Patrick Sullivan, CEO and Founder at Bonsai | Startup Stories

The second time around with Facebook was very intentional. Let's build something, let's get a value that we feel comfortable from, and it was almost like a game mindset: like can we get acquired within two years? And we did. Could we create enough value that we would return enough value to the employees and the investors? Which we did, and it was pretty exciting. But it was very deliberate. It was a little shorter. We didn't have any revenue, we didn't have product market fit yet. We just built the infrastructure that we knew would be valuable to Facebook and get acquired.

Great, great to have me, and I'm very happy to be here. Thank you.

Sure. Bonsai was built out of a passion of love to help connect young entrepreneurs, founders to experienced entrepreneurs, and as well as other professionals to young professionals in business. That's kind of the intent. Everything we do is done over a marketplace and one-to-one video chat, so we actually built a video platform that connects people, and we called it like a LinkedIn 2.0. Rather than going on LinkedIn and trying to connect people off platform, you actually stay on platform with Bonsai and you're able to connect with people. That's kind of what we built, but I think I alluded to Christina in our last conversation that we're now pivoting, and I'm happy to talk about that later. But we're definitely at a critical point in the company where I've founded many companies in the past and pivoted many times, and so we're at the stage of pivot at the company. That's where we originally built. It was an amazing platform to connect people, but we found that we were more interested in what's going on in the Web3 space, and that's kind of where we're making the big pivot today.

Yeah, so when I first founded my first company, prior to that I worked for a global business called The Orchard, that's now owned by Sony Music, and I got a lot of experience working with businesses all over the world and identifying problems to solve at scale. And so when I left The Orchard, my intention was to build a company that solved problems for similar type companies like Google, Rhapsody Music in the music industry around copyright licensing at scale. And we still from the get-go of starting that company on a napkin, we were thinking how do we get positioned for one day being acquired with the intention of building a great business with revenue and all the exciting things around a company structure. And I was very sort of playing two sides with building a publicly facing company with the intention of one day getting a position to get acquired, and it was very methodical and thought through and how we did that strategically around customer acquisition, building the brand, building the revenue, the income, and I was very thoughtful till we got to a point in time where we felt it was time to sell the company. So we're very thoughtful. The second company that acquired was acquired by Facebook. We started the company with the intention to raise capital and sell the company. It was a little bit more egotistical, but we were very intentional. And the reason why, when we got acquired by Google, even though we were doing 22 million dollars in revenue in three years, because the first year and a half the company was a consulting business, the opportunity of the revenue was not that interesting to Google or YouTube. Eventually, we were acquired and put into that stack. They were thinking how can we increase a billion dollars in revenue, and so that's why they acquired our company to take YouTube and turn on monetization around ads and copyright licensing. So we had that understanding, like 22 million dollars, great revenue, getting acquired by Google, but what if we could build a company from the onset that could create value to a company like Facebook? So we were very thoughtful the second time around, but now we had the resume of getting acquired at Google, and we were in a better position to have conversations way earlier to get companies like Facebook and others interested in acquiring us. Very strategic, very thoughtful from the start.

You know, we were very fortunate that in the world of landmines, we've never hit, like, a world of startups, we never hit a landmine, we never hit like anything that really hurt us. One of the biggest challenges that occurred, I think this happens with any, was the financial stress. We were in the financial downturn of the market in '08, '09, '10, and so the world was upside down financially. And we had built such a great revenue, incoming client base, but the payments started to come slower, companies were going bankrupt, and we were a little startup trying to figure out our way through this financial challenge. And it was a great learning curve, but the pressures were tremendously high on a company that had payroll, employees, and headcount, and we were very fortunate we navigated through that. And we did not hit a lot of, like, I'd say fundamental mistakes. The one big mistake, I'd say in a good way, was we didn't realize how big the company was going to become within the Google infrastructure at YouTube, that blew our minds. Once we were acquired, the impact went from 22 million dollars to now it does billions of dollars, and that was fun, and that's because of Google and YouTube. But that was pretty much one of the wildest things going through an MA of not knowing what you're going to create in value once you're integrated, which is very difficult at times. Getting into those big systems, we learned a lot. The second time around with Facebook, very intentional: let's build something, let's get a value that we feel comfortable from, and it was almost like a game mindset: like can we get acquired within two years? And we did. Could we create enough value that we would return enough value to the employees and the investors? Which we did, and it was pretty exciting. But it was very deliberate. It was a little shorter. We didn't have any revenue, we didn't have product market fit yet. We just built the infrastructure that we knew would be valuable to Facebook and get acquired. You know, Facebook versus Google acquisition in the MA, Google was very pro, in our experience, the entrepreneurs; they were very giving, they gave us a lot of lean weight. Facebook was very challenging. It was a very heated negotiation, you know, very difficult on the flip side. When we got acquired by Google, it was challenging to get integrated because that's what you want to achieve is getting your company integrated. And we learned at Google only 33% of startups get acquired get integrated successfully, which we thought it was a little bit higher. At Facebook, it was way smoother. We had learned so much about integrations, we learned so much about putting ourselves within a process. Once we were internalized, we weren't shy; we kind of knew who we needed to talk to to get the job that we were acquired for to get done. So it's two different experiences, and Facebook now had, I think, a road map from learning from, you know, Google in the past on how they acquired companies so they can integrate and acquire companies as well. But I'd say big challenges were the MA transaction to then post interaction where we got acquired with two different experiences, but you know, both of them were a lot of fun at the end.

Yeah, at Google I stayed for a little under three years, and I was very much involved with sort of integrating the company rights flow that was required and sort of getting us on a success path. Facebook was a little different. We negotiated what's called a short-term employment agreement. I had no intentions to stay longer than six months; I stayed around a year and didn't really contribute as much to that acquisition. It was just more, let's just get the company integrated within the period of time. But at Google, I was very involved. At Facebook, it was my second time around; I had no interest in working at Facebook at the time, although I loved the company; they were very good to me. But where I was in my life, I had no intentions of staying at the time.

That's a great question, Christina. You go from running 180 miles an hour to all of a sudden you're no longer involved in, you know, because these companies have infrastructure and systems, redundancy, verticals, orgs that can help take over the workload, and almost in a way you find yourself alone as the CEO. And if you do your job right, as in any role, you eventually become replaceable, and I became replaceable twice. And when we exited, when I did my exit interview with Google, we were setting up a business team to help entrepreneurs onboard to Google so they can get more mentoring and coaching around the experiences of getting integrated from a big company, because it's a challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs or CEOs that get acquired and now they're no longer a multi-faceted person who's doing business development, they're doing legal advice, they're doing marketing, all these things you no longer have to do and think about because the company has those infrastructures. So it was definitely a lonely experience, more lonely I think at Facebook because I knew I wasn't staying there, and you're going to a job that you know you're not going to be part of any of the teams in a long-term investment of that.

No, I'm not. No, I've been very blessed. Never second thought about selling the company. A lot of people became very fortunate on the first company and then the second company as well. So those people's lives have been changed, and that's probably the most important thing, and seeing that where someone who interned with you, eventually worked hard, got a full-time job, is now at Google making big salary, big compensation, bought the house, got married, has the kids, and was part of that journey. And it was a lot of that that went on to the company at Google and similar at Facebook. The company acquired my other companies, of course, three, a lot of those folks came from Google, went to Facebook, to Source3 with me along the journey as well, so they became two-time exit entrepreneurs or employees. And so those are the things that I don't regret because I have more money, more problems now, but it's been very good and helpful to me, especially I have a special needs child, Christina. So getting acquired, Google was the right time, right place, and I always look back on Google at that time in my life, it was like, my God, it helped with my family and helped change our lives and helped us with our child.

I think waking up with the idea of working with people smarter than you on something that seems like an unsolvable problem, on a journey around the excitement of not knowing where you're going. I think where I lost interest at working at Google or Facebook and other companies was I knew where we were going, I kind of felt I was now a teacher, I wanted to be a learner. And I think along the journey of anything, you want to be learning along the way. And when you go into the world of entrepreneurship, you're a learner every day, and every day you wake up not knowing what you're going to learn about, and you have to figure out is that the right learnings or should I switch or pivot to something new. And I think that's the most exciting thing, working around incredible people around solving something that seems unsolvable and trying to solve it, and eventually in my past have solved it a few times, which has been really exciting.

Yeah, I think when I in my previous corporate life, I traveled the world doing business in London, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. I was building infrastructure to enable, at the time, iTunes, the largest music service, to help internationally license as well as U.S. licensing. So I was building infrastructure around copyright licensing and payments. And so when I left, I went and built it for Google, and Google acquired that; we were able to globalize YouTube for global music rights. So when we were in position for our second company at Source3, we knew that Facebook publicly was trying to build a competitive landscape to YouTube, so they had to build infrastructure very similar to what we had built at RightsFlow that Google acquired. So we knew that we could position ourselves that we were able and capable of building something that was necessary for Facebook to build a global music rights system. And so we were very fortunate to not only have conversations with Facebook but have multiple conversations with other buyers as well, so that helped with the conversations. But we knew we had built it and we succeeded at Google, and we were able to tell the narrative, and the narrative was told many, many times through the MA process to lots of teams at Facebook that they would help understand how unnecessary it was to do this in order to do business around the world as well as in the United States.

No, when we launched the company, we were trying to take on building a licensing system for 3D printing. So we raised the capital and we raised the funding that we believed at the time that printing on demand 3D objects would require a license for copyrights and trademark. That's what we started, but as we were building out, maturing, and learning about the industry, not coming from the 3D printing, and we felt it was not going to be mature for maybe five years of time—now I think it's 10 to 15 to 20 years—3D printing where the infrastructure is going to be able to license copyrights and trademarks similar to YouTube as well as Facebook. And so we pivoted very early in the company's development to start building some sort of infrastructure around copyrights and intellectual property. So we were sort of identifying, let's go back to what we know, let's build the database, the taxonomy of information around copyrights and trademarks that we feel one day we can have a conversation with potentially a Facebook, potentially a Spotify, or any of these companies that have a need for intellectual property licensing.

That's correct. And one of the things, back to being involved in an industry that I came from—I came from the music and tech industry—I had the relationships already in place to have conversations very early as we were ideating and building the infrastructure to get in position for an acquisition with Facebook. So one of the things I encourage entrepreneurs to do is have conversations with your potential strategic partners as well as your potential acquirers early. And so even with my first company, I had conversations with industries and companies, but the second company I was very methodical. I want to understand what their pain was, and one of the things that was a great indication was Facebook publicly announced they were going to build a similar content ID system to YouTube in order to enable copyright licensing, and so that was a very big signal. And I was able to wave a flag and start a conversation by saying, hey, I've built this before and Google acquired it, would be good for us to have a conversation earlier rather than later. And so I was able to have those, and then I went out and had conversations any media music company I was having conversations with because I knew the key players within the industry.

So from launch, within a year, year and a half, a year. Yeah, about a year.

We struggled with a high, high-quality struggle because we were able to raise capital pretty easily, which is good and bad. You know, you can get very laxal and you're just burning capital, and so that was a fear because like, wow, we hired a great team, but once we're able to position ourselves and get on direction, it was all worth the investment. But a year goes fast in entrepreneurial world sometimes.

We took the money first and then we pivoted. Exactly, but afterwards you still have the board and you need to be a little bit accountable in front of them. So how did you justify that at the seed stage? We controlled the company. We had really wonderful investors that had worked with us before, and I was able to be very elegant on how I delivered the message without approval. There was no board approval, no voting rights, because we were too small. The seed stage was a three-person board, and they had the intention, like, I know you'll figure it out. You know, there's a lot of belief in an early founder that they will figure it out. They're investing in that person who has the capabilities to do three things: build out a team, build a process, and build out a technology. Those three things are critical to making a business successful, especially in the tech world. And my goal and objective was to build out a strong team that could figure out a problem, put a process in place around solving that problem, and then building a technology that was going to help enable the process and the team to execute the business. And so that was sort of the belief. But most of investors in my second and now my third company kind of are more hands-off, and it's more me asking for some advice around some subject matter that they can help me with. And it's kind of been, and being transparent too. So I think that was also key. One thing I found with some first-time founders, second, they're not as transparent with their investors. So giving them as much disclosure around the downside versus the upside is helpful. So when you have to have tough conversations, they're prepared and knowing that, hey, I know you're struggling, or I know I can help you with something because you're being disclosing to me the challenges you're having. So that's been more how I approach to be very transparent.

Usually critical. I'm constantly networking, and you always want to have that position of conversations. And here's a very good example: when I was going through the MA process at Facebook, I put a spreadsheet of anyone and everyone I knew that had a connection to the person who was the deal sponsor who had to influence Mark Zuckerberg to say yes. So there was an individual that I needed to influence that would say I vote yes to Mark to get Mark, and I have a little email from Mark saying I approve of the deal hanging on my wall. I influenced 70 people around the world that I was whispering to around that, and that was all through my network. So I was able to like map out and architect and utilize even a company like LinkedIn, who are the people that know someone that you need to influence. But networking has been the basis of my career. A little bit about me: I come from, I grew up in the Bronx. My parents are sixth-grade educated. My dad retired in 1993 making 22,000 a year, so you can imagine our network is localized to the block I lived in in the Bronx. No deep network, no wealthy family. So most of my career was networking and, you know, handing out a business card with a smile, you know, and being very methodical but documenting and building a network database of people, and also giving along the way as much as you could, whether it's helping younger professionals that one day might be a professional executive out of Google or Facebook that you walk in a room, they remember you and say you helped me when I was younger. You know, those are things I was very fortunate to help dig that network, a relationship earlier, and it was critical, and it's still critical to any business you do, and it's also being common where if you walk into a Starbucks, be nice to people, you know, and they'll remember you.

Underestimate who you might come across. When I walked into my first MA meeting with 34 people at Facebook, the person who walked in the room, the first words out of his mouth because of my network was, 'Patrick, you're a legend.' And I said in front of the other executives, 'Yes, I am, I guess.' But I built a relationship with people within his community, his college alumni, and I helped give to the alumni of Columbia at NYU that they were part of this network that I participated in giving mentorship and coaching back to the students in the program. That one day came back five years later and they remembered that I was part of that program and giving back to the students. So it's little things in life that are nuggets that you never know when they become valuable.

Be kind. You know, sometimes people think they're more important than others. The one thing that I always believe is like, I hope I'm not the smartest person in the room. I don't want to be the person who's talking the most. I find myself talking the least unless it's in an interview, but the whole goal is to empower people to succeed and people like to be learning and encouraging them to learn. And the key is just be kind to people because you never know. One day, with all my success in Google and Facebook, eventually I start a new company and I'm back. You got to go down and go up. I'm back in the bottom. I'm not in the executive position at those companies. But you got to be kind and you never know, you might want to knock on a door with some of those people and say, 'Hey, do you remember me?' And if they remember you, they might say, 'Yeah, you were kind to me or good to me.' And those are very important things along the journey around networking. You never know who you might run into one day.

Yeah, correct. Yeah, yep. And I know that quite well. I taught at academia for 10 years and a lot of the students that I worked with in college are now executives at big music companies and tech companies. You never know who you're going to run into, and hopefully they have a nice memory of you versus thinking you're important and have an ego. You want to check your ego at the door. And I'm very fortunate, the people that I work with in my new company, they won't allow any ego in the room. They're just nice people. So it's trying to celebrate nice people and smart people importantly.

Mental stability is one of the biggest challenges I think founders face and don't realize when they get into the entrepreneur game, as you would say, because it's a game and it's a mental game. I think try to get as much of your life in order, your financials, the stress around your marriage, your spouse, all these things that you encounter. In the world we live in with social media, it seems very alluring: 'I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to exit, I want to be a founder, I can get acquired and I can be wealthy.' Those are the kind of illusions of grandeur that people don't understand once you get in. I think mental wellness is so important. Being active physically, working out, moderating social drinking, all these things are very important to a founder that can get caught in the hamster wheel. Whether every founder believes they're going to get to some point, whether it's an MA or a strategic partnership or standalone business or go public, but getting along that journey, it's very important that you have your mental health in place to be able to make best informed decisions. I've sat across the table from a lot of entrepreneurs that I knew were not in a good mental place but they were begging for you to take them and help them get out of that: 'Can you just give me some more money? Can you help me with this relationship?' And you knew that it wasn't going to be me that was going to change them. Although I could probably help a little, but not to the point of what they needed to succeed, which is really building a great business and all the things necessary around that. But mental health is so important, and being prepared for the challenges, the hiccups, the pivots. How people in the team understand how you pivot. But I think being very mentally strong as possible is very key, as well as the person you're spending your time with, whether your partner, your spouse, your wife or husband. Those people go through the journey with you. And unfortunately with an entrepreneur, you live and breathe it mostly 24/7, 365 days a year, versus when you're in a company, you kind of turn it off and go home and go on vacation. And you see your friends that live this life and they're like, 'Wow, look at how they're living, they're just going away on vacation when they want.' But the flip side of that, there's nothing like being an entrepreneur or knowing you're working on something every day that impacts your life and the people you're around within the small company or big company you've built.

Well, one thing to get back to, what I would highly recommend—I'll answer the question too—is surround yourself also with people, whether it's you, Christina, or advisors, coaches, people that you can sound off. Because being a CEO or a decision maker sometimes can be lonely. Obviously you want to have collaboration and conversations with the people you're working with, but ultimately you're almost accountable and you might be accountable to your investors, your board. You should have people around you that you can sound off and have conversations with, whether it's a coach or advisor. And very important. I've been fortunate in my first, my second, and my third company to build an advisor network of people that I can call up and say, 'Hey, what would you do? What advice can you give me? I need to have a sounding board.' And I still do that. My third company, obviously I do that a lot for others and friends. But I think it's very important. When you're looking at starting a company in an industry, there's like four fundamental things that I look at in building a company, outside of the team, the process, and technology—that side of the mechanisms within a business. One: what's the problem? That's a hard thing to answer. What's the problem you're solving? And you want to be very clear and deliver how you define that problem. Two: how are you solving it? It's usually an application, it's a cross-sided marketplace, it's enterprise business, it's an app—something that defines how you solve that problem, the technology. Three: what are the addressable markets? Who are the people you're solving it for and how big do you want to size up the addressable market? Is it for your wife, for your kids, or is it for a million? Why is it a million kids? The addressable market. And four: what's the economics of how you make money solving that? Those are the four things that are necessary for any business to operate and stand alone. So: what's the problem, how are you solving it, who are you solving it for, and how do you make money off it. Those are things you can do on a napkin and constantly write down. Sometimes you get one and two, sometimes you get one, two, and three, and sometimes you never get the four, which is the business model, how you make money off it. But those four things, if you nail those four things and it's big enough opportunity within a market, you can build a sustainable business. And those are things that as a founder you can constantly do, whether it's in your day job, post day job, or your company: what's the problem, how do you solve it, who do you solve it for, and how do you make money. Those are four things I highly recommend for an entrepreneur to think about how they build their business.

Yeah, I'd say the difference is, what's the problem. Source 3 is a copyright licensing system. It solves copyright licensing for Facebook. We built a technology to identify copyrights. And the third is the addressable market and the opportunity to revenue. They handled Facebook and handled those two other parts for us. We didn't have to build the customer base and we didn't have to build the revenue model. They had already built that infrastructure. All we needed to plug in was we were able to solve a problem with our tech, and they were able to acquire the four other components. If you want to build an IPO business, it's like any company: you want to solve a problem, you want to have some sort of technology that's capable of solving a large addressable market of people—tens of millions of people if it's a consumer-facing business—and a way to make money, you know, five dollars a month off each customer. That's the IPO model or the standalone business. But with regards to a Facebook or Google acquisition, we were able to do it successfully by solving a problem for them with our technology. Now, we had an addressable market and a revenue model for Google, but it was not going to be as big as it was when it was acquired and they're implemented into YouTube's infrastructure.

I would say ask for more money, maybe. With Google acquisition, we didn't realize how big it could become. We made a lot of life-changing money, but it's fun once you see the size of the impact you've had. You look at the market and say, 'Oh wow, we could have negotiated a little harder,' but at the time we just, we were going to get rich and be worth tens of millions of dollars. You don't really know. But that wasn't a mistake. Everything was incredible and I don't look back at anything. There's little mistakes we made where we hired people that were not the right fit, and you learn from them. But we were strong at overcoming those obstacles and they weren't at the end obstacles, they were just life learnings in the journey of the startup. Getting to MA is kind of the holy grail we were thinking about at the time. We knew enough about the market we were in that it most likely wouldn't have been a billion-dollar company, the first one. And the second one, we were very deliberate that we knew we could build infrastructure that becomes highly acquirable, so we were very deliberate around that thinking.

Again, and I'll just give you the contrary to my Google, we've made hundreds of mistakes in this company from the start, from thinking things differently and approaches. But we evolved as a company from an online marketplace connecting people over one-to-one video chats, that's kind of the pivot, and now we're going back into the music industry, highly focused on digital collectibles and building out a business that enables a fan to interact with an artist, a musician, a recording artist over creating a digital collectible that can then get minted into an NFT. So we're super excited about the Web 3 space and we're super excited about the idea of fan engagement, fandom, and creating a new revenue stream for musicians. And we're super excited that we're at MVP and going to launch in late June. And the music industry is very interested in the NFT, in the Web 3 space, and they're trying to create the ability for them to enter that space from a low cost, no implications of recording contracts and publishing contracts. So we're super excited and we're about to announce some partnerships in that space, probably in Q3. And really excited, but we're going through a major pivot and building on top of the infrastructure we have and going into the digital collectible space with the ability for artists to engage fans and create digital collectibles around audio files and minting NFTs.

We are at the stage where we have about 3,000 users on the coaching side. And it's an amazing product, but it's just not where we are going as a company and where we want to go. At the end of the day, we can control our destiny and we're super excited about it.

Well, most of the marketplace is professionals and young professionals, and there are quite a few recording artists and producers on there already in the music industry. So we're going to piggyback on some of them, but we're not going to shut down Bonsai or the URL. It's just going to become branded with a new identity and heavily focused on the recording and music industry.

Correct, correct.

I think what excites you is trying to get the product market fit and unpacking and understanding around where you see an opportunity. And this opportunity we feel is a better fit for who we are as a company and people and team. What excites us, we got very interested in Web 3 and NFTs about a year ago and we were trying to figure out a position. The marketplace that exists today, people got jobs at Facebook, jobs at Google, people got signed to Sony Music, we helped military and veterans affairs communities—all these great things. But it was more going to be a SaaS product and more for corporations to use, and that's not what we want to be as a company. We've evolved as a business, but where we are now, working back in the music industry, working with artists, working with artists' managers, really excites us. So a lot of unknowns, but it's exciting. And we did a lot of research around it for the past nine months while we were pivoting to validate where we're going. And that's kind of key too when you're dealing with consumer-facing businesses: doing the research and getting yourself in a position where you can understand how you'll grow the business.

I think opportunistic, as well as coming from the music industry. My network is in the music industry. And Bonsai, our first version, we were in multiple industries, we were working in Brazil and Argentina and in the UK and all these great relationships we built, but it was too broad. But now we're 100% going into the music industry, 100% focused on musicians and recording artists. And it's a lot more opportunistic, but it's exciting because we know the industry. We're able to have easier conversations. There's a confidence in the conversations when I converse with managers of artists. My businesses, I've built, I've paid out billions of dollars to these artists in the past, and so they're aware of who I am and the companies I've built. So it's a lot easier to have an open conversation around an idea. Similar to my first company where people thought you're crazy, it was just me and my partner, and people said you can never build a licensing system to take on the music industry and build something better and smarter that Google would acquire. And we did. So you never know where you'll go.

All right, well, I think two years, just having a really amazing consumer product that has millions of fans engaging with thousands of artists over our Bonsai platform. And that's kind of where we see where we're going as a company. And still being excited every day to be working on a startup, or a mature startup, whether it's a Series A, Series B. But for me, it's just the excitement of building and evolving as a person and learning. And hopefully in two years we're in a different position with an evolved business.

The key is constantly questioning all facets of your business all the time, in my opinion. Be almost uncertain. When you get to a point where you want to make a decision, you've already made the decision, or the decision makes itself. That happens. You don't want to be, 'Oh my God, I didn't realize I should have pivoted earlier.' Those are things, it's very hard to measure when's the right time to pivot. And sometimes you can't pivot because you don't know where to pivot to. But it's constantly questioning and asking questions of people to make sure. Whether it's internally, your team, your customers. Don't believe that just because you're building something, someone's going to use it. Those are things you learn, a hard lesson. I think the biggest constant stream is: question, question everything about the business, figure out what is the opportunity. And pivoting's hard. It's not easy. Knowing not to pivot is hard too. With my first company, we thought we were going to pivot but we didn't, we stayed the course. My second company, we did pivot and we were able to position ourselves with that pivot. This third company, we're pivoting as well. And it's a tough decision but it's the right decision, the best decision for us. Constant questioning and answering around where we're going. Don't believe the hype around yourself. Don't believe you're smarter than the markets are telling you. And you're constantly learning. That's kind of been the key, I think, for a lot of things I've been working on.

You know, do you love what you do? I think that's one of the things I learned. If you don't love what you're doing every day around the business problem you're solving, don't do it. I think some people believe that they can get into a business and just feel confident they can find a way or succeed. And if you don't love it, enjoy it, that's a hard thing to do. And I question it every day, constantly: do I love this? I do. And finding that finally, as a business, I really do believe I love where we're going. I love the interviews I've had and the questions I've had with people in the music industry around the idea we're working on. It wasn't just me or my partner coming out with an idea. And we eventually now found a place where we really do love what we're doing. And that love will put you in a position to overcome a lot of the challenges. And I say more passion too. Do you have the passion for it? Because the key to success in being an entrepreneur is sustainability and getting yourself in a position that you can overcome the challenges and figure out the problems to the challenges. You got to be constantly thinking and have that passion around the opportunity. So make sure you love what you're doing. If you don't, it might not be a good thing to be doing.

Thank you, Christina. Until the next time.