations, how many, roughly, of course, is the doesn't have to be completely accurate. Could you provide like a rough estimate of how many investors you got introduced to or had first conversations with, or I guess even before that, how many you reached out to or got intro to, then first conversation, second, third, whatever. And then ultimately how many investors did you end up with? Again, rough numbers. Eric Stark: It doesn't have to be perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just even looking at like, kind of on the side in conversations that we've had. Rough numbers, we, I mean, for each of these rounds, we're definitely talking to like at least like 30 different sort of investors, right? Like pitching. And I would say five or six of those end up being like in the running. Running for like actual next steps of like, okay, we could lead this round. In the first round, it was basically those two investors, Wise and Titletown. And then, you know, there's a bunch of like angels and smaller individuals that kind of fill out the round. But all told we have, we have basically five kind of more major investors from all that work. A lot of just like smaller angel groups that again, kind of fill out smaller checks around there. So I would say both of our kind of more, you know, pre-seed round and the actual seed round all together, it was probably like 60 to a hundred conversations. And yet, you know, you end up with like five or six of them actually investing in a company and like, yeah, probably 10 to 15 of them, you know, almost investing and then you kind of get to that next level of who actually writes the check. But it definitely was surprising to me given this is like the first startup of like, you have to really take those first meetings with a grain of salt with investors because they will all seem And then they won't move on, you know, even when you have really good traction, you're kind of in a hot segment of the market. And, you know, the years 2021, where things were like, even frothier than they are now, you kind of think it'll still be easier to raise than it is. Not that it was exceptionally hard. But I think, you know, you have the first wave of calls, and you're like, Oh, everyone's going to be interested. They're just having so many of those calls every single day that, and only investing in so many companies that it really is just a numbers game. And that's honestly part of why investing is, or raising around is such kind of a burden on the company. And you really have to know that you need to do it because, um, at least for the founders, it's going to take up a ton of time, a ton of time for multiple months. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, a hundred percent. That's really good advice. We have an advice section later. So I'm going to put that part in um, that's really good. Um And when when you were pitching, you know, what did you what did you emphasize in the pitch? Eric Stark: Yeah I mean we um At first we always emphasized our traction and what we've been able to do with very little resources right as a pitch to like if we this to the next level. Obviously a big thing to emphasize that investors want to hear and that is kind of part of why we even want to raise money is how massive like the opportunity actually is and could be, right? How big the addressable market that we're going after is and how basically venture-scale thing can be, right? Investors don't want you to have like a plan to build a $50 million company, right? They want a billion dollar company plus. So, sorry, let me just decline that. Yeah, so our traction, the huge opportunity we have in the market, and the space that we’re in and how that market is only going to get bigger and the pain we’re solving is only going to get more important over the next five to 10 years are kind of the main things that we look to emphasize. We’ve had some investors who we got very, very close with to investing in the company tell us that our pitch was too practical of how we’re going to be running the business, which I think just shows you one, some of the culture of like, you know, tech and investing and, you know, this sort of like crazy dreaming, like idealist sort of sentiment that I think some people look for in the pitch, right? And I think it’s, in a lot of ways, there’s like feedback from that we took and like, okay, we need to like, portray like a bigger vision more than like a stable business plan. Some of that may have shifted it a little bit as, you know, I think what VCs want from startups has shifted pretty quickly in the last few years to be a little more efficient and practical with money than crazy. But it’s just kind of interesting and definitely something that, you know, new founders should think about as they’re pitching, even if that’s not necessarily their style normally. It is part of What like the venture world wants so it’s part of the decision you’re making and like jumping into that venture world is like They want to find the next like zuckerberg or whatever. So they kind of want you to speak like you’re gonna be that person Even if you know that that might not necessarily be your style and it definitely wasn’t our style like me and my co-founder Practical, definitely ambitious, but I think some of how we pitched was for some investors almost too practical and not wild and crazy enough, which I always thought was interesting feedback, you know what I mean? But again, could have just more been a sign of the times too back in that era, which was not too long ago, but kind of seems like a different era at this point. Ben Ornstein: 2021 does feel like it was. I mean, startup back then. And we were turning away investors. Like we had too much inbound. Yeah, it’s just out what we’re giving investors max check sizes. It’s insane. Yeah, yeah. That time is crazy. Eric Stark: And we were never like, we were never like in possible space, right, where it’s like crypto then, and now it’s AI, but everything’s AI also, you know, which we, we very much are now an AI company, I think you have to be as a software company. And so maybe if we went out to raise now, you know, it would feel like that. But I think a lot of companies are AI companies, and it’s just almost like a prerequisite. And we were, we were always raising from a place of like a pretty hot space, you know, content creation, I think that there was always a lot of interest in, but it wasn’t like, this is the single most like frothiest thing, like, you know, crypto in 2021, you know, I’m an NFT company. So yeah, that’s, I’m sure it was a crazy environment to see from the inside. Ben Ornstein: It was pretty crazy to be a part of It was my first startup experience after leaving Morgan Stanley. So it was a pretty wild first trench, first pit, so it was pretty crazy. Yeah. But yeah, no, that makes sense. And did you apply any sort of like FOMO tactics, any urgency tactics among investors to close the round? Eric Stark: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think we’ve done that. We’ve done that multiple times of, you know, I think on our seed round, we kind of raised it a bad time in the year, like it was more toward the end of the year, which is usually not recommended. But we wanted to, we had a lot of traction, and we had made the decision that it would be a good time to like inject some more cash into the business. But we didn’t want it to be like this long drawn out process that distracted too much of the team and went, you know, from kind of Q4 into Q1 and became something that like our big focus. And we kind of communicated that up front, we basically didn’t need the money. And we’re saying we have an opportunity right now. And we think it’s a good time. But if this is going to go past, you know, Thanksgiving, we’re not gonna, we’re not going to do this right now. So if you, you know, think you are interested and want to do this quickly, we would be interested. So we’ve done stuff like that. And I think, I think, each time we’ve raised is we haven’t necessarily needed the money, which gives you the opportunity to kind of do stuff like that. Because again, it’s, you know, it’s, there is an opportunity cost to going out and raising. Yeah, in the end, you could inject cash into the business, but you don’t want to distract from executing because every quarter is so important in like a startup of our stages life. That, especially if we’re already efficient, if we can kind of keep executing and keep growing, it gives us more optionality. So that’s almost been like a philosophy of ours is like, you know, never raise, never raise, like burn money to the point where we feel like, okay, we need to raise even if growth is high enough, but we’re just like, okay, we need to, we need to raise that next round, because we’ve just been burning, we’ve always raised out of a place of cash flow, like efficiency, and always kind of looked to be close to profitable as we operate the business and kind of play the levers of like, okay, let’s burn more to invest, let growth catch up and make sure we’re not kind of going all in on needing to raise in a year or two. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, absolutely. Going coming with that leverage of like look guys, we don’t need your money. Like that’s so important Exactly able to dictate. Eric Stark: Yeah, exactly But also, I think something that’s really helped us overall besides kind of having that leverage there is We never over raised at too high of a valuation or too much of an amount, you know, so we We don’t feel like we’re at risk at all for like a down round or, you know, even like, obviously like the ultimate risk of being worth less than the amount you’ve even raised, you know? So we’ve chosen pretty practical and not, you know, and honestly pretty sensitive to dilution. Part of that is just like how much we value our own equity and like what we think it can be worth. Another part is we did start with four co-founders. Like more dilution than, um, individually than, you know, a startup that is one or two. And that’s kind of led us to, um, I think raise in a fairly conservative way of like, what do we just need right now to get to the next level and not kind of trying to over, overdo it. Um, yeah. And I found that, you know, we haven’t raised now in, basically like what feels like multiple years at this point and we operate a lot more I feel like you run the business better when you’re the moment you raise money yeah you inject like a lot of things into the business and we have injected things into the business that have sustained us and gotten us to the level we are but you always inevitably are going to over invest in things that you then, when like push comes to shove, like don’t need because everything feels like every decision can feel like a yes, right? I’m like, okay, yeah, we can just hire that other engineer or we’ll get like two sales reps instead of the one because we think we might need that or we interviewed two really good people. We’ve never been that level like to, we’ve never been super irresponsible. Possible with it, but it’s just human nature to feel, especially right after you get like cash injected into the business, that you could just do a few more things. And inevitably, you know, you look back and say, like, okay, or in these times, where we’re actually more operating like a profitable business, I think it forces you to make better decisions sometimes, you know, about how you spend your money. So that learn that over the years, too. Because each time we’ve raised, you end up getting kind of enough interest to raise a little more than you thought you were going to. And then you’re like, OK, well, we added an extra half a million or a few million from this raise that we had anticipated. And sometimes I think you can let your foot off the gas, you know, trying to just make sure again, especially before anyone really cared about efficiency. We always have. But now it feels like um You know back then growth was really just the name of the game efficiency wasn’t at all Um, so it was easier to I think overspend after a round Absolutely Um, and you know when Ben Ornstein: you talk about it Uh in hindsight you make it sound so easy, but I assume there were some sort of challenges You know, what was the what was the biggest challenge that came up during fundraising? Eric Stark: Um, the biggest challenge during fundraising, I definitely think that making sure I would say the two, two of the biggest challenges, the biggest challenge to us for actually raising money. Is really just making sure that the pitch speaks to what investors are expecting and want to hear. And again, I think we kind of learned that over time of being more selling the vision than communicating kind of the practical nuts and bolts of the business. So I think that was a challenge. Um, get good at kind of selling a more crazy vision that we do believe and are excited about, but would sometimes get too in the weeds of the product or, um, our customers and Not boil it down into kind of its bare essence that, you know, an investor just wants to hear a good story and walk away feeling good, you know? And I do think that is like a hard thing to kind of learn and do over time. Which we got better and better at. And then the second challenge internally is just, you know, having a context switch between servicing customers and building a pipeline and, um, you know, trying to mitigate churn and, you know, work with any internal strife that might be happening with, you know, the team and then, you know, out there trying to invest it or trying to get money from investors is just like, almost a full-time job of doing cold outbound and pitching and doing all that stuff. So really, that part of it is always a challenge, the time management and the willingness to dive into that. Again, you have to really be confident as to why you’re wanting to spend the time to do that and give up the equity to do that if you think you could just do it yourself with the money that you’re already making and the money you already have. Ben Ornstein: Absolutely. Are there any unique or interesting fundraising stories that you haven’t brought up? You said you closed a round in December 2019. That might have been an interesting story just given the timing. Eric Stark: Yeah, that’s a good one. We got fairly lucky in that So I was still working at the nfl and I quit my job at the nfl in um I guess it was like february of 2020 So like right before shit hit the fan, right? But we had just raised around we had just raised and we were already making money from our customers We had about 30 customers at that point already, and big logos, big sports teams across the NFL and NBA were already using Slate. And it was the four co-founders at that time, but we weren’t making enough money to continue to sustain ourselves comfortably for the next year or whatever. But we had raised that round, money got into the bank and everything immediately shut down and we hadn’t spent a dime of it yet. So we were kind of just like, okay, we like just got this injection of cash. We have customers, you know, they, a lot of them were on annual contracts, although some of those, we had structured some pilots with NFL teams to end in February because we thought we were being clever, like the end of their season, they’re going to have to Decide to renew so it was kind of like crazy of like, oh man, all these contracts are ending right as like the pandemic was hitting but We were in like a pretty safe position then to kind of be like, okay, let’s ride this out. Let’s see how it goes and Our tool ended up being really useful during that time because social media content creation was almost like a bigger need so after kind of a month or two of not being able to sell and things being kind of frozen as people were freaking out, we actually had like a really good summer in the summer of 2020. I think a lot of tech startups obviously started kind of bouncing up then. But yeah, March of 2020, we were thankful to have just raised around and had that all fully done and set. And again, we hadn’t spent any of it yet. So we didn’t hire any really, we didn’t really spend that money until the summer. I think we started hiring our first people in June, July of 2020. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Wow. Ben Ornstein: Wild timing to close that round. That’s amazing. Eric Stark: That was great. I can imagine. Ben Ornstein: Just a few questions left. So you already mentioned fundraising advice. Any other advice you’d like to give other founders? Eric Stark: Um I mean, it’s kind of generic advice, but uh, I think the best advice I can give right now is You know, there’s always a chance to reignite growth and um Continue to have success even if you’re having like a down year or a down time time. And we kind of jumped up to a million ARR really quickly. And we’re feeling like, okay, we’re on a path to kind of this like double, double, triple, triple path, or triple, triple, double, double path of just like, we’re going to be, you know, at 10 million in a year. And it didn’t work out that way. And we we had, you know, some moment after 1 million ARR, where we felt like we stalled a little bit. And in some years where growth rate or a year where our growth rate wasn’t nearly as good as we wanted it to be and rebounded from that, like in a big way. And I think going through that was really helpful, if not hard to see like, okay, we thought we were on one trajectory and we kind of got knocked off the horse and like our ideas about where we would be after three years were like different, but we then, you know, it wasn’t just doom and gloom of like okay this is like our plateau and like we’re done like we were able to keep executing and find um a way to get back to like the growth rates that that we were at before and continue to have like an even bigger sort of future than you know we had originally imagined so I think that just like taught me a lot about the sort of thing that is a little more cliche about like the resilience And just like not quitting is like the best thing you can do because there are definitely times where you know things aren’t working out like you planned and you get pretty burnt out that you start to just like Question, you know, what can this be? Were we wrong about our assumptions? Like, you know, are we not good at this? And I think that’s like totally natural But yeah, it’s honestly been helpful for us to not just be like up and to the right first our whole trajectory and most companies aren’t you know, but you don’t usually hear about a company that like Then like stalled out for a bit and had to figure stuff out and grow again. It’s usually like oh they were Talking away and you know building some other thing and then all of a sudden they build slack and we’re like a billion dollar company so and I didn’t find a lot of content out there that I was reading, you know of founders who were kind of and then got unstuck. So, you know, it’s been helpful to kind of live that experience and realize like, okay, if we go through like, you know, a hard stretch again, that doesn’t mean everything is like doom and gloom, that there’s still ways to get back to kind of the original vision. So, yeah, I guess that advice is just about keeping that in mind and trying to be resilient, even if things aren’t working out, whether it’s a core a quarter, a month, or even like a full year that you look back on and think, wow, this year did not go like we planned. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, that’s awesome advice. There’s always a way to find a way back. Yeah. Eric Stark: Who’s an investor you would recommend other founders work with? Our investors have been really great. Charge Ventures is kind of one of our biggest investors, and they’ve been amazing in supporting us. Both from a strategic standpoint, but also just kind of there to, yeah, they’ve been helping us with a lot of different things. And Brett, who’s kind of the lead there, has really been an advocate for us and feels like part of the team in a lot of ways. Turtle Town Tech, also one of our earlier investors, have always just been, like, super supportive in how, like, anything we need, we actually were just just in Green Bay, visiting them in person. They took us to a Packers game, and they were hosting an event for Bay Area. It was a Packers 49ers game, like Bay Area Tech coming to the other Bay, Green Bay. They’ve just been awesome at being kind of a really supportive partner. I would say those two are ones I would recommend. All of our investors have been really supportive in their own ways. Ben Ornstein: That’s awesome. Are there any resources that you would recommend to other founders? This could be books, podcasts, newsletters, really anything. Yeah. Eric Stark: I mean, Sastr has been a favorite of ours since day one. I’m sure a lot of founders already are stumbling upon it through their SEO or LinkedIn or whatever. So yeah, that’s one. I mean, Jason Lemkin’s kind of a, he’s our dad, basically. He’s our hero. Ben Ornstein: Jason Lemkin is a beast. And Harry Stebbings, who worked there, now, of course, started 20VC. I was like, oh, okay. That’s up until recently, actually. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, yeah. Eric Stark: So yeah, that’s, he definitely, he seems to always post That’s like exactly what we’re going through at the time and we’ll like share it in Slack. Ben Ornstein: And yeah, he’s been super helpful, honestly. Yeah. Absolutely. And last question here. Eric Stark: Do you have any hot takes regarding the fundraising process? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: It sucks. Ben Ornstein: That’s a good one. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Right. It’s like you got to do it kind of thing. Eric Stark: Right. Exactly. Exactly. You go into it. It’s almost like it’s almost like searching for a new apartment. You know, you go into it like pretty excited. You’re like, oh, I’m going to find a great place. I’m going to, you know, it’s like kind of fun to start that search. But then after months of like, Craigslist and Zillow and hitting people up and being second on the list and just like getting you’re kind of just like, all right, when is this going to end? You know, you eventually land in a good place and you’re glad you did it. But yeah, it’s always kind of a painful process. Ben Ornstein: I’ve done like 85 of these now and I have not heard a better comp to the process than finding an apartment. That is, that is really good. I’m going to steal that one. I’ll give you credit though. Eric Stark: Thank you. Thank you. Eric, thank you so much. Ben Ornstein: This has been a lot of fun. Really loved hearing about your journey. I’ll try to get this back to you very quickly. I know some people probably say they went very quickly. They mean like a month. I’ll probably get this within, definitely within a week, probably by early next week for your review. And yeah, feel free to edit it, change things, ask questions. And then when you give me the go ahead, I can, we’ll post it with the rest of them. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Eric Stark: Yeah, that sounds great. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Ben Ornstein: Well, it was great meeting you, Eric. And yeah, if you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to reach out. Eric Stark: Sounds good. Thanks, Ben. Awesome. Nice meeting you. Later.