Raise at a price investors can 4-6x, and turn down higher offers

Nathan LatkaSo, if someone's thinking, "Wow, 20% EBITDA profit, you know, profits in 2025 on 60 million, why would he go out and do the 140 million Series C? What was your thinking?"

Alex JekowskyWell, hopefully you never raise capital when you need to. Uh that's always not a great position to be in. Uh When we did this round, we said, "Here's this is the valuation we want to raise at and these are the terms we want to raise at." It wasn't if somebody offered 20% more or X percent this way or the other, didn't sway us. We had higher term sheets, we had different terms by different folks. Uh I think the the thing that drove us to to want to raise the capital was the quality of the partnership of Sumeru. It's just an amazing group, top to bottom. And we, I mean, we went probably had three or four dinners before we even started in the process. And in aggregate of the 12 hours of of uh of dinners and uh in, you know, I don't even know how many bottles of wine, we probably talked about Cents for an hour or two, but as people, they just were incredible, and that's what we indexed on. I always said like, I never want to be afraid of going into a board meeting. I'm okay to be frustrated and angry, knowing I'm going to get my ass kicked, but I don't want to be afraid, because …

Nathan LatkaWhat percent of the 140 million was for that sort of thing versus operations?

Nathan LatkaOkay, fair enough. And the re- I look, I think it's a valuable lesson for founders, right? So, Alex, correct me if this is wrong. What Alex is saying is, "Listen, 140 is a lot of money. 10 to 20x feels okay. If we keep growing, he sees outcomes where someone would pay more than that multiple, where everyone would be in the money, basically. Himself, investors, employees, everybody." Alex, is that sort of accurate?

Alex JekowskyThe way that I view it is, you know, when you're getting the multiple and that's driving the enterprise value, and somebody invests at that at that price, can you get, if it's growth equity, can you get four to 6x that price in an outcome with enough of a buyer profile where, you know, why do people go public? Public Going public isn't a liquidity event, it's a financing event, because you've raised too much capital, the preference stack is is crazy. It's usually because you you kind of have to at a certain point. Yeah. And there You're too big to be bought or whatever the the the case may be. And so, we want to pre- preserve as much optionality as possible for an exit event, whether it's going public, selling to a strategic, private equity, or staying private and and holding the business for as long as as as we want. And so, but you but no matter what, in order to preserve that optionality, you have to be in a position to be able to have a growth equity or private equity event, or a public event, or something like that, or you need to have the cash flows to stay private and not constantly need more capital. We've seen it more often than not where uh companies raise at large prices and the investors rarely lose, the founders will lose more, the employees will lose more, the common stock holders will lose more.

Nathan LatkaHow much today of the company, just all-in, is the ESOP pool plus you plus employees, basically non-investors, how much did they still own?